If You Can’t Ban Cars Downtown, Take Away Parking Spaces

How sure are you about those numbers?

100 cars commuting daily is 4.1 cars an hour that is typical of a rural farm road not a busy city.

10,000 people is Prince George's Stadium[1] full to capacity.

[1]http://www.theballparkguide.com/graphics/bowie-baysox/prince...

I don't understand why such a large fraction of our usable land in people-dense areas needs to be consumed by expanses of ugly, dead cement full of giant deadly "creatures" traveling at high speeds, nor why that state of affairs needs to be imposed everywhere on everyone.

It's all about balance...

I think we can learn some things from the way some French cities do things. Most days and most hours of the day, cars can drive on all streets, however, on weekends and some other times, in certain core commercial areas, only delivery vehicles are allowed and these streets become pedestrian-only. I'm okay with that. [as an aside, interestingly, people are in some areas, are allowed to park on the pavement (sidewalks) --which is a bit jarring at first].

Autonomous electric vehicles present the opportunity to keep a lot of the comfort you want and prevent the dead expanse of cement that so many people distaste.

Don't like it? Move to the suburbs. But don't expect a suburban lifestyle in the city center.

"particular urban hipster lifestyle"

I don't think everywhere needs to look like or support the activities of dense urban cores. But I do think dense urban cores should look like and support the activities of dense urban cores.

In America even this is controversial and difficult to achieve.

> Norway is on the forefront of the EV revolution

That's great! How do they deal with Li-Ion batteries in the cold? I imagine it'd be similar to what you'd do before—turn on some lights and the radio to get some juice flowing before you try starting the engine.

I have a very small child, and living somewhere where we don’t need a car to get around is immeasurably nicer than living somewhere with car-centered planning. I can put my son on my shoulders or in a wagon and walk to the park, to the grocery store, to the library, to the post office, to the toy store, to cafés and restaurants, ... and we can smile and wave at all the other pedestrians as we walk along. Compare that to the annoyance of strapping him into and out of a carseat, not being able to interact with him while I’m driving and he’s sitting in the back by himself, and spending most of our outdoor time in parking lots.

Beyond that, the poor, disabled people, the elderly, and children between the ages of about 5–18 have a much better time living somewhere that they can be independently mobile instead of needing to rely on someone else driving them around.

Many people in larger cities do quite well without cars. In Manhattan, it's quite normal even for the hedge-fund-managing class to take the subway.

Knowing that it's possible to comfortably get around the city without a car, these citizen can't help but notice how much their quality of life is lessened by people insisting on cars.

- Emissions, known to cause premature death, and often exceeding the guidelines, especially in summer

- Traffic accidents

- About 2/3 of the area of public streets being required for cars (two pedestrian walkways, two lanes parking, two lanes traffic)

Even without completely eliminating cars and trucks, which you would probably still need for deliveries, emergency services and disabled people, you could reduce most roads to one lane, and get rid of traffic signals. That would:

- Greatly increase the speed of biking (currently, 1/2 of the time is spent waiting for signals or in traffic)

- Increase the speed of busses even more (they spend more time waiting in traffic that bikes can pass)

- More than double the available space for wider sidewalks, greenery etc.

Cars are a huge impediment to creating walkable downtowns, even if they're green. This is downtown Annapolis, looking down Main Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9777543,-76.489652,3a,75y,10.... On a nice summer day (this picture is in October), the sidewalks are packed with tourists, but a handful of cars take up most of the space. Further down the street, you get to this giant expanse of pavement: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9773508,-76.487682,3a,75y,67.... To get from the main drag to the water front (in the distance in the picture), you have to cross this expansive waste of space dedicated to cars.

All for what? The whole downtown area is walkable, and there is a perfectly good multi-level garage at the edge of Main Street for people to park in.

> This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.

Parents don't need to drive up right to wherever they're going; their children could do with a little walk. I've got a four year old, and we go downtown every weekend. It's no problem to park in the garage and walk half a mile to where we're going. At the same time, it's a big worry to have kids running around with traffic zooming by.

Deliveries and disabled people can be accommodated by permitting busses, special vehicles for the disabled, and commercial deliveries during certain windows. You don't need to permit all vehicle traffic to accommodate those special cases.

>I don't understand this concept of banning cars

Downtown? It's easy: they're noisy, annoying, polluting, take up space, and designing a city for them results in urban and suburban wastelands as opposed to vibrant, walkable city centers.

>This is a massive reduction of comfort

Well, comfort is not everything. And for obese car-obsessed sedentary people "a massive reduction of comfort" might just what the doctor ordered!

>a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.

And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.

As for people with disabilities, they can always use mechanized wheelchairs and disability friendly public transport (something car and private-transport obsessed cities usually lack, only allowing the richer disabled people those "comforts").

As a parent of two young children, cities are stressful because of cars. You constantly have to be paying attention, holding hands, watching out at intersections. To me, no cars is more family friendly.

> Norway is on the forefront of the EV revolution, so they can go "green" by just banning gasoline cars.

That's assuming that you can "go green" in any meaningful way with a significant share of motorized private transport. Electric engines might emit fewer pollutants and CO2 than ICEs while operating, but it would take quite some advancements in battery tech to produce the required battery packs without CO2 emissions that are about as significant overall. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959

As far as the environmental impact goes, it's always much better to replace trips taken by car with trips taken by bike or by foot (or, to a certain extent, by public transit) than to just replace one type of car by another.

@lazyjones here's the "second" movement you're sensing. It's about concentrating the population in urban areas as well as curtailing personal movement. It's called UN Agenda 21 and it is being quietly implemented without voter approval through local zoning boards.

