I don't have a car and absolutely hate the car-centric culture of American cities (I live in SF).
That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car because most people had cars. The article would have you believe that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people owned them.
It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars.
> As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle.
And how much dedicated infrastructure is there, in terms of space and money, for walking vs biking vs driving?
People always ignore this, that driving even in "walkable" neighborhoods generally still has ENORMOUSLY more money and more land dedicated to it. If you look at how much space the road takes up, vs sidewalks and protected bike lanes, and how much money those things cost to build -- it's not even close.
That, plus in the US there's usually a lack of mixed use zoning, so there's hardly anywhere to walk to (though I don't know whether this is the case for your neighborhood in particular).
At the intersection I'm looking at, it's around 2/3 for cars, 1/3 for peds, 0 dedicated for biking. However, SF is actually pretty good about this. There are two "slow streets" within 1 block of me that are mostly car-free. There are also 2 streets within 3 blocks of me that have dedicated bike lanes with raised barriers.
Slow Streets (also called open streets), and really a half measure as it stands. To make them fully low-car, they need to be one-way for cars, alternating directions, so that there is no reason to be on the street if it's not your final destination. It would also be helpful if the intersections were genuine roundabouts.
I live in SF too, but calling our infrastructure "good" is really setting a low bar. We want about 10%-15% of the streets primarily serving bicycles, with pedestrians getting another 10% of roadways. That should be the goal.
I agree with you and the slow streets, that would be a better design.
As for goals, what we currently have is good for me, where I live. There are many areas in the city where it would be impractical not to have a car. I believe the goal should be to make it possible to live without a car anywhere in the city. I don't really care about the specifics of proportions of infrastructure.
>what we currently have is good for me, where I live. There are many areas in the city where it would be impractical not to have a car
So, i see this as a bit myopic though. The combination of the rising developing countries and climate change mean that fuel should slowly increase in price over our lifetimes. We ought to prepare. Providing a network of about 10% of streets to be effectively car-free is a great way to plan for that, while allowing people to use cheaper (see: wealth building) alternatives in the meanwhile.
I don't see the car going away in our lifetime, nor would i want it to, but as a low-car person myself, i feel that people should be able to bike most anywhere in town without needing to wear a helmet. Children should be able to bike to school. Grandmas should be able to bike. People don't bike because it's legitimately dangerous, even under current paradigms. It shouldn't be. A few slow streets and some bike lanes is vastly insufficient.
That's not what I said. I said that right now not everyone can avoid car ownership and the goal should be to change that. I'm saying the goal should be to make it possible for nobody to need a car. I'm objecting to the 10% number, which seems arbitrary to me.
Can you imagine someone saying that a city is actually pretty good about driving because even though 75% of the houses are completely inaccessible by cars, there’s 1 road a block away that you can drive a car in and 2 more roads within 3 blocks of you?
Most Americans don’t even realize how auto centric their entire thinking is.
No, that's not right and doesn't make sense. I can bike on the road in front, and I can even park a bike here. If the road were a block away, the driver would have to get out and walk a block to go home. And actually a lot of people do that with street parking and would say it's "pretty good"!
It's not just land. Walking paths cost far less than and require less maintenance and drainage than smooth impermeable asphalt roads with curbs. "Intersections" for pedestrians are simply paths, with no signage or expensive signals required.
Drivers rushing about at 20-30mph pose a danger to people on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in strollers, etc.
Another thing people seem to underestimate is that cars wear down a road way faster than any other form of transport. You basically never need to maintain bicycle paths unless the soil subsides.
The number of bikes on my route from the hotel to work yesterday and today in Munich vastly outnumbered the cars. The main roads have good off-road cycle (and now scooter) paths with priority over side roads and decent signalled crossings.
Germany is the home of the automobile, Munich is the HQ of BMW.
Probably still about 4 times as much space for cars as there is for bikes though
It’s a lot harder to collect taxes from walkers and cyclists to build that infrastructure. Drivers in theory pay for the roads and everything else. Maybe not paying enough but still.
> Gas taxes and other fees paid by drivers now cover less than half of road construction and maintenance costs nationally – down from more than 70 percent in the 1960s – with the balance coming chiefly from income, sales and property taxes and other levies on general taxpayers.
· General taxpayers at all levels of government now subsidize highway construction and maintenance to the tune of $69 billion per year – an amount exceeding the expenditure of general tax funds to support transit, bicycling, walking and passenger rail combined.
They don't come close to paying for everything else when you take into account things like quality of life, safety, and more. Not everything has a price.
Living in cities with high crime and police that won't stop it with self-defense bans/punishments on those that try to defend themselves seem to be a safety hazard too.
Actually it's a lot easier. You get more rates and land tax from the denser housing you can have.
Drivers don't pay for roads. They get subsidised by everyone else paying property taxes. The money out of the fuel taxes is insufficient to cover the costs that cars cause.
Why don't road users pay for the land the roads are on? Beyond construction and maintenence. If 1 square foot of land costs $600 (manhattan), and with say an opportunity cost of 2%, that's $12 a year per square foot. A 13' lane would thus cost $156 per foot, or $800k per lane-mile. Assuming an average 4 lanes per street/avenue (including parking) that would be the best part of $2bn a year for roads in Manhattan alone.
not at prices that people are willing to pay. Suburban-style roads are cheap to build, because developers generally pay the upfront costs and price it into the initial sale price of the development, but taxes in the period that follows aren't nearly high enough to cover the price of resurfacing, repair, and improvements that the city has to cover 20-30 years down the line. Suburbs that have gone through several such cycles are increasingly taking on debt to pay the costs of that maintenance, and older ones are now going bankrupt.
Why does the amount of money and land spent influence the behavior of individuals? Cars are larger than bicycles, so I would expect their infrastructure to take up more space.
The point is whether it's a fair comparison or not. If you allocate enormously more land and money to one mode of transport, no shit it'll probably end up more attractive.
If there were as few dedicated, reasonably safe car lanes as there are bike lanes in the US, hardly anyone would drive, either, unless they really had to.
> Cars are larger than bicycles, so I would expect their infrastructure to take up more space.
That's just an inherent disadvantage for cars, just like being slower is an inherent disadvantage for bikes or walking.
You're basically suggesting that we should forcibly remove the car disadvantage, while of course the disadvantage for walking and biking has to stay. It should be obvious why this makes for an unfair comparison.
I'm not suggesting anything except that given two roads in a spherical universe, both going to same hypothetical place, I'd expect the one built for cars to be larger than the one built for bikes due to basic logic.
Your response, and several of its ridiculous peers are just stuffing words into my mouth.
Yes, I am acutely aware that many parts of the US have some shitty bike infrastructure, but in the parts that have good/improving bike infrastructure I still observe a slow uptake of bicyclists. As to the OP's point, we reap what we sow.
> hardly anyone would drive, either, unless they really had to.
What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super dense areas where this is even possible?
1-2%?
Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild weather like California and has to contend with conditions that make bicycle travel a “fair weather”, novelty activity.
1. Part of the way we built around cars is exactly the kind of zoning that resulted in super spread out, super low density living. This isn't an accident of geography, this is an intended outcome of these government regulations. This is also fixable over time through rezoning.
2. Even with minimal changes to existing zoning, biking would be highly practical for many trips for many, perhaps most people within the US, with good bike infrastructure. Most Americans don't live in rural areas, they live in urban or suburban areas. There are usually some things within bikeable distance of a few miles from where people live, there just aren't good bike lanes or paths to get there.
3. As Germans would say, no bad weather, only bad clothing.
It's a cute novelty now precisely because it's impractical and unsafe. Having good infrastructure changes that. In places with good bike infra, it's a great way to get around.
> Cars are popular because they solve a real problem for the overwhelming majority of people in the US.
To be clear: that "real problem" is a manufactured one. The overwhelming majority of people in the US live near urban centers, and could be served not just adequately but well by mass transit. That's how they were served a century ago, when we were a far less urbanized country; the numbers are even further in our favor now.
Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time, the same speed 5% of the time, and slower the rest. Cycling is also generally faster than driving, and is perfectly comfortable with the right clothes throughout the year. And that's before we even consider the "fringe" benefits (like being able to read wherever I go, not having to find short- or long-term parking, and not polluting the neighborhood I live in).
> Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time
Do you live in Manhattan? I can't think of anywhere else in the US where that could be true.
Commute to work here (pre-covid) was just under 30 minutes. On public transit, according to google maps, it's about 90 minutes. That's if schedule lines up just right with bus schedules, otherwise it is more time.
> Cycling is also generally faster than driving
As a frequent cyclist, I did ride to work at least once a week (pre-covid). But that takes 2hr 30min. It was great fun and exercise, but not really practical by any measure. And then I had to take a shower at work after arriving, so it was more like 3 hours home to desk.
> To be clear: that "real problem" is a manufactured one.
So it's not a manufactured problem, it is reality for mostly everyone.
I live in central Brooklyn, in a residential neighborhood. My commute (to lower Manhattan) is around 35 minutes door-to-door, including a 10 minute walk on each end. The equivalent drive would be about 50 minutes at the same time of day, not including parking.
My most recent cycling commute was just under 35 minutes as well; a bit over 7 miles.
“Manufactured” doesn’t mean it isn’t real, it means that it’s a problem we’ve created for ourselves. That, in turn, means we can undo it.
> Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90% of the time, the same speed 5% of the time, and slower the rest.
Despite the benefits that you cite, you’re still selling something most people don’t want. Or, if they do use it they dislike it and still use a car for the majority of their other travel.
Do you have any numbers to substantiate this? Most people in NYC like the subway, even the ones who express grievances about cleanliness, crime, &c. It's a cornerstone of the city's convenience and culture.
At the turn of the century, most people didn't want cars on their city streets; that's what the article we're discussing is all about. What the average American (not just NYer) wants changes over time; I consider my support for public transit to be merely an investment in a perceptual shift that's already taking place.
So you think it’s a good idea to judge whether people like driving vs mass transit based on areas that have no mass transit vs areas which have both?
That seems illogical at best.
People in areas that have high quality mass transit almost always prefer mass transit over cars. And areas which have decent biking infrastructure overwhelmingly prefer biking over other alternatives.
> It may come as a surprise to people in NYC that, in fact, most people don't live in NYC.
What's the point of this? People in NYC overwhelmingly use public transit; they're a logical group to sample from. Correspondingly, it makes no sense to ask people who don't use public transit how they feel about it.
"Most people who utilize public transit" is a mixture of demographics, with overlap: there are a millions of Americans who live in dense urban areas and choose to take public transit because it's faster, cheaper, and more convenient than owning a care. There are also millions of Americans who are economically disenfranchised and rely on ailing bus networks to get to work. The two overlap, but the latter is much larger outside of major cities.
In brief: the US's failure to design and allocate public transit systems (a problem that's been more or less solved in every other country in the world) taints any objective measurement of public transit perception as a whole. If you look at the places where it's even done half right (like NYC), perception is extremely positive.
I live in a small city of about 60k. To get to work I drive through a city of 350k, 50k, 20k, then into a city of 250k. Each of these cities is 5-10 miles apart. It's a straight shot on the freeway, there isn't much traffic. We average 75mph on the freeway with room for people to go faster and slower. America is a big place. Problems New Yorkers have with cars/parking are different that much of the country.
Cars are popular because they're both useful and enjoy extraordinarily strong government support going back decades, both in explicit funding and also in regulatory policies. It's no surprise that the mode with the deck stacked in its favor managed to win.
Cars are popular because government has built infrastructure for them.
The idea that bicycling and mass transit are a novelty and dedicating 75% of the most valuable real estate in the world to tonnes of metal to transport 1 person at a time while killing 50k Americans a year is just normal is ridiculous and little more than a reflection of the pervasiveness of auto centric thinking.
> What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super dense areas where this is even possible?
> 1-2%?
>100M people live in the top 10 metropolitan areas in the US (all over 4M people) [1]. Rural people in the US vastly overestimate their own importance.
> Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild weather like California and has to contend with conditions that make bicycle travel a “fair weather”, novelty activity.
You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell you it is easily possible to bike all year round even here.
Good luck without a car in pretty much any suburb. Your time has to be worth nothing to make biking or public transit work for your needs.
You essentially need to be in a hyper dense, urban area to live without a car. Most Americans have no interest in living like that.
> You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell you it is easily possible to bike all year round even here.
