Its insane to me how large space-wise small towns in the us (Oregon in mind as I write this) are — with a huge percentage of the real estate devoted to parking lots. Even setting aside the traffic, it’s silly to walk across these towns because businesses are separated from each other by massive parking lots.
The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the major highway which has speed limits within the town but still sees so much traffic as to be very dangerous for pedestrians.
These towns need the commercial visitors brought by the highway to survive — but the design common in Europe for this scenario is so much better. There will be a sign for an exit off the main road for the “city center” exit — there will be a single parking lot for the city center, and then comfortable walking distance to the businesses ... superior design.
Many small, especially old, towns in Europe have ancient road layouts that are too narrow and steep for cars within the town — which resulted in these car free designs for free. It’s beautiful. Parking is easy because there is only one place to do it on the outskirts — and then walk everywhere. There is no improvement for a small town to be designed otherwise in my opinion.
What really amazes me is the creation of new "Shopping Centres" - miles and miles of independent stores and nothing between them but parking lots. They took the mall and scaled it up so everyone gets a store, and now if I want to go to two places I have to actually drive from one to the other because it's nothing but parking lots and pedestrian hostile roads separating them - sometimes it's a two minute drive, but that's so much easier to do than try and navigate on foot it's ridiculous. You want to go to the next store over, but it's 3 lanes each way of homicidal traffic between you and it, or a 5 minute walk to get to the closest cross-walk.
This is precisely what shines so much in Pontevedra (the city featured in the article) and e.g. Oviedo (another Spanish city that aggressively adopted this policy in 1991). Local shopping benefited so much from banning cars downtown. Little specialty shops and cafes blossomed vs suburban malls.
Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.
Paradoxically, shopping associations were initially strongly opposed to implementing car-less downtown plans. Only to reckon later how wrong they were.
If I recall correctly, car-less policies were imported from Aarhus and Aalborg, where majors were experimenting with turning some main streets into pedestrian only by the late 1980s.
It's also interesting to note that both Aalborg and Oviedo tend to rank very highly in a few quality of life EU metrics [1]. I know both, and they are pretty fantastic places to work and live in. Everything is within short walking distance.
> Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.
You are right about the "easy" part, but it can definitely be done. In fact that's what Tokyo feels like, and it's the largest city/metro area in the world, with 38 million residents.
I moved here 2.5 months ago and I'm so glad I did. It's a huge metropolis where one can comfortably live without owning a car. On top of that, it has one of the lowest crime rates among the world's big cities:
I second the fact that most towns in Denmark have superb pedestrian-friendly downtowns. Ghent is also really good in this regard. And of course some mid towns in Spain & France.
Many American and British cities fail in this regard due to excessively sparse housing. But, for example, I found downtown DC & Arlington very walkable and nice.
When I was in Denmark, many downtown roads were close to cars, making them pedestrian malls. Unfortunately, certain traffic was allowed, such as official vehicles. There was just enough of them to pretty much ruin things. You couldn't just amble down the street without having to constantly get out of the way of them.
It's like being in the airport concourse with those electric golf cars racing between the pedestrians with their interminable annoying beeping.
The comment was killed by HN's anti-troll software, which is tuned more aggressively for new accounts and unfortunately gets some cases wrong. Fortunately users tend to vouch for those, as happened here. That unkills them.
I wonder, when/if autonomous taxis come about will the whole attitude of catering to cars over than pedestrians will cease.
If people don't have cars, parking won't be a problem, and walking from one store to another rather than paying for a taxi would become preferable. Then more people would have the awful experience of walking half a mile through a giant paved parking lot which would motivate people to change it.
I'm worried that the opposite will become true. Autonomous taxis will drastically reduce the cost of taking a car ride. The benefit though might be that we get rid of the parking lots since a much higher percentage of total cars should be made up of vehicles that are shared and those shared vehicles should have much higher utilization than personal cars.
I feel like you'd end up with a micro-payment type system - it'd be $1 to cross a parking lot or two and you'd have fields of parking lots everywhere to house the cars that would serve the instant demand people would expect.
I don't think there would be so many parking lots needed. Cars today spend most of their time not in use, which is why we need such large amounts of area to store them.
Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.
A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.
> Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road.
I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc.
Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)
Sometimes they're a bit overly quote courteous unquote -- stopping unexpectedly to let you cross, holding up traffic behind them, or waiting too long to turn onto the road you're on so that they end up behind you when they could have easily gone in front and been on their merry way, etc.
Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock bands. Just a bemused observation.
Peeve: these folks often don't realize there are other sides/lanes of traffic that they aren't able to stop. So the pedestrian still can't cross because of other lanes, but now the good Samaritan is just holding up traffic and slowing everyone down. Including the pedestrian who would normally wait for traffic to clear.
Paradoxically, in these encounters I prefer the "rude" drivers that get out of the way as quickly as possible.
I think this is a pretty interesting phenomenon and I often struggle with how to handle it. I have pretty severe defensive navigation requirements where I tend to require active perception of velocity change before I trust obstacles are going to behave in the manner I expect ... and I think that mentality often leads to these kinds of outcomes.
I was recently in Amsterdam where there are many many bikes and many variations on the scenarios that can cause this to occur. I felt like I started to observe communication on the faces and trajectories around me that tried to convey a message about a kind of conscious morality for influencing the outcomes that results in these scenarios. There seemed to be a kind of social encouragement toward modulating one’s trajectory when possible in advance of where uncertainties could cause delay in order to have the effect of minimizing the required velocity changes — an expression that seemed to say “if you put yourself into a situation where uncertainty about your trajectory is likely to cause a group velocity decrease, you haven’t found the ideal path. Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.” (Edit: Culture in the Netherlands is rather amazing)
> Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.
I think what you describe just minimizes fuel consumption though.
I had not really considered that people might view it differently but thinking back on my experience in Canada, I remember being surprised at how much people would accelerate when the light turned green and how hard they would have to brake just seconds later at the next red light.
I think what I was trying to describe does more than minimize fuel consumption — at least assuming as I sort of was trying to imply that changes in velocity are a message passing component that is part of a distributed “proof of consensus awareness” which is then employed to maximize the likelihood of involved parties converging on the same set of safe trajectories. If applied widely — I think the principle results in reducing the number of interactions where trajectories come too close for safety margins and cause involved parties to introduce extra delay due to uncertainty in the other agent’s behavior. If you modulate speeds in order to reduce the occurrence of delay-from-uncertainty, you can ensure that one party doesn’t experience any extra delay at all rather than both being likely to, which is a net win as well as win-win as the person who does stop or experience delay will wait less time in total for the obstacle to clear.
This is exactly how my first and only car accident happened. I was driving and the car in front on the next lane randomly stopped on the road. I couldn't see there was a cyclist on the other side of the car. The old lady went for it despite me not slowing down, so I hit the brakes and got smacked from behind by another car.
I would argue this is more to do with Portland culture of nice than anything.
I love riding, but I have been run over. No thank you. I will bike for transportation the day we implement Dutch style separated bike lanes (i.e. by an actual physical barrier, even if only a slightly raised bike lane)
Other than that, I drive my mountain bike to areas where there are no cars.
Edit: in the city I'm in now, we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt and expect vehicles moving at 10mph that weight 50 pounds to do just fine sharing the road with vehicles weighing 2000+ pounds and going 50+ mph. Ridiculous and a waste of my tax dollars.
> we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt
Yeah, this kind of thing is really disappointing, but unfortunately predictable. There's a real chicken/egg situation. Few people will bike until there's safe support for it; until lots of people are biking, all the infrastructure just takes space away from the people using cars.
I've had multiple people throw stuff at me from cars, I've had a teenager take a swing at me with a baseball bat from the curb, I've had a car stalk me for eight blocks driving inches from my back tire late at night. This is mostly West Oakland and the parts of of North Oakland along Adeline that gets you up to Berkeley -- I can't really comment on East Oakland or the hills. YMMV, of course.
I've been to your part of the world. The entire area felt unsafe everywhere. I got into a semi-fight on the bus for taking a seat. I've had poets aggressively push there words. It seems like the area is ready to explode.
Detriot feels much safer. People mostly leave you alone.
Wear the wrong colors could be an issue. The boards over windows is a little bit scarier but in Detriot you feel more prepared, even expect something to happen so it rarely does. In Oakland/SanF things can be very calm but turn really quickly.
If there’s one thing that gets my goat it’s overly aggressive poets. The media really need to pay attention to this widespread problem. Once in Detroit a 15-line sonnet almost got me into fisticuffs with the so-called poet. Let’s just say I grew up in the mean streets of Anaheim and she didn’t stand a chance.
Cyclists really don't belong on the road. It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit. I think this is because we conflate the benefits of cycling and the value of making our public infrastructure amenable to cycling with the opinion that cyclists should share highways with cars. It's simply not safe and no amount of "Share the road" stickers and driver education will compensate for that. Cyclists need their own infrastructure, bike lanes on the highways at a minimum. They don't belong mixed in with cars.
If we insisted bicycles only be allowed on dedicated bicycle tracks, there would be no track because there would be no bicycles (because there was no track!)
As a bicyclist, I would love to have a dedicated network of bicycle track all over town. But it doesn't exist, yet.
Also, this is way fuzzier than you present. There's little conflict between cars and bikes on lightly traveled, spacious suburban streets or sleepy neighborhood county roads. Even on collectors & minor arterials, on an e-bike I travel about the same speed as a slow car.
Speed delta is not an incorrect observation, but varies in significance. In terms of priorities, highways are certainly top candidates for the first dedicated bike tracks.
> It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit.
Most cyclists are slower than the speed limit on most roads, but this does not occur "virtually always". Don't assume. Check the speed limit and the cyclist's speed!
As a cyclist, I find it really irritating to be dangerously passed by a driver, seemingly as punishment, catch up with them at a stop light, and then have them chew me out for not going the speed limit, when I actually was going the limit or faster. It's not hard for a fit cyclist to go the limit on a 15 or 20 mph road, particularly downhill. The problem here is that many drivers think anyone not going 30+ mph on those roads is being a jerk, and unfortunately some of those drivers believe dangerously passing slow vehicles is an acceptable response to their impatience.
But the reality is this: Going 30+ mph in a 15 mph zone is being a jerk!
I love small walkable shopping centers that are organically grown over decades that mix residential, commercial, and retail uses. I live in such an area and it is great, but, if society wants to find a way to move to a better human scale constructed landscapes, it might be a good idea to stop referring to people in cars as non-human inhabited objects and use a more human focus word like motorist. We use pedestrian for a person use their feet or a bicyclist or biker for someone using a bicycle.
Cars can be a great tool for humans to use and they are not yet running around without a human inside.
Similar to most rooms in a house/apartment? My living room and dining room is utilized way under 5% of the the time, both more square feet than my car.
I think the most intrusive part of cars are when they are moving. That is when they are dangerous, mess with peds and bikers, and occupying roads that break up community space. Look at how much parking structures are as a % of the total building space in downtown SF or Manhattan. Not nothing, but pretty small. Maybe 5%. Probably less.
This kind of snark, or perhaps just unrealistic statements, gets us nowhere...dedicated infrastructure for cyclists alongside the same infrastructure for cars is actually viable. Making a comment about how everybody should be using bikes isn't helpful.
I'm a cyclist and I drive a car. Dedicated infrastructure is usually for slow bicycles. I welcome it but I stay clear of it. I don't feel in danger in the road and I can go faster.
Problems with bicycle roads:
90% of traffic is much slower than me, which I do 20 km/h in cities (nothing special with some training)
They go up and down sidewalks and turn before intersections. This slows down everybody willing to go faster than 10 km/h
They are bumpier than roads
They are on the side of the road and more dangerous at any intersection, where they are close or before the stop line for cars coming from the side. Furthermore there is less space to look for incoming traffic. Being on the car's road is safer. I like bicycle roads when they are far away from car's roads, for example along rivers. Small low traffic roads are good enough.
On the other side, roundabouts and every other modern road layout that force cars and bikes to get close is dangerous for bikes. I feel safe to say that roads became less dangerous for cars in the last 20 years and more dangerous for bicycles.
I'd like to have the roads of the 70s: long straights, no speed bumps, no roundabouts (cyclists also don't like stop and go),
The United States is not Spain. Nitpick all you want - the vast majority of populated places in the US will never ban cars, at least for the foreseeable future.
Not because they can't though. Because they think they can't. Most cities in the US could do this with some adjustments to public transit, and by managing regional transit much better - for example it's insane that the default for suburban rail line stations is the "park and ride" - huge parking lot surrounding the train station, rather than using that area for residential development close to transit.
I wonder how much space could be allocated to residential development though. Here (Portland Oregon) The park and ride infrastructure isn't that built out (Or maybe it is and I just haven't noticed it???). I dont believe you could move all the people that need to drive into the city to work, into the new residential development provided by that conversion.
Shops can move with the times, schools can continue to have buses to get kids there and offices can stay where they are as long as they'd like.
Banning vehicles has been shown to greatly increase shopping revenue and improve the healthiness of the area, so if a few businesses suffer, poor them... I'll not shed a tear for the strip malls.
corndoge, it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we has to be in the United States.
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
However, if you want to talk about the United States, I would agree with you that it’s going to be expensive to shift the suburban sprawl away from personal vehicles. As much as that particular urbanisation failure is seen as typically American, it’s far from the exclusive option there. You will be surprised to learn that there are dozens of millions of Americans living in cities dense enough to justify not using cars as the default transport mode (“banning” isn’t a very accurate description of what that city did).
Electric scooters or bikes, typically the dockless kind, combined with existing (but re-inforced) public transport sounds doable, especially if you invest the same order of magnitude as local authorities spend on highways. That would require little investment (most of it would be private and from people keen on giving away billions).
it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we *has* to be in the United States.
I wouldn't say this to anyone on hn who uses "we" without a qualifier because I assume as a matter of course that everyone on this website is aware that there are non American users. The pedantry here isn't appreciated.
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
You will be surprised
You must live in America. Here in Portland, the bike are winning out and things like a city-wide 20mph speed limit are taking hold. It's faster to get across town on an ebike than in a car, because all the drivers are stuck in traffic that the bikes rarely see because they use different streets. It's far from perfect but pockets of success like this prove the investment is worth it.
If you are interested in a ROI based perspective on town planning, https://www.strongtowns.org/ makes a compelling case that sprawl is not economically sustainable.
Totally agree with the sprawl issue, but I cannot see why we have to make one more of transportation worse to make another better. Not everyone can ride a bike. Either because of their physical ability or because of the for they'd need to travel. Europe has better bike lanes and higher speed limits for cars. We can have our cake and eat it too. Let's get rid of the sprawl, add some decent public transit and prohibit cars in city centers and we get somewhere. The sprawl that's subsidised by everyone is the root of all Urban planning problems in the US.
Small note, cars usually get stuck in traffic because they are bad at handling intersections, while pedestrians and bicyclists have such a high troughput in intersections that this seldom is an issue.
Disagree, slow the cars down. I've seen good results with "road diets" where 4-lane roads are converted to two lanes for cars and more space for bike lanes and center turning lanes. Also, adding pedestrian activated lights to stop cars.
Why do we need to slow down and even stop cars if we in your proposal even have a dedicated bike lane? Why not put up a small barrier between cars and bikes and have everyone go their own way? Speed limits on the US already are insanely slow compared to most of Europe and the bike thing seems to work better their regardless. We need more diverse infrastructure for different modes of transportation. I want trains that go 200mp/h, dedicated bike routes, and smaller dedicated roads for cars that are better organized with much higher speed limits and walkable city centers where pedestrians can feel safe from cars AND bicyclists. Sounds crazy but works in parts of Europe.
As a cyclist I've seen too many barriered-off cycle lanes that left me trapped and unable to go where I wanted to go, so if my choice is the main road or a cycle lane behind a barrier, I'll stick to the road. Separate lanes make sense for between-city highways, but inside the town speeds are already low enough - and space limited - that we ought to be able to share.
Wow, never heard of her but quite interesting background.
DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, the former CEO of the multi-level marketing company Amway, and is the daughter-in-law of Amway's billionaire co-founder, Richard DeVos. Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA.
What surprises me here is the fact that Amway has done so well in China yet is connected to Blackwater.
I think there's a happy medium that already works fairly well. I live in a fairly bike-friendly mid-sized city. For the most part, cyclists stick to designated bike paths and neighborhood streets, where traffic is minimal. Someone who's riding a bike on a main trunk road is either inexperienced, or trying to prove something. Most people eventually find ways to avoid those roads.
For me, high speed and low speed are both OK. I take longer rides that get me out onto the trunk roads where people drive 55+, but they usually give me plenty of room. What I'm not OK with is congested roads where drivers are not controlling their cars -- if someone stops suddenly, there will be a crash.
The city is gradually adding bike lanes on the more congested main roads when there isn't a good alternative. They're also designating some side roads as "bike boulevards" with "traffic calming" features that effectively discourage cars.
A way of planning for bike paths is if bike traffic gets heavy enough on a road, then set aside a portion of that road for bikes and leave the rest for cars.
It really depends. The biggest safety issue for cyclists is being overlooked at crossings. Being on the road makes them safer for cyclists in those situations. Especially for bigger roads there are also other solutions to this problem.
definitely agree. in fact, one of the biggest dangers of accidents is difference in speed on the roads. Its my understanding that this is one of the primary reasons for a speed limit (note if you drive too slow you also get a ticket), which is to limit the variance of speed.
Do you have a source for that? I had always understood the speed limit as simply being an objective, statutory codification of the subjective notion of "appropriate maximum speed for conditions"
Which fits well with dynamic speed limits cropping up in places that get regular bad weather
There is the source for California -- I see it gives exemptions for safety and law (I assume for road works, etc) but generally speed limits are objective based on conditions. It doesn't mean you can drive slow and impede other traffic traveling around you though, which is why there are laws for it. I don't see it enforced as much in San Diego, but when I lived in the Lake Arrowhead area it was enforced quite often on the highway up and down the mountain.
Quick edit -- that law is for highways, I haven't checked whether this also applies for other types of roads.
“Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of how broad the term was for California. Do you know if (silly question I'm sure) that definition can differ per county or municipality?
I started to reply to thinking there was a federal minimum speed limit but decided I should confirm what I believed and glad I did because I was wrong. In the US, states have full control over the speed limits that are set on both the state hwys and the interstate freeways within that state. That said, I'm pretty sure every freeway I've ever been on had a posted minimum 45mph speed limit, and bikes are not allowed.
Whether or not speed variances between vehicles increase accidents doesn't seem to be clear. With a quick search I found this(1) that indicates that speed variances don't play a role in causing accidents. I also found this (2), which says "that the greater the difference between a driver’s speed and the average speed of traffic—both above and below that average speed—the greater the likelihood of involvement in a crash". And I found this (3) which basically says the speed limit should be set at the 85th percentile of what everyone is driving. Kind of like how you should build sidewalks where people walk ("Don’t make any walkways this year. At the end of the year, look at where the grass is worn away. That shows where the students are walking. Then just pave those paths"), set the speed limit at the speed most people drive.
