I live in Hong Kong, where 95% of the population uses public transport daily, and has a very low car ownership rate. Reasons include $7.4 petrol (gal), vehicle registration tax that can exceed 100%, and expensive parking ($400 a month for a single car, and that's just at home)
Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs).
That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo
The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.
You and your numerous fellow residents are fortunate enough to live in a city that has quite possibly the best designed and most ubiquitous public transit system I have ever encountered as well as a city geography where it is economically viable to service virtually everyone.
The vast majority of the world's cities are not quite so lucky. This is especially for cities in the American Midwest. I live in one - Detroit. It would be nigh on impossible to function without a car in this city.
> The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.
Couldn't agree more. Situation is very similar in Tokyo. Almost from anywhere in the city, one can walk to a train station within 15 min; and trains come every 5-10 min if not more often. I was very surprised when I had to wait for 1 hour for CalTrain to go from airport to Palo Alto.
I tried to imagine what kind of transport infrastructure can be developed to accommodate possession of at least 2 cars per household in such places. So I realized that the only thing keeping the current cities developing and looking like some kinky SciFi version of them is ...regulation!
Of course, packing people into these Hong Kong apartments (dozens of stories of flats upon each other, 3 people living in a 5 square meter unit) is not exactly considered "good quality life" by most of us. Though it is better than the life these people had before.
Your linked article says around 100k people live in those cramped quarters. Fair enough, that's roughly 1.3% of the population (7,234,800 as of 2014 estimate).
In other words, there's plenty of people living in what you and me would classify as normal apartments. Albeit perhaps not incredibly spacious.
The article is about a very specific scenario: dense metropolitan city centers. It has always been the case in those areas that many people do not own cars, and yes you can get by very well by using public transport, taxis, walking/cycling, and the occasional rental when you do need to drive somewhere.
Pretty much everywhere else, cars are almost essential to modern life.
It's a little more than that. The internet reduces peoples need to go somewhere, buy stuff, and take it home even outside of cities. This is killing the suburban shopping mall, but it also significantly reduces peoples need to move around with a pile of stuff. Because public transport is mostly focused on moving people and not their stuff this makes public transport more useful to more people. Even if they don’t give up both their cars living in a one car household is far easier nowadays.
PS: It's not just about doing less shopping trips; if you only get 1 bag of stuff it's easy to carry around. If you’re getting a massive load of junk you really want to drop it off in your car.
The internet has largely removed my desire for physical goods. It's probably partially my age, but I suspect it's somewhat true for younger people as well. I'd just as soon read an in-depth review on a new piece of tech rather than buy it and get it configured before putting it on the shelf not to be used.
Desktops with their huge CRT's have consolidated into laptops. Your phone consolidates an alarm clock, a landline, a camera, a torch and a calculator. You don't really need a TV or radio. Modern tech is slowly reducing the amount of clutter needed for daily life.
It's even a little more than that. The Internet is now making it so that I can hire someone else to deal with moving stuff for me. For example: https://getdolly.com/ and https://www.instacart.com/
It's getting to the point where, if you live in a dense city, owning a car isn't just a thing you can live without. It's becoming one of the more obnoxious possible ways to get things done.
I live in Waltham Forest, London, which is mentioned in the article. I am delighted not to have to own a car.
We're sort of on the edge of the naturally car-free zone: end of the Victoria Line tube one way, boundless greenery and suburban shopping barns the other. So yeah, lotta people here do have cars.
Well, the end of the radio age hasn't finished the radio. I guess this can be said of about any technology - it is not finished, just not anymore the center of the attention.
To put it succinctly: cars are useful, but also dangerous, and require huge amounts of land to run and store in any quantity. After discovering that trying to rebuild cities with room to run and store large amounts of cars, we've discovered many negative side effects, and so have stopped trying to build cities in such a fashion.
I would agree. It is definetely not the end of the "car age"
Cars will live on for many years but as self-driving cars come into play, owning a car wont be a need any more.
For your day to day activities you can take public transport and bike to work.
For weekends that you want to do a trip with family/friends you will simply "hire" a car that will take you where you want to go.
I am excited about this future. Cars slowly being phased out for a more accessible city for the people. Taking back the roads from cars for bicycles and walking.
Cars kill over a million people annually and injure millions more. Let that sink in. Getting rid of cars as we know them will be like curing a dread disease.