And I live in MN where biking in the snow would be possible (and fun!), but again, only as a novelty. The percentage of people who would be willing to commute in the manner this is so low you could round it to 0.
Most Americans “prefer” that because it’s all they’ve seen.
In reality, most Americans prefer European cities over anything they have themselves. Which is a huge reason why they spend tons of money to live in little hotel rooms in the middle of well run European cities.
Also, countries like Switzerland, Netherlands, etc have suburbs and excellent mass transit connecting those suburbs.
Sure, mass transit isn’t possible in American style suburbs because American style suburbs have literally been designed around cars.
Trillions of dollars and the majority of our urban land have been dedicated to making driving easy and biking hard. The government built toll-free highways, and mandates builders of housing, retail, and offices to include excessive amounts of parking (parking minimums). Once all of this subsidized infrastructure is built each individual's rational choice is to drive in 30 min instead of risking death by biking or ride a bus for two hours.
This is really noticeable in places in the US where things are close enough together to walk or bike but nearly every trip is still made by car because there's no safe way to do anything else. There's actually quite a bit of stuff within easy biking distance of where I live, but up until recently there was no safe way to actually bike there because all the infrastructure was high-speed, multi-lane streets without even a shoulder. Recently the city has been investing more in wide, separated paths for biking and walking places and it's starting to make a difference.
Unfortunately having a safe path is not enough - there's a significant cultural component.
I'm currently residing in a house on the outskirts of a small (population 50k) town.
The other day we were visited by a friend from around here - she drove to our place.
The way to her home is 1,5km - half of which goes through the main district, with sidewalks and exclusively single-lane streets, and the other along a 30km/h street with detached houses and very little traffic.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that most of her trips are likely not as easy or safe as that one. I wouldn’t expect her to get used to riding a bike when 95% of the time it’s infeasible or unsafe.
It’s not worth the mental effort for most to say “is this specific trip a bike trip?” and “which are the safe routes to get there, which are probably different than my driving routes?” Most people just never try at all because there aren’t enough opportunities to make it worthwhile, and not enough safe roads to know how to navigate.
If it was possible for more of her daily needs to be met by bike, with comfortable and safe infrastructure, I’d bet she’d be more open to the idea.
In Seattle non-single occupancy vehicle transportation is encouraged by the government. The bus system is good (relative to the United States as a whole). The city controls sprawl by refusing to extend I think water or sewer outside a line drawn in the 90s. Even with this official backing, they have maxed out the proportion of alternative commuters at 50%. This is similar to Stanford University's experience of alternative commuters reaching a maximum of 50%.
Seattle has better non-car options than average for the US, but it still has a looooong way to go before one could say that the transit or biking options are good; they're still quite bad on average.
Only one subway line, a handful of bus-only lanes, and a handful of protected bike lanes, maybe one or two protected intersections? Seattle has a lot of passable design, but very little that's good.
Seattle has mediocre transit. The buses are fine, but they’re inherently limited in how fast their average speeds can be.
Seattle could greatly increase transit usage by:
- expanding the subway/light rail network.
- provide more than two commuter rail lines (right now you can only commute by rail North-South, from Lakewood to Everett).
- run more than 4 daily trains to/from Everett (at least one per hour for 16 hours is needed for consistent commutes).
- electrify the Sounder corridor to improve acceleration. I suspect the tracks are shared with freight, in which case create dedicated electrified passenger tracks so you can have smaller trains that run more often and at higher speeds.
- through run trains so they don’t have to dwell at a Seattle terminus (which means you could run all 16 of the daily Lakewood trains to Everett as well).
- add 2-4 more Seattle city stops so people getting off the train are closer to where they need to be (this should be done in combination with through running the trains, so the sum of the dwell times at all 5 Seattle stations is no more than the total dwell time at the terminus now).
Because the infrastructure spend and land allocation is not evenly spread. In most places, there is a dedicated lane for cars heading each way, possibly with parking or at least a decent shoulder on either side of the road.
The same cannot be said for sidewalks and bike lanes, which may be non-existent or poorly maintained, and certainly never take precedence over the almighty asphalt.
I agree that we should build sidewalks and (protected) bike lanes to go everywhere cars can go.
If we do this, I still expect it to cost less than the corresponding road network built for cars. I also don't think in this utopian hypothetical that people would choose to drive their car every time simply because the road cost more.
People got cars in large part because new development was done in car-specific ways rather than dense ways that support alternatives. I recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which goes into how new development was shaped by roads without planning for rail or mass transit, and how even as this was being built in the 1950s people understood induced demand and how roads couldn't scale and advocated for the inclusion of planning for mass transit but were overruled. This led to sparse suburban development that required cars, but didn't have to be the case. Once it was in place it was prohibitively expensive (and in many cases impossible) to change.
I am also a car-hater in SF and live here specifically because it's one of the 4-5 cities in the US where you can not own a car without it being an immense inconvenience/making yourself into a pariah.
Most people want cars sure, but not the drawbacks. Many people would like to listen to loud music or practice target shooting outside their home, but if everybody did that it'd make for really shitty city living.
I think a lot of people in the US simply don't realize or consciously acknowledge how inconvenient car-centrism is, so they only think of the personal convenience their car gives them, rather than how inconvenient things become when everybody uses cars (ie the conveniences cars afford are in many cases only because we've developed around cars). Most people probably hate not being able to walk a few hundred feet to the store to get some milk, or don't realize how nice it would be (because in a lot of the US it's such a bizarrely foreign concept) to have that as an option. They probably hate that the only way to get to work is to commute during rush hour with tons of traffic, or that their friend in the same urban area is actually 80 miles away, or that everything is covered in asphalt and the air sucks.
I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery. When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son, and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after... it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily.
I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a lot better.
Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk from work to home so I just ate out all the time.
Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95 weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.
I agree that once kids are in the mix "walk everywhere" gets more challenging.
There are more savvy ways to do it though, like getting stuff delivered - it's not a dichotomy between carrying stuff everywhere and hauling it in a car. It is a bit painful at first to get used to paying an extra $5-10 here and there for delivery, but it's nothing in comparison to the cost of a car, not to mention the time it saves. Any time something is heavy enough that I dread carrying it I just get it delivered (which for groceries, I generally do once every 1-2 weeks).
Of course there are a lot of caveats, like using specific delivery services which don't create headaches or charge exorbitant prices. I hate hate hate substitutions/when something is out of stock, but it essentially never happens with Amazon Fresh or Food Rocket (a startup in SF), is rare for Whole Foods, and mildly infrequent with Safeway - none of which have extra markup for delivered goods beyond a transparent delivery fee. I've heard too many horror stories about Instacart or other services to even bother though.
As an aside, that is something I've noticed about car ownership, that people treat all the costs as its own thing without looking at the marginal cost it adds to the various things they do. When deciding to go carless, that was one of the strongest arguments tipping me over. Just what I was paying in insurance and gas was enough to cover all my delivery fees and public transit costs.
I'm pretty aware of the costs of vehicles and delivery. I can afford the vehicles. When I need them they're way easier than hiring a vehicle. I have hobbies you can't fit into an Uber, such as a plasma cutter, and forget renting a U-Haul to look at a lathe or cnc.
I biked everywhere for 7 years when I moved to Seattle, 2800 miles a year. Still was very nice to have the car.
If I feel like snowboarding I can just go. Which was highly dependent on work, especially night skiing, which you can't Uber to, and the one bust required me to only go on Saturday with 4 hour overhead and a 30 minutes Uber in the wrong direction. The opportunity cost of all that planning is worth the $2000 I spend a year on licensing and insuring my vehicles. Gas is gas be it Uber or my car.
Not everyone fits into one mold.
If I have to get deliveries with someone else's car then I've just externalized the car but I'm still very car dependent
But there is much more efficient use of the car. Instead of a personal vehicle spending 99% of its time parked, a delivery van/truck spends 25% of its time making deliveries. They can be routed efficiently to deliver from a hub location to a group of homes.
But once you have a family, that's just not factored into the price. If at about a family of 4 (mine's 5), public transport becomes more expensive than driving a car and renting parking even to go into the city center. Frankly, in the suburbs a car is cheaper even for 1 person. There are some other usable ways to get around (electric scooters, the kind you sit down on) are becoming popular for a good reason.
So I wonder about this increased efficiency. Most modes of transportation, as well as rental prices, are priced per-person. A car helps enormously, especially as the number of people increases. Plus cheaper groceries, cheaper access to everything from furniture to woods, ...
If there's any truth to capitalism, efficiency, when it comes down to it, is price. So for families, even small ones, I think we're dismissing the idea that suburbs are the most efficient possible too quickly.
Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare, and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a similar to superior convenience factor.
> I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself).
That last part is the logical flaw: you’re acting like traffic is some random coincidence when it’s actually inherent to the design. Cars are inherently inefficient because you’re using over a hundred square feet of space and 2-3 tons of metal to move on average 1-2 people but because they’re familiar people who drive a lot tend to make excuses or simply not recognize those drawbacks - it’s always someone else making traffic, adding another lane will fix it even though that’s never been true anywhere in the world, it’s “under 30 minutes” because they’re thinking the best-case travel times from where they parked to the general vicinity of where they’re going rather than realistic door to door times including traffic, parking, etc.
Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice an awful lot of people are spending large fractions of their non-work time sitting in traffic and paying a large quantity of money to do so, all of which lowers the standard of living even before you consider the annual death and life-altering injury rates, effects of pollution (not just fuel but also tire and brake particulates), and the social cost of reserving so much public space for vehicle motion and storage.
> Similarly, it’s not rolling back the standard of living to acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes, it’s nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a rural setting but in practice ...
I have a family of 5. For me, a car is cheaper, faster, and healthier (less sunlight, less smoke, less pollution (or at least filtered once before it goes in your lungs), more capacity, flexibility in where I go...). It's cheaper for actual transport, for housing, for groceries, holidays, ...
But, frankly, even going to work by myself in the morning the car is still the cheaper and faster option when it's just me by myself. Even if I have a 15/20 minute walk from where I park to where I work (I can, and do, take public transport for that if it's too hot or raining or ...).
And when we're 5 it starts at an order of magnitude cheaper. Except perhaps compared to flying, but compared to public transport it's just not a contest.
In Hong Kong, you can go to all of those places in 20 minutes from most populated areas, and you don't need a car to do it. The trains are shielded from rain and are usually well air-conditioned. You don't have to deal with parking and it's much safer.
There are downsides of course, it can be crowded and you have to be around other people. I think those are things people adapt to culturally, while things like dying in a car accident and sitting in traffic are less culturally plastic.
Hong Kong has a density that makes a car near-impossible to use and certainly not faster. Only a helicopter would be faster in Hong Kong. Hell, I'd say in Hong Kong the density of people is so bad, walking has all the disadvantages cars have in suburbs.
You will be constantly breathing in heavy pollution (in fact this is one of the main reasons people still use cars in Hong Kong: to avoid breathing in the street air). It will be hot, even in winter. It will be slow, the streets will be over capacity and slowing you down. Sitting down on the many train/metro/... just never happens at any time people usually travel. It's not fast, not even as fast as walking. You're in danger (despite crime being very low, there's a LOT of problems big crowds cause) ...
Sounds like a drug addict TBH. Smoking is great! You get to socialize, have a fidget toy, it's calming, fun, looks cool, etc. (Seriously, it is great! That's why it is addictive)
What if your work was a walkable distance? What if light rail and buses were dense and frequent enough where that was the fastest way to get to work. What if there was a train to go out to the coast? What if you did a rideshare to go junk the mountains?
Pinning it all on self driving at this point imo is continuation of the corrupt car culture that lobbies government and social appeal with absurd efficacy. I don't believe self driving will really ever happen (the complexity is too high), and that solution means that we can maintain the car-centtic status quo and even double down on it. I'm not sure if there were a more comforting idea than that - that we don't have to change anything, just wait for technology and everything we are doing suddenly is good and sustainable. Yet, there are all of the tools available to not require a personal car and have a better travel experience.
*downsides to cars:
- super loud
- pollution
- you are traffic, and by travelling in practically the least space efficient, you are creating traffic
- unsustainable, highway funds are often federally granted for new construction, yet the zoning connected by those funds do not generate enough revenue to sustain the upkeep. Each mile of road costs about 10 mil to build and the same to maintain over 50 years. Strip malls and suburbs simply do not generate enough tax revenue to support dozens of miles if roads to connect them. Given we had such a big glut of road building in the 50s, should not be a surprise that America's road system is falling apart. If our infrastructure were sustainable, would we even need "infrastructure week" or a "build back better" (my understanding is both of those were to focus mostly on car-based infrastructure). Point being, if that were sustainable infrastructure, we wouldn't need these one time surges and the roads wouldn't be crumbling like they are today.