Everywhere in the US I've lived, the max speed limit laws were written like "whatever speed is safe for current conditions up to a maximum of XX Mph" So you can get a speeding ticket for going slower than the posted limit if conditions are bad. I've actually been pulled over going well under the posted max speed limit during a hard snow storm.
>That said, I'm pretty sure every freeway I've ever been on had a posted minimum 45mph speed limit, and bikes are not allowed.
There are exceptions, especially in the US West, where interstates may be the only path for miles and miles through some mountain ranges. Of course, they mostly have wide shoulders where people ride.
As someone who lived in Eugene and now PDX, the model I advocate is the wagon spoke. You need to ferret the people between the large spaces as the population density is that of the Ukraine which presents little in the way of the geographic challenges we have here. Get people to the perimeters and in parking garages and then make it so they're able to use alternative transport. We won't be building fast rail between Portland, Salem and Eugene but we can certainly make it so you limit the amount of driving you need to perform.
"Livability", in America, doesn't really exist as a concept. I get blank stares from most people. They all want a single-family 2000 sq. ft. home somewhere in a suburb that will doom them to be behind the wheel of a car for every little thing and see nothing abnormal about it.
In America, a city is a place where cars drive to get from business A to business B. People enter the equation only as a necessary side-effect. But fuck you if you're a pedestrian or don't have a car.
In Europe, cities exist for people. Streets are built with people in mind, businesses are placed with people in mind, infrastructure is built with people in mind.
I grew up in Europe, and the entire city was "mine" as a teenager - I could go anywhere, cheaply, quickly, and never needed a driver's license. I shopped for groceries, paid bills, hung out with friends, went to school - everything was within walking distance or a short bus ride away.
Here - I don't know how kids do it. To rely on parents to drive you to - where - shopping malls???? - to "hang out" or be doomed to watch tv/play video games all day - I'm so glad that was not my child-hood - I really think it's one reason I'm not on various anti-depressants, nor obese, nor anti-social.
I really wish someone would do a study that looked at the number of depressed/anti-social/about-to-go-on-a-shooting-spree people in a country whose only interaction with other human beings is to say "good how are you" at the clerk at the grocery aisle check-out lane or to curse at other people behind the wheel of their car while getting there.
I really believe (no evidence, just belief) that if cities in America didn't make you stressed out just for trying to get from place A to place B, or putting your life in danger by having to drive, we'd see a lot fewer problems - a lot fewer.
It's the same everywhere, I can vouch for rural Illinois.
Check out strongtowns.org, a non-profit that explores this EXACT phenomena and how it happened.
Basically, infrastructure == progress to a LOT of poorly informed communities who don't bother factoring in maintenance costs or look at the actual economics of building huge roads through their main street.
Throw in a dash of pork-barrel spending and lobbying to secure funding to build more roads for the hell of it and you have the US's current mad-max roads-to-fucking-nowhere infrastructure nightmare. It was all a big experiment where everyone but the guys getting paid to build the roads lost.
Chalk it up to the fact that almost literally every European city developed while people still traveled on horses, and nearly every American city saw 90% of its development when cars existed. If Americans already need cars because cities are so far apart and it isn't yet feasible to rely on public transportation across states and the country, why bother making cities that resemble European, pre-steam engine city layouts unless you are dealing with a city like New York or Los Angeles, where there is no practical reason to leave?
It always comes back down to money. Suburbs are inherently less efficient; you need more sewage, more electric, more road, etc. to serve the same amount of people. And this is before we consider that suburban houses are much farther away and apart, much bigger spaces with more heating and AC requirement, etc. Suburbs generally don't make enough money through taxes to cover their lifecycle costs.
The first generation of suburbs is already failing as they become choked by the next generation of suburbs. Ferguson, MO was once a rich suburb of St. Louis. The suburbs of Nassau County, one of the richest US counties by median income, have been under state fiscal control since 2000.
You can have all of those things in a city. It's not as if the Europeans are all single slaving away in cubicle farms. Most people would say that the Europeans work far less than Americans do.
In fact, suburbs can be some of the most limiting places for kids. Every activity needs a driver, so until you get a license you need a chaperone. You mostly can't walk to the shops, or the park, or your friend's house, with limited exceptions. And biking and walking are out of the question if you have to navigate a main suburban arterial to get there. As a parent your choices are to trap them in the house or spend your precious time driving your kids everywhere.
Half of Kansas City's downtown is parking lots which generally sit empty during the day. To make matters even worse, the city is constantly building mixed-use areas with retail and office space, restaurants, hotels and apartments intermixed with roads running every which way. Walking around these places is just a constant hazard.
Can you explain how the mixed-use makes this worse? Not having seen it, I'd expect it to make the situation better that I have a restaurant right next to my apartment or office and don't need to get in the car.
I haven’t spent any time in Kansas City to know what the parent referred to — but with a lack of knowledge I could imagine this aesthetic could lead to some pretty bad designs if the feeling was that each mixed use function needed its own entrance and each entrance needed to be as close to parking as possible. Such could encourage all the buildings to be islands surrounded by a moat of parking lots which would help ensure that walking anywhere would involve a lot of walking through parking lots ...
One of the most interesting experiences in my life was visiting Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur. On that day all car traffic is prohibited (also TV stations are offline etc). It was absolutely amazing. Tel Aviv is a city with large roads and usually extremely busy. On that day, cyclists ride over the highway, kids play on the streets. I never felt that directly before how invasive the normal car situation is.
Just to clarify, there is no law that I know of prohibiting car traffic on yom kippur in Tel Aviv. However, since this is the most important holiday of the year, even many Israelis who don't celebrate other holidays will celebrate this one. I believe that virtually all businesses are closed that day, even those that don't close on other Jewish holidays (again, not illegal to operate, but customary). So in practice, few people will be driving that day/night.
Moral code or just social pressure - the discomfort of the thought of disobeying the tradition and everyone glaring at you as you drive down the road outweighs the benefits of doing so even if you don't believe in the tradition.
Reminds me of walking the Bijlmermeer near HVA in Amsterdam on a Sunday morning. No cars, no people, no traffic, absolutely empty streets. The only sound was that of the wind streaming through steel canyons, and my footsteps. A positively divine experience
Kids can play anywhere else when cars are on the road. What's so attractive about playing on a big patch of hard material that gets so hot in the summer you can't touch it without burning yourself? What's wrong with parks and people's yards? I never understood the pining for the days of playing on streets.
When I played baseball growing up, the street was level and hard and so on. The backyard with grass had a steep hill and poor traction, etc. The street in front of my house made a much better baseball field than my steeply sloped, grassy and uneven backyard.
Yet, it was right in front of my house, so I could use the bathroom, get a snack and remained under the watchful eye of my mother, unlike, say, some distant park with a proper baseball field.
Its amazing how divided Israel culture is yet the idea of having no cars for one day is totally embraced by anyone. Gives me a feeling of how polluted my daily life is with noise and gas.
The main parts are well accessible. There are some districts which are very car-centric, but the "old" part is well walkable. Or you can rent a bike, as I did.
I don't know why this didn't occur to me but in San Juan Capistrano, CA, I enjoy that place so much with my kids because of the fairly large area where cars have to have very slow speed limit or no cars allowed at all and pure walking which was far better even. There is such freedom allowing your children to laugh and play and walk on their own pace without worrying they'll be run over and having to strictly hold their hand near each cross walk where cars zip by at instant collision death speeds. I could hear the birds too. Was calming and slows the perception of time so you can actually relax.
This is why I like theme parks.[1] It's sad because in America we've largely relegated what should be a normal living environment to fascimiles of imaginary places.
Actually, I live in San Francisco and the "downtowns" of each neighborhood do allow kids some freedom away from their parents (e.g. to dart in and out of stores and restaurants without waiting for the parent), but it's limited to a single block unless you want to risk being run over. Hit-and-runs occur here regularly, unfortunately, because the city is just barely pedestrian friendly enough that pedestrians feel comfortable, but not friendly enough that cars are actually forced to slow down (e.g. streets too wide). If car and pedestrian are not both carefully paying attention, accidents happen.
[1] My wife doesn't like theme parks. But where she's from you never let kids out of sight, regardless, so they offer little respite for her.
"It's sad because in America we've largely relegated what should be a normal living environment to fascimiles of imaginary places."
This is deep and very quotable. It's one of the things I love the most about living outside the USA, when I'm able to do so-- not relying on my car to get literally everywhere. My happiness and quality of life feel so much higher. I know for sure it affects my waist line.
I think there is a big difference though. Theme parks are super over crowded and you end up having sore feet and wait in long lines all day and still having to hold on to your kids of fear of losing them in the crowd. I guess its still better than fear of death.
I visited San Juan Capistrano the other day, and it reminded me quite a bit of a theme park.
There's not much housing around the historic area, so nearly everyone drives in and parks in one of the parking lots surrounding it. Then they spend a few hours pretending like they live in this walkable, historic town, maybe they visit the Mission, then it's back into the car and the suburbs.
The area your talking about, where there's little places where kids can play: it's called the Suburbs. Growing up in the suburbs, cars went slow enough that we could play in the street. The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to stop. There's not the density of little shops that you might find in SF, but as a kid you don't need that density (I don't need it as an adult; the suburbs I live in have a nice downtown, but if I need serious shopping, I have Amazon)
Suburbs, much reviled here, are the answer to all of the density problems that people are complaining about. Mass transit works with commuter rail. There's no argument except prestige to stay in the city.
I also grew up in the suburbs in the 1980s, both in Florida (more rural northwest) and Illinois (Chicago suburbs). The suburbs of my youth don't exist anymore; certainly not the ones I actually lived in. The streets are far more dangerous because cars drive faster and they seem to be more reckless (e.g. idiot kids or grumpy adults racing down the block in cars that outperform sport cars from 20 years prior). I used to regularly walk 2 miles to high school (when I slept late and missed the bus), a portion of which required walking on the side of a main thoroughfare without a sidewalk. Cars today drive 50mph or 60mph on that road whereas they once drove 30mph. I wouldn't walk that route as an adult today, and sure as heck wouldn't let a kid walk it regularly.
They do exist in some places. I've seen them and have visited friends living there. Cul de sacs in subdivisions still on the city periphery, predominately Mormon neighborhoods in Utah where people expect kids to dart into the street, or tony gated communities. But they're just not as common. And in any event, even when they can, kids these days don't spend much time outdoors. In places where I did (and kids still can) spend all day roaming around in the woods or riding their bikes across town, today's kids spend all day playing video games or chatting online. Even if I my kid chose to hang outside, he'd be playing alone much of the time.
As someone else mentioned on HN a couple of years ago, you can optimize for a kids ability to play in the streets when he's < 10 years old. Or you can optimize for a 10+ year old to have the freedom to get around an entire city by himself. These days you can't have both, unfortunately, whereas once upon a time the city offered both (when kids could play in the street because drivers and cars were less threatening).
Times are different. I don't dislike the suburbs, I just don't think they're sustainable. Most often suburbs deteriorate quickly within a decade or two. The qualities that make them livable disappear once they're subsumed by a new ring of suburbs, bringing increased cross traffic and a new generation of childless homeowners.
> The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to stop.
This doesn't sound like the typical American suburban experience, and I think what you are describing is almost heading in the direction of the best existing solution for non-city living, which is the "village" style denser towns that you see in Europe. The idea basically being that you turn a fairly evenly distributed suburban population into one that clusters around small to medium sized town centers that are walkable and bikable, but contain and are surrounded by large areas of communal countryside and green space.
It necessitates a sacrifice in lot size (and potentially house size), but in return you get a quiet, safe, traversable town with plentiful access to the countryside, and it also helps immensely with things like logistics, infrastructure (electricity/gas/internet in the suburbs is a nightmare), and, potentially most importantly, transportation, since a strong commuter rail system can actually service that sort of layout effectively.
Many if not would still describe this as a suburb. There are definitely places (I'm aware of ones in the North East) that follow this model that are called suburbs. When people complain about suburbs, they are complaining about the model that dominates the US, not the concept of a less dense population area surrounding a metropolis.
Having lived in dozens of suburbs moving around in life, it seems very typical to me. Even challenging neighborhoods buried in sprawl would lead to local zoning opening up for shops. The problem often solves itself. Where I live now only had one nearby market within driving distance, but market pressure opened 2 more. Its almost as if there is profit in these overlooked planning issues and people like to win it.
This urban-centric thinking is odd to me. I do not want to live so far away from the natural phenomenon of earth, and I think it is unhealthy that so many want to push that lifestyle on everyone. It rings absolutely hollow to me to have effortless transport to a thousand places all manmade, and mostly devoid of non-domesticated plant and animal life.
+1, grew up in the suburbs (which are regularly the butt of jokes in "the city"), actually explored all around town with my friends without fear of being run over or really any other problem endemic to high-density living. Plus, the older I get the less I appreciate a dense city, and realize just how unnatural and problematic that kind of living is.
There has to be that balance of market places and convenience, not just a bunch of houses spaced far apart and wide streets. That isn't scalable. The suburbs are too sprawled where driving is necessary to get to anyplace useful if you need to shop or get stuff.
There is a gated neighborhood of large, well appointed homes near Rice University in Houston.* They open up every once in a while for tours, particularly at Christmas. More than once kids or adults raised there have mentioned being able to just play in the street as one of their fondest memories of the place. In car-centric Houston their experience is rare if not exactly unique.
Ex-Houstonian here: down there we worship and give sacrifice to the motor gods. We'll build massive multi million dollar freeway interchanges[0] as monument to our gods.
No place for busses. Our attempt at public transit was a slow tram that runs up and down main street through dozens of intersections, pushing any hapless motorist not expecting a train on the fucking road it encounters out of the way.
So when rice closes off the gates, it is like a little paradise. I disagree that it's "not unique," I can't think of a single other place in tbe entirety of Houston (a city so wide that it can take two hours to drive across if you go corner to corner, in non-rush-hour) where you get to experience that.
When I say it's "not unique" I'm acknowledging there are other gated communities with low traffic. The closest one I can think of to Rice is in Montrose on Courtland Place. If you ever went to KPFT on Lovett and noticed a big wall where Lovett ends that's the back side of their little community. Look on street view or satellite view of Google maps at Bagby and Courtland Place to see what I mean.
Also the first neighborhood I listed is separate and distinct from the Rice University campus. It shares a border but it's not part of their land holdings: all the homes are privately owned.
Exactly. Walking with young kids is so stressful. All that kids want to do is run ahead, and I keep having to yell at them to stop, wait. You can never be at ease.
A city with fast cars running around is the least human-friendly environment that we have built on purpose.
People often complain about hostile or "anti-human" architecture [1], but those are silly details. The sad tragedy is building the whole city around the needs of cars.
I wonder what effect the increasing performance of cars has had on safety. Any modern car can accelerate to ridiculously unsafe speeds within the span of a single block, whereas cars from the 1970s and even 1980s were sluggish. Similarly, modern cars can make sharp turns where older cars risked skidding. Then factor in things like less noise and larger A-pillars reducing visibility[1], and modern cars seem more anti-pedestrian.
The gap between inattentiveness and recklessness has been closed. Even considering improved braking, there was simply more margin for error back when speeds were naturally lower.
I know cars have always been dangerous to pedestrians. But there were other factors at play, like drunk driving being nearly ubiquitous.
[1] The left A-pillar in my Honda CRV has just the right size and placement that it blocks the far left-hand corner of the intersection from view. A pedestrian about to cross the street is invisible to me unless I physically lean over or have already entered the intersection.
Pedestrian safety is a big consideration with modern cars, as it's a legal requirement in most countries. Most of the homogeneity in modern car design is due to these regulations -- low hoodlines are rare because there needs to be a buffer between the engine and the hood; the hood can't extend all the way to the grill because the edge causes excessive injuries; and the front ends of cars have a weird bulge because pedestrians struck should be tossed to the side of the car to prevent them from being run over.
That's not even getting into automatic braking systems or backup cameras.
In contrast, a 65 Toronado looks designed to cause the maximum amount of damage to any person you run over.
Yeah, but there's only so much technology can do to mitigate a 40mph impact.[1] And I assume that 65 Toronado required wide turns (as did the 60-something Pontiac Boneville I briefly owned and stupidly sold because it wasn't sleek enough). Whereas pedestrians getting clipped by a left-turning car racing pedestrians is a regular occurrence.
That said, point taken. And those mitigations are based on real-world data, not my anecdotes. And, of course, nothing prevents us from having the best of both worlds--safer cars and safer streets. I was just thinking that streets are so stupidly designed today because, once upon a time, the same configurations may not have been as stupid. (I know that one reason SF streets are so wide, especially in the Western part of the city, is because they were designed to accommodate street cars and cars simultaneously.)
[1] Automatic braking is a huge deal but its far from pervasive. The last time I went car shopping three years ago, it was still an expensive option for both the Honda CRV and Mercedes GLC we were looking at. My lease is almost up and I think it'll be standard on the same model CRV. Even when it becomes standard industry-wide it'll be many years before I'd factor it into my mental calculus as a pedestrian. Less well-off drivers in older cars spend a disproportionate amount of time on the streets simply because of the economics (e.g. often live far outside the city because of housing costs, and drive into the city because neither their homes nor jobs are conveniently located to mass transit).
I don't think that cars vote or really have any agency (yet). Maybe if people, who think that people who emphasize the use cars have been in charge of building cities for too long, used a word like motorist that recognized the humanity of car users, you might find less resistance to your ideas. Being referred to as an inanimate object is an quite an "othering".
Being able to drive places feels much more like freedom to me than having to walk everywhere. As a kid I literally never walked into the road because I knew it was dangerous, so maybe that's just a problem of communicating the risk properly.
This is an almost uniquely American point of view.
To obtain this freedom you must :
1. Get a license and learn to drive
2. Buy or lease a large, rarely utilised machine
3. Keep it maintained
4. Keep it fuelled
5. Ensure your tax dollars are spent on enormous infrastructure projects
6. Continue paying for the maintenance of said infrastructure
7. Undergo the significant risk of getting in a vehicle, and impose higher risks on all those around you
8. Pollute the air around you with fumes
9. Warp the development of all living spaces around you to suit your convenience, regardless of cost or benefit
That is a ridiculous cost to just throw on poor people. And this is assuming a poor person has a full time job with no dependents, and has no other competing concerns for money.