It's the dawn of the second age of modern cities. There was a period of time in the mid 20th century when cities were being drained of people. Some of that was motivated by a desire to have a nuclear family living in a house in the suburbs with a lawn and a garage. Some of that was motivated by the perception of the cities as an unsafe or unsavory place to live. Some of that was motivated by blatant racism (so-called "white flight"). The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910, as did the population of Paris, the population of Detroit around 1950, the population of San Francisco originally peaked around 1950 as well.
But since around the 1980s or so there's been a revitalization of cities, especially in America. Changes in crime, changes in the economy, and changes in culture have brought people back to the cities. The suburban nuclear family is no longer the ideal for ambitious 20 to 30 somethings. The best paying jobs are no longer factory or industrial jobs outside the city, frequently they are knowledge worker jobs in urban centers. And young professionals seem to prefer the city life in many cases. The crime waves of the late '80s and early '90s (due to innumerable factors, especially the onset of the "crack epidemic") abated by the late '90s, right as the tech boom started. The result of all of these changes has been an influx of population and business back to urban centers.
And that has led to the increasing importance of public transit as well as walkable/bikable cities. Cities are discovering that expecting everyone to drive their car to work every day leads to gridlock, and they are reaping the consequences of low urban populations, low city revenues, and low investment in transportation infrastructure during the mid-20th century. They're also discovering that there are strong benefits to walkable and bikable cities. It leads to generally more appealing downtowns and, at least the perception of, nicer cities to live in. The improvements in telecommunications as well as delivery and other services (smartphones, amazon, uber, etc.) has reduced a lot of the traditional downsides to not owning a car (it's easier to find your way around due to GPS and maps, it's easier to coordinate with friends, it's easier to get important household goods delivered, etc.)
Cars are still relevant, and important, but things are changing in terms of where people want to live and work, and the era of the city designed solely around car transit is finally coming to an end.
It's funny when drivers echo the sentiment that their city would be better off with fewer cars. Of course, they mean "my driving experience would be better off with fewer other cars on the road".
Still, even if this is selfish and hypocritical, it can be harnessed - transportation is all about "if you build it they will come". If people support the development of alternative transport, it will get used. The biggest obstacle is people demanding that all the transport funding goes to building roads and parking lots, if we can defeat that mentality by telling people it will make the roads better for them, thats good.
It is not completely true. Sometimes a critical mass is required.
I'd be happy to bike to work. It is not a very long commute and the exercise would do wonders to my sedentary self. Though, I will not risk my life to the maniacs on the road.[1] A few people do, but many don't, so no cyclist lane is going to get build that I could use.
[1] Cyclist like to say it is more the perception than reality. Still, one pedestrian or cyclist per week get killed in this town, by public transportation alone.
Buy the car. Park the car. Maintain the car. Repair the car. Insure the car. Put gas in the car, inflated by infrastructure and environmental taxes. Pay tolls for the car. So why not: pay for fewer others to be in the way of the car.
By the way, don't forget to wash and wax the car, and vacuum the car. And you can't use the same product on chrome, glass, paint and tire: what are you thinking?
"We will still have cars – people need them for carrying goods – but their speeds will be very low and there won’t be so many of them."
I wonder how much things like Google Shopping Express, Amazon Fresh and (possibly in future) drone deliveries would help to reduce the need for personally owned cars?
It might help in US (I guess?) but in most of Europe this is not the issue. I've lived in several EU countries, never had a car. I always walk to the nearest grocery shop or bike to a bigger one. City design allows me to do that.
Its worth noting that in walkable cities people shop more frequently as a rule. If where you do your shopping is within a short walk of your home it becomes practical to buy stuff most days. In fact if you are traveling to and from work or anywhere else its likely you will pass by somewhere you can buy your groceries as you go about your business so there is zero additional travel time added by buying groceries every day.
If you are only concerned with what groceries you will require in the next 24 hours then carrying the required groceries for a large family isn't such a big deal.
And if grocery shopping every day sounds like an ordeal remember that everyone else is doing it too so generally everyone is only buying a handful of items. No trolleys piled high with stuff.
Andy, do you have kids while living in a walkable city? I've done this before and some days, it's like what you say. Other days its simply that we haven't gone for a bit, and so it takes 3-4 arms to heft it back. Serious pain if you're out with the tykes and don't have your spouse/SO along.
Bah, HN seems to have eaten my original response. Retyping...
>do you have kids while living in a walkable city?
I do although my collection is limited to a single 1 year old at this time.
>Other days its simply that we haven't gone for a bit, and so it takes 3-4 arms to heft it back. Serious pain if you're out with the tykes and don't have your spouse/SO along.
Shopping as a lone adult with children when you have extended your usual shopping schedule is always going to be painful no matter what.