Could go on, self driving is not an answer to many of the intrinsic problems to car-centric society.
It is a walkable distance, and it’s unsustainably expensive for how little space I get. Not to mention the fact that there aren’t any ownable properties in walking distance to work—renting an apartment is the only option.
Sure, huge investments in creating an amazing mass transit system would be awesome! But that’s nowhere near happening in the next couple decades. So why should I (or anyone) be asked to pay more to rent a tiny apartment near work where I can barely escape the city using existing public transit options?
Chances are if you can drive to those things in under 30 minutes, you can probably ebike to them in just over 30 minutes. I bike a lot in my city. For a given 10 minute car ride, the bike trip works out to 12 minutes. In traffic, the bike is faster than the car, because of lanesplitting ensuring you never wait for a light cycle. The car wins out when you have an open freeway, but thats only in the late evenings really in socal. Personally though I generally stick to the parallel running residential roads that hardly see cars at all, even here in busy LA, since I can practically take the entire road and just bike down the middle and avoid people potentially backing out of driveways.
Traffic is absolutely not orthogonal to the vehicle itself. Almost everything wrong with cars as a mode of transportation can be boiled down to: they take up too much space for the number of people they transport.
You're looking at on car usage after all the rules were changed, and all those drivers know no better, or worse, have no choice. But imagine a city designed for no car usage! How would all those car driver vote then?
SF has terrible public transport by international standards. You have to rebalance your baseline, I'm afraid.
Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents history and misrepresents the current situation.
Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority of people. Today we have technology to build better transit that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces hurt us".
Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me is that people really like owning cars, even in places where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one. Those are very high rates of car ownership in those places, given the costs and availability of good alternatives.
The lesson here is that you can create environments with enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out), but what you cannot do is create a place where most people don't want one.
Even in NYC, a car is an incredibly useful tool. People aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.
Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? Given they don't have one, there is oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..)
I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those same numbers.
> Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car?
The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a selection effect (people who fit that description move there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up there may not be interested in something they have little exposure to).
What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so good there's no possible need for a car" than there are people who simply can't afford the additional costs or are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car ownership in the city.
Cars are useful tools of course. If people used them only for the odd errand or a long distance trip, we wouldn’t have a problem.
Public transit for all our regular trips to work, restaurants, dentist, etc. and private or rented cars for the rest is the way to go towards a prosperous future.
>it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars
Actually, I think that's exactly what we should do.
Most people don't have a strong opinion on cars. They originally bought cars due to marketing. If we talk about how great cars are, most people will agree. If we talk about how terrible cars are, most people will agree.
Don't worry about what people think. Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities, and that will become the new popular opinion.
There's no evidence this is true and boatloads of evidence that it isn't. For one thing, when people can afford cars, they buy them. And if you've ever spent a lot of time around people who can't afford a car, "affording a car" is one of the main reasons they'll tell you they want more money. And if they do come into money, a car will be the first thing they purchase.
Obviously, you can't divorce people's individual choices from the environment in which they're made (and ours is a particularly car-dependent society), but given the constraints as they actually exist, the fact is that people like owning a car.
The same car is not a liability to the extent it should be, considering it's reducing our life expectancy through emissions and tire and road wear particulates, it's burning our planet through inefficient resource usage and it's literally killing people.
People should be able to do whatever they need without a car, within reasonable time frames and reliably (taking 3 buses for 2 hours for a 15 minute car ride is not reasonable) and in parallel to that cars should be taxed like in Norway, they should be a luxury item. Any time you need a car you should first think: do I really? Can I rent one? Etc.
Make no mistake: I think we should properly price the externalities, we should mostly get cars out of the densest urban centers, we should require speed governors and geofencing in all new vehicles, and we should drastically increase the costs on drivers of injuring pedestrians and cyclists (coupled almost certainly with entirely new (and much more expensive) insurance products).
I'm not a huge fan of cars. (More accurately, I'm not a big fan of drivers. Cars are very useful. The 25th percentile driver is a loud, dangerous menace.)
But, do they only like owning a car because existing without one *sucks*? I don’t know that I buy the idea that people inherently want to own cars, just that our urban design makes life really hard to go without one
You can make an urban design in which the tradeoffs of car ownership tip toward non-ownership, but it is very difficult to make a modern city in which car ownership confers no benefit. Even in a place like NYC, where I've lived, you really cannot beat point-to-point for convenience and speed. That doesn't mean every route in NYC is best served by driving. The subway is great! But there will always be situations in which the easiest thing by far would be to drive point-to-point, if you have access to a car.
Urbanists who tell people there is no benefit to car ownership in dense urban areas are performing a sort of gaslighting. Everybody basically knows that's not true. The argument, instead, is that you can create a city in which the cost/benefit analysis changes. This is subtle, but I think the difference matters. You can adjust how people think of the tradeoffs, but you cannot really make them believe cars aren't still useful in those environments.
While I would not say there are no benefits from owning a car point-to-point speed is pretty bad for cars in many European cities due to having too find parking. On many trips I would say the fastest mode of travel is electric scooter.
I like having a car for the occasional long voyage, but I don't want to have to rely on it for everyday trips, because I enjoy walking and living and working in walkable places. I think that's a pretty common position.
My dream would be living in a car free zone, with parking and inter-zone road and rail connections on the exterior, like a superblock. Walking a while or taking a short train to get to my car would be a worthwhile trade off.
> Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree cities
If you don't worry about what people think, you're never going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy cars.
When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable! They are making choices informed based on their own life experiences that it would be smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive meaningful change.
> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable!
This is because we plan for the only possible route by car. We prioritize making car access fast in every single aspect of planning, and never once even consider public transit during the planning process, and hope that underfunded transit systems can somehow work around the cars.
A far better system would be to have children be able to walk to school rather than hop in a vehicle. Or school buses, which used to be common in the US to get around the car dependency.
> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk them into not being miserable!
I saw a case recently where a woman crashed her car outside her child’s school in London, injuring some children. All very sad and especially compounded by the school only accepting enrolments within 1km of the school due to demand.
Where I live almost everyone walks their kids to school. Many people having to drive their kids to school or use public transport is a sign of bad urban planning.
> When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get 2+ kids to school on public transit
That is dumb, in the US, school buses exist even in the suburbs. You most likely already fun them with taxpayer money for public school. I have even taken school buses for private school.
Does it sound like she just needs someone to tell her why public transit is great? Or like she has actual challenges using public transit that you don't understand.
Point taken. Where I grew-up they had school busses up to middle school. Then you needed to take public buses. They then gave us a special pass that allowed us to travel during school hours for free. I am not sure that public transit is the problem per-se here, but really the city infrastructure.
A valuable anecdote - I lived in a city with amazing public transit - cheap and plentiful.
What do people who can afford do with their money? Buy cars.
People act like cars are a forced choice, while completely ignoring the fact that even with the option of great public transit, people still choose cars.
Children and animals don't drive cars. If we forget for a moment that they are not at all important and assumed a level playing field the child would need to give up playing outside so that mostly unfit people only have to walk the bare minimum distance to maximize commerce. Animals would have to accept thick lines of asphalt that one may not walk on with death by car as the chosen punishment. Then surely it is a deal that is good for everyone?
Not that I have any proposals. It's just funny in a dark and morbid way.
The ME ME ME context has more comedy in it. Those roads one looks at as "things for me!" but to a much greater extend they are things for others. Others will come blast their fumes and noise into your neighborhood. Murder your cat, your dog and your kids. But also a parade of suits who got it in their head to serve and enforce a rule set created for you to obey. What is the tax man to do if he cant extremely conveniently get to your house? Is your lawn mowed to spec? That your kids are fine doesn't mean they are yours to keep and neither is your home.
Roads are the great enabler for more and more rules and regulations by designs you only have influence on in theory.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live at the top of some hard to climb mountain surrounded by forest swamps and/or oceans. Surely you could still contribute to society? That your pull requests come in a bit less frequently hardly makes you unproductive.
the MPAA might not care if you are brewing your own liquor and the building inspector might not care you are growing opium, mescaline cacti, shrooms and like licking the psychedelic toads. But all combined they make a formidable army fit to examine every inch of your life. Are those real nikes, is that a stolen rolex? Do you wear a helmet riding that bicycle?
The mailman - the bringer of bad news, over the road.
And in the end your road is perfect for tanks and marching armies coming to murder you.
That was a choice, though. We (especially in North America) have decided collectively to build infrastructure in such a way that most people will have strong reasons to use cars, as a result most people want cars. We did not have to do that, or at least there was no compelling reason to do it to the degree that we have.
Well, there was a compelling reason. Massive funds from an auto and oil industry lobby rooted in excuses such as the american car tourist dream and a life in a segregated suburb. Where we arrived is IMO almost wholly corrupt, perhaps one of the biggest astro-turfing campaigns ever seen.
It depends on the city honestly. In LA county, cars save you time but you can get everywhere, eventually, on a bus. Again, the key word is eventually, so bring a book and it will be like teleporting. Ridership reflects this. If you can afford to buy convenience you do so. 70% of LA metro riders are very low income, median income for riders on the system is $19,000. In other words most riders can't even entertain the idea of affording a car. Even a 20 year old beater car in CA might be a few hundred alone just to register a year, whereas low income people can ride metro for free.
That's mostly an American/European thing though, world wide there are only about 1.5 billion cars, 275 million of these in the United States, another 250 million in Europe. Together those account for ~ 1/3 of the cars but only for about 12% of the world population.
For sure, and some economies were "lucky" enough to wait until the late 20th century to develop. The public transit systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, the entire Pearl River Delta, etc are all IMO far better ways to get around than driving a car in most US cities.
Lucky might be subjective. Standard of living in the suburbs of American might be deemed superior to living in an efficiency apartment in Hong Kong, but that's much less an option for people who live in areas that developed later on, as these areas leaned into true urban levels of density since it's infrastructurally far cheaper per capita. Given the choice, many would prefer to not live in New York levels of density.
For sure, and I want people to have that choice! But I also want the amount paid by people living in the suburbs to more accurately reflect the cost, and I want people who prefer living in denser urban environments to be able to improve their surroundings by removing cars.
I dunno about your interpretation. When did jaywalking become a thing? When did people get kicked off the road so cars to use them, before or after everyone had cars?
It became a thing in different places at different times. I'm curious to learn more about the history actually, because all the sources I can find are specifically oriented around political action and do not present any factual history.
From what I could find about California, jaywalking is not illegal on most streets, but happens to be illegal when crossing most streets in densely populated areas. Specifically, you are not allowed to cross streets that have crosswalks at both ends unless you do it at the crosswalk. The current laws are from 1959 and seem to have been passed specifically to reduce pedestrian fatalities. These laws seems pretty successful at accomplishing that goal, and recent attempts to remove jaywalking laws over racial equality concerns have been blocked in the interest of public safety (rightly, in my opinion).
To answer you question, in CA at least, it appears that pedestrians were kicked off after everyone had cars. Streets are unsafe for pedestrians, but it's because people drive on them, not the other way around.
I contest that people do secretly hate cars, but they don't hate their own car. Put two identical patios adjacent to each other on the same street, and I'd bet that the one furthest away from cars would attract people first if you sufficiently isolate the variable.
Suburbs are basically a symptom of their own car-dependent design. Even they don't want to be near them! But it's fine for an individual if they're driving somewhere else.
Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm.
But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? I've been to towns with trams in the middle of roads and it's normal for people to just walk around it or near the tracks without problem. But I am a stupid tourist so I kept my distance.
> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.
Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same.
Biking's not my thing, but it's telling that surveys in the local MA area sometimes now say "aside from protected bike lanes, what would you most like to see?".
It is an indication that walk-and-bike interests are making good progress, and I'm glad to see it.
On the other hand, that's exactly how I would phrase the question if I wanted to prime the survey respondent to get a result biased toward freedoms for unprotected road users.
There's no good reason to phrase the question like that instead of filter the answers after the fact. The only reason is to get people thinking in a certain direction.
...they do that because if they don't, "protected bike lanes" will be the only thing they hear, and in Cambridge etc. the plans are in the works (slowly, but in the works) to implement them. They're looking for additional things, not the thing that's already in the works but takes time and the progress is non-obvious 'til it's done.