There is a nice place by the train station where you park and can walk into the little shops. The general speed limit is much lower than in LA and noise is much reduced. "Banned" is the wrong word. There are no roads in that area after you walk past the station but there is a parking structure by the theatre. I think in general, places like The Grove and and Irvine Outdoor Mall are like that in that you can walk freely but they still feel busy and overly commercialized because they are malls. I particularly liked the calmer area of San Juan downtown.
"No cars allowed" possibly service vehicles to the shops? But I never see cars and looks like they are never supposed to drive there. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/ZOOMARS,+31791+Los+Rios+St,+... See near Zoomars and Regency Theaters as the start of it where you park then you can walk past the station and go to the coffee shop and go to the restaurants etc there are never cars in there or any traffic
I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedestrian district plans need to be considered carefully, else they backfire.
Church st in Burlington VT partially closed to cars starting in 1980 (based on Stroget in Copenhagen) and ongoing into 2005 with more and more blocks carved out for pedestrians only. It has been very successful.
Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly?
(The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?)
I don't know anything about the Raleigh project but some other thoughts on maybe why Church St works:
- Burlington is the biggest city in VT, and being on Lake Champlain and relatively close to the best ski areas in the state, it attracts a lot of tourists year round
- A ton of local businesses downtown, urban/residential neighborhoods are also very close
- A fair amount of parking (multiple parking garages, nearby on-street parking and parking lots)
- There's City Hall Park, and the town promotes the 'culture', e.g. allowing street vendors and performers, and with the recentish ban on smoking, it's pushed most of the bums into the alleys/side streets
I'd attribute a large portion of church street's success to zoning policies, the city has kept that street focused on small business to avoid that common american experience of walking by a walmart for twenty minutes... the north end of the street was more sparse in terms of doorways and always was more empty, but the center and southern end were vibrant.
So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.
Just speculating, but looking at the photos from Fayetteville, it was totally car-scale. Sure, it was pedestrian-only, but just look at the pictures of the locale. Huge buildings, long distances, wide street.
This is not the best example but the first to pop to mind- compare to Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, which seems to be doing well:
Among the differences are that the University of Colorado is right there and Boulder has been a fairly affluent town for a long time (even before the relatively recent immigration of Google, etc.)
Also, let's not overstate the differences. The actual pedestrian mall on Pearl is just a few blocks long. And Fayetteville in Raleigh these days, while not car-free, is part of a very walkable area of downtown Raleigh with lots of restaurants, a few hotels, some shops, new condo construction, some major businesses, the convention center, government offices, etc.
As a counter example, Vienna largely converted its second major shopping street, Mariahilfer Straße, to a mostly pedestrian + bike zone, with parts of it also shared space with cars, though they do not have priority over pedestrians. Gets very crowded during core shopping hours, so much that biking there is rather difficult.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Wien_07_...
First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only.
Downtown pedestrian malls were tried in many US cities and mostly failed. They were an attempt to make downtown retail competitive with suburban mall retail, by the former emulating the latter, after the former was already failing. They only worked when other things were in place that made lots of people walking downtown utilitarian, like adjacent universities, tourist attractions, and dense connected residential. Few people wished to drive and park near downtown for a quasi-mall shopping experience, apparently. Lots has been written about this, but one overview: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/revisiting_pedestrian_malls_scmi...
You could also make the argument that opening city centers to cars should be considered carefully, and that is also true. It just happens to be the current default almost everywhere.
Contrary to that anecdote, Jersey City (across the Hudson river from Manhattan), created a no-car zone near one of its busier subway stops and what was once a dead-zone after 8pm is now an extremely vibrant place filled with bars, restaurants and shops.
Proximity to mass transit and having density that already discourages driving helps.
It has nothing to do with car free streets and everything to do with the Jersey City being on the other side from Manhattan with rents being 50% or lower than the rents in Manhattan and Jersey city being accessible by PATH.
I don't think you understand. The mayor closed off a stretch of Newark Avenue, which leads right into the Grove St Path Station in late 2014. Prior to this, Newark Avenue was a strip of fairly grimy stores, a few restaurants, and some new promising places like Word Bookstore had been moving in since 2010 or so.
Still, this was a pretty dead place at night. In 2008, I would go to one of the two bars there and it would be a literal ghost town, with stores boarded up with metal gates and such- it looked almost post-apocalyptic. It was a little better from 2011-2014, but still it was a quiet area at night.
After the pedestrian plaza was put in, the amount of foot traffic increased ten fold, particularly during the day when it was a heavily traffic-ed street. This brought in a new wave of bars and restaurants to the area, and its now a destination on its own, filled with people nearly 24/7. In fact it has gotten so popular and become such a destination, the city is now trying to introduce ordinances to reduce noise at night.
The change was instantaneous after the pedestrian plaza was put in place.
People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
> People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
Bed-Stuy
Bushwick
Gowanus
East New York
Bronx
Inwood
Same thing happened in Kalamazoo, MI back about 1978.
The city center closed part of the main street to cars when a four story enclosed mall of boutique stores was built. Within five years most of the mall and nearby stores were dying.
This was partly due to the growth of a pair of large enclosed malls 5 miles away which sucked business elsewhere. But I think most of the problem was that shoppers don't wants to walk outdoors in the long Michigan Winter. They needed to somehow enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize peoples' exposure to the elements, but that wasn't in the budget.
Heh, enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize exposure to the weather, thereby creating what we usually call a 'shopping mall.' Ah the irony that would be.
I don't know the history of the mall in Raleigh but I suspect at least part of the issue was that, at the time, downtown Raleigh probably wasn't a place a lot of people wanted to walk around. As you say, there are a lot more people (and companies) downtown today and more upscale restaurants, bars, etc. Though, even today, like a lot of smaller cities that have had something of a renaissance, most of the places the average upscale professional would want to walk to are in a fairly small area.
I wasn't alive in 1977, but in the 90s, the perception was that downtown was busy during the day, but a ghost town after 5:00 PM. I don't believe that particular area was particularly unsafe or unwelcoming, it's just that the only reason people were there was daytime business.
They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise.
Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolutely a win.
There’s something to be said for joint car/pedestrian spaces as a permanent situation. Pike St outside of Pike Place market and Hanover St in the North End of Boston come to mind. Both are nominally streets, and cars attempt to drive them, but the speeds are slow enough, and there are enough pedestrians that both are on relatively equal footing. Cars are cautious of the pedestrians, and pedestrians weave around the cars, everyone has their choice of mode of transport.
My city did this with bike lanes. Most of the housing isn't within easily walk able distance from downtown and the city is where a lot of people from surrounding towns go to buy things. All the downtown businesses that weathered the recession got rewarded with all their customers decided to spend their money at the businesses a mile away that had readily available parking. Grade A city planning right there. /s
Actually you need people in the city to not depend on cars. Public transport, cycle lanes and a reason to stay in the city centre like good restaurants, cafes, some festivals. Just closing a street to cars might just make everyone drive around and miss it. Also don‘t let big shopping malls be build at the outside of the city with huge parking areas. Create parks instead.
The area was closed to vehicular traffic in 1977. The article about possibly replacing the pedestrian mall is 1997. Construction began in 2005. The area reopened to vehicular and pedestrian traffic in mid 2006. The article about the results and other cities considering the same is 2007.
All of which is in TFA[1] the person you're replying to linked
Pedestrianisation works well in European cities, especially small ones. It's quite common here in the UK, often there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out.
However this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even within the context of a single street - for this to make sense. If you had electric scooters or something though...
It took major redevelopment for many US cities to become car-centric, so I am not seeing why we could not do another redevelopment to create pedestrian-friendly cities.
The cycle of gentrification will change that. In 10, 20 years, a new neighborhood will be the hip place to be, all the rich propel will move there, and prices will drop. It'd be nice if the development could happen in the low-income areas from the beginning, but it's hot hopeless.
For now at least. As mentioned in other comments it's hard, and expensive, to redevelop entire cities. Politically it's also probably difficult because it's such a big change. Makes sense that those with money to afford making changes privately would have them first.
However, it's also likely they will want this nice life in more than just their area and will push for that over time.
Internalize the cost of parking, drop mandatory parking minimums and change zoning to allows for reasonable density. Wait a few decades and cities probably won't be as car centric as they are now.
> there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out.
That is nuts.
That means a plumber, electrician, home appliance deliveryman, mover, etc. can only handle one job requiring a vehicle per day. He will have to charge 3-4 times more for his services than someone working in an area where it's feasible to finish 3-4 jobs in a workday. The costs are of course passed on to the customers. Is their car-less life worth living in a pigsty that they can't fix up because laws force contractors to charge exorbitant fees?
That means any business will want a dedicated vehicle to haul what they need in the 6-8 am window. This is not just grossly economically inefficient (no outsourcing delivery to third parties), it results in more vehicles sitting idle during the day, using up parking space!
And that means moving is a nightmare. Moving a two-bedroom apartment worth of stuff into or out of a truck is, realistically, at least a four hour job. That means a cross-town move that could be done in one workday with sane laws will take at least four workdays (two to load the truck, two to unload) in your crazy UK town. Imagine the costs. How is it moral for you to shackle your people to the land by making relocation unaffordable?
When you look into the details of these things you'll nearly always find that there are enough exemptions to make it work. If it was genuinely unliveable people wouldn't live there. People have managed to live in Venice for centuries despite it being physically impossible to get motor vehicles around the centre.
"In fact, in most streets there are no physical barriers to keep the cars out. Vehicles making deliveries or locals heading to private garages can still circulate in most places.
“What we did is to create loops to keep people from driving through the city,” Lores explains. “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
The goal of this strategy, which is complemented by severe parking restrictions in all of the central area, is to get rid of what Pontevedra officials call “unnecessary traffic”.
I live in a large apartment development in Manhattan that is pedestrian-friendly and decidedly vehicle-unfriendly. You can't drive a car to the front of my building. And yet it works, very well.
I moved in with my girlfriend recently. You know how that worked? The movers she hired drove as near as possible, and simply pushed her stuff on dollies the rest of the way to the building. No big deal. Yeah, it took a little bit longer, but nowhere near as bad as the 4-day move you're hyperbolically claiming. And that side of the move was actually better than the other side, since she was moving out of a fourth floor walkup. Even though the truck could park almost directly in front of that building, it turns out it's harder to carry stuff down many flights of stairs than it is to push it on wheels across a flat surface and then up an elevator.
I moved from another building within my complex, and I accomplished my entire move simply by pushing my stuff on a dolly, without even having to hire movers. I've never before had a vehicle-less move even be an option, but it was in this situation.
As for repairmen, you know how they work? They get around on bicycles. You can carry a surprising amount of stuff on a bicycle, including all the tools you'd need for >95% of repairs. The plumbers ride around on bikes with a toolbox, plungers, and a snake, for example. For appliance delivery, they use tiny little vehicles that are basically a pick-up truck version of a golf cart. These vehicles don't go fast and the drivers yield to pedestrians, and you see them on pedestrian paths (and don't feel unsafe about it).
Every problem that you're bringing up is already solved in the many different areas that are pedestrianized and prohibit vehicle traffic. It's a failure of imagination to think that these problems are unsolvable. When your city is dense enough, a plumber/electrician can easily support him/herself on just jobs that are within a 10 minute walking radius, with the tools that can be pushed on a handcart or fit on a bicycle. Vehicles aren't necessary. It's actually more efficient for these professions, because in the suburbs it's typical to drive for up to an hour to get to a jobsite! So much wasted time spent just getting somewhere!
The 6-8am window is for large deliveries. There is normally a retractable barrier for emergency usage (police/ambulance etc) and for minimal day access (I don't know how this is managed, but I have seen vehicles have to turn around and leave, where others, normally with a business inside get access).
Another common way is to have a central pedestrian only section, but with vehicle access through the 'back streets' behind. The pedestrian street is normally a great deal larger than the (often one way) back streets, and again has retractable bollards for maintenance, event vehicles and emergency vehicles. These back streets also give access to underground/aboveground parking for residents in flats. I would love to see this model used to some extent in residential areas. Some of my favorite times are when a street is closed to traffic for a street party.
In practice it works very well, at least in a large number of towns and cities in the UK. It's about finding the correct roads and spaces to limit and disallow motor vehicles on.
I don't know of any residential areas that have these sorts of restrictions. Its generally in shopping areas. Businesses have to schedule deliveries for these time slots.
>pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre
It's a lot less impressive when you realize that they just banned cars from the area that was optimized for foot traffic anyway. Good on them for not trying to go to far and force people to walk/bike in areas designed for cars.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
Tangent: This is probably the most European quote ever. Roman senators, medieval lords, members of parliament, Napoleon, the Kaiser, etc, etc. could have all said this.
>And the same shopkeepers who complain are the ones who have survived in spite of the crisis
Surviving in spite of the crisis does not make the crisis fun or necessary. It took a lot of boarded up shops before my city took away the bike lanes and put back the on-street parking (no, the failed businesses did not coincide with the recession if anyone was wondering). You gotta do what works even if it's not what fits your political objectives. If an area of the city was designed for pedestrians that's probably what will work best there. If an area of the city was designed for cars then that's probably what will work best there. It's a disservice to taxpayers to use their money to jam a square peg in a round hole or vise-versa.
>The works were all financed locally and received no aid from regional or central government.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
There's nothing European about it, despite the fantasy of Europe being comfortable with dictatorships. Driving a car is also a privilege in the US - try driving one without your state-sanctioned license to do so and you will discover that.
By the way, Members of Parliament are democratically elected so I am not sure how they fit in with the rest of the motley crew.
Cars have to some extent led us through part of the industrial revolution. However, it's my belief that cars, except from polluting the environment and destroying our cities - makes people unhappy and sad.
Visiting LA this summer, I knew I was in for a car heavy metropolis but this... I can't understand why people waste so much time of their precious life (usually alone which also greatly worsen the problem) - locked in a car.
Coming to the topic of the autonomous car revolution, which I frankly do not understand. Sometimes it feels like the ambition is to end up as the humans in WALL-E. What kind of life is that?
Ps. Coming from Europe, I crossed US by bicycle a few years ago, from NY to US. People say it's a country to be seen through a car, but I argue it's to be seen on a bike.
I was born in Europe and lived there for 14 years before moving to US. I went there recently.
I also recently visited LA.....
Most people I know from smaller cities in Poland own cars or would love to own a car but simply cannot afford it as gas is really expensive, so are cars compared to incomes. When I visited I rented a car which allowed me to see so many things all over the country. I would not able to visit so many locations without a car.
Same goes for LA, renting a car allowed me to travel from LA to San Diego on a relatively short trip.
In NY over 50% households are car-free. In Chicago about 30% of households are car-free. People travel to cities for various reasons, often they don't do it daily.
My wife traveled to school by train in city of chicago for one year, then she switched to driving her car, she saved a lot of time on her commute, and didn't have to deal with weirdos on the trains at night.
Cars are here to stay. Some people drive less by utilizing services like amazon but then amazon needs to deliver packages, but, I guess that still minimizes fuel consumption as things are delivered in a more efficient way.
First thing I noticed when moved to SF Bay Area from Europe was “God, Los Gatos would be so beautiful if the main street was a pedestrian area.” Then went actively searching for one and found a little stretch at Santana Row in San Jose, if you can call 30 meters of blocked off street pedestrian area.
But even dense populated cities like SF dont have a pedestrian zone. It is one of the rare things I miss quality of life wise.
As a kid in the early '90s the corner market, grocery store, schools from elementary to high, both jobs I had, and park were all within a 10 minute walk -- and that was in the suburbs. Cars don't need to be a requirement for daily life even in the suburbs it just requires good planning or planning at all.
When people ask me why I like living in Mexico, this is one of the main reasons:
The other week I walked around my neighborhood in Guadalajara to do some errands. I got my knives sharpened, picked up my repaired shoes from the cobbler, some fried pumpkin seeds from the seed guy, some meat from the butcher, and then some tacos of course. All within two blocks.
I moved to a center (pedestrian zona) of a small town in central Europe, from a country's capital, same experience here.
In a capital, I didn't do a detour on my way home to get a good bread, as it would add 15 minutes to a way home. Here it's a pleasant walk behind a corner.
European grocery stores are so wonderful. I love how everyone's just stopping by to pick up a few things for dinner and tomorrow's breakfast, not pushing their yacht of a shopping cart around. The produce is always super fresh and cheap compared to American, and I always like getting a nice carbonated mineral water.
For the past 50 years or so, the literal books on good design (according to the govt of the US) have specified cul-de-sacs, which offer the promise of less vehicle traffic but actually guarantee MORE traffic, because you can't have good walking paths. From a plane you can get an idea of how old an area is - old ones will have cul-de-sacs, middle-aged ones will have a fern-like structure with dead end streets that have only lines of cul-de-sacs coming off of them, and recent ones will have this fractal-like shape of cul-de-sacs of cul-de-sacs of cul-de-sacs. In those environments, nothing is walking distance (and walking paths start to become labyrinthine swirls if you actually wanted to walk them) so vehicle traffic increases.
I think that problem can be avoided to some extent with paths/cycleways. Many cul-de-sacs in parts of Christchurch, New Zealand, are only cul-de-sacs for cars, and pedestrians and cyclists have a through-route. This can lead to situations where driving means covering a much greater distance, and is one of the enablers of the city's current focus on increasing bike-friendliness (the other being that it's very flat, unlike much of other NZ cities). It's still a pretty car-centric place, however.
It’s expected that suburbs are walkable for children and maybe even stay-at-home parents, but working members of the household usually drive to work and take the family to activities (restaurants, youth sports, shopping, other adventures) outside the walkable bubble.
>People don’t like being told they can’t drive wherever they want, but Lores says that while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges.
Modern discourse about "rights" has become twisted. Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. A society needs to choose its rights wisely lest the unintended consequences result in less overall freedom.
In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximation. In unhealthy societies legal rights are often cold comfort.
IMO as we accumulated more and more "rights", the concept became diluted. We went from the bedrock negative rights of freedom of speech, travel, etc, then to positive rights, and then people started applying the concept of "rights" to what I would consider "entitlements".
It's all the same debate, really. After all is said and done, rights function to entitle you to things or acts. The blurry line that I believe you might be talking about has a very specific name, but recent social and public discourse make a lot of people nowadays automatically cringe at it's sight (wrongly, IMO) without seriously hearing out or considering it's merits. I'm talking about the word "privilege".
>Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition.
I take slight issue with that - for example, what prohibition on males was there when women were given the right to vote? I suppose one could argue the male vote was diluted but realistically no pain would be felt.
I say this because oftentimes for social services arguments, conservatives will ask me "well who's gonna pay for it," which I can often answer with "literally nobody. You are generating property value for yourself by housing homeless / increasing the value of your currency by educating disenfranchised youth / whatever."
Granting the right to private property ultimately deprives people of access to necessary resources. Private property is what forces people to have to pay ever-increasing rent, or work more hours for less pay. It's an inherently unstable social system because those with more property can more easily increase their ownership and thereby make it harder for those with no property from ever getting any.
> Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition.
In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.
Indeed and I think a further manifestation of this "privilege" is the constant honking of the horn by drivers at the slightest reduction in their speed or movement.
Not only do they want to drive wherever they want but they seem to feel entitled to take out their frustration on anyone they want. The noise pollution that invariably accompanies traffic seems to really only penalize pedestrians, the very people who aren't contributing to the traffic problems.
I work in the Domain of Austin Texas, it's an outdoor mall, office park and residential area that is supposed to be like a downtown 2.0 in many ways. A place for humans to "live, shop and work" according to their mantra.
In reality, it's scary to walk to whole foods to get lunch at times. Cars NEVER yield to crosswalks or pedestrians. It's so bad they have flashing LED's on the stop signs in some areas.
The domain would be beautiful if parking garages were on the exterior and everyone had to walk in. Imagine being able to walk to shops, work and dining without worrying about getting plowed down by an F150 with a "thank god for our snipers" sticker on the back.
In fact, the best couple of days at this area are the art walk days but its been a while since I've seen those. For the artwalk days, they close the streets and it's like a magic little city of everyone breathing easier, enjoying some quiet serenity and kids walking around without parents needing 100% attention.
For the price they demand to live and lease space here, it would seem serenity and peacefulness would be the best thing they could do! (and there was plenty of land at one point for exterior garages... now its just a mad dash for people to find spots across the different garages which are all too small for the big trucks texans love)
I identify with that crosswalk yielding issue. In Boston they sometimes put up signs on the road surface itself, informing drivers that is ILLEGAL to not yield to pedestrians. I say "You broke the law" loudly whenever a driver doesn't yield in that situation, yet I've never seen any enforcement of this law.
Meanwhile, law enforcement is quick to sit on the highway catching those going with the flow of traffic over the speed limit, or quick to over-police non-violent drug offenses. So sad to see enforcement of the rules of the road take a back seat, especially when it comes to pedestrians, whose chosen mode of transport is beneficial and should be encouraged.
Considering Paris is roughly 10 km across North-South, that's about 12 min/km at an average human walking speed.
So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
1/25th the size of Paris is not what I would call a "village". Paris is a huge metropolis. It is a small-medium sized city.
Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.
For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)
Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.
Most cities in the Netherlands have a car-free inner city or shopping streets, no need to idolize this particular one. Going from a congested city to a car-free one is a good move though.
Interestingly, while Amsterdam's historic inner city is fully open to cars, you don't really see much of them - in part because it's just not practical, in part because parking is very expensive.
1) There are a few types:
- Working in the city center --> Walking mainly.
- Working outside of the city --> Cars/bus
The city that has banned the cars is the city centre, but is a round island, so in 10-25 min walk, there are parking slots, where you can drive from.
2) Shopping trolley, instead of buying a lot one day, you ended that each day you pick up a few things. (And this is great, 15 min day walking)
3) All the emergency services can go to the city centre, so cars are banned, but if you have an event or emergency cars can get into, here is the common sense rule.
And there is a benefit here, kids are in the street, and due a lot of kids in the street, that moves the street from unsafe, to full of #know people, that make things super safe.
I recently saw a delivery service for that kind of stuff (kind of "Bier Taxi") using small electric vehicles in our 180k city.
Scaling this to a "local grocery mail order service" could be a nice business model for a car-free city: Supporting local businesses AND avoiding having to carry 5 crates of beverages for the next party.
I think Rewe (a supermarket chain) is doing something like this in (parts of) Germany; but I believe they use gas-driven cars.
Hey, I'm taking my family next year on a 10 day trip through Galicia, and was considering spending some time around Combarro, Pontevedra, etc. Can I get your thoughts and opinions on places to stay, things to do in that area? siegel dot darren at gmail
I thing "banning" cars in a Town/City work well for smaller cities, through you still might want to have some time frame in which e.g. trucks can bring new goods to super markets, fire fighter etc.
For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public
transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses,
you just need to deploy enough of them with a good
rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).
Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from ideal.
Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
I guess if the only industries in your city are white collar or tourism it's fine.
Better to just not allow noncommercial vehicles during certain times.
>Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
>For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from idea
TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
Disclaimer, my father is a deliveryman for restaurants.
> Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
For white-collar, these entry areas, allow delivers to walk less than 5 min, so it's ok.
Is not walk/no-walk, the city did awesome to allow entry zones and make the walking culture for all of us.
>TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
I should have said industrial foodservice. Are there no schools, hotels, etc. in the city center? Do catering services not deliver lunches to the city center?
>Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
Um, yes, you still have skilled trades. These are the people installing new light fixtures in office buildings and replacing the blower motor for a building's HVAC. Not being able to do diagnostic work and then send someone around later in the day to actually perform repairs is like getting shot in the foot to any business that does repair work.
I support not allowing commuter traffic in city centers but not allowing commercial vehicle traffic seems like needlessly cutting the clock cycle of every part of the economy that deals with physical goods by a factor two or three.
It's interesting how people's expectations and attitudes develop. I remember landing at San Diego airport and asking how I could walk the relatively short distance into the city center. I just got looks of derision and directions to the taxi rank. I did attempt to find a walkable route myself to no avail.
It's an interesting contrast to banning cars and essentially banning walking
I'll preface this with saying that I own two cars and in general like cars. However, I think personal motorized transportation along with industrialized animal farming are for me among the two biggest evils that arose in the last century. Cities in North America are entirely architected for the presence and convenience of cars. The mortality arising from pollution and accidents is staggering. The alienation and isolation of people as well. The cities and suburbs stretch so far out that you rarely get to see your friends unless you specifically organize something well ahead of time. Pedestrian zones with small shops are replaced with massive shopping malls.
I've always imagined a modern city with no cars, but I never knew that anyone actually had the balls to make this a reality. Kudos to this Spanish city! You can try to argue that the specifics of this city make it more amenable to being car-free, but I think that if there was enough desire, it would work anywhere. Just think if everyone paid their monthly car loan/lease into the public transportation system how incredibly functional it could be.
Working in the center of Berlin, I wish Berlin would do the same. There is a hospital near, and a constant load noise level from ambulances. Without cars, those could be much much quieter, but traffic increased, cars got more soundproof and people hear loud music, so ambulances became loader all the time. Noise kills people.
I really dislike cars and being around cars. They are noisy. They ruin the air quality of a city. They take up massive amounts of space through parking that could be better used. They force the public to subsidize car owners. They kill people through both air pollution and through collisions. They dominate a city's life in an extremely unattractive way.
I base a lot of my existence around avoiding cars and living in places where I can have a pleasant walk without having to deal with traffic. To the point where I recently moved from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon because Portland is a much more pedestrian friendly city. And it shows. You walk around the city and it's actually alive and working.
In Portland, people don't have to have their children on leashes because every street isn't a 4 lane highway with constant traffic that is disrespectful to people's space. People are strolling down the streets and wandering into businesses. In Portland drivers slow down and wave you across the street instead of swerving around you at 40 miles an hour.
In Chicago a common occurrence was for a car to decide to make a red light, so they would make a turn into a crowd of pedestrians who are crossing the street and "shoot the gap" without slowing down, with maybe 3 feet of clearance on either side. People would open doors without a second thought and door bikers. Trucks would make dangerous turns into bikers and frequently kill them ( A young woman was recently killed this way, and I once had to jump off of my bike and drag it onto the sidewalk to avoid being run over ).
Cars drivers seem to enter this "magic circle" where it's fine to do dumb and extremely dangerous things because you are driving. When you are in a car, all behavior is acceptable.
Decide to teach the biker a lesson by turning into them? They won't charge you with anything.
Swerve into a crowd of pedestrians? It's fine normal behavior.
Make a blind turn into an alley and have to slam on the breaks to avoid running into a pedestrian? Totally A-OK chief! Great work!
As has been pointed out elsewhere, a lot of European cities do not have this problem. When visiting France, I went to the city of Strasbourg where they have a very nice little "park and ride" system where you park your fume-spewing, space-taking machine and park it in the PARKING AREA, instead of letting you drag it into their beautiful city.
strongtowns.org has a lot of great information about how the US road infrastructure is, to put it bluntly, a dumb and bad experiment that has failed.
Population: 82.5k - obviously cars have no business driving through such a place.
I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it.
That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink.
Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.
There is a pedestrian city in my province (Córdoba, Argentina) called La Cumbrecita. You leave your car in the entrance to the city in a parking lot and you can walk the entire town.
First time I visit there made me wonder why not all towns aren't pedestrian like this. I mean most towns have nice sidewalks and are walkable but why not just banning cars. In addition to having less noise I can imagine plenty of other benefits.
> [La Cumbrecita] is completely pedestrian and reminiscent of the small German towns of the fifteenth century. One can hike up through the town (and then down) to the waterfall, a truly paradisiacal experience.
The one question I have, that I haven't seen answered in the article or elsewhere, is how deliveries are handled. Presumably shops and businesses in a car-free city need to get truckloads of goods or equipment moved in and out on a regular basis. How is it done?
I've always loved the idea of being able to live in a car-free city, but never quite understood how certain things would work, including garbage collection, deliveries, and emergency services, without vehicular traffic.
Or do they make exceptions for all of those? Does anyone know?
Where I live, the municipality is seriously looking into an out of the city distribution centre with (smaller, electric) vehicles for supplying the city centre. That doesn't make it free of cars, but it will be more efficient (not every shop needs their own supply truck, supplies can be shared).
This may be nice in a sunny seaside tourist city, but any pedestrianised towns I've been to in the UK are barren, dull, and frankly scary once the sun starts to set.
The Atlanta belt-line is mostly being built on top of old light rail line around the city. The idea, as I understand it, is to provide a pedestrian and (unfortunately) cyclists only pathway that connects many of the notable places around the city. On this pathway, there already exists a large amount of beltline and road accessible shopping/restaurants/bars. There are plans to build a large amount similarly accessible housing on the beltline as well.
I assert that this strategy is a better alternative than closing off convex sections for cities similar to Atlanta.
What would define a city similar to Atlanta? One that is not very dense, with some undeveloped or neglected land in urban areas, and whose centers of social activity are decentralized. By saying the centers of social activity are decentralized, I mean to say that the major parks, stadiums, shopping developments, chic neighborhoods, and so on, are dispersed around a few mile radius of downtown. Shutting of any two square mile area to car traffic would fail to capture more than a few of these places, and cause worse traffic problems elsewhere, which is costly regardless of how you approach it.
There are some downsides to the beltline of course, mainly its cost, but you get the same opportunity for a pedestrian urban experience, without overtly turning it into a political battle.
Most of Golden Gate Park in SF is closed to cars every Sunday (and Saturday during summer) and it is really magical. Normally living in a city makes you feel tiny but this makes you feel like everyone is on the same level.
European cities were very much pedestrian and bike town in the 1950's. In Helsinki they proposed banning bikes from city center, because they caused traffic congestion and gave poorish image of Finland. Bike paths were kept open all year manually. I biked some 10 km to school and every single day dozens of guys had woken at 5 o'clock and shoveled and sanded narrow but adequate bike path just for me.
The Las Vegas Strip is the antithesis of this. It's probably the only place in the world where the main downtown area is also an 8 lane highway. It's so bad that you actually cannot cross the street there, and you have to get around by walking on raised walkways above the street. Uniquely terrible urban planning.
What about people who live inside city limits but work elsewhere? For example, I currently reside in Washington, DC but work about 30 min away. There is no public transportation to my work. At night, I park in a garage but there are others who park on the street and commute out of the city every morning.
This would solve itself if cars were banned. Either you would have to find a more practical place to live, the city add public transportation to the work, you find a new place to work, the work moving offices etc.
It's only a problem because you decide things has to be exactly like they are. But with other constraints the society would have landed on an other configuration.
Every solution in your second sentence either costs businesses money or costs your workforce money.
What is your solution for your economy when BOTH decide to relocate to an administrative region that DOESN'T ban cars?
I've considered other places to live in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I found that used Japanese sports cars (I own several) were all prohibitively expensive to import/register in each. The crazy-low "total cost of ownership" for automobiles is one of several reasons that Japan is my primary base of operations/residence.
Your're right, I am looking at it through a self-centered perspective. But I think a lot of people would do the same. If you banned cars, considering how long it takes for decent public transportation to roll out in the US, you would be incentivizing people to live elsewhere. My job and work location are fixed so the only option would be to move out of the city or suffer through a miserable commute. I guess people like me would suffer and those that spend all or most of their time inside city limits would benefit.
If this actually happened, buses would be common. And companies would move to a location on a bus line. If not and you needed a car, here is what you would do. Metro, bike, or bus to the city limit. Then pick up your Zip Car or pick up your private car in a garage.
I grew up in the suburbs in Los Angeles. I lived on a cul de sac. Think the family house in ET. We played in the street all the time. That seems pretty normal for suburbia isn't it? I would ride around the block or over to the next cul-de-sac from like 4yrs old.
It's also possible to design cities for both people and cars. The trick is to separate them.
For example a shopping street where no cars are allowed could have parking lots at the back of the shops. So trucks can supply the shops and customers can pickup large goods with their car.
Another method is what we call in Dutch a 'Cauliflower-neighbourhood'. The closer a road comes to the place were people live, the smaller they become. And speed limits will go down as well. The limits most of the time go from 50km/h to 30km/h to 15 or even 5km/h.
I wish, we could do that in the few feets of Murphy's Square in Sunnyvale. It would be so pleasant to not have hot spewing smog vehicles park, one feet from your dining table.
In my city, Linz in Austria, only a small part is pedestrian, and even then the main-line of the 4 (actually 2+2) tram lines is cutting right through it. I wish they'd extend the pedestrian area and add that second tram line overground rather than underground as the current political fantasies look like.
Anyways, from that article, if you have a change in a city's government, change is a lot more likely to happen. If only there were some time-limitations on mayor posts and the council.
We so so need this in Hongkong, especially in the older areas where the streets feel as narrow as a rickshaw. Public transport is excellent and ppl here so unhealthy i general they need the walking anyway! Most of the corridoor from Saiyingpun all the way to North Point at least should be car free. And pretty much all of TST through to Mongkok. More than enough metro lines and bordering causeways to move the masses in an out of the area.
As much as I like to see a car free HK, there's still a lot of need for vehicles in those areas, banning cars, especially in HK is not the solution.
If you want people to walk more, make the city actually walk friendly, even a short walk from my apartment to the MTR station is annoying; people just randomly walk anywhere, making it impossible to enjoy walking. There's aircons leaking constantly, little newspaper stands blocking the sideways.
I really enjoy walking, but in HK it's really not that fun.
We were living in downtown Toronto during [the Northeast blackout of 2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). It was amazing to experience the city, for several days, without the usual crush of cars and trucks and busses on the roads. Really magic couple of days I'll never forget.
I really like the idea of restricting where and when people can drive their cars. In China there are policies in place that only allow to commute with your car on certain days of the week. The other days you need to use public transport or find a car pool.
A lot of Americans think that they should be able to drive and park their car when and where ever they want. This mentality needs to change if we want to continue to grow our cities sustainably.
I have a fantasy that once a year a major US cities (think Manhattan) ban private cars for a day. Public Transit, and emergency vehicles pass as normal.
Many cities in the US have banned cars from a significant number of Downtown Streets. We call them skyways for the most part, though sometimes they are underground. It works well, keeps cars out of the way of people. It also makes for a nice environment to walk around.
Our zoning is such that those streets close at night, and I wouldn't recommend them in the late hours before they are officially closed.
Had a quick search and didn't see anyone talking about it.
If your interested by this article you might enjoy the book 'happy city'. It's a bit one sided but looks at how cars have changed cities, and how changes can be made to make them happier.
I'd love to live in a city like this. I spent a couple of days in Dublin and it was just crazy how loud, crowded and congested with cars and buses the city is. Was not really pleasant walking through the city.
my wife and I used to need to take vacations and drive to the mountains on the weekends just to get away from the stress of the city. Then we moved to an area where we can bike to two separate town centers and we haven’t felt the need to take a vacation in years.
We are more social and more relaxed now, and I swear it’s because we can bike to all the places we would have driven, like restaurants, movie theaters and grocery stores.
Ditching the car has been a very positive experience.
There's actually only one street with no cars (Kaufinger Str.) and lots of traffic around on the Altstadtring and such. It's far from a city without cars, to the contrary. Also you'd need to be able to afford the rent.
I walk to the grocery store most days. It seems to kill several birds with one stone:
- unwind after work
- get exercise
- get outside
- time to think
You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.
70 year old people are exactly those who already walk to the next shop multiple times a week. You should keep in mind that this article is from Europe. Its walking short distances and even shorter shopping lists.
I am not sure you should be driving a car at seventy if you're not able to ride a bike anymore despite a livetime of experience. (and you can get bikes for various disabilities, yes)
My mother is seventy one and rides a cargo tricycle to the supermarket. She can't drive so in an American city she would have to order her groceries, I guess.
Elderly people are often helped the most this type of change. People who can no longer drive can still get around by other means. My grandfather had a tricycle that he rode for many years after he became incapable of driving a car.
This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing.
But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??).
I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon.
I lived for a while in Berlin. Coming back to the U.S. the first thing I noticed were too many billboards and ugly parking lots. Each store has its own parking lot. Largely underused. No nice paths to traverse the bleak endless parking lot landscape. It’s ugly and wasteful. It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander. Even in relatively walkable communities like the one I live in have far fewer people out and about. An endless stream of cars going from one ugly parking lot to the another. I wish I could move to Europe permanently.
> It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander
This is a good point. The leisurely stroll is practically nonexistent in my city. I'm in a more rural setting, but there is still a well-defined city hub. It just feels awkward walking down the sidewalk when people are zooming by at 35mph+.
The result is sidewalk cut offs, which is inconvenient to me as a biker. There are frequently plants starting to take over because no one cares to use the walks.
Makes sense that people gradually prefer to spend their free time with Netflix, video games, or in a gym.
Where I grew up (Huntsville, Alabama), if you saw a pedestrian or cyclist around town you would assume they are homeless. After living in SF and Montreal and traveling in Europe, I can't see myself going back to a "car-first" city. Which sucks because that's pretty much all the US offers.
There was the author, Bill Bryson, moving back to the US after a few decades un the UK. He would take a stroll, and his neighbors would constantly offer a ride, thinking his car broke down or something.
I lived on a college campus for two years without a car, with on-campus amenities and a very walkable town right next to it. Now that I live elsewhere with a car, I can't see myself ever going to a pedestrian-only area. I just do not like having to walk everywhere. The closest on-campus food was a five minute or so walk away from my dorm room, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I didn't like having to walk even that distance. Classes could sometimes be a 10 minute walk apart. Town was only 10 minutes away but I never went there because I didn't want to do the walk. So, I largely didn't go around much. Not to mention how uncomfortable it could be outside during the coldest parts of the winter or hottest parts of summer. I'd settle for a freezer burned hot pocket instead of having to walk in the biting cold even with a good jacket and gloves.