[link goes to UN website] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agend...

It's like zoning.

You can improve an area by seperating incompatible uses. When white flight was in full swing in the 1970s, cities removed pedestrian plazas, bulldozed marginal real estate and created parking lots in the name of urban renewal (and enriching speculators), etc.

In my area, a few cities have selectively closed streets for events or permanently closed streets to create pedestrian zones. It's largely been successful in attracting more visitors and creating a good environment.

That's fine, if at the same time you have private businesses and public offices out of the pedestrian zone.

Does Oslo have such regulations?

I've seen the opposite. A limit to the number of car parks in a new development. Look up "Hammarby Sjöstad" south of Stockholm.

I think the whole idea is to add cost to bringing a car downtown, so fewer people will do it. The proposition is that the harm this does to suburbanites will be offset by making the city more livable for it's residents, and maybe by doing so encourage suburbanites to move inward at the margin.

Yes.

Life will be a little less convenient for you for those "sometimes" that you have meetings, and a lot better for a lot of people.

That kind of trade-off is something we call "society".

Your subway takes more than twice the time to get you to the city center than driving?

I have to say, I've never been to a city like that. I mean, unless your meetings are at 4am or something. Don't you have traffic? Is your subway pulled by horses?

One would hope that a car ban would be done alongside heavy reinvestment in public transit. Best of both worlds would be car-less city center with fast access from the suburbs.

To take it even further: they should make an individual parking spot held in reserve for you at every place where you might conceivably hold a meeting. That way if you are running late to a meeting in the center of the city you can always drive right up to the door from the suburbs.

And they shouldn't charge, because that would add a lot of cost to your trip.

Why does public transit have to be 2 hours? If you replaced every 30 cars with one bus, you could run one bus every minute, the bus could travel much faster because there are no cars clogging the lanes. It is simply more efficient and potentialy faster.

> No need to ban all cars, just gas-powered ones.

Seconded. Especially since while riding a bicycle, people likely emit more CO₂ than an electric car. ;-)

Evs are in the long run good but make no mistake that the batteries come with an ecological cost during their use and afterlife. Evs, autonomous cars, and ride sharing are all good but for a major ecological change to happen there has to be a societal one as well. The future with autonomous cars isn't most efficient with everyone having their own car, it's with summonable cars that services own instead of individuals. Much of the benefit of autonomous cars is lost if the vehicles continue to sit unoccupied for the majority of the day. Likely for some time, anything more than a city wide autonomous car network won't be possible as the reliance on networked machines to offload the heavy lifting onto seems too great, much less to get it to poorly connected rural areas.

Society needs to be willing to change how it uses cars in order for a major change to happen.

In the age of ride sharing, there is no need for people to park a car downtown. It is a waste when compared with the cost per square foot resting such a huge hunk of steel on the side of the street.

Use the bus? Subway?

Cities have enough people - we don't need suburbanites clogging up our streets with ugly cars.

Exactly what is happening in my town currently. All serious business migrated to megacenters at the outskirts because city parking is expensive and scarce.

I would be interested in seeing some empirical numbers on this. I live in NYC and have driven a Zipcar here a handful of times for errands. The experience is . . . not great.

This has made me wonder: who are these people in cars? And parked up and down the street? What are their reasons for using the mode of transport they do? I ponder this regularly. Sometimes I have the most irrational urge to go around and knock on people's windows to ask. I never do, of course.

I know for most things I do, the car would be the worst possible way to accomplish them. Walking or subway are better, and biking is best. But maybe for others the story is different. There are some obvious good reasons: tradespeople, delivery trucks, taxis and ride-sharing services. But who are the rest?

That said, I don't think you can really expect people to buy this claim without providing evidence.

Maybe that is the case when it comes to large towns in the US (particularly in the South or the Midwest). In cities, even North American ones, you would have to be totally insane to want to drive downtown. To a large extent, this is because parking is a nightmare to begin with in a downtown core. It is far more convenient to Park and Ride in places like San Francisco, New York, Toronto, etc... even somewhere like Boston or Seattle.

Do you have any empirical evidence this outcome would occur? Nearly everything I've read suggests the very opposite [1]. Further anecdote: I've been to many European cities with minimal cars, and many American cities ranging from super walkable to Robert Moses-esque highway-organized downtowns. The overwhelming trend is that car-unfriendly zones are the most bustling, and the car-streamlined zones turn to ghost towns after work hours.

[1] https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-busin...

And public transport takes twice as long because we've been focused on improving car-life as much as possible.

This is a good example of "things have to get worse before they get better", because in order to provide a decent alternative, we must, for some time, bite the bullet and ween off cars.

It's no wonder that public transport takes longer than private car travel: when you spend tens of millions of dollars on roads, when you illegalize crossing a street (jaywalking), when you optimize traffic lights to the flow of traffic, when you provide free parking, when you guarantee a minimum number of parking spaces per development, (and so on...), you've basically given public-transport the middle finger.

Public-transport and private (car ownership) transportation is an opportunity cost, and we've disproportionately spent our time and money on the latter. If we want to improve the former, then we're going to have to make these tough decisions to dis-incentivize private transportation.

Public transport is not a valid alternative because cars create endless neighbourhoods.

You can't make an effective transportation system with low pop density because few people will be able to get to stations on foot, and you can't make a fast transportation system because low density means downtown is very far away.

On the other hand, in downtown, cars are a big nuisance: they take most of the public space, they pollute, they are dangerous, etc.

Perhaps towns should be more focused on the people that live in them rather than drivers from outside.