Then the item should say something to the effect of "You can make more than one suggestion." or even more concretely, "Please suggest your top five, or fewer if you can't think of that many."
I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them?
Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
In quite a lot of places, highway was first. So, no I don't see issues.
Highways exists. There are two options. First, they divide country into two parts you cant cross on foot without taking long hike. Or, you build tunnels and bridges.
Seattle proper is very walkable. I lived in Belltown for years and it was great how I could walk to pretty much anywhere in the city I wanted. Queen Anne and downtown were very accessible. I suppose I was never a big Capital Hill-goer so the longer walk there wasn't relevant.
Pedestrians play second fiddle to cars in Seattle as a whole. The walkable areas of Seattle are great, but they are a small portion of the city and are poorly connected. Some very active parts of the city have 4 or 5 lane arterials cutting through them with cars completely ignoring cross signals and pedestrians. Other areas lack sidewalks altogether.
See the "Lake to Bay" project, connecting a decent walking path from Lake Union to Elliot Bay. It will involve crossing streets. It will feature additional benches/seating and improved lighting. The initial proposal by a local resident was extremely well done.
SoDo has the only free public COVID testing center in the central area of the city. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable that people without cars should be able to safely access a public service.
Not to mention plenty of cyclist deaths from people who have to cross SoDo to get where they’re going.
Belltown resident for decades chiming in. It really is extremely walkable, including to Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market as well as locations the previous post mentioned.
Bell St. is a park (albeit paved for vehicles), and it finally received signage about local-only car access:
In Tokyo it is possible to just randomly walk out onto most streets and expect cars to work around you. There are obviously a number of busy roads that would be dangerous but cars will still stop (for example if you were to misjudge crossing a street) and of course the highways are off limits (but there was a case recently of a man standing in the middle of a highway redirecting traffic who was hit by autopilot telsa).
I’d like to see less permanent scaffolding, and a better trash management system so that it doesn’t take room from pedestrians (not to mention the hygienic benefits). And the city could crack down more on the drivers who blow through red lights or stop across crosswalks.
But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.
> But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.
In the US? Sure. Now imagine a place where there are hundreds, thousands of cities that walkable or better, and you don't have to be a gazillionaire to live in one.
> And the city could crack down more on the drivers who blow through red lights or stop across crosswalks.
Based on my recent visit to New York, the main traffic issue I saw was really bad light timing. This trains both pedestrians and drivers to ignore the traffic signals.
Self driving cars will remove barriers (ie. licensing, age, ability, cost(if they're taxis)) that prevent people from driving and so it'll result in MORE cars on the road.
If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars is one of the worst developments that could occur.
1 - traffic jams slow down public transit too if the road space is shared (buses, trams) or they increase the time needed to reach a train/subway station if you don't happen to live at walking distance from one.
2 - driving time is only half of the time you spend in a car. in Milan I could drive to work in 15-20 minutes, compared to 25-30 using the subway.
good luck finding a parking spot though. they're either forbidden, very expensive or non existent. Not counting that many areas, like where my office is, are restricted traffic zones, getting a permit is really hard for non residents and fines are very high (very common in many medium to large cities in Italy). I gladly use the subway and read the news while commuting, so I don't even need to drive myself.
I'm really sorry for those that drive to work everyday, it must be hell, I don't understand how they can withstand it.
That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.
Public transit could be faster if we adopted Japanese style bullet trains and gave the buses their own dedicated lane. Running more frequent transit service and offering trains that skip some less popular stops also reduces travel time.
In the US because roads are built to maximize vehicle throughput rather than throughput of people. The former would have 2 lanes with cars and buses using all the road space. The latter would have a massive traffic jam in one lane and a clear land for buses. The buses carrying 30x the capacity moving freely is more efficient for moving people.
I'm hoping self driving cars will not happen for another two decades because they will cause more traffic, not less. The limiting factor for a lot of possible car trips right now is that a driver is required. When that limitation disappears you'll see an explosion in car trips without an occupant.
And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade.
For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence.
Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years.
However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable.
Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere.
A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.
And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.
Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this:
1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent.
2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there.
3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with.
It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work.
>Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while,
"The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today"
Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently.
The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road.
The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city.
True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation.
Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.
Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
Yes, they are definitely only talking about New York City itself and not the surrounding metro area. People mostly refer to the surrounding areas by other names, e.g. county names like Nassau County.
And even within the city, there are less-walkable areas, although for the most part there is bus coverage and sidewalks everywhere.
> Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
Couldn't have been since US cities (at least on the east coast) predate the very existence of cars.
> But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm.
Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface.
> But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem?
Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases). And streetcars generally keep to pretty low speed (bike range) in pedestrian areas.
>> But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem?
> Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases).
That's what one would expect, but surprisingly that might not be the case.
I haven't been able to find a lot of articles about pedestrian deaths from horses but those I did find tell of rates comparable to cars.
1900 pedestrian horse fatality rate in NYC for example were higher than the 2003 car rate [1]. In England and Wales cars are more deadly than horses were but not by much [2].
The BMJ article notes that direct fatality rate comparisons might not be appropriate because treatments have greatly improved since the horse and buggy days. Horse rates would likely be lower if current treatments had been available back then, and car rates would likely be higher if we only had 1900s medical systems.
> Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry
Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians? It's not a good idea to walk on the train tracks either. It seems like the "entire concept" of not walking in front of heavy, fast moving objects may predate automobiles.
The difference with train tracks is that they have been specifically constructed for the purpose of transporting heavy machinery. By not being allowed to access them by foot you are not losing any right that you previously enjoyed. Roads and streets, on the other hand, predate automobiles by millennia.
Hence the philosophy that is followed in the UK, where there is no such thing as a "jaywalking" infraction. People have had a right of free passage along public highways (English law definition [0]) and general rights of way (Scotland [1]) for centuries, and this right cannot simply be taken away just because now there happen to be heavy fast moving objects that are allowed to use some of them. You are free to walk on and across the road at any point and time whatsoever, as long as you do not cause a danger to other users.
Note that this doesn't apply to motorways (≈freeways) though, as these were expressly constructed to carry automobile vehicles and are therefore legitimately of limited access.
No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the pedestrians. It made collisions between cars and pedestrians the fault of the pedestrian by default, and excluded them from the road surface.
> It's not a good idea to walk on the train tracks either.
"High speed" train tracks take very little space compared to the road network criss-crossing cities, and thus the exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
>No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the pedestrians.
This does not mean that it is not for their safety.
>"High speed" train tracks take very little space compared to the road network criss-crossing cities, and thus the exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
Train tracks don't take you to as many places as roads.
> Pedestrians are not excluded from tram tracks
Yet, they are expected to avoid them and the tram has priority, and many tram routes are protected from pedestrian crossing by barriers. Pedestrians aren't excluded from roads either, it is just that safe crossing points have been established. I know in many places, such as Wien, trams are not obligated to stop at crosswalks if people are waiting.
It's not that important, but the idea that "entire concept of jaywalking is for the convenience of car owners" is really not accurate. No need to overstate that to make your other points.
>> No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the pedestrians.
> This does not mean that it is not for their safety.
Imagine a car entering a shopping mall: it will go at a very slow pace as it’s in a place primarily for pedestrians, and hitting kids running around will be 100% the car’s fault it was going any faster.
Putting the burden on the car gives more safety to pedestrian. The reverse (putting the blame on the people for entering car’s way) doesn’t help in that respect.
PS: for instance entering train tracks is not “jaywalking”, and I think you’re focusing on a similar aspect, but for freeways and car dedicated roads ?
Most right of way systems specify that the smaller more nimble participant is required to yield in conflicting right of way scenarios. Pedestrians yield to bikes, bikes yield to cars, cars yield to trains. On the water too, a swimmer yields to a row boat, which yields to a jet ski which yields to a motor boat which yields to a yacht which yields to a cargo ship which yields to a carrier. It's more a recognition of the laws of physics than it is a exclusionary practice.
“Jaywalking” as a term is derogatory; you can look up the etymology, if it were invented today it would be called “stupidwalking” or some such.
It was pushed hard by car companies, and they lobbied to make cars the primary user of the road within cities. So a pedestrian choosing to cross would by default be in the wrong, unless in the “correct place”, instead of the opposite.
The difference is that train tracks are designed primarily for trains. Before cars existed, streets were primarily for people and horses. Cars were, as the title of the article suggests, intruders into this space. The push to popularize the term jaywalking was an effort to reframe streets as a space for cars first, where it's the responsibility of pedestrians to stay out of their way rather than the other way around.
One would think the deterrent of being hit by a fast moving object would be enough. I’m not sure how arresting or fining people improves their safety or welfare.
I believe the argument is that it may create danger for other people as well. For example, an oncoming car may swerve to avoid striking the pedestrian and hit something else. I'm not sure that's a very likely scenario, however.
The pedestrians were there first though, and it's not clear how to balance the needs. After all we do have the concept of isolated car travel for safety, it's called a freeway. Much like a rail system, they are useful and pretty safe for point-to-point travel mostly outside densely populate areas.
The contentious bit is that all other surface level infrastructure should be primarily shaped to fit the needs of cars at the expense of everything else. For a not-so-practical example, if city traffic was strictly limited to 10mph or less, vehicle pedestrian interactions would be much more safe...
No. If primary goal is safety, you draw crossings and traffic lights. You create laws that give priority to pedestrians attempting to cross where is no sidewalk. You lower the speed inside cities.
> Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface.
In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
> In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle.
Nonsense. The ability to walk doesn't a pedestrian make" in the context of the discussion, and having to walk from the parking lot to the store and back isn't a pedestrian activity.
> Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
I didn't decide of the historical events of a hundred years ago mate.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
Even worse, completely ahistorical, nonsense. Long-term infrastructural decisions are rarely decided directly by voters (as Robert Moses knew and leveraged), and furthermore can often be swayed by short terms concerns.
> In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
I live in a city where almost 40% of households do not own cars but our public space has been massively reconfigured to prioritize car owners, not just with traffic lanes and signal priority but also huge subsidies for car storage at the expense of other potential use of public space.
Despite this, any time someone tries to make something better the public planning process will inevitably have car owners loudly complaining about being discriminated against if something will remove even a single parking space or suggest that they pay market rates.
> In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
Only in an environment where public infrastructure is designed to require a car for social participation. The venn-diagram is substantially less circular when public infrastructure accommodates and encourages other modes of transport, like walking and metros.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
Again, only true if you ignore the wider context. US infrastructure policy for the past 50 years has basically made car ownership an absolute necessity. It doesn’t matter what one’s personal preference is, if you wish to participate in US society, you must own a car.
For concrete examples of these policies, look at US zoning policy. It basically requires that only single family homes are built, and makes it almost impossible to build new dense housing. Despite the fact that historical sense housing in walkable areas is currently some of the most expensive real estate in the US, showing clear and strong demand for such housing.
Further US road policy prioritises automotive speed above all other factors. Pedestrian accessibility, or accessibility in general, pedestrian safety, is given little to no thought at all. An approach that is now rearing its ugly head in the US pedestrian fatality rate, which is far high than almost any other developed nation.
It's crazy how all the zoning policies were hand crafted by the General Motors board of directors. Oh wait, they weren't, they were decided by the municipalities.
US zoning policies are the way they are because that's the way the people in those cities wanted to live. Have you been to a city council meeting in a US city where they've discussed zoning changes? Tons of local people will come out against denser housing and against public transit and against protected bike lanes, and then there's usually only the builder from out of town or the transit authority arguing for it. Single family housing in far flung suburbs is built out so much because that's what a lot of voters want.
> Tons of local people will come out against denser housing and against public transit and against protected bike lanes,
This is true in almost every city in the world. But not because that “what the people want”, but rather only those who hold very strong opinions ever bother to turn up to planning meetings. Most people only have strong negative opinions about public infrastructure, especially public infrastructure that’s seen “take something from them”. Public infrastructure that works well is mostly ignored, with the vast majority of people being entirely indifferent to changes to the infrastructure. Unfortunately it means that making any attempt to improve infrastructure, where that improvement isn’t “more of the same please”, is difficult because the only people who hold strong opinions are experts who have studied the problem, and people that hate change. Which, as it happens, is exactly the mix of people you say are in these meetings.
If you want to get a real understanding of peoples views on walkable areas, bike lanes etc. you need to build it, then survey the locals a year or so after the work has completed. Only then can you remove the selection bias seen in city meetings, and also remove peoples initial dislike for change, before they’ve had any opportunity to realise the positives brought by that change.