Going shopping with your car having not done it for a while is very definitely no picnic. Managing a child who isn't happy about how long this whole thing takes while you select, pack and eventually unpack your own body weight worth of groceries is not fun. Even if you aren't buying that much, as a lone adult juggling a baby and your groceries and getting all of them into the car while standing in a busy car park is an inherently unfun and often dangerous activity.
Frankly the only non-unpleasant way to do a larger than usual shop alone but with children is to get it home delivered.
And yet somehow, back in the days when family sizes were larger and car ownership rates were lower, people managed.
I think our baselines have shifted: We've become so accustomed to living in places that are designed around the assumption that everyone owns at least one car that it's becoming hard to even imagine things that were just everyday life less than a century ago.
Yep. And the distance they'd have to haul them could be as great as 6 whole blocks, judging by the density of former neighborhood groceries in the historic neighborhood I used to live in.
Conversely, I suspect the density of Snap Fitness locations was much lower. But you have to take the bad with the good.
Incidentally, in my (currently) single-income family I'm expected to pick up groceries on the way home from work. When we were two income, we'd share that responsibility. Historical chore assignments were a product of more than one factor, and I don't think anyone would suggest that all of them were desirable.
If there are six people in this family, surely some of them can help carry the groceries.. but I digress.
I think you miss r00fus's point - in a walkable city, you're not forced to haul hundreds of pounds of groceries from one centralized megalocation once a week. The design of a livable city means there are plenty of small shops interspersed in and near residential areas, making it easy to frequently visit them to pick up whatever you may need.
By "we", you really mean American suburbanites. Supermarkets are almost nonexistent in Germany, for example, and there aren't very many in Manhattan either.
I live within a 5-8 minute walk of half a dozen different grocery stores. It's great. I've lived in places where you need to drive, and I never want to go back to that.
After the Second World War, most additional housing was built in suburbs, massive highways were built--largely for military reasons but they also contributed to suburban sprawl, and the white urban population deliberately fled to suburbs in order to maintain racial segregation from the increasingly urbanized black population. Supermarkets were a side effect.
Actually in my 5 person family only 2 of us can carry stuff. One (me) is designated as the procurement person, so I do the shopping. I can't go every day because I have a busy schedule (even on days I WFH).
Consequently I'm buying hundreds of dollars of stuff each time I go, and most times I have a kid pulling on my arm. How am I supposed to carry all this stuff?
Luckily I have instacart, Google express, and Amazon to fulfill all non-groand the deliveries are sent to my house.
To be fair, you do need to move around just to maintain health. If you're working from home, you need to walk down to the shops or something similar, to get anywhere near the level of activity which we're supposed to do. There's also online deliveries for buying heavy things like tins in bulk. A lot of families do live like that, although it's obviously not going to be universal.
It's not really the death of cars, that's just a good headline, it's a shift in priority in new design, and a transition in that direction over time. But obviously there will be huge variance in transport models in different cities and countries, and from the centre to the suburbs.
If you live reasonably close to a grocery store, you can actually go once per day and don't need to carry that much at any one time. On the plus side the food is more fresh because it didn't have to sit around for a week or two.
Though of course, you can always get a cart or something.
When I lived in Denver many years ago, King Sooper's sent around a flat truck a couple of times a day, picking up grocery carts that had been left on lawns and curbs by pedestrian shoppers. I doubt that something so great could still be happening, but I'd be happy to hear that it is.
Perhaps a stepping stone to a general self-driving car would be a car that could just drive itself back to the store, to have the trunk filled with more bulky purchases.
It's a combination of both. Also consider that traditionally with "vicinity" shops/markets you did your grocery shopping much more often. We are just 3 at home but only do grocery shopping once per week, that would be impossible without a car.
Delivery was a bigger thing in the railroad era. Department stores and grocery stores used to deliver. UPS began as United Parcel Service, delivering for department stores. In some older houses, there's a pass-through compartment into the kitchen, so that bags of groceries can be delivered from the outside and retrieved from the inside.
Now it's coming back, now that the ordering end can be automated.
> This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted wisdom across the developed world. “The height [of buildings] is going up; density is going up; borough policies and London plan policies are all about intensification and densification of land uses,” [...] People live very close and they don’t travel at all because everything is on their doorstep; the population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you could ever want.
Densely built cities will be a lot easier to build encasings around, that filter the air on the outside before it circulates around inside the encasing, when they'll need it in 20 or 30 years time, than low density single-house cities fed by cars on freeways. East Asian and some European cities seem better suited for this than most in the U.S.