Nowadays, with a car, I don't mind driving for 10 minutes somewhere - it's actually often enjoyable, whereas walking for ten minutes out of necessity feels like an annoyance and a burden. I don't mind walking when I want to, like on hikes, but I certainly don't miss it being a necessity. There is a fast food place about 1.5 miles from me, which many consider walking distance, but I always take the car there and use the drive-thru even though the way there is very walkable.
The place I'm at right now is a nice compromise of usability for pedestrians and motorists, but I personally plan to someday live in a more rural area and maybe have a small farm, and I'm not bothered at all by the fact that such a place is essentially car-only.
I felt similarly while at college.. until I got a bike. Urban bicycling has changed my life entirely. Did you ever try it? What used to be a 20 minute walk becomes a 5 minute glide. In SF and Montreal, google maps even acknowledges that most routes are fastest by bike.
Even here in TN where it's easy to drive without congestion, biking allows me to simultaneously save fuel, get blood pumping, and run errands. Feels practical
New York, SF, Boston and San Diego are quite nice for walking IMO. But it's definitely more prevalent in Europe. My commute here in Copenhagen consists of a 10 minute bike ride and it makes me happy every day.
back in the UK I had a 40 minute bike ride to work, along the river and canal. Was perfect distance. Enough to be a decent workout, but not enough to dread how long it would take. Watching nature change through the year - mitigatory birds coming and go, the trees blossoming back to life and shutting down in the autumn / fall was beautiful.
Another major benefit was by the time I got home, the stress of the day was long gone. When I used to drive, the 45 minute journey of being mostly stuck in traffic meant I was more wound up when arrived home than when I left work
Oh please. Call spade a spade - you are talking about Manhattan, Dumbo or Williamsburg, Harlem and newly gentrified, serviced by subway places with white cafes and bars and restaurants loved by the lily white people working in tech or in finance. The thing is... it is a very small part of NYC. People in Queens take a car to get to a subway because it takes thirty to fourty minutes to get to it otherwise and after that it takes another hour and half to get to the place of work, but hey, who cares about Cinthia Lopez that cleans the desks on clowns working at Google that want to bike to work from their $6k/mo apartments.
You are not talking about Queens or Bronx or Bed-Stuy; you are not talking about Crown Heights or Inwood, or Washington Heights or Staten Island (it is also NYC even though people really like forgetting it).
Coincidentally, I recently came across an interesting quip while reading "the Fountainhead" recently:
[Peter Keating discussing whether or not he and his wife should build a country home away from the city]
"Will you like commuting?"
"No, I think it will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."
Even in Queens only a relatively small percentage of people own cars and even fewer use a car as part of their commute. Recent data indicate that less than 3% of low income workers commute by car. Your average outer borough janitorial worker is going to be taking a bus to the subway (though if citibike and some protected lanes were available I’m sure some would consider that option).
Washington Heights and Inwood are quite walkable and most people there commute by subway, without having to drive to it. The same goes for Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.
This is the "Vote with your wallet" at the international civic level.
It may not have been very convenient or practical in the past but it seems to be becoming an increasingly accessible option, at least for first-world people.
Move to the places whose ideals align with yours, and help them develop those, if you can't convince your current home to adopt them.
The comment I left on how exactly to do this was marked off topic and detached (no idea why to be honest), but feel free to message me if you want some advice. There are a few ways to do it.
Also this whole idea is known as Exit, Voice, and Reason too.
It’s not as easy as it should be, yet, but if you can get a job somewhere they would help you relocate, or you can look for places that offer residence via investment.
The "hostile to pedestrians" is a feeling I get in many countries. When I'm walking somewhere I often have to walk at the side of the road where cars drive at least 50 km/hr and often honk at me or drive by dangerously close. It always makes me feel like I'm doing something illegal, or wrong.
Just a side question: Did you also happen to found that you're more likely to going into a store when walk by it compare to drive by? (assuming you can park your car right at the spot and no charge)
I don't know the answer to this. In Berlin I had no car and walked everywhere near my flat. Just strolling around I would end up finding shops, cafes, whatnot. When I used public transportation I had a destination in mind. So it was more purposeful and I didn't normally casually find a store when I used public transportation.
Now that I'm in the U.S. except for one street I never casually go to a store. Everything is purposeful. In the U.S. I go to the store because I need to and it's not a chance encounter. I know where I'm going and what I want to get.
Though I hate the huge, ugly parking lots and what they represent. I tend to purchase stuff online and rarely go to a store these days. I do try to go for walks frequently but that is to get outside and I don't shop when I do this.
The fact that people walk around their neighborhood also has has an effect in local commerce. Most neighborhoods in European cities have bakeries, coffee shops, clothing stores, pharmacies, etc. Posher areas will have higher end ones, poorer areas will tend to have shittier ones, but in the end you always have your basic needs covered at no more than 10 minutes walk. I found that in the USA it was much more sparse and you'll normally find these things in the typical "strip malls" (which, the first time I heard the name, shocked me as I thought they were taking me to a strip tease show or something). Even bars in strip malls were shocking to me since they'd have to drive there, and drive back, sometimes drunk.
This is absolutely true for me. For me even cycling doesn't cut it. If the store is only moderately interesting, it doesn't hurt to spend a few seconds walking into its door. But it's already too much trouble locking my bike, removing my helmet and then walking in, let alone in a car.
Yes, but Berlin is car-friendly AND pedestrian-friendly. And getting close to bike-friendly as well. The thing is, Berlin has a huge area for a relatively modest amount of inhabitants.
This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.
Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.
Berlin is the most car friendly city in Germany, both east and west (and the united city) spent a lot of money on car friendly streets - and still is.
It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.
Times change and mentalities with them. I think many European cities had a "cars everywhere" mentality during the post-WWII "renaissance" (maybe inspired by the USA) but then we realized that we hit a limit and started scaling things back starting sometime in the early 90's I'd say. Many projects from the 70's that were hailed as the future of transportation are now seen as huge warts we don't know how to replace now. Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly.
People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.
> Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly. People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO.
Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.
- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.
- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...
Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.
Well, there are plenty of cars in Berlin, so unless they're all masochists they probably enjoy that more than the other options. That I personally can't see why doesn't change that.
To add to this: I wouldn't call it "most car friendly city in Germany", either - but driving there isn't "hell on earth" either: I felt it's neither better nor worse than e.g. Kaiserslautern or the 10k inhabitants "city" I went to school - the traffic is just on a different scale due to the city being huge (compared to most other German cities).
(Disclaimer: I'm a relaxed driver; my experience might not hold for those who enter the full-rage mode when starting the engine)
Berlin built a very expensive tunnel in the city center, still expands the inner Autobahn ring, has large east/west streets (Stalinallee and 17th June), parking was free in residential areas until very recently, tickets for parking in the wrong spots are a joke and cars parking on sidewalks or bicycle lanes are pracically never ticketed. Bicycle police which was introduced to ticket cars and bicycles practically in the same way never tickets car drivers [1]
Compare this with the pedestrian infrastructure (many bad sidewalks in the East) or bicycle with no or chaotic lanes [2]. Also when houses are build or roads are maintained, car driver concerns are always prioritized above cyclists and pedestrians [3].
> cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward
Inside cities that is. One must remember that a lot of the people that move around in a city every day don't live in the city. And for many of them a car is a requirement anyway. For me the car is a sunk cost - I have it for the rare times I need it (I don't need it to go into the city), but buying/maintaining/insuring it is mostly a fixed cost, meaning that the marginal cost of each mile driven is very very small. I wouldn't mind if my city was made car free tomorrow - but I still wouldn't drive any less.
Many suburbanites, however, have the entitled attitude that cities should accommodate their car trips to dense areas at the expense of people actually living there. Often their mindset is that cities are strictly where people go instead of where people live. In the US this mentality is exarcebated by the white flight and the decay of inner cities, but does also exist in Europe.
As one of these so called "white flight" people, I can't describe how much such statements frustrate me. I didn't move from the city because I'm a racist or don't want to be around people of color. I don't want to be around people period. Living in the city stresses me out. The constant noise, the issues with drunk people randomly knocking on my door at 2am, the couple of times I woke up to people fighting in the parking lot, the sirens, the random music festival 3 blocks over that I didn't know about, the fact I had 2 motorcycles stolen in 5 years, my kids not having a convenient place to play outside and more led to me leaving the city.
I didn't move because I'm white, I moved because I wanted peace and quiet. Most of the people I know who live around me moved away from the city for the same reason. Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
Part of the reason the trend is called "white flight" is that for a long time and in many places non-white people were prevented by bank, municipal, real estate office and HOA policy from purchasing houses or even getting mortgages in the suburbs.
Calling it white flight isn't always an accusation of racism against the people who were fleeing, more against the people who openly prevented people of color from leaving as well.
That's not what "white flight" refers to. While the 1940s-1950s move to the suburbs consisted almost entirely of white people due to systematic racial discrimination preventing POC from moving, that is not "white flight".
The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".
No, the OP is actually correct. The origin of the term "white flight" was a phenomenon that that followed the "great migration" of people from the rural south during the war and immediate post war years in the US.[1][2]
>"The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon ..."
No, the 1970s may have seen a recirculation of the original phrase but it is commonly understood that "white flight" refers to phenomenon around the war years.
There are good reasons to believe that highly urban environments are bad for your mental health (in ways that I think are worse than how bad they are for your physical health). Sometimes I feel like strong advocates of increasingly-dense construction feel that the denser your lifestyle, the more prosocial your behavior. Maybe these advocates are among the most extraverted people, and they have little experience with the stress it causes others.
And to what extent the hostility of urban environments is due to cars and car-centric planning hostile to human-scale activity? The whole point of new urbanism is creating livable, hospitable urban environments, and usually people-friendliness means car-unfriendliness.
Your generic suburbs have their own problems – massively artificial, claustrophobic rows and rows of almost identical houses, with zero character and nowhere to go without a car.
I think you may be neglecting the extent to which you are describing the self-reenforcing downsides of "post white flight" urbanism. Given the age demographics of HN, it's more likely than not that the city life you (or any of us) experienced was well after white flight ran its course, with consequent effects on crime and noise in cities. If you imagine a world in which the people who wanted quiet never left, the picture of urbanism looks a bit different. If you read about American life in pre-war cities, or the late 19th century, urban areas were a place where all types of people lived, including families, the elderly, and people who seek calm and quiet.
traditional white flight (1970's style) mostly ended in the early 2000's when traffic got bad enough and baby boomers started to age out of power. It's an outdated term in most cities I think.
I agree wholeheartedly with you; like you I'm a proud suburbanite who can't tolerate cities, noise, and people, and to that I'll add one thing...
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
On this note, almost the entire Asian population of the Dallas area lives in the suburbs, and those who can afford it are starting to move to the exurbs. Only people without the means to leave are staying in the city because the city sucks.
People make noise. People shouting in the streets, nearby festivals, etc. I don't like people, and there's no such thing as a dense city that doesn't suck for me.
I don't know how it is outside of Canada, but here in Toronto what drives me insane is that Cities are essentially completely beholden to the province and it makes everything worse.
Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are making a mess of our city, but it's only a partial fix and it's distortionary.
Meanwhile, people that actually live in Toronto pay way more in income tax than people that live outside of it, and our taxes are indexed to inflation, unlike the petrol taxes. Add in the three way split of the left vote and the FPTP system and we end up with a vindictive moron in charge of the province fucking up representation by changing our riding map in the middle of a city election.
Cars have ruined so many things. The amount of times a car has honked at me for not putting my own life in danger because I need 5 seconds to get to a safer place to pull over with my bike is crazy. I'm not "taking a lane" I'm just keeping myself from getting doored.
Imagine if cars had never been invented and we could have stuck with trains for everything? Way more green space. Way healthier population. Way more 4 or 6 story buildings. Way more parks. Way less time wasted behind the wheel. Fewer deaths. No road rage.
And what would we have to give up?
3000 sqft suburban houses and their shitty pools that get used 5 times a year. Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park.
I left the city when we had kids, and the thing that drew me to suburbia is that kids can just roam around outside unattended, biking around, building tree houses etc.
Basically it's centered around 2 themes 1) As a parent I don't want my kids outdoor time to be limited to the times I can follow them, and 2) The idea that since my childhood was happy, I should give my kids the same experience.
I don't necessarily think suburbia is the culprit for traffic though. It probably is in North America where suburbs often means "not even public transport available to the city". They were planned for and built for cars! My suburb was not. People lived here before cars too.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year - but I use my car many times for short distances, mostly things like picking up kids from daycare etc.
I understand the impulse to go to the suburbs now that we have cars everywhere, but it didn't need to be this way. Plenty of people walk to daycare or buy a bike with a cart to pick up their kids.
Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations.
First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare workers pay their taxes, the family pays theirs after claiming a $6k tax credit. At the end of the day the government gets around $30–40k more in income tax.
Second situation: Family A has two kids and so does Family B. They take turns watching each others kids, reducing each family's working hours by 25%. Assuming both parents earn the same base income in both families, but that only one of them wants to raise kids all day, the government loses about $11k in tax revenue per family, or $22k total.
The only thing that stops this practice from being widespread is that most employers want full-time workers.
Cart + bike is definitely an option, at least for 3/4 of the year.
In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year
As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!
"Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park."
No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants to live in miserable close quarters paying exorbitant rent for the freedom to walk to convenient overpriced services.
A home and a yard allows those who need it to live with a measure of dignity. It's pants and you're trying to argue that everyone would be fine with shorts.
Ironically I live in NYC right now which is even worse in most of those respects, but at least the pay/COL ratio is better. Public transportation is better too. In the end if I buy a home it isn't going to be in either city.
My point is that it is a lot easier to argue against cars when you make a good living and can afford the nicer parts of the city. When your choice is a crappy car commute or a nightmare commute via trains and public transit, and the places in your budget for you to live in don't have "cute restaurants" or "well groomed parks", things are not so cut and dry. Cars improve quality of life for many people and it's downright myopic and classist to say they ruin lives and cities.
You're confusing cause and effect. The effect of having cars everywhere is that we end up with cities where the downtown core is hyper dense and the extents are flat. What we want is the opposite. Six storey mid rises. And commutes via trains and mass transit are only nightmares when they're all trying to get to the same place and they're 3rd class citizens to cars and trucks.
To live within reasonable walking / public transport distance of my workplace in SF, I'd be paying about a thousand dollars a month more in rent. If you don't want me to commute in from the suburb, build more housing in the city and bring down market rent there.
Sure, that's exactly what urbanists are trying to do. But they're prevented by NIMBYs and car-centric regulations, like mandatory minimum parking spaces per inhabitant.
Or encouraging people to take the train into SF. Of course, not everyone has a convenient train option because the patchwork of cities makes it incredibly difficult to drive a joint transit initiative.
Many urbanites have the entitled attitude that cities should not accommodate people who are not rich enough to live within walkable distances of their job.
Many of the cities in the US that are dense enough to be reasonable walkable/bikable are also incredibly expensive in those areas.
I haven't met many urbanites who would deny that cheap and reliable public transport also is the backbone of any large urban area, precisely for this reason.
This is normal for people who work in London and live in the commuter belt around it. Most of these people have a car but walk to the station, or drive to the station, and then take a train into London. Once in London these people then take the tube, buses, bikes or walk to get around.
The car still gets used outside work to get groceries, pick up kids from schools and of course at the weekends.
Locally (Portland, Oregon) the car2go rental rate is approximately equivalent at 1 hour versus my cost of owning a new car for a day. So if I could get by on less than an hour of car2go time per day it would be worthwhile.
One of the culture shocks from Europe to US (California) was that there are places where you can't do shit without a car. Like, no place place to walk along the street to get from point A to B.
I was visiting a customer site near Miami, some years ago. I opted for not renting a car, I could easily go to the customer's site by taxi. But then some components got stuck in customs, and I had to stay the weekend. It turned out that the hotel was its own enclave if you didn't have a car! I couldn't walk to the shopping mall, or a nearby restaurant, I tried everything. Just couldn't get there. It was like being in a Kafka novel. Nightmarish, and utterly unnecessary.
It is probably more than a few miles to get anywhere which makes what in EU would be a simple walk into an expedition.
Reminder: originally one (Roman) mile was a measure of thousand paces, while a Dutch, Russian and such miles were related to an hour of marching. (later rescaled in feet)
You definitely have areas that are not designed for walking at all. I've been in a situation where I could see a shopping mall and restaurants from my hotel across a busy multi-lane road and there was literally no way to get there on foot.
That said, it's not the US vs. everywhere else. For example, the UK has lots of charming little villages where you can walk to the pub and a few stores. Once you get out of the village though, some public footpaths notwithstanding, you're mostly talking very narrow roads with no shoulders, much less sidewalks, and no real way to walk off the road.
In Switzerland one of the things we'd learn in primary school age was to walk roads without sidewalks - always on the left side such that incoming cars are in front, and by paying lots of attention and walking in single file. Since cars expect at least cyclists anywhere they generally should be mindful of slow traffic.
I could see a shopping mall and restaurants from my hotel across a busy multi-lane road and there was literally no way to get there on foot.
This is almost exactly the situation described by Bill Bryson in I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I believe he wanted to visit the shops across the street while his wife was at a mall and there was effectively no way to get there without a car.
There were sidewalks, but only for a limited range around certain landmarks (malls, hotel, etc). I managed to cross an eight-lane street, but that section (with malls) was also closed off to the next 'island' (i.e. the sidewalk stopped. There were some car-only tunnels here and there also.) All those islands, and only cars could go between them. Yeah, quite similar to what poster @ghaff described in a post below.
That's just nuts. You'd think that there are at least state-level regulations to have sufficient sidewalks, car culture or not. I mean at some point it's a health and safety issue (when you can't even get to the doctor's office across the street).
It's because of the geography. Southern California and Arizona especially were impossible to live in until after Air Conditioning became cheap and widespread in the 1950s. At that time, modernism in architecture and city planning was at its peak: build it big, build it simple, and build it for cars.
This thread is filled with strange ideas. I live in San Diego. I know people who don’t have air conditioning, and they’re fine. The weather is mild unless you get 15-20 miles off the coast, and then it’s still not that bad 90% of the time.
Southern California? There are tons of places in LA and San Diego where AC is entirely optional and often not installed. 72 and sunny is a stereotype for a reason...
Desalinization is expensive compared to pumping water out of the ground, but it's dirt cheap compared to ubiquitous air conditioning and/or depopulating cities.