It turns out, that if you actually do all that leg work, most people like being able to venture outside and do things, without getting in a car and driving first.
So you're arguing the government should act against the wishes of the people being governed and ignore the desires of the people who care enough to actually vote?
I'd argue we need more people showing up to these kinds of public planning meetings who do want these things which are supposedly incredibly popular online and actually vote for candidates who say they'll do these things.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests
Why make up a history when there's a real one? There were real people that did real things to push a reluctant culture in a particular way. I think you're using Panglossian reasoning here.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case
Orr it could actually be that they paid for advertisements and politicians just to do that. If you don't want to read about it, here's a video that explains it:
> … trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem?
Horse manure was a huge problem on city streets. (Trams we’re originally horse-drawn.)
> According to the 89th Annual Report of the Board of Health, nearly 500 tones of horse manure were collected from the streets of New York every day, produced by 62,208 horses living in 1,307 stables.
I've never had a problem walking around trams, they're incredibly predictable. And horses (as vehicles) are the level of intelligence we're hoping to get self-driving vehicles back to - they don't actually want to run you over.
I was in Birmingham for a couple of weeks, the squares and streets with trams (not busses, taxis, and other nonsense like oxford street in London) are great -- the tram is only every few minutes, you can easily hear it, you know exactly where it's going and where it stops, and through the pedestrian area it travels slowly.
It was trams and horses and people and early cars. It was pure chaos, almost like images you see from countries without strong traffic laws. Here was downtown LA:
As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).
Surely it would have been difficult to be hostile towards walking at a time when walking was the only mode of transport readily available to most people?
Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking.
Well, the article is more saying the average person in cities was car hostile but it notes that authorities starting trying to force people to adapt to cars quite early by enforcing "jay-walking" ordinances and similar things.
I remember in Sixth Grade (in Maryland), our teacher telling us that there was still a law on the state books, that said (I can’t remember what he said, precisely, but this is the gist):
If a car is going in one direction on a road, and there is a horse (I don’t think he specified whether or not it was harnessed, but I’ll bet it needed to be in harness) coming the opposite direction, the car needed to pull over, and yield to the horse.
If the horse refused to pass the car, then it was incumbent upon the car owner to (in escalating order):
1) Turn off the engine.
2) Cover the car in a blanket.
3) Dismantle the car, piece by piece, until the horse passes.
I could see a cranky old farmer having fun with that law.
What I wouldn't give to have a planned neighborhood where cars are banned. It would be kids wonderland.
In US at least even inside gated communities u can't leave kids (3-6) by themselves because cars. Imagine all those kids having fun without parent supervision.
Then I have good news for you: for not that much effort, you can move to Europe. Several cities here are bike friendly and becoming more so every week.
As an American honestly considering this because I hate the car-dependent lifestyle… any advice on where to start? I’m OK with lower compensation. I suspect I have the savings to purchase a home or at least rent for a year. I speak… modest french, and I’m willing to learn another language.
Emigration seems tough without a company sponsoring you, though.
If you're able to work as a freelancer, consider looking into the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (DAFT). Basically, you start a company in the Netherlands with €4500 set aside for it, and you get residency for two years. You can continue renewing the visa every two years as long as your business isn't dormant. This is how my wife and I moved to the Netherlands last year. The main catch is that you legally will not be allowed to be a full-time employee anywhere, so any money you make has to come through your business. You can have a full-on "BV" where you pay yourself a salary, which comes with nice tax benefits, but it's more complex to set up than the "eenmanszaak," which basically just means you're a freelancer. Alternatively, you could just get a job at a company with an office over here. However, your residency will of course be contingent on your employment. Many companies here don't require that you speak Dutch since virtually everyone in the country is fluent in English, and much business is conducted in English.
My understanding is that Portugal is another easy place to move to. However, it's a bit more difficult. I don't know the specifics, but I think you need to buy property valued at €200k or higher or something. It's cheaper than the Netherlands, but English is less spoken, and my understanding is that there's a huge influx of immigrants (especially American) which are driving up the cost of living for locals.
If you have money for a house the look into countries that incentivize investment immigration. Some of them might even consider real estate for that purpose. And once you get through the door aren’t EU open border anyways?
I would expect suggesting possible immigration/leaving extended family/taking a massive pay cut over improving ones home would be a preposterous response! I suspect you know its preposterous but are enjoying some sort of pride in Europe? The idea that you need to move to a different continent for something so simple and attainable by other means is... Idk, you've lost me. Have a good one!
You’re way overthinking this. OP said they’d “give anything”. Moving countries is a far cry from giving anything. It’s a very pleasant experience in fact, for many, especially if you’re in software engineering as most people here likely are.
It is completely ignoring common aspects of life. People have kids, pets, families. The list goes on. Moving to another continent and dealing with the legal ramifications is absurd as a single dude. It is a beaurocratic nightmare for a family. I can’t believe I have to explain this to adults but here I am!
I’ve moved over twenty times in my life, countries over ten, I know exactly how difficult it is. Which is to say: yes it’s a big step, but no it’s not that big a deal.
And again, this isn’t what this little interaction was about, and you’re making assumptions about the person I replied to. I am not forcing them to move, jeez.
> What I wouldn't give to have a planned neighborhood where cars are banned. It would be kids wonderland.
It would also require the neighbourhood to have much more relaxed (and saner) zoning rules than the average, and historically it's been the exact opposite.
It isn't cars that kept me from leaving my 3 year old unsupervised. It's not like there aren't other (in many cases more significant) dangers to a young child.
The teachers can't watch everything at once at the playground. We were doing things like climbing on top of the slides and jumping off. Sure you'd get scolded, if you were caught that is, but with 200 kids running around a huge space it's not so easy to make sure they aren't all horsing around. Not to mention stuff outside of school. Parties where the adults are chitcatting and talking amongst eachother gives opportunities for the kids to be tearing around the neighborhood or playing in the woods.
You know nothing about the GP’s neighborhood or living situation. Dismiss it as “stranger danger” if you wish, but what if their concerns about the safety of unsupervised children is rooted in some genuine concern? Again, they just said cars weren’t the main reason. Doesn’t that imply something else?
For what it’s worth: the right answer is still cars, just indirectly. Yes there are more factors but those factors are caused by how American suburbia is designed and evolved over the last fifty decades, which, surprise …
Walking to school is impossible in most of the US. Biking to school on six lane stroads is unthinkable especially for a child. Mobility is freedom and independence, and that independence is removed from American children. And so things evolve in exactly one direction: that of less and less freedom to roam the dangerous streets.
Parents of children in the 60s and 70s were raised with their full freedom and had no reason to prevent their kids from roaming the streets. It takes multiple generations for these changes to take effect in the mindsets of people. America will take decades to heal from its car centric mistakes… when it finally starts.
This is not true where I live in Tacoma, WA. In fact, in our neighborhood on the North End, I would guess somewhere around 40% of kids walk to school. There is an elementary school two blocks away from me, and a middle school five or so blocks away. The private schools are a bit further and would require driving or cycling.
The neighborhoods I used to live in the residential areas of the Seattle core(Madrona,Leschi,CD) were similar.
HN won't let me reply to your subsequent comment, but 83% of the US population lives in urban areas - I'd be willing to bet in most of those, the closest school being anything like a 4 hour walk from home is very much an anomaly.
FWIW, my partner grew up in rural Japan where her school would have been pretty close to a 4 hour walk away, so she took the only realistic option available: bicycle.
The comment I replied to stated that it was “impossible” to walk to school in the US. It might benefit your reading abilities to live closer to a school :).
I believe they must have edited it after my comment as I simply copied and pasted their original text. I stand by your case being really strange. In any case; check out the other reply in this thread.
Either way, are you seriously going to sit here and argue with someone that a 4 hour walking distance to a school is somehow normal? Even in the US? I’m sorry dude but I’m done talking to you. I hope you enjoy the unique place that you live in.
It was definitely modified after your post. Wonder if HN shouldn't have some smarts to either disallow editing or at least ensure it's possible to see what edits were made if someone has since replied to/quoted your post.
Cars have only increased in size, but the main issue when everyone hops in a car is that it creates unsafe environment for everyone not in the car
Even if we ignore the threat of being run over, constant noise, pollution, less space for walking etc
Cars create a vacuum where if you were mugged in plain day light next to a motorway everyone knows the chances of being helped by a motorist is incredibly low
But if there are more pedestrians around you, the chance of getting help from a stranger goes up
Cars create dangerous deserts everywhere and that's why we don't let kids out
> Cars create a vacuum where if you were mugged in plain day light next to a motorway everyone knows the chances of being helped by a motorist is incredibly low. But if there are more pedestrians around you, the chance of getting help from a stranger goes up
One is more likely to be mugged in New York than in a Kansas suburb. Long before cars existed, people have been terrorized by highwaymen on country roads with little help or recourse. If anything, cars have likely reduced muggings as fewer people on the streets have created fewer opportunities to be overtaken and robbed.
I don't buy this argument. Cars are extremely heavy these days, and while they have better control, they're also much faster on average. On top of that, there are bigger vehicles going around, like enormous trucks and SUVs with horrendous blind spots and horrible handling.
> In the 60s and 70s the kids were running around the streets all day and cars then were bigger and harder to control.
Car density has increased a lot in many of these places, as has average speed (due to widening efforts, it seems). They are also bigger and also heavier on average. Or at least weight has been increasing since the 80s. It did dip a bit earlier from then, as the large steel frame cars shrunk due to gas prices. Visibility is a mixed bag but is often worse now in the front (cabs are much higher), which is pretty critical for the kids-running-around scenario. Pickups are especially egregious in this way. They are much bigger, much heavier, and have terrible visibility these days. They are a growing segment for reasons unrelated to their nominal function.
A friend recently commented after visiting his childhood home (parents still lived there). He spent the Sunday evening on the front porch, an recalled when he was a kid they would probably have been playing street hockey all evening in the neighbourhood, but that would be impossible now.
> In US at least even inside gated communities u can't leave kids (3-6) by themselves because cars.
This part is sad to me because it seems we are stuck envisioning a place where all the houses face the roads, and all the walking paths are next to the roads and the only place kids can play is in the road or next to the road!
As an alternative, imagine a house that backs up to a park. Instead of playing in the front by the road, play in the back without conditions (I can recommend you some examples).
Or, imagine even in a downtown of a city, a one-block-long gated community with dense townhouses facing each other, an oasis away from traffic (again I can share examples)
These exist today, they aren’t just in some urbanist sketchbook. They aren’t super common and maybe people just don’t think of them.
I live in such an area. With 2 exceptions, there is an area of just over .5 km2 (138 acres) where there are virtually no cars.
I can let my kids out anytime.
It was built during the "million program" where the Swedish state built apartments for a shitload of people and elevated the living standards for about 2 million people.
For some reason it is not considered a nice area, but in many ways it is heaven. I can bike to work in 12 minutes. My son's preschool is just 5 minutes away by foot. We have a moderately sized grocery store and a pharmacy within crawling distance.
All areas in the "million programme" are not like that, but one pretty general idea was that since people living there didn't have their own garden they should have access to ample green spaces.
My pet theory is that just like everything in nature keeps evolving into crabs, eventually every mode of personal transportation evolves into a golf cart.
The Japanese have kei cars, the Dutch and other people living in bicycle-centric cities cargo bikes - sometimes you just need the extra luggage space.
This is my dream too. I'm starting to work on it, doing some very early research now. Consider filling out my survey if you want to weigh in: https://airtable.com/shrdtCXsJfbzZ719W
It is worth noting that streets were dangerous even before cars. For instance, Pierre Curie (Nobel prize and husband of Marie Curie) was killed by a horse-powered truck in the streets of Paris in 1906. He was 46.
But pedestrians at that time had the freedom to walk in the middle of the street at any time. You can clearly see it in this fascinating video of Paris in late 1890s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc
In those cases, it was easy to blame either the horse or the professional rider. Cars were driven by wealthy people who could not face that kind of responsibilities — see _The Great Gatsby_.
I usually say that walking is the most simple/easy form of transportation. Why is walking to another room of your house simple, but walking anyway in the outside world hard? Driving is basically a second level of complexity that means your focusing on driving rather than sleeping, working or playing. You walk in a mall and a park for example.