* you've never heard of air pollution and global warming,
* you don't experience air pollution every day for it to register in your thinking, or
* you disagree that polluted air will within decades encompass the globe.
Far more people live in places like Beijing China and Delhi India than Adelaide Australia or Anchorage Alaska, and the only trend they see wrt air pollution is an ongoing increase. A decrease is only talk by people whose other hand is milking the machine.
Most of the pollution comes from inside the city, so encasing the city would be rather disastrous. And you can't really protect against the global warming, aka greenhouse effect, by building a greenhouse - because that's effecticely what encasing a city is. A very large greenhouse which gets very hot inside.
(The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)
Perhaps "connected enclosures" would be a better term. The enclosures would be built gradually, incorporating present air-conditioned buildings but with air filtration systems added, and slowly extended to more and more areas. Many subway stations in Asia have a transparent seal between the tracks and waiting area which would be part of the enclosed zone boundary. You probably imagined a dome over a city when you read "encasing".
I still don't quite get why cities should be any kind of enclosures. The world as we know it has these huge air filtration and CO₂-to-O₂ conversion systems called "forests", and I do not understand why cities should be disconnected from them (apart from perhaps protecting the forests).
Actually, I agree with you on those points. What I don't see is how your proposed solution solves the problem. The sources of pollution are usually inside the cities. Los Angeles doesn't have a smog problem because of all the ozone blowing in from the Pacific ocean - it's because of all the cars in Los Angeles. Putting up an encasement around the city would actually make the air cleaner everywhere else on Earth, but would slowly suffocate the citizens. Given a choice, I'd want to be on the side of the encasement that does NOT have all of the cars and factories.
Are you planning on moving the factories outside the encasement?
I'm thinking of dense Asian-style cities run on subways and enclosed walkways, not Los Angeles, and the encasings built gradually, where every air-conditioned/central-heated apartment/shopping building is part of the enclosed area. The current factories wouldn't even be included in the area that gets enclosed in the first place.
It seems more likely that various cities and countries around the world will act in self-interest by gradually enclosing more and more of their own living spaces inside air-filtered zones (including areas currently outdoors) than that governments around the world will mutually agree on and execute solutions to growing air pollution.
Sorry, this makes no sense. It would be far, far cheaper to decrease pollution than to build airtight seals around every living space. Just think about how impractical and expensive that would be. Space stations and submarines are airtight, and they are extremely expensive. Now imagine making every building to similar standards, and connections between them to the same standards. Then think about how space stations and submarines must be maintained in order to remain in working condition, and how expensive that is. It would be absurdly impractical.
In fact, reality bears this out. Pollution in the U.S. is down over the past several decades, compared to its previously increasing. Pollution controls work and are economically viable.
Yes, developing (and far more corrupt) nations like China are increasingly choking themselves with air pollution. That's because of their social problems (i.e. not putting enough value on human life and quality of life). Their governments are willing to let their citizens suffer, and their citizens are powerless to effect change within their social and governmental structures.
Eventually the costs will become too great and even the corrupt governments will have to do something. (Or the rich/powerful will live in expensive, isolated structures while everyone else suffers.)
But one thing that certainly won't happen is to encase everything in airtight seals. Not unless Free Energy happens, in which case pollution would no longer be an issue anyway.
> It would be far, far cheaper to decrease pollution than to build airtight seals around every living space
But it could be cheaper for the inhabitants of a few living spaces to build airtight seals around their own living spaces only than to contribute to the cost of decreasing air pollution worldwide, something you suggest might happen when you say...
> Or the rich/powerful will live in expensive, isolated structures while everyone else suffers
A city's residents and a country's citizens tend to act in short-term self-interest, and taking part in worldwide pollution control is a long-term solution that gives up a lot to developing countries like China and India who expect the developed world to bear the greatest costs because they've already reaped the greatest benefits from polluting and causing climate change.
> you disagree that polluted air will within decades encompass the globe.
I'll go with point 3. In some places it will continue to get worse, until either governments change and people can enact change, or the workers suffer so much that the economics make it cheaper to reduce pollution than to let it increase.
But no, it will not "encompass the globe." That's an extreme exaggeration, and your mentioning Australia and Alaska as counter-examples proves it. Are you letting your agenda trample upon your truthfulness? :)
I have a small theory about cars and low birth rate.
If you look at developed nations with well developed public transportation (which means less need for private cars), you generally see lower birth rate. Really low. Look at Japan. S Korea. Europe.