The coming droughts will affect agriculture, but not the cities.
Of course, that's why I've mentioned California explicitly. Mentioned Texas is similar, and is also notable for my only time when I saw a car tire explode due to the heat.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countless small population centers between them for any kind other kind of transportation to provide a feasible solution. It's not a matter of "engaging in democracy."
It seems that the city in this article strikes a great balance - parking on the periphery for people who commute in, but the city center is car-free. The same could work for the US midwest. You drive to the edge of Chicago and then take an (improved) subway in, for example.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but also know it would be an incredibly difficult uphill battle, culturally, to make such a thing work. Chicago residents not only love their cars but also seem to feel absolutely entitled to the idea that the roads are _only_ for cars.
I say this as a local who has gotten into countless arguments with friends and family on the subject. I probably believed it as well a few lifetimes ago before I moved to NYC for 13 years and have since been completely converted.
It would require an enormous investment in public transportation and real bike lanes - I mean protected bike lanes like they're doing in NYC, not two faded white arrows in the rightmost lane - and then a generational shift where we convince the younger generations that car-ownership is overrated, wasteful, and terrible for the local economy.
Or we could prosecute drivers who run over bicyclists (and motorcyclists) the way many states now do to protect road construction workers -- huge fines and jail time.
But Americans care too much about comfort and convenience to do that. SUVs rule here.
To use the Chicago example, The profiled city has a population of under 100,000. The Chicago-land area has nearly 10 million, if you look at just Chicago it's still nearly 3 million. The mayor mentions that you can walk from one end of the city to the other in under half an hour. In Chicago you could make a multi-day hike out of it.
In my head, Chicago seems like it could work if you subdivided it into smaller regions of no-car zones, and marked out specific high-volume streets to connect them on a grid with designated parking per-zone.
Because parking is presumably cheaper on the periphery and the subway may actually be faster than driving all the way in. When I worked in Boston, that's how I sometimes did it. (Other times I took the commuter rail but that was more or less useless if I was doing anything in the evening.)
To use an example from a German city: Because going from the park+ride spaces at the edge of the city to the center takes > 45min by car, but 4min with the train. And parking at the edge of the city is free, but downtown you pay 8,50€/h.
It actually makes a ton of sense. Imagine a scenario where parking downtown were actually impossible.
You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.
It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.
There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.
The design and density of cities will change even in the Midwest. Inter-city transport can and will change.
From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."
There is a huge difference between cities that have done most of their growth after 1940, when cars have been common, and cities that developed their physical structures before the car. The car-oriented physical structure has to be retrofitted for walking -- streets narrowed or replaced with housing, shopping, and offices.
Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great.
I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0].
Yeah, underground transportation is definitely one solution that can help solve the transportation problem. The Boring Company seems to be more US focused, so maybe it can help with the "bigger" challenges that the US is facing in de-caring their cities.
This isn't necessarily a transportation problem. The question is "what kind of transportation?". A full (electric) bus is vastly more efficient than 20-50 SUVs carrying nothing more than their driver regardless if you do it on the surface or underground. And you don't need tunnels or even most of today's infrastructure if most surface traffic is public transportation.
Musk's idea basically focuses on moving cars underground if I understood correctly. It should focus on moving most of the public transport underground and simply "decommissioning" some of the road infrastructure from the surface.
A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city,
no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels).
That's not the solution if still you plan on having every person and their car move around. Maintaining the infrastructure for cars on the surface is already expensive and inefficient. Suddenly we can do it better or cheaper by multiplying it underground? You won't get rid of any of today's problems except one: drivers will be able to move from one side of a city and create a traffic jam on the other in no time.
Tunnels are great if you plan on connecting a few hubs spread around a city. From there you can use the most efficient surface transportation available. A bike, a bus, a tram, even on foot.
One lesson that most city planners learned in time is that the more infrastructure you build for cars, the more cars you'll have clogging it. The solution is o discourage the reliance on cars in cities and it worked every time it was applied.
> That's not the solution if still you plan on having every person and their car move around. Maintaining the infrastructure for cars on the surface is already expensive and inefficient. Suddenly we can do it better or cheaper by multiplying it underground? You won't get rid of any of today's problems except one: drivers will be able to move from one side of a city and create a traffic jam on the other in no time.
That's not quite true: by completely splitting car traffic and pedestrian traffic on different levels, you can create a city which is much denser and easier to walk because you don't need large car streets, and at the bottom you don't need pedestrian affordances alongside car traffic. Plus by banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city: it's usually easier to walk, bike or take public transport than go to the bottom, get into your car, drive, park over there and go back up.
Louvain la Neuve works on that model, the city is built on a huge concrete slab and entirely pedestrian, with car traffic and parkings underslab.
So the plan is to duplicate all needed infrastructure underground? Basically the equivalent of streets, parking lots, everything plus the added elevators to the surface) will now be moved on several levels of underground? The BC FAQ suggests it will have to accommodate current traffic. Isn't this an enormous waste that will only move traffic congestion underground? You can already reap most of the benefits without enormous investments in tunnels.
I will point out the fact that according to Wikipedia Louvain la Neuve has ~30.000 inhabitants and ~30 square Km (12.5 sq mi). It is also 2Km on the longest side. How do you see this applied to New York or London, cities that need it the most?
And why is it better to still spend billions moving infrastructure underground instead of shrinking what's already available to the point where pedestrians get the vast majority of space and the infrastructure only serves the needs of public services?
> banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city
I don't know what "far away" means but in reality drivers still go out of their way to drive the car. Think about this: they are willing to spend hours in traffic jams. You think an elevator ride to level -4 will discourage them?
P.S. I'm using info from BC [0] and their vision on this looks a lot like "let have the same traffic as today but on many levels of tunnels". Only the company drilling the tunnels walks away happy. You just pay a crapload of money to hide some of the issues of urban traffic.
> Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great.
Louvain La Neuve (in french-speaking belgium) has an interesting take on this: the entire city is on a concrete slab, topside is entirely pedestrian, and underslab hosts car streets and parkings.
Speaking of abundant collections of beers, this bar in Ghent, Dulle Griet, boasts a choice of 500 beers. It has a great interior, and, I was surprised to learn just now, you can go inside via Street View [0]. It has these cool multi-liter (can't remember exact capacity) beer glasses that look like something out of a chemistry lab, because of their shape, and the fact that they come with a wooden frame for support. You can see an image of one on the wall right of the bar, near the winking cartoon man and the word "MAX" in big lettering [1]. And, if you look up at the ceiling, there's a curious looking basket there. Comes evening, it has a bunch of non-matching shoes in it, because when you order that big-beer-glass-with-frame they take one of your shoes, lower the basket, put it in, and raise it again. You get the shoe back when you return the glass intact!
Downside is that the bar is pricey and touristy, and most of the beers seem to be commercial. We were in this bar in Bruges last winter, it has 300 kinds of beer and all from small breweries. If a brewery is acquired by a big company, they don't serve it anymore. They also have almost no tourists there, which is refreshing for Bruges. I'll try and find what it's called.
Edit: The Bruges bar is called Le Trappiste [3]. Apparently, it's well advertised in touristic literature. They even have a website.
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city.
This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open space and beautiful nature, it's super awesome and amazingly freeing to just go wherever you want to on a whim. Wake up Saturday morning - let's head up to that state park with the cool water falls and hike around for the day. 10 minutes later you're on the road and an hour or two later you're surrounded by nature. Real nature too, not some small 10 acre park somewhere.
There's real freedom in being able to go where you want, when you want. It's not just a "convenience" thing.
I’ll re-iterate this here, because I got downvoted there. There is no comparison. Tell me one city in the US that can compare to London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, etc.
There is no comparison to be made between european cities where you can walk for hours and hours and see a thousand things vs americans cities where you will mostly spend your time crossing large streets. If you really believe this you probably never have been to Europe.
There are several European countries with a lower population density than the US, and places like Norway and Finland are _much_ more sparsely populated
That's not terribly significant. An average density for an entire nation says nothing about the spaces between population centers. There are national parks in the US that are bigger than entire European nations. Destinations that are more remote from American cities, than all of Europe.
I mean, I live in Europe and I can do the same thing... or do you think Europeans don’t have national parks and never take car trips? OP was criticizing cars as a daily method of transportation inside cities.
In at least one smaller city I lived in the US, there weren't even sidewalks. The town was built for cars only. Even in bigger cities like NY where there are bike lanes at least in some places, there is some level of looking down on cyclists from drivers and cab drivers. It is going to take a massive mindset change to reduce dependence on cars.
I also think there's a cultural relativism (pardon the anecdotal neologism~) factor. 100 years ago, moving people with a loaded trunk 100miles an hour was heaven. It became an obvious axiom of modern life that "further faster" was always good. To an extent I even think high speed internet is related to that (you can be everywhere without even moving).
But I realized that going fast you forget what's near, and you forget what time can feel. Walking around you discover places you didn't know, you spend time in the forest, on a hill. You're not rushing to go from A to B. Maybe "time density" will have a come back.
It goes both ways, people do less things when they can't and their lifestyle / social structures goes accordingly. Say villages with things nearby/local.
Another point, I stopped looking for parking spots where I go. I park 1-2 miles before and walk the rest. It actually saves time.
A lot of the time these discussions seem to take place in a foreign language where you recognize the words but they just don't make sense.
Personally, it's hard for me to imagine not having a car, much less not having a driver's license, because so many things I do are utterly dependent on driving even if I both worked and lived in a city (neither of which is the case). I need a car to transport my boating equipment. I just booked a getaway that is utterly dependent on a rental car when I get there. I've had jobs that I would not have been able to do were I not able to drive to job sites, etc.
But you basically adapt to what you can do if you don't have a car. You do more stuff around the city and less out in the woods. Maybe you don't take vacations that require driving. Etc. For my part, there are places that require high-clearance 4WD and knowing how to use it. I just don't do those things.
I don’t have a driver’s license. Almost none of my friends have one. I don’t understand the need to have one besides the occasional “I need to do something on holidays that requires a car” and even then I would say: rent one.
It's not "needed" to rent a car, it actually is needed. Buying/leasing a car versus combining traditional rentals, hourly rentals, and Uber/Lyft/taxis/etc. (plus other forms of transportation) is mostly an economic decision. But not having a license means that you don't have a lot of those options available to you. IOW, there's a big difference between not owning a car and not having the legal ability to drive a car.
I'm kinda curious, do rental rates change for people who own their own car versus people who just have a license? I mean, you definitely have to buy the insurance coverage then, but is that coverage itself more expensive because it's assumed you're not going to be quite as good a driver as someone who does it every day?
Edit: quick google search says some companies might refuse you, but you should be able to pay $15 or so extra per day to get full liability and comprehensive coverage if you have no insurance of your own already. And check your credit card because some of them have limited built-in coverage you can leverage.
Definitely agree with you, but doing the math in my case it’s just better not to spend the time and money getting a driver’s license. Unless you live in a city where you need to drive.
For years people busted me to get my driver's license. I finally gave up and did it. I went from eww to meh to cool to meh again. It's really not in my blood, I feel bad every time I use it without having cargo in the trunk. Even some groceries .. I'd better have a backpack.
I don't really like driving and I actually do less of the drive for an hour at the end of the day for some evening activity than I used to.
But I do like being able to get away for weekends, go to national parks and wilderness areas on vacation, etc. (And I like living in at least the semi-country which wouldn't be possible without a car.)
I basically live in the country. I can walk in the woods from my front door but not to anywhere else.
However, knowing lots of urban folks, having to rent a car (when everyone else is also wanting to rent a car) for weekends can be a PITA, especially if said car requires special racks and the like for sport equipment.
Of course, when traveling by air for vacation, renting a car is perfectly normal which is what I do.
Until the 1950s most heavy things were moved by water.
I still can't believe how much I can pack into a canoe, probably as much as I can into a pick-up truck. Running down a lake or river, with a canoe, is even a smoother ride than a car on a regular road.
The first passenger trains were actually designed to move people from the city to the countryside. Once they achieved regular service people figured they can commute into the city, and started to live in the country.
I’m from Europe but I lived in Houston during my college years. I had to use my car to go almost anywhere. It was the opposite of freedom. No matter what whenever I left my apartment I had to get into my car, drive it and then park it somewhere. If it was rush hour I was at the mercy of traffic. At times (e.g. Sunday mornings) it was pleasant. But often it was suffocating.
Now I’m back in Europe and I feel free when I’m moving around a city. I might take public transportation one way and walk back to my apartment. I can get a call from my friend in the afternoon and go out for some whisky without having to drive back to my apartment and taking a cab.
I don’t know where I’ll live in the future but I’d be happy if I didn’t need to own a car.
Marketers for cigarettes [1], gogurt, lunchables, cell service, guns, etc. make similar claims. It doesn't make it true. Cars bring convenience, sure. But freedom? Not owning a car, I've never lost sleep worrying that someone was breaking into my car, I pay no car insurance, no gas, no car maintenance, never pay for toll roads, never get road rage, never sit in traffic. I feel significantly more free today than I ever did owning a car.
> One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you.
> I feel significantly more free today than I ever did owning a car.
That works both ways though. I feel significantly more free today owning an EV hybrid car, then I did without a car.
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I have lost sleep worrying I would miss the only bus, or that it would be late, or that it would be full, or that it would never show, or that they could change the route without telling me, or that if the weather is bad I'll arrive soaked / freezing / dripping in sweat. Or if the other passengers are bad, I could arrived smelling bad or covered in bedbugs.
I have commuted by bus. It was a huge impact on personal freedom -- even if all conditions are ideal every trip still had to be delicately and precisely pre-planned, with exact arrival and departures, (that all stacked up, because even the shortest bus trips require one or more transfers) and they allowed travel only to specific places deemed worthy of it by other people. And of course, every trip required at least 2x to 3x longer trip times than driving.
Buses are like 70% of the stress of flying, with only 10% of the benefit.
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A car isn't limitless freedom, it comes with plenty of responsibilities and costs of it's own. But it certainly can be a form of freedom of mobility. One that currently isn't easily reproducible in any other way.
Constantly worrying about parking, insurance, traffic, how long you need to wait before you're sober enough to leave the pub does not seem like freedom to me.
Only being able to use a car to get around also does not seem like freedom.
Freedom is having good options - the option to use a car if that's what you have to, but also the option to bike, bus, or walk if you don't.
I've been to Houston recently - 'freedom' was about the last thing that I was feeling, as I traversed its freeway system.
In cities sure, but there’s plenty of us who do not want to live in cities. Heck, I don’t even want to live within eye sight of neighbors, stores, or really anything else except some pristine woods. That’s not possible without a car.
Sure there are always going to be people like us who want an 'archaic' life style which require an archaic mode of transportation, but the world shouldn't be optimizing for these people, and I see nothing wrong with making these people pay extra for the externalizes their lifestyles impose.
But in the US, it is the (vast) minority who wants to live a pedestrian lifestyle.
If you look around the US you will see that even today, investment in suburbia far outpaces investment in "urbanism".
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
If you are suggesting that society somehow prioritizes the 0.3% of young single males who want to live as pedestrians in urban cores...put it to a vote and watch what happens.
This entire thread is about optimizing cities for young single males. I can't wait until HN turns a median age of seventy...everyone will be in here screaming about a society that punishes the aged.
Car centric life is not better for the elderly and the disabled, quite the opposite.
Elderly and disabled people are often can't safely drive due to either physical limitations (eyesight, reaction time, arthritis, seizures, limited movements, dizziness and fainting, etc., etc., etc.) or practical limitations (a car that accommodates a driver in a wheelchair with hand controls is a specialty item that costs $90,000+, I'm not making that number up, there was an article about it on HN a bit ago). Even if and individual has a ride it can be difficult to transport a motorized scooter in a standard sedan or compact car: going to the park with the grandkids is out without a folding wheelchair, which, depending on the individual's limitations, can make that person dependent on someone else to push them around.
Whereas electric scooters and wheelchairs can navigate easily and independently in pedestrian friendly zones when designed with accommodation in mind. And accommodation is now the law.
Also women and married people don't exactly, by definition, prefer driving over walking, dunno where you're getting that from. In fact, women drive less than men on average.
Society built around cars isn't too optimal for the elderly, quite the opposite.
I think the issue is that people don't know what they are missing until they get it. If your city is built around car, no proper public transport exists, why on earth wouldn't you want a car? For me the mind shift switched when I moved from a car city to a higher-density city (Toronto) for work reason. That's when I realized that I actually didn't want to use my car every day.
Well, that's the problem with the tyranny of the majority. The fact that people want unsustainable living doesn't mean unsustainable living should be encouraged. See also Hume's guillotine [1]
How exactly is it unsustainable? Are we running out of something? Are we running out of electricity?
The idea that cars are unsustainable is ridiculous. Just because they may not fit into sonmeone’s desire for increased government control of mobility doesn’t make them unsustainable.
Every generation seems to think their generation will be the last, unless we “do” something. They were likely debating horse carts in England a thousand years ago with equal fervor.
Yeah, money. In the US, new transportation projects are generally financed with federal help, while maintenance is left to the local government. This essentially creates a Ponzi scheme, where cities are going bankrupt due to depreciation on infrastructure, and not even realizing it. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
In my opinion, roads are essentially underpriced. They're expensive to maintain and given out for free. (Similar arguments apply for parking, expressed humorously here: http://cityobservatory.org/parking-where-we-embrace-socialis...) This bothers me, as someone who doesn't own a car but lives with worse air quality and safety due to those who do.
Call me when all cars are electric and all that electricity – not to mention the batteries and everything else – is produced by sustainable means. Burying your head in the sand and figuring that someone is going to solve the problem at some point does not work. Never mind all the people who want to believe the problem doesn't exist in the first place, in order to maintain the belief that their lifestyle is fine.
Google reports the population of the US at 325.7 million, and the population of New York City at 8.54 million. So, your "0.3%" is a tenth of the population of one urban core.
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
I think this statement is misleading. The market has filled with SUVs that are adapted from compact and midsize sedans (e.g. Toyota RAV4, Highlander). The giant SUV market still exists, but I don't believe it's growing anything like it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. I probably see forty Rav4's for every Ford Expedition I see.
I think you’re underestimating the total acreage of “pristine” wilderness in the United States. Any realistic demand for a lifestyle like koolba‘s would find ample supply.
I’m not so sure. How much land would you need to be completely isolated, no other houses in sight? A square mile? More if you live high on a hill (which many people would like to do).
Wikipedia says the area of the USA is only 3,794,100 square miles, so there aren’t very many square-mile patches to hand out compared to the size of the population.
Generally speaking, about 2-5 acres is enough. Most rural build to suit lots are in this range. A square mile is a ludicrous amount of land and not at all typical for rural living. If you have that much land, you're a farmer, have had it given to you, a significant portion is unuseable, there's a large pond/lake on the property, or you're just eccentric. Even out in the country, there's an amount that's practical and beyond that is just a waste. Once you get over 30 acres, it really starts to become silly.