I grew up and prefer a lifestyle where the car exists but you have multiple options of public transport. It's easier to be able to take a metro train under traffic jams and buildings to where you need to go, or a bus after a night out drinking. Driving is just a lot of stress and work.
I mean people don’t put up with those costs and complexity for no reason.
Carrying stuff and long distances are the big ones for me day to day. My nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, my friends 19 miles away, the nearest Costco is 5 miles away, IKEA is 11 miles away.
Just last weekend I rented a small venue for a birthday party and had to transport about 100 lbs of food, drinks, serveware, decorations, and alcohol 18 miles of highway.
The weekend before I was camping at a festival and again the car was packed with coolers, tents, and clothes. That was a 56 mile trip.
Getting to my airport is 2.5 hours by public transport or 20 minutes by car.
I don't think most people are arguing that you as an individual should switch to walking or public transit without anything else changing. The situations you describe are the way they are because we've spent decades heavily investing in making cars the most convenient or often only option. The suggestion is that we should consider making different choices going forward so people have other options. Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like public transit don't have to suck.
I also think there's a misinterpretation that alternatives to cars means nobody should drive anywhere. For something like going camping, it's hard to argue that a car doesn't make the most sense. But the point is to make it so you don't have to drive everywhere for everything and can save the driving for when it really is the best option.
>Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like public transit don't have to suck.
I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people who want to live in a rural area to do so. Towns and cities are great candidates for centralization, but when you have a low population over a large area you can only justify for example one grocery store, and spreading public transport over a large (and likely low income) area is prohibitively expensive. having everyone live closer together effectively solves both problems, but most people in these areas either don't want to live in cities or can't afford them, so having a inexpensive car and driving is the cheaper option.
> I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people who want to live in a rural area to do so.
There's no reason it has to be some one size fits all solution. Investing in transit options other than cars in cities and towns where it makes sense doesn't mean trying to force light rail to work in rural areas or whatever. The problem is actually the opposite, where we've set things up such that the transit option that makes sense for rural areas is the norm everywhere.
I currently live in Japan but I have lived in major cities of the West as well.
For big items the locals will usually do home delivery, and for groceries the norm in most of Europe and Asia is to buy them every few days in smaller amounts when you need them (since centuries ago) and therefore you do not need the car.
For the camping you would rent a car. I said that the car was still something I expected to be able to use. Switzerland for example is famous for its car journey holidays but most people use public transport.
> I mean people don’t put up with those costs and complexity for no reason.
Consider the cause and effect here. You live far from everything because cars make that possible. The world after cars became designed for cars. There are advantages and disadvantages to car society but to participate at all as a baseline member of society you need a car. Part of owning a car is just recovering what functionality you would have in a world that wasn't designed for cars.
The area you live in was built to force you to own a car. It is not an accident, or a naturally occurring phenomenon, that it is intolerably inconvenient and dangerous for you to get around any other way.
> Why is walking to another room simple but walking in the outside world hard?
I'm pretty sure if houses were so big it took 2 hours to walk from one side to the other people would drive in them. Best not to ask rhetorical questions with obvious answers.
"Why are people happy to cycle to the shops but not to cycle to Australia for holidays?"
"Why are electric toothbrushes so affordable but electric cars are still the domain of the wealthy?"
Why are you in a place where everything is a two hours walk away? The thing is that most people around the world live in neighborhoods or villages where everything they usually need to buy is within walking distance.
I explicitly said that I had a car when I was younger but opted to use public transport most of the time, and I kept the car because it was useful for random occasions (and coincidently I did actually fly to Australia).
I like being able to walk my city (I live in San Jose) but I can't imagine not having a car. Being able to take road trips to things like festivals where I don't have to pay incredible baggage fees or sit on a train without wifi for days at a time is fairly nice. I would like a world that balances being able to walk with being able to own a car, especially as I get older and move out of the city.
I do think it's a little odd that so many HNers hate cars (an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297081). I'm not quite sure what to make of those attitudes, even after reading some of their text.
How much of that is because you live in one of the sprawliest cities in the US?
Of course living in San Jose would be terrible without a car. But that's because the city was designed around cars. In places like Hong Kong it's the exact opposite, you would not even want a car because the city was not designed around them - you can easily get to places without one, and things like parking/dealing with pedestrians/the cost would make it an overall terrible UX.
Also, you are not exactly not paying baggage fees or saving money on wifi. The car itself still has a lot of costs (the upfront cost or payments, insurance, gas, various bureaucratic costs, parking, potentially tolls) - it may very well be that in your situation you're still effectively saving money with the car, but it's not exactly clear-cut.
You actually didn't address why I said I liked cars, which is for road trips. My independence is really another. My point here, is rather than arguing for no cars, I argue for a society that balances both equally. I don't really like the idea of people making somewhere totally unwalkable or totally undrivable.
Ironically, as much as you tried to disqualify what I said, I have no problem walking or biking around San Jose. Whether it was "designed for cars" is pretty arbitrary to me. I can ride my bike to the grocery store or deli and I can walk to a c-store and anywhere else I need to go.
Maybe stop trying to dismiss me and really read what I said.
NYC has become extremely more hostile to pedestrians in only the last 4-5 years. Now, not only are you on the lookout for cars when crossing, but you have to add e-bikers and cyclists. Both of those often don't honor one way streets, so now you have to look both ways. They don't stop at red lights, so you have to look both ways when you have right of way. They ride on the sidewalk, so you have to be careful when turning a corner. Society loves these vehicles as eco-friendly, and carves out a part of the road for them.
No one carves anything for pedestrians. It's time to leave the city, which now seems left for people in their 20s and people who generally don't care about any order whatsoever.
It is a real problem that NYC street design gives so much space to cars while people walking, cycling and scootering are left to fight over the scraps. GP is correct that things are getting harder although I think they are wrong to blame individual behaviors instead of faulty infrastructure.
But there are bike lanes available. And markings that say yield to pedestrians. And lights for bikes in some cases. These things are generally completely ignored, leaving the pedestrian with the burden of watching everyone else.
It's fine to have a preference for a bike-friendly city over a car-centric one, but one has to consider that almost any vehicle is going to be dangerous to a pedestrian, not just cars. Would you feel comfortable with an older member of your family taking a walk on a Sunday while trusting e bikers not to bowl them over turning around a corner on the sidewalk, going the opposite way on a one-way street, or running a red light?
"Available" is a strong word. There are many streets in NYC that lack them, and Casey Neistat's infamous video on bike lanes illustrates what happens in places where they exist.
I am already jaded to the point of having no trust in people to adhere to lights or signs when they believe it is in their interest to do otherwise. Anyone could jaywalk, drive in the bike lane, blow a red, or take a rolling stop, or make an illegal right-on-red. If you do not have infrastructure that violently enforces those rules, such as concrete bollards, or make them extremely convenient and desirable for individuals to choose to follow, such as detection loops that turn the light green as soon as it is safe to cross, those rules may as well not exist.
> Would you feel comfortable with an older member of your family taking a walk on a Sunday while trusting e bikers not to bowl them over turning around a corner on the sidewalk, going the opposite way on a one-way street, or running a red light?
If you ask me why I'd feel uncomfortable, it's because of cars, by a long shot, every time. The risk profile in both probability and magnitude is just so much worse with cars. Take space away from cars and give it back to people; it creates tons of additional space for everyone to maneuver, improves visibility, and calms the streets, all of which filters down to preventing accidents that people on bikes and scooters cause as well.
So what? I can go 45 mph on a human powered road bike downhill. 28mph isn't as scary as it seems and you'd be glad you had that speed when you have to inevitably take that ebike into mixed traffic with cars. I believe for motorcycles they say speed is safety for similar reasons, to be able to escape somewhat from dangerous car situations going on all around your spongy soft body.
I enjoy riding e-bikes, for the record. Going fast on an e-bike is like having happiness on tap. I think more people should own them so that we can collectively start to realize a different way of organizing transportation and commute.
Regarding safety, when it is a bike vs a car, I agree that having more speed is better and safer for the cyclist.
But the issue is when we have a bike vs a pedestrian. I've been a pedestrian next to groups of fast moving e-bikes. It can be pretty scary. Some cyclists can feel entitled to riding on the sidewalk, which at high speeds can really injure someone if they were to crash. E-bikes also weigh a lot more than a non-ebike (up to 120lb in some cases) so getting hit at top speed is a bigger deal than a normal bike.
My overall point is that I think cyclists need to start behaving more like vehicles, rather than fast-moving pedestrians. Obviously we need more investment in biking infrastructure for that to happen, but with how fun and useful e-bikes are, I am optimistic that will eventually happen. As e-bikes become more common, I expect this to become a bigger part of the conversation.
>My overall point is that I think cyclists need to start behaving more like vehicles, rather than fast-moving pedestrians. Obviously we need more investment in biking infrastructure for that to happen, but with how fun and useful e-bikes are, I am optimistic that will eventually happen. As e-bikes become more common, I expect this to become a bigger part of the conversation.
I agree, but there needs to be enforcement of laws against cyclists and e-bikers. The entitlement of sidewalk riding and red light running, in pedestrian cities that already have bike lanes like NYC, needs to be counterbalanced with fear of consequences.
It would be easier for cyclists to behave like vehicles if they actually had infrastructure available. No one is going 28mph on a sidewalk by the way. Honestly going much faster than a light jog is sketchy enough with all the utility poles, cracked sidewalks, debris, foliage, even living situations, that one is liable to encounter on the sidewalk, imo.
> "A developed nation is not a place where the poor own cars, but where the rich use public transportation."
- Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá
We have gone so awfully off the bend with our cities; not places to live but places to drive through. I'm hoping that with the trend to more homeoffice, we can maybe scale back the commuting a bit and go back a step towards cities for living, with community neighborhoods, parks and public spaces everywhere.
Just imagine turning the streets of your local city into green lanes, with lots of excellent public transport. That would be amazing.
Bogota has a mass transit system with BRT stations and double/triple length buses. This was done to avoid the upfront capital cost of a metro while still providing most of the benefits of frequent high capacity service. Now it is extremely crowded and an upgrade to an actual metro is needed but has not happened.
It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians taking precedence over cars.
The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
I'm not sure this applies here. Urbanism seems to be taking strong root in the popular imagination today, especially among young people, who are increasingly saying "screw cars, give us trains and buses and bikes and let us walk around town."
And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and transportation that became dominant during their lives, possibly arguing to hot-swap the ICEs with EVs while keeping all the new highways and sprawling developments, and young people want to revert to the patterns of development from over a century ago with car-free infrastructure.
> And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and transportation that became dominant during their lives
Even in 1960 80% of households had a car: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans.... Even in 1925 it was over half. There isn't a generation in American history where most people lived in a city and took public transit. In the 1920s and 1930s when that was common for people living in cities, half the country lived in rural places.
You say this as if the only places that can be walkable are metropolitan downtowns. Small towns and villages used to be pleasant and walkable too. Many had single-line streetcars.
There has never been a time in US history where the majority of people living in rural counties were farmers. The USDA estimates that the population of rural counties who actually work in agriculture peaked at around 40% in 1950, it's now more like 14%. Most people in rural areas live in towns, and they shouldn't be forced to own cars either.
This is pretty ignorant about what "towns" in rural America are like. My wife went to high school in a "city" in Iowa that's big enough to be classified as an "urban area" by the census bureau.
The town is still tiny and walkable, but having a car is essential because you can't feasibly organize your life around staying in town. My wife didn't live on any of the surrounding farms, but her best friend did, so without a car she couldn't visit her friend. Half the kids at her high school were from the neighboring town (neither town was big enough to have a high school for themselves), so without cars those kids couldn't visit each other. And kids in the other town couldn't visit the Pizza Ranch or the movie theater, which were in my wife's town. There was no mall or major retailer in town, so on the weekends the kids would cajole some adult or older teenager into driving them to Sioux Falls South Dakota, which is about an hour away. That is also where the nearest Costco is. Back before cars, people in those rural towns were cut off from modern amenities. They made their clothes at home, didn't buy mass market consumer products, etc. Most of them don't want to go back to living like that.
And in reality, it wasn't practical to organize life around the town alone even back then. Before cars--even in 1920 more than half of American households had a car--they rode horses to access stores and amenities in neighboring towns.
This is totally impractical at scale. In most small towns, you need to go outside town routinely, and possibly daily. Even if you live and work in town, your kid may go to a high school or your spouse may work one town over. And once everyone is already paying for a car, it doesn't make much sense to ask them to also pay extra taxes for public transport within town.