However developed nations with less developed public transportation (meaning more ownership of private cars), you generally see higher birth rate. Examples are most of US (excluding NYC), Canada, Aus.
I personally think young moms just decide to have less kids if their option of traveling within the city is limited to public transportation. And with young kids, you do have to travel more than usual to get to doctors office, school, activities etc.
When you have a sedan/suv/minivan, traveling with kids is much more tolerable. You don't have to carry everything on your back or in your hands. You can strap them into car seats once and that's just about the only time you have to worry about it.
I think you're drawing conclusions from coincidence. If I had to pick a reason for the disparity, it's that public transit and dense city centers make less sense in countries with large, rural areas. Rural areas tend to have lower levels of education, and level of education has been linked with birth rate (specifically, higher female educational achievement leads to lower birth rates).
The three areas you list as "developed nations with well developed public transportation" are all compact and densely populated. The three you listed as "less developed public transit" are much larger, with a significantly higher rural population.
I would bet that if you normalized for education, you would see any disparities between your cohorts disappear.
I would say that high density cities have a high cost if living, and high cost of living impacts the birth rate.
It's also the case that young urban populations don't get the discount rate on children right. A lot of young urban people see children as a very high cost, and see no benefit. The benefit of children is all in the long tail. Many people who say 'kids are expensive and too much effort' have failed to factor in what happens when they get old and lonely. Anyone pondering this question should consider how much your parents like getting a phone call, then project forwards in their life where this possibility of joy is eliminated, forever. You don't even have to see adult children to get joy from them.
"When you have a sedan/suv/minivan, traveling with kids is much more tolerable. You don't have to carry everything on your back or in your hands. You can strap them into car seats once and that's just about the only time you have to worry about it."
From 1st hand experience the main problem is finding a cheap parking spot near your destination. Then you still need the pram or the stroller to get from that spot to where you are going. That pram (or more specifically the carry tray underneath) is like a pack mule for all the junk that your kids need.
Can Google make an auto driving pram please? Something that can handle getting on/off public transport.
> How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your shopping home from your local store.
That requires a handicap-accessible city. There absolutely cannot be stairs between your front door and the aisles of the store (including bus rides). I'm sure some newer cities are like this, but older cities tend to grandfather in older buildings and public transit systems. I don't see this happening anytime soon.
I hate to be a downer but this "idea" will vanish like morning mist with the first terrorist nuke.
Urban designers for densely-populated countries should plan instead for people and industry to spread out as much as possible to eliminate the effective damage of WMDs. I think there was a sci-fi novel (by Asimov?) where people no longer lived or even met with each other, fearing death through either disease or malfeasance.
And the way drones are progressing, we'll soon have some like those in Dune - "bugs" that fly to their target, identify him/her and kill only that individual. I haven't heard of anyone working on a bug spray yet.
One solace: all the above was brought to us, one way or another, by democratically-elected large powerful national governments. Guess we wanted these things, eh?
The reality of terrorist WMDs is one incident, ever. That was the Aum cult's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. That's it.
That was a hell of an effort to achieve a result that a) could easily have been exceeded by a small, simple low-explosive IED; b) Ended up having the opposite effect of the goal of terroism - it highlighted how difficult and relatively ineffective WMDs are.
"Thus certain bombs were designed to destroy an entire large city even if dropped five to ten kilometers from its center. This objective meant that yield and effectiveness were positively correlated, at least up to a point. However, the advent of ICBMs accurate to 500 meters or better made such yields unnecessary. Subsequent nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy, miniaturization, and safety. The standard practice for many years has been to employ multiple smaller warheads (MIRVs) to «carpet» an area, resulting in greater ground damage."
So sprawling won't save you neither from the initial "nuclear carpet" (that can be quite wide), nor from the radioactive fallout that have always spread over a much larger area than the radius of initial explosion(s).
You are thinking of Caves of Steel and its follow-up novels. The "spacer" worlds were extremely sparsely populated, just a few thousand people per planet, and the people did not want to meet physically for fear of infections and dirt (much of which was mental).
But in these novels, the Earth was living in huge underground cities; big, noisy and somewhat dirty. The funny thing is that in Asimov's future Earth, population density was very extreme, people did have very little privacy (their apartments didn't even have own bathrooms, regular citizens used only public bathrooms and toilets). This was for 8 billion people, which in early 1950's looked like a huge population. This was supposedly achieved by megacities covering entire continents.
But today, the world has 7 billion people, and will have 8 billion people in a couple of decades - and life will not be that much different from what it is right now.
Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs).
That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo
The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.