A square mile is way more than needed. it is 640 acres. My parents recently retired out to a small farm in Missouri with 60 acres. With even 1/5th of that you would not have to see or hear neighbors. And assuming everyone around you has an equal amount, that is quite a buffer.
If you were to distribute all people in the US uniformly, everybody would have about four soccer fields of space. If you distributed them over the forest area of the US everybody would have about one soccer field of space. In either case if you account for yards and access roads you wouldn't have what I'd call pristine woods anymore.
I feel like we should at least exclude people under 18. We can then, in addition, account for couples, and perhaps even prisoners/institutionalized, college kids, the military, and so on.
Pristine woods is probably a bit of a high bar but you can get plenty of separation from neighbors with a lot less land, especially if some of the land is shared conservation space such as near where I live. A square mile is 640 acres which is a lot of land. Between myself and a couple neighbors we're on about 75 acres much of which is orchard, a Christmas tree farm, and adjacent woodland. We can see each other but we're pretty separated.
To quote koolba: "That [lifestyle] is not possible without a car."
Living in a dense urban area, taking trains, walking, and biking. Goods delivered all in close vicinity. Large building with the opportunity to be more energy efficient than your single family home.
All that, I'm convinced makes the carbon footprint of the average urbanite much lower than someone who often drives miles for errands
I know this must feel contrary to the intuition to those who live very close to nature
My medium-sized city made its main retail street pedestrian-only in the 80s. It quickly died and nearly all stores went out of business. The road was re-opened to traffic and now the area is booming.
One size doesn't fit all. What is your personal preference may not be others' prefereces.
Making a blanket statement like cars "are not effective in today's society" is profoundly off base.
Interestingly enough, my medium-sized city made its main retail street pedestrian-only in the 80s and it is booming. There's no way they'd ever allow cars on it again. People love it. Our downtown is fairly dense and has three universities nearby. They built two parking garages next to it to give people a place to park and they seems to operate close to capacity most of the time. So it has these things going for it.
There is an "activation energy" to walkability. If you drop pedestrian-only development into a car-dependent area, nobody is going to visit.
Personal preference is largely a reflection of the status quo, and in the US the status quo heavily sculpted by federal policy that has favoured car-oriented development for 60+ years.
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
It's not limited to the US. Even in Europe (at least in France where I live), we have a lot of protests whenever there are measures against cars. A few days ago, there was a no-car day in Paris, you could see people on social medias extremely angry.
Cars are the ultimate tragedy of the commons. People want to use cars but at the same time don’t want the negative externalities caused by everyone else using cars too – congestion, noise, pollution, road surface erosion. Because that selfish individualistic viewpoint gets us nowhere, a coordinated approach is needed.
You have also a good public transportation system in New York. There are many big cities with much worse traffic than NYC but there are simply no alternatives to cars.
Do NYC subway stops all have functioning elevators yet?
If not, then it’s not a “good” system. It’s a good system for single adults carrying their Manhattan Portage bag. Not so good for kids in strollers, carrying groceries for a family, people in wheelchairs, elderly with difficulties on stairs. It’s not a “good” system at all.
I've never been in a NYC elevator that didn't smell like human waste. Even if all stations had elevators, the immense heat on the platforms seems dangerous for babies and seniors. I always bring a fan to keep the little one cool. Too bad we can't seem to elect someone that will fix our subways.
>But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem
Private vehicle ownership isn’t about solving society’s transportation issue. As far as consumers are concerned, a car is one of the most significant and life changing purchases they’ll ever make. It gives them far more than just a solution to a ‘transport problem’, it provides the freedom to pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. If your idea is ‘convince people they don’t actually want cars’, then your idea is going to fail.
A lot of the traditional American lifestyle doesn't make much sense anymore. A large house with a lawn is incredibly wasteful, in terms of heating, water consumption and emissions. I can't even imagine the amount of water wasted to grow a rectangle of grass, regardless of temperature, aridity and general climate. Like it or not, the future for efficient living is cities.
How do you do this with kids? Suppose you're taking three kids to an event or a climbing gym or whatever and it's further than walking distance. Can biking be made safe enough, or if it's further, is it reasonable for them to bring them on the metro? What if it's three kids ages 5 and under?
This is an honest question. I live in a city with public transport now and I much prefer it for myself, but when I think of how I was brought up it's hard to imagine that working without a car.
I took my kids around in a bike trailer for the first seven or so years of their life. I didn't do this exclusively---we had a car and often used it, but the majority of places I wanted to get to I could reach by bike and bike journeys were 100% to 5% depending on the location. Now they are old enough to ride their own bikes. This was in the fairly bike unfriendly city of Birmingham, UK. (Birmingham bought into car culture in 1960s and is slowly recovering.)
I find this question very bizarre, what's the hell is wrong with riding a bus with kids? Why is it "more difficult" or any different from just riding the metro yourself? I rode the bus regularly from birth until 7 or 8 when my parents bought a second car and still rode sporadically with family or baby sitters from 7 or 8 until I was a teenager. I started riding again by myself or with friends as a teenager to go places and also rode the bus to work until I bought a car at 17. Riding with children is exactly the same as riding by yourself, except you have children next to you. Children under five usually ride for free too, at least they did in my city.
As far as sticking kids on bikes, you got many options:
I have two kids (now 8 and 4 years old). I don't own a car. We never had any issue bringing them with us in public transport (bus, metro or train). We live in Barcelona.
I live in Poland and similar experiences have often surprised my friends in US. „How do you go to the gym, buy groceries and get to school/work without a car?”
Well there are six stores (from very small to a supermarket) within five minutes of walking from my apartment. There’s a gym 500 meters away and another 1 km away. Cinema is 10 minutes by metro. A huge park and a forest are also about 10 minutes away each. Density is convenient!
I don't own a car in Berlin and I either take public transport or a cargo bike. Any long-john style cargo bike can fit 2 kids at least, most three-wheeled models easily fit up to 4.
There ARE some great suggestions in the article, namely underground parking, roundabouts instead of stop lights, and banning street parking. Now, to YOUR points:
"Mass transit": Shared and claustrophobic space with other travelers.
"Biking lanes": Requires exposure to the elements. Depending on where you live this is already a non-starter if you don't want to arrive at your destination drenched in sweat.
"electro-scooters": I've been on one of these in Vietnam. Doesn't carry 2 adults well and has the same weather problems as the peddle-powered version.
"Elevated footpaths": I live in an urban conglomerate in Asia with ~1.1 million people. A typical day of running errands can easily rack up ~50+km of driving because of the distances between either people I know or businesses carrying niche products. There's no way in Hell I'm covering that ground on foot, in 34deg C weather with 90% humidity.
The city in the article is (1) miniscule at ~85,000 people and 15-20km across at its widest and (2) possesses a pretty mild climate. All of the transportation assets you propose as "solutions" are fine....if you live in California or a similar "Mediterranean climate". Most humans don't.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Why so quick to jump to sweeping, society-altering prognostications based on conclusions which you yourself recognize as applicable to a small-scale and optimal use case?
Your suggested alternative transport means all severely restrict your freedom of movement compared to a private automobile as they come with range and/or comfort compromises. They would shrink the options of citizens for long-distance ground travel as well (say goodbye to road trips).
"Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like"
Yes, and given that 22% of humanity lives in urban areas of 1 million+ [1] and 40% of humanity in cities over 100,000 [2], it might be premature to call people to political action to hasten the death of the automobile when you don't have a solution that scales well.
Pontevedra mild climate? MediteWHAT? Please, take a map of Spain and comment again. Spain among Portugal is what you see when you cross over the Atlantic from the US.
Pontevedra is in Galicia, northern Spain. Here it rains like UK, and even worse. No Sun except a very few weeks a year.
Not all Spain is sunny, and not all the US is like California, Texas or Florida. You would freeze in Castille or Aragon in Winter. You would pray to see the sunlight in Asturias, Galicia or any region of the Bay of Biscay.
I know where Pontevedra is....because I looked at the Wiki article and read all the climate data before I posted. ^_^
And where I live on a tropical island in Asia has 25% more rainfall (2000mm annually), annual daily mean temp is 9deg Celsius higher (with 29deg C average highs June - September), and 25% fewer hours of sunshine.
So yeah, Pontevedra's climate may not technically be Mediterranean by Koppen classification but it sure as Hell is "mild" compared to where I live.
The last 10 years there are no longer rains, and the sun is here from late May to October, last year we have big wildfires in the last weekend of October, water restrictions from Sept due to the drought.
I remember when I was 10 years old rain a lot, nowadays no more than London ( I lived in London for a year).
That's due global warming. Also, the UK will have a shift too, soon :)
Recent years have been warmer in Bilbao, too. But... still gray skys and rainy days at least twice a week.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
I live in a remote mountain town in the North Cascades mountains and am approximately 80 miles from the closest stoplight. Obviously we rely on cars and trucks. It is wonderful place, and an additional benefit is that sanctimonious city dwellers who make comments like this are nowhere to be found.
Why are you so hostile? It is eminently clear in OP's comment that we are talking about transportation in cities. Even if it wasn't, you could give OP the benefit of the doubt.
> It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Yes, but there's also a geographical difference. Countries in Europe are rather small, and a long history has restricted some land use. In many areas of the US land was almost a non-issue, so people settled more sparsely, and even cities became sprawls (e.g. Houston, LA).
Resources are optimized relative to their current values. Medieval construction was often labor intensive because it was the cheap part compared to materials. City housing got disrupted by a new technology, cars that made additional cheap real estate more available for use.
Central planning can theoretically avoid some growth pitfalls "skipping to the end" but in practice it has often had limited success beyond zoning promoting the obvious - high traffic areas are good for retail and often annoyance to residents. I am no expert but it seems predictive design performs best with planning.
> Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found.
"In Scottish geography, a Carse (the modern form of older Scots kerse) is an area of fertile, low-lying (typically alluvial) land occupying certain Scottish river valleys,[1] such as that of the River Forth."
Distances in a lot of the US (I live in Texas) are such that I don't see cars disappearing. What might happen is more short-term renting of cars.
But a lot of American cities were built around the automobile, so they would need a lot of changes to function in a post-automobile world. That makes such a transition much less likely. I think it would work better in older, East Coast and mid-western cities that largely predate the automobile.
I like the idea of large cities improving their public transportation systems and having parking lots on the outskirts but it doesn't make financial sense in the smaller size cities. There are lots of people like me that live in a small down and commute into a city (60k people). I'd love better public transportation but it only makes financial sense in the "downtown" areas.
I live in Chicago and I only NEED a car once or twice a year. I walk to work. I can walk to the blue or red line trains which will get me just about anywhere else I need. There are a few grocery stores on my walk home from work. There's great coffee shops and restaurants near me.
I uber home when it's late and I've been drinking but that's really the only time I'm in a car.
I know I've got a somewhat special situation as I chose my apartment based on it's walk ability. However I've lived in other parks of the city and I had similar a similar experience. It just took a little longer to get places sometimes.
I believe eventually cars will be a shared service. Automated cars that will arrive whenever I need one. That will be the day.
I don't think cars are going anywhere for a while, but I'm very interested to see all of the alternative fuel options that show up eventually (CNG, Hydrogen and Electric so far).
I currently drive a Volt...and it's wonderful. Chevy is really missing out on a lot of potential free press by not putting a bigger emphasis on it. I went from spending over $400 / month on gas to about $20 / month. You get the ability to cut such a huge amount of gas usage without the need for any additional infrastructure to support them like pure-electrics that are out there.
My guess is that when clean energy is used to produce fuel cells, a lot of the conversations around the negative impact of cars in general will dry up.
I've done that before, when the Yen:Dollar exchange rate was brutal, I think in 2012, Japanese premium fuel was pushing $7.50-$8/gallon. In 1990's sedans with turbocharged engines, city driving, and a heavy foot.....yeah you're getting <20mpg and spending $3-400 per month too.....totally worth it. Japanese sports sedans are awesome.
> cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward.
Sure they do, just not in all situations. I'm all for walkable city centers, downtowns, parks and such, but I also very much love to drive my car. I'm happy to vote for more pedestrian/public-transport friendly metropolitan areas (and do), as long as there's also non-metro areas for me to live on my privately owned land and drive my privately owned car as I please.
In relation to the transportation-problem being discussed, autonomous vehicles are much better than normal privately owned cars because (in theory) they do not need any parking, at least not in premium inner city ground. They can just drive away and park somewhere where they aren't disturbing anyone, and come back when needed. Alternatively, if they are part of a car sharing service, the % of time the car is not being used and is therefore a wasted resource is going down. A normal car is only being used for what, 5-10% of the day? the rest of the time it is a completely wasted resource. If a car is not owned by an individual but by a group of consumers, a much smaller amount of cars is needed to satisfy transportation needs for the entire group.
Of course, even though they have these two advantages, they will still pollute(if not electric, and even so because they must transport more mass than say a scooter, and the electricity still needs to be generated at an external power plant) and create noise pollution and they also need to use traffic lanes and road-infrastructure.
People buy cars with their worst case transportation requirement in mind. By moving car ownership to an external fleet, people will be free to only use the extra transportation capacity as needed. Why are we spending all of this energy to accelerate giant metal boxes when most of the trips in cars are only to get a person from point A to point B? It's incredibly inefficient. Self-driving cars and electric bikes are going to completely change the transportation paradigm inside of dense cities.
You have to account for reduced cost of driving. Not just in dollar cost, but the cost of stress and driving time. This could lead to increased demand for car trips.
100% wrong....autonomous vehicles will result in vastly more cars on urban roads, idling or driving around in circles waiting to do profitable work...it will shortly become an epidemic requiring congestion legislation
think about it....if you set up an autonomous ride sharing service, your path to profitability lies in having cars closer to prospective riders. so it makes total sense to put as many cars on the road as possible....it's not like there is a person driving who must be compensated or fed
There isn't really much political will to mitigate car dependency and curb sprawl, but if hypothetically there were, it would still take half a century of concerted effort to reshape our cities into something a little less dystopian, and in that meantime autonomous vehicles would be very effective for shuttling people between their homes and major transportation hubs, because busses on feeder routes just don't work very well out in the burbs.
This has been modeled and studied extensively by the car companies to understand market sizing in a fully autonomous world. Everything points to a rather dramatic reduction (integer factor) in the number of cars on the streets, which needless to say is a dire outlook for those businesses.
The Segway was banned from San Francisco sidewalks almost immediately upon release. You really think NIMBYs are going to sit quiet as the streets fill up with empty cars circling like sharks?
I'm not very excited by autonomous cars, at least for short-trip personal transport, as I don't think they're solving the real problem which is to not need cars in the first place.
However it's far far easier for commercial companies to invest $billions in them than it is for governments to invest $billions in the infrastructure to make cars redundant. Look at the bitching and moaning that happens whenever a new train line is proposed.
> But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
They pretty clearly weren't effective in the old cities, either, at least in the U.S., since we had to more or less raze them and move everybody to the suburbs to make cars work.
> I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics
in the Bay Area, they tend to vote for more and better roads (but tend not to get them)
privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society
For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis.
Is that urban planning or suburban planning? Are we talking about better planned (more walkable) inner cities, or are we talkingt about a long term shift in what people wants, such as people not wanting a private back yard?
Because outside of cities, as long as people have detatched homes on reasonably sized lots, getting around requires a car. There will simply not be the density needed for efficient public transportation.
While I might agree that the idea of large suburbs with detatched homes is probably not very sustainable, I don't see how they aren't here to stay (together with the cars required to live in them)
I don't see why it requires a car. A suburb neighborhood could have a bus stop somewhere, taking the people to and from a more connected (as in public transport) place/hub. Walking a few hundred meters must be doable?
Or maybe the hub (outside the city) could have parking, so you drive there but take public transport from there on?
> I don't see why it requires a car. A suburb neighborhood could have a bus stop somewhere, taking the people to and from a more connected (as in public transport) place/hub.
That's how it works. I walk 600m to my bus stop in my suburb neighborhood. So commuting from where I live is no problem. I don't need a car for that. But all the other transportation (driving kids to various sports practices, going to the forest, the lake, going to the school that isn't along a bus route with kids that can't walk very far etc) is harder. There will always be a gap between the transport I want/need and the transport that can be solved by public transport. So some kind of semi-private transport (e.g. shared autonomous cars) is probably required if the suburban lifestyle is going to be possible without cars.
Taxi prices would have to be substantially lower for taxi to be a viable alternative.
Perhaps for some of the use cases there could be better utilization (meaning cheaper) taxi, e.g. a taxi picking up my kids for school could also pick up a few more.
To everyone above wondering why people think self driving cars will help. This is why.
Eliminate the driver and taxis become way cheaper (probably cheaper than owning a car). That means people like alkonaut here will be far more interested in just not owning their own car that sits idle except when they are personally driving it. Which reduces the amount of space we are spending on car storage.
Why do you think they will be cheaper? Get ready for surge pricing being the norm. If you don’t have a vehicle of your own, you’ll have no choice but to pay. That’s why investors are willing to pour untold billions into this, they expect a massive payoff.
I'm sure that investors will extract a nice sum of money, but it's their ability to outcompete taxis on price that will allow them to do that. Or to put it another way they don't need to extract $30,000/car/year^1 and competition means they won't be able to.
^1 what ddg tells me the average US taxi driver salary is.
Yes, just wave a wand and instantly transform thousands of existing low-density cities and suburban neighborhoods into little European villages. I’m convinced, cars will be useless in short order.
I don't think anybody honestly suggests to get rid of cars in short order. As you noted changing cities is a multi-decade operation. So it's best to start sooner rather than later.
I don't have a car but my life is not restricted to a few city blocks. I either ride a bike or take public transport (or both!) to get where I want to go.
Indeed - in fact that is exactly what I do. Walk/train to work, drive to the hills or the coast at weekends. What I am responding to above is the assertion “I don’t need a car myself therefore no one should be allowed to have one”.
On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.
Please send a note to the Dutch (and the Germans, the Danish, the French, the Belgians, …) to tell them to stop riding their bicycles in the midst of winter.
In the past five years there was one day when I couldn't cycle to work due to black ice covering most of the roads, and even that resolved itself in the afternoon. Snow just means you need a bit more dexterity than usual.
As for comfort; proper clothing means you are pretty much comfortable most of the time.
The ultimate irony of the point attempted to be made is that people don't drive when ice or snow cover on the road (or suck at it, take undue risks, fail to, and ram into curbs/cars/people).
Many people don't though (look at how attendance rates plummet at schools and businesses on heavy snow days), and of those who do drive anyway, the accident rate is highly elevated.
I cannot relate to what you write at all. In all my years in school, I did not witness a single day of attendance drop due to weather (the only weather-related exception was for the early years of elementary school, when you could choose not to go outside during breaks if the temperature was low enough, but that was rarely the case here near the coast).
What's more, in bad weather people (who have the option to choose between public transportation and their own vehicles) tend to choose cars more often because public transit has a habit of becoming increasingly unreliable, especially due to winter conditions, even though such conditions can be reasonably expected for 6 months a year.
I grew in a mountain pass area where there (used to, times change...) be heavy snow 2 to 4 months per year, and learned to drive there. Now I live in a city where snow happens regularly but much less and typically goes away in a couple of days, and when there's snow there's much less people on the roads, and for those who are, only a fraction know how to handle it, or even have proper winter tyres even though temperatures dive below the freezing point every year. People routinely flat out skip work on such days because "snow", which coming from where I grew up, is unfathomable unless you got a meter of snow overnight. On the occasional trip to Paris I've witnessed a couple events where emergency services are scrambling to bring water, food, and clothes to people gridlocked for hours (it was winter and many couldn't be arsed to take even a jacket, oblivious to their environment, living in their air-conditioned bubbles from house to covered parking lot to car to workplace); the entirety of the city streets was in deadlock because of a couple of millimetres of snow (obviously {rail,sub}way was unaffected). Pure madness.
Where are you from? Where I'm from, schools would be closed during heavy snowfall, so attendance would necessarily drop to zero. That's kind of necessary in a place where snowfall doesn't happen often enough for it to make sense to invest in a whole fleet of snow-clearing vehicles. It would take days to clear the streets from a heavy snowfall, but snowfalls like that happened less than once a year.
A few years back I took a trip to Sapporo over the New Year's holiday. It snowed ~3 inches per day the entire week I was there. I consider myself pretty comfortable with cold weather (I went up there so the girl I knew could teach me to snowboard). I'll be damned if I ever agree to give up a private auto in favor of biking in that sort of weather. I didn't even like her FWD Kei car, and wished I was in an AWD Lancer Evolution or Subaru WRX instead.
I live in the southwest of Germany, 500km from the coast as the crow flies. I cycle-commute year-round, around 5km each way. It's no problem if you have a good rain jacket and rain pants, and a down jacket, gloves and a hat (that fits below a helmet) against the cold in winter.
I live in an European city 60 degrees northern latitude, and the bicycle season is more like 9 months out of the year. That can be extended to 10-11 months with a bit of clothing/gear and bicycling the whole year is not impossible either (but most people who do have a separate winter bike).
I used to do 15+15 km bike ride to work and back almost every day for 9 months out of the year. Sadly I can't do that any more as I moved farther away from work.
There might be days of bad weather where other means of transportation is more convenient, but that's the case all year around.
For motorcycles/scooters the season is shorter because you can't get (affordable) insurance.
That's very subjective, quite a lot of people do that year round in a lot of European cities. Certainly it's viable in southern Europe where it rarely snows.
Even here in Minneapolis many people ride their bikes all year round, with fewer riding when it is extremely cold or snowy, but coming back out when it warms up just a little.
What’s interesting to me about Minneapolis and other northern cities where there are a lot of cyclists is that they very often have far more people riding to commute or do other practical tasks than any number of other cities with much milder climates. In the American south, where you never see snow, commuter cyclists are practically nonexistent. Obviously there is a climate challenge of a different sort, but not insurmountable ones and not all year round.
Citation needed, I know. There’s a relevant article about this phenomenon out there somewhere, if I can find it I’ll post a link.
Heat is way worse than cold. Many people can't do harder physical activities once it's around 30 degrees Celsius and/or humid because they would pass out (me included, when it's over 28, I just drive everywhere because I can't stand it outside). The idea that someone in their full health would force me to bike onto the steep hill where I live (and 18 km away from my workplace) is extremely unsettling to me. Public transport is not an option - it takes 50 minutes that way (while just 12 min by car) and the buses and trams are constantly overcrowded, late (or don't arrive at all) - and you definitely can't transport a server (or groceries for a 5-member family) that way.
Riding on the rare occasions there's snow on the ground in London is great. Assuming you can avoid snow in your chain (which causes it to skip the sprockets), the roads are empty - no cars, no busses, it's lovely.
You've got it bass-ackwards: biking becomes more difficult the closer you are to the equator. You can always add insulation to protect from cold, but you can't go much further than a singlet+shorts in case of heat.
Cities in the Nordic countries have bike paths that are kept clear of snow and are used for commuting year-round. People know that there is a way to dress to be comfortable cycling even when winter comes.
That really depends on the level of comfort you want to have when riding a bike. A lot of people do still use a
bike in winter (through I can't recommend it), through
even if you don't do so, using it for 5/8 of a year is quite doable.
I ride all year round in edmonton, I don't understand what the superstitions are against riding in winter. It's like walking, just a bit windier and you can't put your hands in your pockets. I'll take -20c over rain any day. The only thing I don't like doing in cold weather is being still. So long as I'm moving I'm fine.
You can't ride on ice and snow unless you have fancy bike and tires.
You will sweat unless you only drive plane roads.
Wind and snow make it much harder to ride.
Most people will just give up on riding in winter the first time they try it.
I've commuting year round for close to two decades, you don't need a fancy bike. You don't need fancy tires. For 90% of my winter commuting I'm on wet or dry pavement, in the coldest major city in North America. Four years ago the city began promoting winter commuting, along with a commitment to keep the bike paths clear, and the number of winter bicycle commuters has doubled annually. Enough of them are overweight middle aged ladies, the last type of person you'd suspect to be a hardcore winter commuter, but that's because it isn't actually hardcore. The barriers are psychological, there's a very easy learning curve to overcome, and it comes quite naturally if you just maintain a cycling through the fall. It's also a cure for seasonal affective disorder/cabin fever.
I ride a fixed gear In winter, with the same tires I use in summer. A lot of people are on mountain bikes. Some people are on fatbikes, but that's overkill for basic commuting.
I'd take some cold weather commuting over summer commutes here in the Midwest US... Those 100 degree days with 95% humidity are a killer unless you have a shower at work.
I ride a motorcycle year long in Paris, it's definitely not comfortable during the harshest winter days but with proper gear it's definitely doable. Spring and Autumn is fine, you just need waterproof gear for rainy days. At lower speeds and with exercise keeping you warm riding a bicycle is probably even less of an issue.
Sure, on rainy or super cold days it's not like it's as comfortable as a car but you'd have to pay me to drive a car around Paris or any big european city at rush hour.
Here's a fact: Pontevedra and the area surrounding is famous in Spain for really rainy winters and springs. Pontevedra city is facing directly to the sea.
Around here (this site I mean), the majority opinion doesn't find any problem at all with sleet and snow and cycling.
The odd thing about this is how the biking paths around here (a city 60N) still remain relatively empty for a long time in the winter. It almost confuses me, but not really :-)
> Around here (this site I mean), the majority opinion doesn't find any problem at all with sleet and snow and cycling.
I know. I expected to get this kind of responses. It shows how little empathy this site has for other (older, overworked, with 3 kids, pregnant, ...) people that are just a little different than they are.
The people that don't just aren't typical HN users. There is a very limited subset of people biking during the other half of the year and that's what I'm talking about - the world isn't only composed of young healthy people that don't carry anything and/or anyone and don't drive long distances and don't live in a hilly region and don't have to wear suit/dress to work (or have showers at work).
Saying "countries" is funny. It's varying wildly within a country, even a small one. E.g. my home city of Hradec Králové is built on a completely flat area with mild weather, so of course everyone bikes almost the whole year, but Prague is built on a series of steep hills and enjoys rougher weather, so while you see people biking here, most people don't.
Your post is how I can tell you've never been to Copenhagen during the winter. Bicycles are used year-round no matter the weather. There's a saying here that roughly translates to "there's no bad weather, only improper clothing".
I'm definitely not wrong, I'm just living in the other half of Europe. And that's my point - there is the other half, you can't do blanket statements like "cars should be banned". Cars need an update, but motorized 4-wheel individual transport has its place, maybe not in your city, but definitely in mine.
Biking in autumn is perfectly comfortable. You are just wearing more clothes (which you would wear anyway if you're outside). It's not like people never leave their houses in USA, right?
Biking in the winter is fine too, as long as there's no snow (and the snow is usually only 1-2 months, depending on the location).
And some people do drive in the winter too (but that is harder and most don't).
Actually biking in snow is fine too as long as there isn’t too much of it. The real problems are around the melting point when everything melts a little bit during the day and three freezes over the night and thus you have to bike on ice. This can be fixed by studded tires but most don’t bother. Main issue for me for biking in the winter is the cold. Not really a problem anymore as I moved to Helsinki where it rarely is cold enough to be a problem.
> This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing
This might be shocking to you, but I'd like to get to work in 15 minutes instead of in 45 minutes while suffering the bodily odeurs of a hundred co-travelers, overlaid with the subtle smell of my wagon having been used as a urinal for a decade, thank you very much.
Absolutely. Only a few cities in the USA are expensive on an international level. The cost of living in most regions of the USA is so incredibly low that a decent programmer has a shot of having a paid off house & car, no student loans, and $100k or so retirement account by the age of 30 (assuming graduating college @22).
Where I live, the median house price is about $170k USD (avg rent is just under $900/mo) and the median software engineer salary is just under $100k USD.
It's not a fair comparison though. Yes, the salary is lower, but you can free or almost free healthcare, you get many vacation days, you get vacation money (at least in the netherlands), you get paid time off when sick, more job stability, unemployment benefits, etc.
The healthcare argument isn't really that compelling, because most white-collar professionals in the USA have pretty good health insurance through their work. The extra time off is excellent, but you can put a dollar value on it and it doesn't come close to adding up to the paycut. You also pay higher taxes, and the cost for other goods and services (food for example) is often higher.
Disposable income for a senior developer in a major market in the US is likely to be much higher than their counterpart in the EU.
There may be other harder-to-measure cultural or quality-of-life reasons that make the tradeoff worth it, but I don't think "free healthcare" and a few weeks off comes close to making the case quantitatively.
It goes beyond these things. You get a quality of life enhancement by being in a more community centric environment. Less pressure overall. No one wonders if there is something wrong with you when you take 3 weeks off in a row. Being able to walk to the bakery, grocery store, and having better access to quality food. The fruit in the U.S. is quite bland compared to what you get in Europe. Having people out and about makes a place worth living in. The focus on the financial aspect is a very American trait. The overall quality of life is just better in Europe. Being able to take a train to a nice destination is great. Being able to walk from one village to the next is awesome. Going to a lake that isn’t fenced off due to private property obscuring access to the shore is wonderful.
Also when I go to the U.S. it’s kind of shocking to see how many people could do with good healthcare but are obviously not able to get it. I want everyone around me to be healthy not just my immediate friends and family.
The US is huge. Just to add a slight counterpoint, where I live I too can get great produce and visit natural areas that aren’t fenced off (California). Walkability depends on the city as well. The other points you make are valid though.
Yeah but I get 6+ weeks paid time off, plus 6 weeks paternity leave, and triple the pay of a comparable position in the EU, at the cost of worse healthcare.
At this point in my life I'm mostly healthy, so the risk of staying in the US outweighs the benefits of moving to the EU.
6 weeks paternity is not very much. 6 months is better but we get 480 days in Sweden. Our children don’t need metal detectors or security fences at school, it’s a given that you take time off if your kids are sick and that the state finances it. University education is affordable for everyone. If you are raising kids 3x the pay sounds awesome until you factor everything in, then to me it doesn’t sound enough.
You really think metal detectors and security fences are a common thing at schools in the U.S.? Maybe in some really sketchy areas of inner cities, I guess
Unless your health insurance is truly awful, or your local health system is unusually bad, you also probably have as good or better healthcare than you would in the EU.
The problem with US healthcare is the cost, not the quality. If you can afford it, you can get some of the best healthcare in the world here.
Sure, but all you're doing is effectively paying for those yourself with the pay cut. It's not just about paying for day to day things, 50% pay cut is 50% less I get to invest.
There is something to be said how amazing it is when everyone around you is also able to get the same health care no matter their income or background.
I don't meet people very often who don't have access to health care. Most get perfectly adequate coverage through their jobs, and the unemployed and elderly are subsidized by the gov't.
I'm a mathematician and I have done programming professionally but it just doesn’t interest me. My training in pure math got me focused on showing something can be done or that a solution exists. When I think of a software project I think of course it can be done and lose interest.
There are a zillion things that can go wrong in software development and problems arise that require creative solutions. That’s the engineering part I suppose. But I have no interest in it. I’m stuck being a teacher at a community college. It’d be great if my job, in its current form, could be found in Germany or Switzerland but I’m stuck where I’m at.
My wife is a physician and she’s not doing residency over again just to live in Europe.
I wish that were the case for all of Europe. I am willing to take the pay cut, but there are no real opportunities in southern Europe and if there are, the pay cut tends to be around 75%.
* Dutch American Friendship Treaty (self employ in the Netherlands)
* Working Holiday visa Irealnd (one year and have to be within a year of school or in school, but if you get a job that sponsors you can stay)
* Germany. Germany is just supposed to be a relatively easy place to get a visa, comparatively. Be sure to look up blue cards.
* Ancestry. Got any history in a European country? Start looking at grandparents' birth certs
Also, a lot of people have mentioned pay. It's true, pay is lower in Europe - in tech. OTOH in other fields there's less of a disparity, or it's higher here. My wife does not work in tech and makes more here (or did before she decided to stay home with our kid).
In Ireland, at least, a normal dev would make very roughly 60(ish), someone versed in ML, etc. closer to 90, and to get to six figures you'd need te be fairly senior. Jobs posted on http://irishtechcommunity.slack.com/ recently have been everything from 40k (junior) to 150k (senior at FB). It's more common to include ranges in job postings here.
Europe is big though and salaries are MUCH different in Portugal than in, say, Finland.
I would have recommended Ireland in the past but now, if you're interested, you'd be wise to steer clear of Dublin. Housing has gotten really scarce, but worse than just being expensive it's just really hard to actually _get_ (no surprise given that rent control is bad policy).
If I were looking myself right now the top of my list would be Utrecht, because I love cities where my kid can cycle to school and not die.
> Dutch American Friendship Treaty (self employ in the Netherlands)
This was my first thought. I was hoping to move abroad for some time before quitting my remote U.S. job.
> Working Holiday visa Irealnd (one year and have to be within a year of school or in school, but if you get a job that sponsors you can stay)
I'm going to check this one out, thank you. I have a few classes I'd like to take, plus the GI bill to pay for finishing my degree (I have a semester left).
> Ancestry. Got any history in a European country? Start looking at grandparents' birth certs.
My wife's mother was born in Italy (well, Sicily), her family migrated to the U.S. when she was just a few years old.
> Ancestry. Got any history in a European country? Start looking at grandparents' birth certs
Unfortunately, this only works for relatively recent migrants. Any documents before 1900 or so are hit-or-miss. I have a very, very unique last name (in the US) and the documents on the country of origin for my ancestors vary between Russia, Prussia, Germania, and Poland depending on who filled out the forms. Then there's the issue of misspellings.
I feel like we should be charitable on the actual wording of the statement as the speaker is being quoted in their non native language.
I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
Given that the entire NHS budget is £125Bn I'm guessing... not much?
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
The problem isn't the wording, it's the hare-brained idea that public and private shouldn't mix and cooperate. Flip the statement, make it about education - "How can it be that private benefit – the education – is financed by the public money?" - to clearly see the implications.
We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?
Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.
[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.
Then as you say don’t simply ban "private property occupying public space" but require some degree of efficiency when doing so – people can occupy public space, but like with all resources, they must be considerate and efficient when doing so and not let it go to waste.
A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.
>A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger
I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.
We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.
>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you
An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs.
Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.
Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.
reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs
All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...
You can be in favor for banning personal use vehicles without banning delivery and ambulances. And as you'll note the city in the article only banned cars in the city center, so talking about an hour outside of London is not relevant. If London banned cars in the city center you could drive to the closest rail station at the border of the exclusion zone and take public transport from there.
Funny you should say that. Next step is people self-segregating into pedestrian cities and car cities or city districts; of high-paid knowledge-based jobs living in tranquil peace vs. of people in low-paid menial jobs, living in ever worsening conditions.
Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.
But that's not possible for everybody right now.
No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent.
Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.
It only occupies a small ephemeral spot in spacetime. Try lying in a single space for hours or days on end in a city and see how far your clever countering gets you. I'm sure there's many a vagrant who would rebut your thesis.
I wouldn't think of my body as private property. Leaving that aside, the answer to your question is that everybody has a body, so we're not talking about the same kind of privilege that car owners have. Nor do bodies occupy the same amount of space. Last but not least, they don't easily kill other people as they cross their way.
But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it.
It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative.
And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
Eliminate cars.
Eliminate the options for people to be autonomous.
Pack everyone into major metropolitan cities by the millions.
Stop building houses.
Build Up.
Build condos and apartments.
Eliminate the option for people to buy land because it is unsustainable and the state knows better.
Sounds like a perfect dystopian society.
Once all cars become electric this will solve one of the biggest problems. Then once they become self-driving the other 25% of noise (honking, sirens, etc) would be significantly reduced.
Half of the problem with cars is a geometric one, they take up too much space. They give rise to sprawl and thus increase the demand for cars in a vicious cycle. Them being electric or self driving will not solve that.
You can thank exacting regulations with the goal of safety/etc for modern calls all looking samey and generally ugly. I feel like there must be ways to give more leeway to aesthetic design without compromising what's truly necessary in terms of safety and economy.
Urbanists who hate cars like to tear down freeways. E.g. in SF they tore down the Embarcadero and Central freeways, instead of repairing and extending them. This of course forces more cars onto the streets, making life worse for everyone.
But to be fair, San Francisco did not even want the Embarcadero freeway and proposed a tunnel that the state nixed. When the thing collapsed in an earthquake it was a pretty easy choice to not spend money building something the city didn't even want.
You do have to agree that not having to walk under a urine-soaked freeway to get to the waterfront is an improvement to the city. The tunnel would have also been fine, of course.
The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the major highway which has speed limits within the town but still sees so much traffic as to be very dangerous for pedestrians.
These towns need the commercial visitors brought by the highway to survive — but the design common in Europe for this scenario is so much better. There will be a sign for an exit off the main road for the “city center” exit — there will be a single parking lot for the city center, and then comfortable walking distance to the businesses ... superior design.
Many small, especially old, towns in Europe have ancient road layouts that are too narrow and steep for cars within the town — which resulted in these car free designs for free. It’s beautiful. Parking is easy because there is only one place to do it on the outskirts — and then walk everywhere. There is no improvement for a small town to be designed otherwise in my opinion.