Cars cost money to drive, so there is value in not making every trip a car trip even if you needed to buy a car anyways. And that's ignoring the costs of building your town exclusively around car travel. Even in places where you regularly need to use a car, there is value in balancing things so you don't have to use a car every single time you leave your house.
I don't think there is any free lunch here. The more trips that are made by car, and the longer those trips are, the more the community also needs to invest in capital costs like road and parking infrastructure (which also comes with a non-trivial opportunity cost in downtown areas). And the more you drive the sooner you'll have to replace your car, incurring more frequent capital costs.
Of course alternatives aren't free either and sometimes they may not be worth it. But I disagree with the idea that it obviously doesn't make economic sense to invest in any alternatives once you've purchased a car.
>Urbanism seems to be taking strong root in the popular imagination today, especially among young people,
That's #2
>And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and transportation that became dominant during their lives,
I find myself 50 years old right now. When I was 18 I owned a '67 mustang. When I was 35 I had a Honda Prelude SH. Now I want to go back to the 1920s and get single occupancy vehicles out of the urban center, and I was working from home full time since 2015. I finally got off my high horse and started using the lime bikes and scooters to get to downtown and back for events instead of driving.
> It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians taking precedence over cars.
It’s not funny at all how condescending almost hateful people this comment is to “conservative” viewpoints. Quite an assumption you make.
Rural (>80% conservative) populations cannot function without cars. So yes, they get concerned when government makes it more difficult / expensive to have cars. That said, I don’t think most have an opinion on city transportation. They take trains and buses like everyone else from what I’ve seen.
That said, this article is a fluff piece. For context, these cities had a massive amount of pollution from the horse poop. The argument to allow vehicles was literally to solve the horse issues. More than that, it was also argued in a free society everyone should be free to move as they wish. Horses weren’t even mentioned in this article…
> Rural (>80% conservative) populations cannot function without cars.
Why do you believe that? Nothing prevents small towns to have good public transport, especially between closely related towns. In my country, which still has a good proportion of the population living in villages, it is very common for the villages to have small "buses" (10-20-seat or so) driving around between common destinations between different parts of the village or neighboring villages. These often have somewhat informal routes, since people who use them typically know each other and the driver. Of course, getting kids to school and back can be achieved by similar means.
Then, even relatively small villages often have a train station, which even if offering infrequent service, is typically enough to transport people to a nearby town or city and back - especially for work.
Also, people in these communities are often working in agriculture, so they do have access to larger vehicles that they control or own for the more infrequent situations where they need to transport larger payloads that would be impossible or too hard to transport in buses/trains.
1. Most European countries are paying 100% more taxes.
2. Europeans have their defense budget (30-40% of US spending) at like 5-10% of spending. The US protects Europe, so…
3. At the end of the day that means countries in Europe have something like 200-300% of the budget for the public over what the US has.
4. The US is very spread out and very wealthy by European standards. There are massive super markets around town which a bus could get to. However, we have 0.5-3 acre yards here. The bus isn’t going to stop at every house, so you’re looking at a 2-3 mile walk to a stop.
5. Why walk and waste time at a bus stop when I can get a car ($5k-100k in price) and drive myself. Saves me hours of waiting a week, totally worth the investment and quality of life boost.
6. The density of homes means the cost of a bus would be astronomical in comparison. Buses around single family homes, when everyone has a car, on a regular basis simply don’t economically make sense. You’d have no one to pick up.
7. Regulations and what not make it a non-option. Many states regulate emissions and what not, which negatively impact the cost-benefit analysis in rural / suburban regions, already running with low number of passengers.
> And I’m sorry you feel that the pro-coup, pro-Dobbs, pro-demonizing-gay-people party isn’t as well liked as you feel they’re entitled to be.
Lol wtf?
I’m saying I think it’s wrong to assume rural folk care what people in the city want to do. Most rural people are pro public transit that I’ve met. They just need cars where they are at, so they don’t like the idea of regulating it heavily such that they MUST move to a city.
> Rural areas account for 14% of the US population
Well over 70% of people need cars to transport themselves and others. Public transit is not practical in the suburbs either. Electric cars might and busses work to a degree, but the overwhelming majority of people need vehicles. At least based on the current suburban layout.
>Rural areas account for 14% of the US population. Why should they have veto power over the urban planning and transportation policy in metro areas?
They shouldn't. And neither should the urban planners have veto power of the planning and transportation policy of rural areas. Yet in my experience, these conversations never stop at "I want my urban area to be less car focused". It always seems to extend to "I can't wait until we ban cars everywhere"
Conservative is better described as resistant to quick changes rather than an affinity for some historical point in time. Though “funny, isn’t it :D” political quips are kind of boring anyways.
Idk if that's a better definition. It's better if what you are describing by "conservative" is a fairly narrow Anglo-American Conservative Ideology. Influential, sure. But not most of conservativeism, even within America or the UK.
I dont think "resistance to (specifically) quick change" accurately describes how most conservatives or non conservatives use that term, not the political/social groups generally see as conservative.
Affinity for "old ways" is absolutely part of what "conservative" is. Conservative movements aren't about a gradual move towards atheism or whatnot. They're about maintaining such traditional beliefs forever, as a rule.
> It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians taking precedence over cars.
Let's leave partisan politics out of HN, shall we? Plus, the "conservatives" you are referring to have never believed that "old ways are the best ways" in relation to technology. They're not making some kind of exception for cars.
> The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
What does that even mean? Ban non-electric cars? Ban all cars? What old ways?
I don't know what you mean by "code words that make you comfortable" so I guess you're wrong about that. I would have made the same comment if you had made a derisive remark on the "liberals".
Just because it's all over HN doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better. From HN guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
> It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians taking precedence over cars.
"Conservatives" also don't want to abandon our "radical experiment" with settled agricultural society to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I think maybe you don't have a workable definition of "conservative" in your head.
And given that it was progressives of the time who radically reshaped the American landscape around what they then viewed as an egalitarian and liberating technology, it's pretty rich for their intellectual descendants to blame "conservatives" for their mistake.
The car industry was back then - well, moving fast and breaking things. Maybe progressives today should be a little more conservative.
I bet that in 45 years the conservatives are going to be the ones arguing to keep some social networks alive and the progressives will be pursuing closing them down because they ruined society. (or something like that just as comical)
It’s good thing we moved from these old urban walkable designs to a car centric lifestyle, which the vast majority of Americans enjoy. The tradeoff of owning a single family home with a good plot of land is well worth the loss in walkability.
This isn’t sarcasm.
Edit: I understand HN really doesn’t like pro car and pro sprawl viewpoints, but downvotes don’t feel well placed.
You posted yourself about the ridiculous subsidies that US suburbia gets so you clearly understand that the way Americans live in the suburbs is completely out of touch with how much it really costs, and very few people if any would actually choose suburbia if they had to bear those costs.
Yet here and elsewhere you also say it’s all a “good thing”, and that Americans are “choosing this”. They really aren’t. Zoning laws are preventing better alternatives from being created, and the subsidies basically force an unnatural amount of people to go that route even if they hate it.
And honestly, most of y’all don’t know any better. Whenever I have Americans over visiting Brussels, it ends in “holy shit I want to move here”.
Last guy I had over was from Alabama. I walked with him from one end of the city to the other in less than a couple hours, stopping everywhere interesting. His mind was blown: it’s the same distance he would have to take his car to go to the nearest pub to his house.
Can we refrain from the reddit-esque creepy "gotcha" of digging through post history of another user instead of addressing the argument at hand?
> You posted yourself about the ridiculous subsidies that US suburbia gets so you clearly understand that the way Americans live in the suburbs is completely out of touch with how much it really costs
Yep.
> and very few people if any would actually choose suburbia if they had to bear those costs.
I don't agree. It's arguable we do already bear much of these costs, as a lot of infrastructure is paid for through development fees (higher housing prices) or through federal & state grants (which we all pay for). I understand cities subsidize suburban areas to some extent, but that's largely from business tax that, again, we all pay for in higher prices.
> Americans are “choosing this”
Look at the pandemic trends, that haven't really reversed since. People left cities and suburban / rural property values shot up compared to big city real estate.
> oning laws are preventing better alternatives from being created
No, they're keeping nice neighborhoods nice low density neighborhoods. Like the inhabitants of those neighborhoods want them to be.
> Whenever I have Americans over visiting Brussels
Something tells me "Americans who want to visit Brussels" has a strong pro-density sampling bias. You're also seeing the initial reaction and not the long term reaction.
> His mind was blown
But would he really live there, or was he just surprised by the different infrastructure?
For clarity, I live right in the middle in one of the most walkable places in the US. In the past, I’ve lived in suburban and rural areas. I understand the pro's of walkability, but I also understand suburbanites and rural folks don't want those pros because of the cons that come with them.
No, own your opinions. You posted something where you literally had to give the disclaimer "This isn't sarcasm", because it reeked of sarcasm. I went through your post history to understand you and your point better. This isn't a fucking gotcha, it's a show of faith and compassion.
> No, they're keeping nice neighborhoods nice low density neighborhoods
Not just zoning laws in your suburbia, zoning laws in the city itself. And no they're not; I'm starting to get the feeling you're not arguing in good faith.
> But would he really live there
I'm helping him organize his move later this year. Does that answer your question?
> This isn't a fucking gotcha, it's a show of faith and compassion.
It certainly comes across that way, from the tone of your comments.
> Not just zoning laws in your suburbia, zoning laws in the city itself.
Yeah, I live in one of those single family walkable city neighborhoods. It’s a nice low density neighborhood. We don’t want it changed, but density advocates that don’t live here have “selected” us for an up-zone campaign. This isn’t a bad faith argument at all… This seems to be the serious lapse in understanding between pro density and pro single family zoning folks.
I’m super glad you were able to help someone move to a walkable area as well! I’m very happy someone discovered they wanted such a lifestyle over sprawl. That said, the vast majority in NA still prefer SF zoning and sprawl. I’m not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl becomes unimaginably expensive.
> I’m not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl becomes unimaginably expensive.
Right, but that's the core of my point: It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting subsidized to ridiculous extents. (For the readers unaware of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
And saying the "vast majority" prefer it is wrong. They prefer it over the alternatives they have within the United States, not over the alternative possibilities. I'm absolutely not dismissing that some people prefer the suburbian lifestyle over EU-style walkable cities, but saying the majority of Americans do when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the best possible read of it.
The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices are due to the high demand and low offer. Another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWDFgzAjr1k
This song-and-dance of "Everyone likes suburbia because everyone wants to move there, it's illegal to build anything else because it would then be something else than suburbia, nobody wants the alternative anyway because it's too expensive, it's too expensive because it's in high demand, and it's in high demand because it's illegal to build something else" is like the definition of catch-22.
> It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting subsidized to ridiculous extents.
Yep, that's totally true. But we as a society have chosen to subsidize it. We would not continue to subsidize it if society as a whole didn't find that lifestyle worth the immense weight on government finances.
> but saying the majority of Americans do when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the best possible read of it.
Perhaps you're correct, but we're getting into conjecture at this point. The single family home on a quarter acre plot is ingrained into the physche of Americans at birth. It's the American dream. Cultural memes like that don't die without a herculean amount of effort. And when this dream is so well built into our urban design, uniformity across the country, the likelihood of it really changing is fairly small. Online spaces are really the first time I've seen anything different from the mainstream viewpoint here--never heard anything like this offline. Even San Francisco won’t upzone. If that isn’t a clear indication of preference, I don’t know what is.
> The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices are due to the high demand and low offer.
Definitely, we need more of these neighborhoods to satisfy demand. Again, I live in one, and I experience the price increases first hand. I just don't agree with the position folks take of changing existing neighborhoods into "urban, walkable" ones when the residents don't want that. There is a lot of space to try building these communities, especially since many people (even not in tech!) don't need to go to downtown offices anymore.
Streetcar suburbs are pretty awesome, because they allow single family home-style living while maintaining walkability. But density advocates want to see those neighborhoods built up into apartments and townhomes. That's tough for residents to swallow, since they have heavily invested in making their neighborhood the exact low-ish density but walkable, manicured living space they want to be in. And it's part of the appeal of unwalkable / HOA subdivisions, because such up zone conversions are difficult to impossible, or make little financial sense.
Vegetation, old architecture, etc. takes a long time to grow and "settle in". Destruction of backyards and old homes for large buildings that don't fit in with anything else in the neighborhood is not a fun time for existing residents. I don't really care about the property value (well, I would care if my neighborhood completely changed by a forced zoning change and I needed to move). It's about keeping the small town neighborhood vibes I chose to move here for.
OK but this is a completely different beast to what you posted earlier, which is:
> It’s good thing we moved from these old urban walkable designs to a car centric lifestyle, which the vast majority of Americans enjoy.
Your (non-)argument that american lifestyle being car-centric is a "good thing" is VERY different to "I enjoy suburbia and I'd like it not to be destroyed".
Your corner of the earth can remain. If some people are trying to destroy or change it, those people aren't me, nor anyone else in this thread, and they may or may not be "walkability advocates" or what have you that's pretty irrelevant.
The majority of walkability advocates argue for the following:
- US suburbia should not be subsidized as much as it is, it's putting cities in dangerous debt.
- Zoning laws preventing the construction of denser neighbourhoods that aren't skyscrapers should be relaxed.
- City centers should become more walkable and livable, less car-centric
- New constructions and renovations should focus on being human scale, instead of giving massive amounts of land and priority to cars.
> Your (non-)argument that american lifestyle being car-centric is a "good thing"
It's a good thing because it allows (or, rather, allowed) the supermajority of people to have the "countryside-style" living (while being able to work) that was available only to the wealthy a century ago. At the time suburbia was "invented", people moved out of the crowded cities to these new subdivisions in masses.
> is VERY different to "I enjoy suburbia and I'd like it not to be destroyed".
> The majority of walkability advocates argue for the following:
In a vacuum I would agree with you wholeheartedly. However, in practice, urbanists and walkability advocates almost always push increased density on neighborhoods whose residents don't want those changes. I very rarely see advocacy for building new walkable subdivisions, the only advocacy group that's even remotely close to this that I could think of is Strong Towns.
> It certainly comes across that way, from the tone of your comments.
There's no ill intent in my comments, you might be choosing to read them as hostile. I'm just giving you some perspective and examples of real life experience. Also you wanted to understand the downvotes, which is also why I chose to reply.
> I'm just giving you some perspective and examples of real life experience
Frankly, this comes across as a little bit condescending. Another example, a phrase like this from your first response:
> And honestly, most of y’all don’t know any better
Who are "y'all"? Why don't we know any better? This comes across as hostile, like you're coming at this from the perspective of "I'm definitely right and this guy is full of it." I don't believe that's true, but that's how it read to me. Perhaps it's just the challenge of no discernible tone in text.
> Also you wanted to understand the downvotes, which is also why I chose to reply
I still don't quite understand. Downvote != agree, and my comment wasn't rude or disrespectful. It's just not the majority opinion here.
Looking through your comment history, it's filled with snide remarks and nothing of any real informational value. Maybe looking through peoples comments on isolated threads doesn't do what you think it does? Unless you think snide remarks and vapid posts got you to 26k karma.
I have no idea what you’re on about; if you’d like to read through my other comments, maybe start with the ones in this very thread, which explain that this isn’t a gotcha?
Do people actually enjoy car-centric living, or are alternatives just not available or something the average American has much exposure to? If you want to live somewhere in America that's walkable/bikeable/good public transit, your choices are a lot more limited than if you're willing to live somewhere where you need to drive everywhere. And those limited choices tend to be more expensive, which I think says something about their popularity.
Interestingly though, it seems like there is a trend to expand car alternative options, at least in some areas of the country. There's not much you can do about an exurban bedroom community because density is so low and nothing besides other houses is remotely within a convenient non-car distance. But in places that could be less car-centric, you're starting to see expanded public transit and bicycle infrastructure. And even in what would normally be a suburban area, I've started to see more mixed use development with higher density housing options. And of course more high-end condo type housing in large cities themselves. The fact these all tend to be relatively expensive places to rent or buy a home suggests to me that demand is fairly high, so clearly not everyone loves the car-centric choice.
I also think there is a segment of Americans who love the idea of low-density, car-centric, single family development in theory, but they're running into the reality that trying to build that for everyone means that people are going to have to live increasingly far away from anywhere they want to go. Even if you don't mind driving everywhere, car-centric becomes a lot less fun when everything is a 30+ minute drive away and gas is becoming more expensive.
> car-centric becomes a lot less fun when everything is a 30+ minute drive away and gas is becoming more expensive.
The funny thing is I live in a city, in transit-oriented, mid density, walkable area, and it takes 30 mins for me to get anywhere interesting outside of my neighborhood. My friends in the 'burbs can hop over to similar amenities in half the time I can.
Certainly many people enjoy that type of life. The frustrating part is the one-size-fits-all zoning that has made it difficult to build anything but that type of community. It's illegal to build car-free apartments in many places because car owners think they should be able to drive and park everywhere.
Existing residents don't want apartments because they block sunlight, they cause overcrowding, they don't fit with the neighborhood's style. Frankly, as well, renters & especially landlords don't tend to take care of property or invest in the community as much as owner occupiers do, because the incentives aren't there for either of them to do so. It's not the renter's property and they can be kicked / priced out of the neighborhood at any time, so why bother to invest in it? Any investment in making your space nice means the landlord can hike your rent. On the landlord side, they know they're going to find another tenant as long as the unit is habitable enough, so in comes the "landlord special". I know this isn't universally true by any means, but the incentive structure is there.
In apartment buildings that are "transit-enabled", every apartment usually has 1 car, maybe 2, and those cars flood the local street, making quality of life worse for all existing residents. Those apartments are more likely to own cars as we look at places that are more car-centric. In suburbia, an apartment building usually comes with a huge parking lot for all the cars, which isn't great, but it's a little more palpable for people living in the area already.
Imagine the amount of free time you gain when each kid can go to practice, school, friends, etc, all by themself by either walking or biking. Safety is also no issue because so many other people are walking or cycling.
I could not imagine my childhood when I had to ask my parents to go anywhere.
I live in a single family house in the UK with a decent plot of land, the roads are quiet enough (even in the busy few days around harvest) to not worry about traffic at all when walking or riding a bike.
I can fly to Schiphol airport, get on a train without even stepping outdoors, ride to a suburb on the far side of Amsterdam in time for a morning meeting, walk to my hotel, all without even a taxi ride. On this side of the ocean, I have to call for a limo to the airport because the commuter rail schedule is too sparse, the trains are too crowded for being under-provisioned. The diesel locomotives are as polluting as if everyone on the train drove their cars instead. There is no long term parking at the train stations. The subway stop at the airport is far from the terminals. Bad transportation is a drag on the US economy. How much productivity sits on our highways for hours each day?
> “The pedestrian,” explained a Brooklyn man, “as an American citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.” Custom and the Anglo-American legal tradition confirmed pedestrians’ inalienable right to the street.
> In 1913 the New York Court of Appeals observed that it was “common knowledge” that the “great size and weight” of automobiles could make them “a most serious danger,” and so the responsibility for preserving the safety of the streets lay overwhelmingly with motorists.
Any legal researchers or history buffs out there know of any other precedents at appeal (or higher) siding with the rights of pedestrians over motorists? Did the issue ever make the US Supreme Court?
Its always intrigued me that arbitrary rules (like driving on the right) have such enforceable weight of law behind them (thank goodness), while other rules are more lax. For example, is the customary tradition for the US (along with Liberia and Myanmar) to use imperial (rather than metric) measurements set in legal stone somewhere? I know that NASA and their contractors all use metric [0]. What requires a custom or tradition to be legally defined?
Reading this infuriates me. I can’t believe so much effort was put into giving cars higher priority than pedestrians. What a tremendous detriment. And it’s so hard to undo! People always stick to the status quo; we need even more work to undo all of it. What a waste.
>With their traditional mission of defending custom and seeking equity, police were unwilling to abridge pedestrians’ rights to the free use of city streets.
How times have changed. In regards to police/government respecting citizen's rights. I've always wondered what a person from the past, say pre-WWI era would think if they were to time travel to the present. They would probably think we live in an authoritarian police state. They'd probably be right.
It's very interesting to read how a few rich people getting cars changed the whole capitol. Tens of thousands of pedestrians had to move out of the way for these few, and everything changed permanently. Or how most traffic safety organizations were really pro-car organizations, and in the media always shifted the blame over to pedestrians being uncultivated and walking where they shouldn't be etc.
To take another slant on the article, you can see how the laws and systems were adapted to support the automobile from where they were before. There were no stop signs, speed limits, license requirements, or traffic lights in the 1920s. Fast forward to today and we see E-Bikes and E-Scooters being banned from different areas, having speed caps put on, not being allowed on sidewalks, into bike paths, trails, etc. There is no adaptation in most locations.
People are finally moving away from automobiles, but officials are choosing to make it much more difficult for people to use new forms of transportation. E-Scooters have been called a scourge just about everywhere they show up. They're vilified in city after city, due to the lack of supporting infrastructure and incompatibility with roads. In some places, officials want scooters to ride in 50 mph traffic - which all cyclists know is a death wish, but not on the unused sidewalks. Many cyclists blame e-bikes and scooters for the problems caused by cars, and want to hoard the infrastructure to themselves. Pedestrian safety is an easy scare tactic, but in reality, e-scooters and e-bikes make being a pedestrian much more feasible and increase the use of bike paths and sidewalks. I'd like to see a comparison of pedestrians killed by e-scooters on a sidewalk vs. pedestrians on sidewalks vs. cars or even cars vs. e-scooters. If a place ends up with scooters on the sidewalks, the city should build a mobility lane, not kick them out into the street. I'm interested to see how planners and cities adjust to using a bike to get to work no longer requiring lycra and a shower. If you do the math, being able to travel at 10-15 MPH for 30 minutes under electric power, can get you just about anywhere in most cities in the USA. It's really a question of having safe infrastructure to get you there.
More pedestrian friendly Main Streets are an opportunity for more local stores to open and thrive. Towns that want to collect sales tax, income tax, and property tax will do road diets, widen sidewalks, enhance trash pickup, and move parking to the periphery of the commercial zone to cultivate growth. While citizens pick their local government leaders, governments also pick their residents by setting zoning laws that effectively determine who can move in or open up shop. Local governments are incentivized to pick what use yields the most votes or tax dollars.
People driving through in their car are only contributing a danger to pedestrians, parking demand, air pollution, and noise. People driving to downtown can be accommodated with parking off to the side (but not taking up prime real estate). Pedestrians are much more likely to stop and participate in the economy.
The same story these days with drones and VTOLs. We know how it will end (and the drones and VTOLs will liberate our streets from cars (except for some small golf-cart likes) and our Earth surface from asphalt), yet it is still a long way to go for the population mentality which right now has even hardly reached the stage of the Red Flag laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts (or in grief stages - somewhere between Denial and Anger)
Adjacent to this, the USA used to have great light rail / trolleys in even small and rural towns. If we just brought back rail, we would be able to improve walkability without rebuilding!
Interesting problem that will soon become a historical curiousity, because there is clearly no alternative. Even if* we immediately ban the sale of gaoline-powered vehicles to be driven in cities, that'd be too little.
For five years I've lived near a suburban arterial street that's busy from 6 a.m. to midnight most days. I've seen no diminution of traffic in that time. This is madness.
We either create a workable rational solution or consign ourselves to our individual fates.
In the 70s and 80s urban planners looked to the US for inspiration. Let's turn this medieval square into a giant parking lot! Pave over the canals and turn them into roads! Giant 10 lane highways cutting straight through the city!
They've now spent billions undoing the future of the past.
that "freedom of movement" was exclusively for people in cars, and came at the expense of the freedom of movement of everyone else (not to mention safety).
besides, it's not like you can't still drive in the netherlands.
what are you basing this on? the netherlands has a system of high speed motorways, along with rapid inter-city rail and a dense network of cycle routes. cars, trains, bikes, buses, are all viable ways of getting around, both within cities and between them.
why do you think the only worthwhile part of the transport network is the road network? and why do you think the only worthwhile road users are motorists?
it seems like you think nobody should have any choice except to travel by motor car. lack of choice doesn't seem like freedom to me.
I’m surprised this doesn’t mention that part of the reason cities supported the adoption of cars was the fact city streets were covered in horse poop… you also had to feed, house, and care for the horses.
Cities in California can't keep up with the volume of human manure deposited on sidewalks, so why not add to the problem and bring back horses instead of cars!
That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car because most people had cars. The article would have you believe that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people owned them.
It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars.