Life in the Spanish city that banned cars
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the major highway which has speed limits within the town but still sees so much traffic as to be very dangerous for pedestrians.
These towns need the commercial visitors brought by the highway to survive — but the design common in Europe for this scenario is so much better. There will be a sign for an exit off the main road for the “city center” exit — there will be a single parking lot for the city center, and then comfortable walking distance to the businesses ... superior design.
Many small, especially old, towns in Europe have ancient road layouts that are too narrow and steep for cars within the town — which resulted in these car free designs for free. It’s beautiful. Parking is easy because there is only one place to do it on the outskirts — and then walk everywhere. There is no improvement for a small town to be designed otherwise in my opinion.
A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.
I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc.
Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)
I love riding, but I have been run over. No thank you. I will bike for transportation the day we implement Dutch style separated bike lanes (i.e. by an actual physical barrier, even if only a slightly raised bike lane)
Other than that, I drive my mountain bike to areas where there are no cars.
Edit: in the city I'm in now, we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt and expect vehicles moving at 10mph that weight 50 pounds to do just fine sharing the road with vehicles weighing 2000+ pounds and going 50+ mph. Ridiculous and a waste of my tax dollars.
Yeah, this kind of thing is really disappointing, but unfortunately predictable. There's a real chicken/egg situation. Few people will bike until there's safe support for it; until lots of people are biking, all the infrastructure just takes space away from the people using cars.
Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock bands. Just a bemused observation.
Paradoxically, in these encounters I prefer the "rude" drivers that get out of the way as quickly as possible.
I was recently in Amsterdam where there are many many bikes and many variations on the scenarios that can cause this to occur. I felt like I started to observe communication on the faces and trajectories around me that tried to convey a message about a kind of conscious morality for influencing the outcomes that results in these scenarios. There seemed to be a kind of social encouragement toward modulating one’s trajectory when possible in advance of where uncertainties could cause delay in order to have the effect of minimizing the required velocity changes — an expression that seemed to say “if you put yourself into a situation where uncertainty about your trajectory is likely to cause a group velocity decrease, you haven’t found the ideal path. Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.” (Edit: Culture in the Netherlands is rather amazing)
I think what you describe just minimizes fuel consumption though.
I had not really considered that people might view it differently but thinking back on my experience in Canada, I remember being surprised at how much people would accelerate when the light turned green and how hard they would have to brake just seconds later at the next red light.
Detriot feels much safer. People mostly leave you alone. Wear the wrong colors could be an issue. The boards over windows is a little bit scarier but in Detriot you feel more prepared, even expect something to happen so it rarely does. In Oakland/SanF things can be very calm but turn really quickly.
Which fits well with dynamic speed limits cropping up in places that get regular bad weather
Whether or not speed variances between vehicles increase accidents doesn't seem to be clear. With a quick search I found this(1) that indicates that speed variances don't play a role in causing accidents. I also found this (2), which says "that the greater the difference between a driver’s speed and the average speed of traffic—both above and below that average speed—the greater the likelihood of involvement in a crash". And I found this (3) which basically says the speed limit should be set at the 85th percentile of what everyone is driving. Kind of like how you should build sidewalks where people walk ("Don’t make any walkways this year. At the end of the year, look at where the grass is worn away. That shows where the students are walking. Then just pave those paths"), set the speed limit at the speed most people drive.
Everywhere in the US I've lived, the max speed limit laws were written like "whatever speed is safe for current conditions up to a maximum of XX Mph" So you can get a speeding ticket for going slower than the posted limit if conditions are bad. I've actually been pulled over going well under the posted max speed limit during a hard snow storm.
(1) https://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/public_html/TRB04... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve (3) http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/szn/determining_...
There are exceptions, especially in the US West, where interstates may be the only path for miles and miles through some mountain ranges. Of course, they mostly have wide shoulders where people ride.
There is the source for California -- I see it gives exemptions for safety and law (I assume for road works, etc) but generally speed limits are objective based on conditions. It doesn't mean you can drive slow and impede other traffic traveling around you though, which is why there are laws for it. I don't see it enforced as much in San Diego, but when I lived in the Lake Arrowhead area it was enforced quite often on the highway up and down the mountain.
Quick edit -- that law is for highways, I haven't checked whether this also applies for other types of roads.
Note that “highway” in California law has a very broad definition; see https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
“Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.
>> ban cars
> unrealistic statements
You, sir, are funny.
Banning vehicles has been shown to greatly increase shopping revenue and improve the healthiness of the area, so if a few businesses suffer, poor them... I'll not shed a tear for the strip malls.
They only want change that doesn't involve money, effort or change, or what?
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
However, if you want to talk about the United States, I would agree with you that it’s going to be expensive to shift the suburban sprawl away from personal vehicles. As much as that particular urbanisation failure is seen as typically American, it’s far from the exclusive option there. You will be surprised to learn that there are dozens of millions of Americans living in cities dense enough to justify not using cars as the default transport mode (“banning” isn’t a very accurate description of what that city did).
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-crowded-city-in...
Electric scooters or bikes, typically the dockless kind, combined with existing (but re-inforced) public transport sounds doable, especially if you invest the same order of magnitude as local authorities spend on highways. That would require little investment (most of it would be private and from people keen on giving away billions).
it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we *has* to be in the United States.
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
You will be surprisedProblems with bicycle roads:
90% of traffic is much slower than me, which I do 20 km/h in cities (nothing special with some training)
They go up and down sidewalks and turn before intersections. This slows down everybody willing to go faster than 10 km/h
They are bumpier than roads
They are on the side of the road and more dangerous at any intersection, where they are close or before the stop line for cars coming from the side. Furthermore there is less space to look for incoming traffic. Being on the car's road is safer. I like bicycle roads when they are far away from car's roads, for example along rivers. Small low traffic roads are good enough.
On the other side, roundabouts and every other modern road layout that force cars and bikes to get close is dangerous for bikes. I feel safe to say that roads became less dangerous for cars in the last 20 years and more dangerous for bicycles.
I'd like to have the roads of the 70s: long straights, no speed bumps, no roundabouts (cyclists also don't like stop and go),
I'm joking just as much as the people saying that bikes don't belong on roads are.
Cars can be a great tool for humans to use and they are not yet running around without a human inside.
I think the most intrusive part of cars are when they are moving. That is when they are dangerous, mess with peds and bikers, and occupying roads that break up community space. Look at how much parking structures are as a % of the total building space in downtown SF or Manhattan. Not nothing, but pretty small. Maybe 5%. Probably less.
As a bicyclist, I would love to have a dedicated network of bicycle track all over town. But it doesn't exist, yet.
Also, this is way fuzzier than you present. There's little conflict between cars and bikes on lightly traveled, spacious suburban streets or sleepy neighborhood county roads. Even on collectors & minor arterials, on an e-bike I travel about the same speed as a slow car.
Speed delta is not an incorrect observation, but varies in significance. In terms of priorities, highways are certainly top candidates for the first dedicated bike tracks.
Sure, some businesses complain, but overall number of bikes on the road seems to have increased.
https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/opposition-to-propo...
http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/mobi-bike-share-vancouver-rid...
DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, the former CEO of the multi-level marketing company Amway, and is the daughter-in-law of Amway's billionaire co-founder, Richard DeVos. Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA.
What surprises me here is the fact that Amway has done so well in China yet is connected to Blackwater.
Most cyclists are slower than the speed limit on most roads, but this does not occur "virtually always". Don't assume. Check the speed limit and the cyclist's speed!
As a cyclist, I find it really irritating to be dangerously passed by a driver, seemingly as punishment, catch up with them at a stop light, and then have them chew me out for not going the speed limit, when I actually was going the limit or faster. It's not hard for a fit cyclist to go the limit on a 15 or 20 mph road, particularly downhill. The problem here is that many drivers think anyone not going 30+ mph on those roads is being a jerk, and unfortunately some of those drivers believe dangerously passing slow vehicles is an acceptable response to their impatience.
But the reality is this: Going 30+ mph in a 15 mph zone is being a jerk!
If you are interested in a ROI based perspective on town planning, https://www.strongtowns.org/ makes a compelling case that sprawl is not economically sustainable.
For me, high speed and low speed are both OK. I take longer rides that get me out onto the trunk roads where people drive 55+, but they usually give me plenty of room. What I'm not OK with is congested roads where drivers are not controlling their cars -- if someone stops suddenly, there will be a crash.
The city is gradually adding bike lanes on the more congested main roads when there isn't a good alternative. They're also designating some side roads as "bike boulevards" with "traffic calming" features that effectively discourage cars.
A way of planning for bike paths is if bike traffic gets heavy enough on a road, then set aside a portion of that road for bikes and leave the rest for cars.
Edit: phone auto-"correct"
Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities (<= 250000 inhabitants), unless there's a lot of planning and investments done.
Paradoxically, shopping associations were initially strongly opposed to implementing car-less downtown plans. Only to reckon later how wrong they were.
If I recall correctly, car-less policies were imported from Aarhus and Aalborg, where majors were experimenting with turning some main streets into pedestrian only by the late 1980s.
It's also interesting to note that both Aalborg and Oviedo tend to rank very highly in a few quality of life EU metrics [1]. I know both, and they are pretty fantastic places to work and live in. Everything is within short walking distance.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/studies...
Many American and British cities fail in this regard due to excessively sparse housing. But, for example, I found downtown DC & Arlington very walkable and nice.
It's like being in the airport concourse with those electric golf cars racing between the pedestrians with their interminable annoying beeping.
You are right about the "easy" part, but it can definitely be done. In fact that's what Tokyo feels like, and it's the largest city/metro area in the world, with 38 million residents.
If people don't have cars, parking won't be a problem, and walking from one store to another rather than paying for a taxi would become preferable. Then more people would have the awful experience of walking half a mile through a giant paved parking lot which would motivate people to change it.
Check out strongtowns.org, a non-profit that explores this EXACT phenomena and how it happened.
Basically, infrastructure == progress to a LOT of poorly informed communities who don't bother factoring in maintenance costs or look at the actual economics of building huge roads through their main street.
Throw in a dash of pork-barrel spending and lobbying to secure funding to build more roads for the hell of it and you have the US's current mad-max roads-to-fucking-nowhere infrastructure nightmare. It was all a big experiment where everyone but the guys getting paid to build the roads lost.
The first generation of suburbs is already failing as they become choked by the next generation of suburbs. Ferguson, MO was once a rich suburb of St. Louis. The suburbs of Nassau County, one of the richest US counties by median income, have been under state fiscal control since 2000.
It is far less efficient if you have a partner, children, pets, and like having peace and quiet. You know, things that make you happy.
In fact, suburbs can be some of the most limiting places for kids. Every activity needs a driver, so until you get a license you need a chaperone. You mostly can't walk to the shops, or the park, or your friend's house, with limited exceptions. And biking and walking are out of the question if you have to navigate a main suburban arterial to get there. As a parent your choices are to trap them in the house or spend your precious time driving your kids everywhere.
In America, a city is a place where cars drive to get from business A to business B. People enter the equation only as a necessary side-effect. But fuck you if you're a pedestrian or don't have a car.
In Europe, cities exist for people. Streets are built with people in mind, businesses are placed with people in mind, infrastructure is built with people in mind.
I grew up in Europe, and the entire city was "mine" as a teenager - I could go anywhere, cheaply, quickly, and never needed a driver's license. I shopped for groceries, paid bills, hung out with friends, went to school - everything was within walking distance or a short bus ride away.
Here - I don't know how kids do it. To rely on parents to drive you to - where - shopping malls???? - to "hang out" or be doomed to watch tv/play video games all day - I'm so glad that was not my child-hood - I really think it's one reason I'm not on various anti-depressants, nor obese, nor anti-social.
I really wish someone would do a study that looked at the number of depressed/anti-social/about-to-go-on-a-shooting-spree people in a country whose only interaction with other human beings is to say "good how are you" at the clerk at the grocery aisle check-out lane or to curse at other people behind the wheel of their car while getting there.
I really believe (no evidence, just belief) that if cities in America didn't make you stressed out just for trying to get from place A to place B, or putting your life in danger by having to drive, we'd see a lot fewer problems - a lot fewer.
Here's a photo https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/09/F141003...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/sep/16/car-fr... https://www.brussels.be/mobility-week-and-car-free-sunday-20...
"Outside" has become synonymous with car traffic, which is why children playing on the road feels so refreshing
That's why I wore shoes or rode a bike when I played in the streets.
I grew up in places with small yards and no parks nearby. The street is where we'd ride our bikes, have water balloon fights, play roller hockey, etc.
Yet, it was right in front of my house, so I could use the bathroom, get a snack and remained under the watchful eye of my mother, unlike, say, some distant park with a proper baseball field.
Fun fact: today is Yom Kippur.
People often complain about hostile or "anti-human" architecture [1], but those are silly details. The sad tragedy is building the whole city around the needs of cars.
The gap between inattentiveness and recklessness has been closed. Even considering improved braking, there was simply more margin for error back when speeds were naturally lower.
I know cars have always been dangerous to pedestrians. But there were other factors at play, like drunk driving being nearly ubiquitous.
[1] The left A-pillar in my Honda CRV has just the right size and placement that it blocks the far left-hand corner of the intersection from view. A pedestrian about to cross the street is invisible to me unless I physically lean over or have already entered the intersection.
Pedestrian safety is a big consideration with modern cars, as it's a legal requirement in most countries. Most of the homogeneity in modern car design is due to these regulations -- low hoodlines are rare because there needs to be a buffer between the engine and the hood; the hood can't extend all the way to the grill because the edge causes excessive injuries; and the front ends of cars have a weird bulge because pedestrians struck should be tossed to the side of the car to prevent them from being run over.
That's not even getting into automatic braking systems or backup cameras.
In contrast, a 65 Toronado looks designed to cause the maximum amount of damage to any person you run over.
That said, point taken. And those mitigations are based on real-world data, not my anecdotes. And, of course, nothing prevents us from having the best of both worlds--safer cars and safer streets. I was just thinking that streets are so stupidly designed today because, once upon a time, the same configurations may not have been as stupid. (I know that one reason SF streets are so wide, especially in the Western part of the city, is because they were designed to accommodate street cars and cars simultaneously.)
[1] Automatic braking is a huge deal but its far from pervasive. The last time I went car shopping three years ago, it was still an expensive option for both the Honda CRV and Mercedes GLC we were looking at. My lease is almost up and I think it'll be standard on the same model CRV. Even when it becomes standard industry-wide it'll be many years before I'd factor it into my mental calculus as a pedestrian. Less well-off drivers in older cars spend a disproportionate amount of time on the streets simply because of the economics (e.g. often live far outside the city because of housing costs, and drive into the city because neither their homes nor jobs are conveniently located to mass transit).
No place for busses. Our attempt at public transit was a slow tram that runs up and down main street through dozens of intersections, pushing any hapless motorist not expecting a train on the fucking road it encounters out of the way.
So when rice closes off the gates, it is like a little paradise. I disagree that it's "not unique," I can't think of a single other place in tbe entirety of Houston (a city so wide that it can take two hours to drive across if you go corner to corner, in non-rush-hour) where you get to experience that.
When I say it's "not unique" I'm acknowledging there are other gated communities with low traffic. The closest one I can think of to Rice is in Montrose on Courtland Place. If you ever went to KPFT on Lovett and noticed a big wall where Lovett ends that's the back side of their little community. Look on street view or satellite view of Google maps at Bagby and Courtland Place to see what I mean.
Also the first neighborhood I listed is separate and distinct from the Rice University campus. It shares a border but it's not part of their land holdings: all the homes are privately owned.
Actually, I live in San Francisco and the "downtowns" of each neighborhood do allow kids some freedom away from their parents (e.g. to dart in and out of stores and restaurants without waiting for the parent), but it's limited to a single block unless you want to risk being run over. Hit-and-runs occur here regularly, unfortunately, because the city is just barely pedestrian friendly enough that pedestrians feel comfortable, but not friendly enough that cars are actually forced to slow down (e.g. streets too wide). If car and pedestrian are not both carefully paying attention, accidents happen.
[1] My wife doesn't like theme parks. But where she's from you never let kids out of sight, regardless, so they offer little respite for her.
There's not much housing around the historic area, so nearly everyone drives in and parks in one of the parking lots surrounding it. Then they spend a few hours pretending like they live in this walkable, historic town, maybe they visit the Mission, then it's back into the car and the suburbs.
Suburbs, much reviled here, are the answer to all of the density problems that people are complaining about. Mass transit works with commuter rail. There's no argument except prestige to stay in the city.
urban sprawl? What does that commute time look like, particularly for the poor?
They do exist in some places. I've seen them and have visited friends living there. Cul de sacs in subdivisions still on the city periphery, predominately Mormon neighborhoods in Utah where people expect kids to dart into the street, or tony gated communities. But they're just not as common. And in any event, even when they can, kids these days don't spend much time outdoors. In places where I did (and kids still can) spend all day roaming around in the woods or riding their bikes across town, today's kids spend all day playing video games or chatting online. Even if I my kid chose to hang outside, he'd be playing alone much of the time.
As someone else mentioned on HN a couple of years ago, you can optimize for a kids ability to play in the streets when he's < 10 years old. Or you can optimize for a 10+ year old to have the freedom to get around an entire city by himself. These days you can't have both, unfortunately, whereas once upon a time the city offered both (when kids could play in the street because drivers and cars were less threatening).
Times are different. I don't dislike the suburbs, I just don't think they're sustainable. Most often suburbs deteriorate quickly within a decade or two. The qualities that make them livable disappear once they're subsumed by a new ring of suburbs, bringing increased cross traffic and a new generation of childless homeowners.
This doesn't sound like the typical American suburban experience, and I think what you are describing is almost heading in the direction of the best existing solution for non-city living, which is the "village" style denser towns that you see in Europe. The idea basically being that you turn a fairly evenly distributed suburban population into one that clusters around small to medium sized town centers that are walkable and bikable, but contain and are surrounded by large areas of communal countryside and green space.
It necessitates a sacrifice in lot size (and potentially house size), but in return you get a quiet, safe, traversable town with plentiful access to the countryside, and it also helps immensely with things like logistics, infrastructure (electricity/gas/internet in the suburbs is a nightmare), and, potentially most importantly, transportation, since a strong commuter rail system can actually service that sort of layout effectively.
Many if not would still describe this as a suburb. There are definitely places (I'm aware of ones in the North East) that follow this model that are called suburbs. When people complain about suburbs, they are complaining about the model that dominates the US, not the concept of a less dense population area surrounding a metropolis.
This urban-centric thinking is odd to me. I do not want to live so far away from the natural phenomenon of earth, and I think it is unhealthy that so many want to push that lifestyle on everyone. It rings absolutely hollow to me to have effortless transport to a thousand places all manmade, and mostly devoid of non-domesticated plant and animal life.
This is deep and very quotable. It's one of the things I love the most about living outside the USA, when I'm able to do so-- not relying on my car to get literally everywhere. My happiness and quality of life feel so much higher. I know for sure it affects my waist line.
To obtain this freedom you must : 1. Get a license and learn to drive 2. Buy or lease a large, rarely utilised machine 3. Keep it maintained 4. Keep it fuelled 5. Ensure your tax dollars are spent on enormous infrastructure projects 6. Continue paying for the maintenance of said infrastructure 7. Undergo the significant risk of getting in a vehicle, and impose higher risks on all those around you 8. Pollute the air around you with fumes 9. Warp the development of all living spaces around you to suit your convenience, regardless of cost or benefit
Your freedom sounds like my tyranny.
2. You can get a good reliable used car for under $1000 easily, and I use mine every day
3. Not a big deal
4. 3
5. I don't mind paying taxes for infrastructure
6. 5
7. Acceptable risk for the massive benefit to me
8. Efficiency is constantly improving and there are no emissions from an EV
9. How is that any different from how we shape the landscape for our own benefit in every other way?
That is a ridiculous cost to just throw on poor people. And this is assuming a poor person has a full time job with no dependents, and has no other competing concerns for money.
This is of course, also assuming that they didn't get a subprime auto loan to get that car in the first place. Subprime auto defaults are increasing: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-02/never-min...
I go there quite often and would like to see this for myself. Especially the area where no cars are allowed.
Cheers
https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/
The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy:
https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-...
I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedestrian district plans need to be considered carefully, else they backfire.
When I go downtown, I usually don’t park on Fayetteville, I usually park a few blocks away and walk.
All of which is in TFA[1] the person you're replying to linked
[1] https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-...
I'm not sure if it's what you intended but implying the whole thing is from 1977 is misleading.
Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly?
(The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?)
- Burlington is the biggest city in VT, and being on Lake Champlain and relatively close to the best ski areas in the state, it attracts a lot of tourists year round
- A ton of local businesses downtown, urban/residential neighborhoods are also very close
- A fair amount of parking (multiple parking garages, nearby on-street parking and parking lots)
- There's City Hall Park, and the town promotes the 'culture', e.g. allowing street vendors and performers, and with the recentish ban on smoking, it's pushed most of the bums into the alleys/side streets
So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.
This is not the best example but the first to pop to mind- compare to Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, which seems to be doing well:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0180565,-105.2792529,3a,75y,...
Which, just skimming, looks to be laid out similar to Church Street.
Also, let's not overstate the differences. The actual pedestrian mall on Pearl is just a few blocks long. And Fayetteville in Raleigh these days, while not car-free, is part of a very walkable area of downtown Raleigh with lots of restaurants, a few hotels, some shops, new condo construction, some major businesses, the convention center, government offices, etc.
They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise.
Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolutely a win.
The city center closed part of the main street to cars when a four story enclosed mall of boutique stores was built. Within five years most of the mall and nearby stores were dying.
This was partly due to the growth of a pair of large enclosed malls 5 miles away which sucked business elsewhere. But I think most of the problem was that shoppers don't wants to walk outdoors in the long Michigan Winter. They needed to somehow enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize peoples' exposure to the elements, but that wasn't in the budget.
First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only.
https://www.streifzugmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AM...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Vienna%2...
I'm looking forward to more streets getting closed off to cars. Way too much space is reserved for cars already.
Proximity to mass transit and having density that already discourages driving helps.
Still, this was a pretty dead place at night. In 2008, I would go to one of the two bars there and it would be a literal ghost town, with stores boarded up with metal gates and such- it looked almost post-apocalyptic. It was a little better from 2011-2014, but still it was a quiet area at night.
After the pedestrian plaza was put in, the amount of foot traffic increased ten fold, particularly during the day when it was a heavily traffic-ed street. This brought in a new wave of bars and restaurants to the area, and its now a destination on its own, filled with people nearly 24/7. In fact it has gotten so popular and become such a destination, the city is now trying to introduce ordinances to reduce noise at night.
The change was instantaneous after the pedestrian plaza was put in place.
People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
Bed-Stuy Bushwick Gowanus East New York Bronx Inwood
However this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even within the context of a single street - for this to make sense. If you had electric scooters or something though...
We have 2 local cities that made themselves bike friendly. Property values are going up in that area.
However, the people living there were already 10%ers.
Its cool to see lots of bike lanes and walkers, but they also managed to price the people that cant afford cars out.
However, it's also likely they will want this nice life in more than just their area and will push for that over time.
Americans tend to live in detached single family homes.
Americans tend to want space between themselves and their neighbors.
Americans do not see their cars as liabilities.
Most people don't live in SF/NYC and/or don't read StrongTowns
Replacing American suburbia would cost $100 Trillion dollars. More suburbia is being created every day, far outpacing investment in "New Urbanism".
In America, when your city/suburb becomes blighted, you can move.
That is nuts.
That means a plumber, electrician, home appliance deliveryman, mover, etc. can only handle one job requiring a vehicle per day. He will have to charge 3-4 times more for his services than someone working in an area where it's feasible to finish 3-4 jobs in a workday. The costs are of course passed on to the customers. Is their car-less life worth living in a pigsty that they can't fix up because laws force contractors to charge exorbitant fees?
That means any business will want a dedicated vehicle to haul what they need in the 6-8 am window. This is not just grossly economically inefficient (no outsourcing delivery to third parties), it results in more vehicles sitting idle during the day, using up parking space!
And that means moving is a nightmare. Moving a two-bedroom apartment worth of stuff into or out of a truck is, realistically, at least a four hour job. That means a cross-town move that could be done in one workday with sane laws will take at least four workdays (two to load the truck, two to unload) in your crazy UK town. Imagine the costs. How is it moral for you to shackle your people to the land by making relocation unaffordable?
https://www.eco-business.com/news/how-a-city-in-spain-got-ri...
"In fact, in most streets there are no physical barriers to keep the cars out. Vehicles making deliveries or locals heading to private garages can still circulate in most places.
“What we did is to create loops to keep people from driving through the city,” Lores explains. “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
The goal of this strategy, which is complemented by severe parking restrictions in all of the central area, is to get rid of what Pontevedra officials call “unnecessary traffic”.
The 6-8am window is for large deliveries. There is normally a retractable barrier for emergency usage (police/ambulance etc) and for minimal day access (I don't know how this is managed, but I have seen vehicles have to turn around and leave, where others, normally with a business inside get access).
Another common way is to have a central pedestrian only section, but with vehicle access through the 'back streets' behind. The pedestrian street is normally a great deal larger than the (often one way) back streets, and again has retractable bollards for maintenance, event vehicles and emergency vehicles. These back streets also give access to underground/aboveground parking for residents in flats. I would love to see this model used to some extent in residential areas. Some of my favorite times are when a street is closed to traffic for a street party.
In practice it works very well, at least in a large number of towns and cities in the UK. It's about finding the correct roads and spaces to limit and disallow motor vehicles on.
I live in a large apartment development in Manhattan that is pedestrian-friendly and decidedly vehicle-unfriendly. You can't drive a car to the front of my building. And yet it works, very well.
I moved in with my girlfriend recently. You know how that worked? The movers she hired drove as near as possible, and simply pushed her stuff on dollies the rest of the way to the building. No big deal. Yeah, it took a little bit longer, but nowhere near as bad as the 4-day move you're hyperbolically claiming. And that side of the move was actually better than the other side, since she was moving out of a fourth floor walkup. Even though the truck could park almost directly in front of that building, it turns out it's harder to carry stuff down many flights of stairs than it is to push it on wheels across a flat surface and then up an elevator.
I moved from another building within my complex, and I accomplished my entire move simply by pushing my stuff on a dolly, without even having to hire movers. I've never before had a vehicle-less move even be an option, but it was in this situation.
As for repairmen, you know how they work? They get around on bicycles. You can carry a surprising amount of stuff on a bicycle, including all the tools you'd need for >95% of repairs. The plumbers ride around on bikes with a toolbox, plungers, and a snake, for example. For appliance delivery, they use tiny little vehicles that are basically a pick-up truck version of a golf cart. These vehicles don't go fast and the drivers yield to pedestrians, and you see them on pedestrian paths (and don't feel unsafe about it).
Every problem that you're bringing up is already solved in the many different areas that are pedestrianized and prohibit vehicle traffic. It's a failure of imagination to think that these problems are unsolvable. When your city is dense enough, a plumber/electrician can easily support him/herself on just jobs that are within a 10 minute walking radius, with the tools that can be pushed on a handcart or fit on a bicycle. Vehicles aren't necessary. It's actually more efficient for these professions, because in the suburbs it's typical to drive for up to an hour to get to a jobsite! So much wasted time spent just getting somewhere!
It's a lot less impressive when you realize that they just banned cars from the area that was optimized for foot traffic anyway. Good on them for not trying to go to far and force people to walk/bike in areas designed for cars.
>"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges."
Tangent: This is probably the most European quote ever. Roman senators, medieval lords, members of parliament, Napoleon, the Kaiser, etc, etc. could have all said this.
>And the same shopkeepers who complain are the ones who have survived in spite of the crisis
Surviving in spite of the crisis does not make the crisis fun or necessary. It took a lot of boarded up shops before my city took away the bike lanes and put back the on-street parking (no, the failed businesses did not coincide with the recession if anyone was wondering). You gotta do what works even if it's not what fits your political objectives. If an area of the city was designed for pedestrians that's probably what will work best there. If an area of the city was designed for cars then that's probably what will work best there. It's a disservice to taxpayers to use their money to jam a square peg in a round hole or vise-versa.
>The works were all financed locally and received no aid from regional or central government.
Good on them for not asking for a handout.
There's nothing European about it, despite the fantasy of Europe being comfortable with dictatorships. Driving a car is also a privilege in the US - try driving one without your state-sanctioned license to do so and you will discover that.
By the way, Members of Parliament are democratically elected so I am not sure how they fit in with the rest of the motley crew.
Visiting LA this summer, I knew I was in for a car heavy metropolis but this... I can't understand why people waste so much time of their precious life (usually alone which also greatly worsen the problem) - locked in a car.
Coming to the topic of the autonomous car revolution, which I frankly do not understand. Sometimes it feels like the ambition is to end up as the humans in WALL-E. What kind of life is that?
Ps. Coming from Europe, I crossed US by bicycle a few years ago, from NY to US. People say it's a country to be seen through a car, but I argue it's to be seen on a bike.
I also recently visited LA.....
Most people I know from smaller cities in Poland own cars or would love to own a car but simply cannot afford it as gas is really expensive, so are cars compared to incomes. When I visited I rented a car which allowed me to see so many things all over the country. I would not able to visit so many locations without a car.
Same goes for LA, renting a car allowed me to travel from LA to San Diego on a relatively short trip.
In NY over 50% households are car-free. In Chicago about 30% of households are car-free. People travel to cities for various reasons, often they don't do it daily.
My wife traveled to school by train in city of chicago for one year, then she switched to driving her car, she saved a lot of time on her commute, and didn't have to deal with weirdos on the trains at night.
Cars are here to stay. Some people drive less by utilizing services like amazon but then amazon needs to deliver packages, but, I guess that still minimizes fuel consumption as things are delivered in a more efficient way.
But even dense populated cities like SF dont have a pedestrian zone. It is one of the rare things I miss quality of life wise.
The other week I walked around my neighborhood in Guadalajara to do some errands. I got my knives sharpened, picked up my repaired shoes from the cobbler, some fried pumpkin seeds from the seed guy, some meat from the butcher, and then some tacos of course. All within two blocks.
In a capital, I didn't do a detour on my way home to get a good bread, as it would add 15 minutes to a way home. Here it's a pleasant walk behind a corner.
This strikes me as the fundamental issue.
In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximation. In unhealthy societies legal rights are often cold comfort.
In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.
I take slight issue with that - for example, what prohibition on males was there when women were given the right to vote? I suppose one could argue the male vote was diluted but realistically no pain would be felt.
I say this because oftentimes for social services arguments, conservatives will ask me "well who's gonna pay for it," which I can often answer with "literally nobody. You are generating property value for yourself by housing homeless / increasing the value of your currency by educating disenfranchised youth / whatever."
Not only do they want to drive wherever they want but they seem to feel entitled to take out their frustration on anyone they want. The noise pollution that invariably accompanies traffic seems to really only penalize pedestrians, the very people who aren't contributing to the traffic problems.
In reality, it's scary to walk to whole foods to get lunch at times. Cars NEVER yield to crosswalks or pedestrians. It's so bad they have flashing LED's on the stop signs in some areas.
The domain would be beautiful if parking garages were on the exterior and everyone had to walk in. Imagine being able to walk to shops, work and dining without worrying about getting plowed down by an F150 with a "thank god for our snipers" sticker on the back.
In fact, the best couple of days at this area are the art walk days but its been a while since I've seen those. For the artwalk days, they close the streets and it's like a magic little city of everyone breathing easier, enjoying some quiet serenity and kids walking around without parents needing 100% attention.
For the price they demand to live and lease space here, it would seem serenity and peacefulness would be the best thing they could do! (and there was plenty of land at one point for exterior garages... now its just a mad dash for people to find spots across the different garages which are all too small for the big trucks texans love)
Meanwhile, law enforcement is quick to sit on the highway catching those going with the flow of traffic over the speed limit, or quick to over-police non-violent drug offenses. So sad to see enforcement of the rules of the road take a back seat, especially when it comes to pedestrians, whose chosen mode of transport is beneficial and should be encouraged.
This seems to be the key point why it works.
you can walk from side to side of Paris in a tad more than one hour with a good rhythm, and two hours if you take it normally.
So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
Drop into street view in the city centre and have a look around. It's not a village.
In my country villages are very often https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement , going on for kilometers along some road, with farming land on both sides.
Small to medium cities (< 100 000 people) are often very dense because they're mostly made out of commieblocks or old tenament houses.
It's much easier to live without a car in a city.
BTW: this village goes on for 20 km. It has 6000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja
For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)
Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.
Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.
Interestingly, while Amsterdam's historic inner city is fully open to cars, you don't really see much of them - in part because it's just not practical, in part because parking is very expensive.
1) that lifestyle is vastly subsidized by economic activity generated in the cities
2) the biggest reason cities are unpleasant is (surprise) the high density of car traffic and noise!
The mass distribution of personal cars is going to go down as the greatest mistake in societal development.
I'm living in one of the closes villages around Pontevedra, I'm heabilly use the city, and I'm doing some remote job for an SF startup.
If you have questions, I'm happy to help and provide feedback.
What do you do when you have to buy a few boxes of beer for a party that are too heavy to carry?
How do emergency services work?
The city that has banned the cars is the city centre, but is a round island, so in 10-25 min walk, there are parking slots, where you can drive from.
2) Shopping trolley, instead of buying a lot one day, you ended that each day you pick up a few things. (And this is great, 15 min day walking)
3) All the emergency services can go to the city centre, so cars are banned, but if you have an event or emergency cars can get into, here is the common sense rule.
And there is a benefit here, kids are in the street, and due a lot of kids in the street, that moves the street from unsafe, to full of #know people, that make things super safe.
I think Rewe (a supermarket chain) is doing something like this in (parts of) Germany; but I believe they use gas-driven cars.
Is there something like that in your city?
For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses, you just need to deploy enough of them with a good rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).
Van and trucks can enter the city the first time in the morning, so things are ok, and there are no problems for that.
The city itself is a "round island", so cars can go close to the estuary and be close to the city, so get into city center takes less than 15 minutes.
Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt.
For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from ideal.
Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
I guess if the only industries in your city are white collar or tourism it's fine.
Better to just not allow noncommercial vehicles during certain times.
>For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from idea
TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk.
Disclaimer, my father is a deliveryman for restaurants.
> Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$).
Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
For white-collar, these entry areas, allow delivers to walk less than 5 min, so it's ok.
Is not walk/no-walk, the city did awesome to allow entry zones and make the walking culture for all of us.
I should have said industrial foodservice. Are there no schools, hotels, etc. in the city center? Do catering services not deliver lunches to the city center?
>Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter.
Um, yes, you still have skilled trades. These are the people installing new light fixtures in office buildings and replacing the blower motor for a building's HVAC. Not being able to do diagnostic work and then send someone around later in the day to actually perform repairs is like getting shot in the foot to any business that does repair work.
I support not allowing commuter traffic in city centers but not allowing commercial vehicle traffic seems like needlessly cutting the clock cycle of every part of the economy that deals with physical goods by a factor two or three.
It's an interesting contrast to banning cars and essentially banning walking
I've always imagined a modern city with no cars, but I never knew that anyone actually had the balls to make this a reality. Kudos to this Spanish city! You can try to argue that the specifics of this city make it more amenable to being car-free, but I think that if there was enough desire, it would work anywhere. Just think if everyone paid their monthly car loan/lease into the public transportation system how incredibly functional it could be.
I base a lot of my existence around avoiding cars and living in places where I can have a pleasant walk without having to deal with traffic. To the point where I recently moved from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon because Portland is a much more pedestrian friendly city. And it shows. You walk around the city and it's actually alive and working.
In Portland, people don't have to have their children on leashes because every street isn't a 4 lane highway with constant traffic that is disrespectful to people's space. People are strolling down the streets and wandering into businesses. In Portland drivers slow down and wave you across the street instead of swerving around you at 40 miles an hour.
In Chicago a common occurrence was for a car to decide to make a red light, so they would make a turn into a crowd of pedestrians who are crossing the street and "shoot the gap" without slowing down, with maybe 3 feet of clearance on either side. People would open doors without a second thought and door bikers. Trucks would make dangerous turns into bikers and frequently kill them ( A young woman was recently killed this way, and I once had to jump off of my bike and drag it onto the sidewalk to avoid being run over ).
Cars drivers seem to enter this "magic circle" where it's fine to do dumb and extremely dangerous things because you are driving. When you are in a car, all behavior is acceptable.
Decide to teach the biker a lesson by turning into them? They won't charge you with anything.
Swerve into a crowd of pedestrians? It's fine normal behavior.
Make a blind turn into an alley and have to slam on the breaks to avoid running into a pedestrian? Totally A-OK chief! Great work!
As has been pointed out elsewhere, a lot of European cities do not have this problem. When visiting France, I went to the city of Strasbourg where they have a very nice little "park and ride" system where you park your fume-spewing, space-taking machine and park it in the PARKING AREA, instead of letting you drag it into their beautiful city.
strongtowns.org has a lot of great information about how the US road infrastructure is, to put it bluntly, a dumb and bad experiment that has failed.
I guess you are not alone. Given a certain location, the singlemost important indicator of your house price is the amount of cars driving by each day.
A factor of 3 in my immediate neighborhood:
$15k per m^2 in a cul de sac vs. only a 100 meters apart $5k per m^2 next to a 4-lane road with quite some traffic.
I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it.
That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink.
Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.
First time I visit there made me wonder why not all towns aren't pedestrian like this. I mean most towns have nice sidewalks and are walkable but why not just banning cars. In addition to having less noise I can imagine plenty of other benefits.
> [La Cumbrecita] is completely pedestrian and reminiscent of the small German towns of the fifteenth century. One can hike up through the town (and then down) to the waterfall, a truly paradisiacal experience.
I've always loved the idea of being able to live in a car-free city, but never quite understood how certain things would work, including garbage collection, deliveries, and emergency services, without vehicular traffic.
Or do they make exceptions for all of those? Does anyone know?
https://beltline.org/about/the-atlanta-beltline-project/atla...
The Atlanta belt-line is mostly being built on top of old light rail line around the city. The idea, as I understand it, is to provide a pedestrian and (unfortunately) cyclists only pathway that connects many of the notable places around the city. On this pathway, there already exists a large amount of beltline and road accessible shopping/restaurants/bars. There are plans to build a large amount similarly accessible housing on the beltline as well.
I assert that this strategy is a better alternative than closing off convex sections for cities similar to Atlanta. What would define a city similar to Atlanta? One that is not very dense, with some undeveloped or neglected land in urban areas, and whose centers of social activity are decentralized. By saying the centers of social activity are decentralized, I mean to say that the major parks, stadiums, shopping developments, chic neighborhoods, and so on, are dispersed around a few mile radius of downtown. Shutting of any two square mile area to car traffic would fail to capture more than a few of these places, and cause worse traffic problems elsewhere, which is costly regardless of how you approach it.
There are some downsides to the beltline of course, mainly its cost, but you get the same opportunity for a pedestrian urban experience, without overtly turning it into a political battle.
http://sfrecpark.org/permits-and-reservations/special-events...
https://odis.homeaway.com/odis/destination/2ee03d5b-c981-44d...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/La...
http://theworldisurban.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Elevat...
It's only a problem because you decide things has to be exactly like they are. But with other constraints the society would have landed on an other configuration.
What is your solution for your economy when BOTH decide to relocate to an administrative region that DOESN'T ban cars?
I've considered other places to live in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I found that used Japanese sports cars (I own several) were all prohibitively expensive to import/register in each. The crazy-low "total cost of ownership" for automobiles is one of several reasons that Japan is my primary base of operations/residence.
For example a shopping street where no cars are allowed could have parking lots at the back of the shops. So trucks can supply the shops and customers can pickup large goods with their car.
Another method is what we call in Dutch a 'Cauliflower-neighbourhood'. The closer a road comes to the place were people live, the smaller they become. And speed limits will go down as well. The limits most of the time go from 50km/h to 30km/h to 15 or even 5km/h.
Anyways, from that article, if you have a change in a city's government, change is a lot more likely to happen. If only there were some time-limitations on mayor posts and the council.
If you want people to walk more, make the city actually walk friendly, even a short walk from my apartment to the MTR station is annoying; people just randomly walk anywhere, making it impossible to enjoy walking. There's aircons leaking constantly, little newspaper stands blocking the sideways.
I really enjoy walking, but in HK it's really not that fun.
A lot of Americans think that they should be able to drive and park their car when and where ever they want. This mentality needs to change if we want to continue to grow our cities sustainably.
Our zoning is such that those streets close at night, and I wouldn't recommend them in the late hours before they are officially closed.
I love this guy, seeing him so misunderstood makes me sad.
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
If your interested by this article you might enjoy the book 'happy city'. It's a bit one sided but looks at how cars have changed cities, and how changes can be made to make them happier.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland#Road_restrictions
- Truck delivery to businesses such as large stores/shopping malls
- Ambulance, police car services
- Disabled/old people wanting to move around
If you allow any or all of above, you still need roads for vehicles only, traffic lights etc, right?
We are more social and more relaxed now, and I swear it’s because we can bike to all the places we would have driven, like restaurants, movie theaters and grocery stores.
Ditching the car has been a very positive experience.
I'm reminded of the Isle of Sark. I thought it must be bigger but wiki says it's only 5,000 sq m.
- unwind after work
- get exercise
- get outside
- time to think
You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.
This entire thread is predicated on building cities for young single men
Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing.
But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society.
I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable.
Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??).
I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon.
Citation needed, I know. There’s a relevant article about this phenomenon out there somewhere, if I can find it I’ll post a link.
I used to do 15+15 km bike ride to work and back almost every day for 9 months out of the year. Sadly I can't do that any more as I moved farther away from work.
There might be days of bad weather where other means of transportation is more convenient, but that's the case all year around.
For motorcycles/scooters the season is shorter because you can't get (affordable) insurance.
Biking in the winter is fine too, as long as there's no snow (and the snow is usually only 1-2 months, depending on the location).
And some people do drive in the winter too (but that is harder and most don't).
Arguably many people seem to consider their car as a self-propelled living room, fully equipped with sofa and entertainment system.
In the past five years there was one day when I couldn't cycle to work due to black ice covering most of the roads, and even that resolved itself in the afternoon. Snow just means you need a bit more dexterity than usual.
As for comfort; proper clothing means you are pretty much comfortable most of the time.
The ultimate irony of the point attempted to be made is that people don't drive when ice or snow cover on the road (or suck at it, take undue risks, fail to, and ram into curbs/cars/people).
What's more, in bad weather people (who have the option to choose between public transportation and their own vehicles) tend to choose cars more often because public transit has a habit of becoming increasingly unreliable, especially due to winter conditions, even though such conditions can be reasonably expected for 6 months a year.
The odd thing about this is how the biking paths around here (a city 60N) still remain relatively empty for a long time in the winter. It almost confuses me, but not really :-)
I know. I expected to get this kind of responses. It shows how little empathy this site has for other (older, overworked, with 3 kids, pregnant, ...) people that are just a little different than they are.
Saying "countries" is funny. It's varying wildly within a country, even a small one. E.g. my home city of Hradec Králové is built on a completely flat area with mild weather, so of course everyone bikes almost the whole year, but Prague is built on a series of steep hills and enjoys rougher weather, so while you see people biking here, most people don't.
I ride a fixed gear In winter, with the same tires I use in summer. A lot of people are on mountain bikes. Some people are on fatbikes, but that's overkill for basic commuting.
Sure, on rainy or super cold days it's not like it's as comfortable as a car but you'd have to pay me to drive a car around Paris or any big european city at rush hour.
The coming droughts will affect agriculture, but not the cities.
Where did you get this idea?
Much of the this was spurred by the aerospace and oil industries.
Even in LA itself, the urban heat island effect is enough that many homes have A/C.
That's the thing, often in the US I felt very boxed into a place, simply because I couldn't just do a Cartman and 'go home' (or someplace else).
Reminder: originally one (Roman) mile was a measure of thousand paces, while a Dutch, Russian and such miles were related to an hour of marching. (later rescaled in feet)
That said, it's not the US vs. everywhere else. For example, the UK has lots of charming little villages where you can walk to the pub and a few stores. Once you get out of the village though, some public footpaths notwithstanding, you're mostly talking very narrow roads with no shoulders, much less sidewalks, and no real way to walk off the road.
This is almost exactly the situation described by Bill Bryson in I'm a Stranger Here Myself. I believe he wanted to visit the shops across the street while his wife was at a mall and there was effectively no way to get there without a car.
I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0].
Musk's idea basically focuses on moving cars underground if I understood correctly. It should focus on moving most of the public transport underground and simply "decommissioning" some of the road infrastructure from the surface.
A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city,
no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels).
Tunnels are great if you plan on connecting a few hubs spread around a city. From there you can use the most efficient surface transportation available. A bike, a bus, a tram, even on foot.
One lesson that most city planners learned in time is that the more infrastructure you build for cars, the more cars you'll have clogging it. The solution is o discourage the reliance on cars in cities and it worked every time it was applied.
That's not quite true: by completely splitting car traffic and pedestrian traffic on different levels, you can create a city which is much denser and easier to walk because you don't need large car streets, and at the bottom you don't need pedestrian affordances alongside car traffic. Plus by banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city: it's usually easier to walk, bike or take public transport than go to the bottom, get into your car, drive, park over there and go back up.
Louvain la Neuve works on that model, the city is built on a huge concrete slab and entirely pedestrian, with car traffic and parkings underslab.
I will point out the fact that according to Wikipedia Louvain la Neuve has ~30.000 inhabitants and ~30 square Km (12.5 sq mi). It is also 2Km on the longest side. How do you see this applied to New York or London, cities that need it the most?
And why is it better to still spend billions moving infrastructure underground instead of shrinking what's already available to the point where pedestrians get the vast majority of space and the infrastructure only serves the needs of public services?
> banning car traffic far away you disincensise car traffic within the city
I don't know what "far away" means but in reality drivers still go out of their way to drive the car. Think about this: they are willing to spend hours in traffic jams. You think an elevator ride to level -4 will discourage them?
P.S. I'm using info from BC [0] and their vision on this looks a lot like "let have the same traffic as today but on many levels of tunnels". Only the company drilling the tunnels walks away happy. You just pay a crapload of money to hide some of the issues of urban traffic.
Downside is that the bar is pricey and touristy, and most of the beers seem to be commercial. We were in this bar in Bruges last winter, it has 300 kinds of beer and all from small breweries. If a brewery is acquired by a big company, they don't serve it anymore. They also have almost no tourists there, which is refreshing for Bruges. I'll try and find what it's called.
Edit: The Bruges bar is called Le Trappiste [3]. Apparently, it's well advertised in touristic literature. They even have a website.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,75y,55.7... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,28.6y,20... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.056575,3.7252618,3a,51.1y,22... [3] https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g188671-d42950...
Louvain La Neuve (in french-speaking belgium) has an interesting take on this: the entire city is on a concrete slab, topside is entirely pedestrian, and underslab hosts car streets and parkings.
It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.
I don't know anyone enjoying taking the car in Berlin and one is often faster with public transport or the bike in the city center.
> rebrand itself as bicycle friendly Shocking! Political parties changing course to adapt to change in popular opinion.
(Disclaimer: I'm a relaxed driver; my experience might not hold for those who enter the full-rage mode when starting the engine)
Compare this with the pedestrian infrastructure (many bad sidewalks in the East) or bicycle with no or chaotic lanes [2]. Also when houses are build or roads are maintained, car driver concerns are always prioritized above cyclists and pedestrians [3].
[1] https://rad-spannerei.de/2015/07/14/berliner-fahrradstaffel-...
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/mediacenter/fotostrecken/berlin/...
[3] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/schild-soeren-dumpf/22966...
People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO. Ancient European cities simply were not built to accommodate cars, they don't fit.
Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.
- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.
- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...
Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.
This allows the city to "breath" a lot more and there is not so much competition for the space between cars, bikes and people.
Compare that to dense cities like London, Paris or Barcelona, and there is a lot more to fight for.
This is a good point. The leisurely stroll is practically nonexistent in my city. I'm in a more rural setting, but there is still a well-defined city hub. It just feels awkward walking down the sidewalk when people are zooming by at 35mph+.
The result is sidewalk cut offs, which is inconvenient to me as a biker. There are frequently plants starting to take over because no one cares to use the walks.
Makes sense that people gradually prefer to spend their free time with Netflix, video games, or in a gym.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/duanes-depressed_larry-mcmurtr...
Or of course, Bradbury.
Another major benefit was by the time I got home, the stress of the day was long gone. When I used to drive, the 45 minute journey of being mostly stuck in traffic meant I was more wound up when arrived home than when I left work
Oh please. Call spade a spade - you are talking about Manhattan, Dumbo or Williamsburg, Harlem and newly gentrified, serviced by subway places with white cafes and bars and restaurants loved by the lily white people working in tech or in finance. The thing is... it is a very small part of NYC. People in Queens take a car to get to a subway because it takes thirty to fourty minutes to get to it otherwise and after that it takes another hour and half to get to the place of work, but hey, who cares about Cinthia Lopez that cleans the desks on clowns working at Google that want to bike to work from their $6k/mo apartments.
You are not talking about Queens or Bronx or Bed-Stuy; you are not talking about Crown Heights or Inwood, or Washington Heights or Staten Island (it is also NYC even though people really like forgetting it).
[Peter Keating discussing whether or not he and his wife should build a country home away from the city] "Will you like commuting?" "No, I think it will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."
Washington Heights and Inwood are quite walkable and most people there commute by subway, without having to drive to it. The same goes for Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.
Nowadays, with a car, I don't mind driving for 10 minutes somewhere - it's actually often enjoyable, whereas walking for ten minutes out of necessity feels like an annoyance and a burden. I don't mind walking when I want to, like on hikes, but I certainly don't miss it being a necessity. There is a fast food place about 1.5 miles from me, which many consider walking distance, but I always take the car there and use the drive-thru even though the way there is very walkable.
The place I'm at right now is a nice compromise of usability for pedestrians and motorists, but I personally plan to someday live in a more rural area and maybe have a small farm, and I'm not bothered at all by the fact that such a place is essentially car-only.
Now that I'm in the U.S. except for one street I never casually go to a store. Everything is purposeful. In the U.S. I go to the store because I need to and it's not a chance encounter. I know where I'm going and what I want to get.
Though I hate the huge, ugly parking lots and what they represent. I tend to purchase stuff online and rarely go to a store these days. I do try to go for walks frequently but that is to get outside and I don't shop when I do this.
This is the "Vote with your wallet" at the international civic level.
It may not have been very convenient or practical in the past but it seems to be becoming an increasingly accessible option, at least for first-world people.
Move to the places whose ideals align with yours, and help them develop those, if you can't convince your current home to adopt them.
Interesting, I know that the Netherlands has such a program, might you know any other? Thanks.
Also this whole idea is known as Exit, Voice, and Reason too.
Of course, even though they have these two advantages, they will still pollute(if not electric, and even so because they must transport more mass than say a scooter, and the electricity still needs to be generated at an external power plant) and create noise pollution and they also need to use traffic lanes and road-infrastructure.
think about it....if you set up an autonomous ride sharing service, your path to profitability lies in having cars closer to prospective riders. so it makes total sense to put as many cars on the road as possible....it's not like there is a person driving who must be compensated or fed
However it's far far easier for commercial companies to invest $billions in them than it is for governments to invest $billions in the infrastructure to make cars redundant. Look at the bitching and moaning that happens whenever a new train line is proposed.
But I realized that going fast you forget what's near, and you forget what time can feel. Walking around you discover places you didn't know, you spend time in the forest, on a hill. You're not rushing to go from A to B. Maybe "time density" will have a come back.
Another point, I stopped looking for parking spots where I go. I park 1-2 miles before and walk the rest. It actually saves time.
Personally, it's hard for me to imagine not having a car, much less not having a driver's license, because so many things I do are utterly dependent on driving even if I both worked and lived in a city (neither of which is the case). I need a car to transport my boating equipment. I just booked a getaway that is utterly dependent on a rental car when I get there. I've had jobs that I would not have been able to do were I not able to drive to job sites, etc.
But you basically adapt to what you can do if you don't have a car. You do more stuff around the city and less out in the woods. Maybe you don't take vacations that require driving. Etc. For my part, there are places that require high-clearance 4WD and knowing how to use it. I just don't do those things.
But I do like being able to get away for weekends, go to national parks and wilderness areas on vacation, etc. (And I like living in at least the semi-country which wouldn't be possible without a car.)
However, knowing lots of urban folks, having to rent a car (when everyone else is also wanting to rent a car) for weekends can be a PITA, especially if said car requires special racks and the like for sport equipment.
Of course, when traveling by air for vacation, renting a car is perfectly normal which is what I do.
Not without a driver's license you won't... ;-)
Edit: quick google search says some companies might refuse you, but you should be able to pay $15 or so extra per day to get full liability and comprehensive coverage if you have no insurance of your own already. And check your credit card because some of them have limited built-in coverage you can leverage.
I still can't believe how much I can pack into a canoe, probably as much as I can into a pick-up truck. Running down a lake or river, with a canoe, is even a smoother ride than a car on a regular road.
The first passenger trains were actually designed to move people from the city to the countryside. Once they achieved regular service people figured they can commute into the city, and started to live in the country.
Now I’m back in Europe and I feel free when I’m moving around a city. I might take public transportation one way and walk back to my apartment. I can get a call from my friend in the afternoon and go out for some whisky without having to drive back to my apartment and taking a cab.
I don’t know where I’ll live in the future but I’d be happy if I didn’t need to own a car.
> One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you.
- Henry David Thoreau in Walden
That works both ways though. I feel significantly more free today owning an EV hybrid car, then I did without a car.
---
I have lost sleep worrying I would miss the only bus, or that it would be late, or that it would be full, or that it would never show, or that they could change the route without telling me, or that if the weather is bad I'll arrive soaked / freezing / dripping in sweat. Or if the other passengers are bad, I could arrived smelling bad or covered in bedbugs.
I have commuted by bus. It was a huge impact on personal freedom -- even if all conditions are ideal every trip still had to be delicately and precisely pre-planned, with exact arrival and departures, (that all stacked up, because even the shortest bus trips require one or more transfers) and they allowed travel only to specific places deemed worthy of it by other people. And of course, every trip required at least 2x to 3x longer trip times than driving.
Buses are like 70% of the stress of flying, with only 10% of the benefit.
---
A car isn't limitless freedom, it comes with plenty of responsibilities and costs of it's own. But it certainly can be a form of freedom of mobility. One that currently isn't easily reproducible in any other way.
Only being able to use a car to get around also does not seem like freedom.
Freedom is having good options - the option to use a car if that's what you have to, but also the option to bike, bus, or walk if you don't.
I've been to Houston recently - 'freedom' was about the last thing that I was feeling, as I traversed its freeway system.
Wikipedia says the area of the USA is only 3,794,100 square miles, so there aren’t very many square-mile patches to hand out compared to the size of the population.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+%2F+population+densi...
Living in a dense urban area, taking trains, walking, and biking. Goods delivered all in close vicinity. Large building with the opportunity to be more energy efficient than your single family home.
All that, I'm convinced makes the carbon footprint of the average urbanite much lower than someone who often drives miles for errands I know this must feel contrary to the intuition to those who live very close to nature
If you look around the US you will see that even today, investment in suburbia far outpaces investment in "urbanism".
Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size.
If you are suggesting that society somehow prioritizes the 0.3% of young single males who want to live as pedestrians in urban cores...put it to a vote and watch what happens.
This entire thread is about optimizing cities for young single males. I can't wait until HN turns a median age of seventy...everyone will be in here screaming about a society that punishes the aged.
The idea that cars are unsustainable is ridiculous. Just because they may not fit into sonmeone’s desire for increased government control of mobility doesn’t make them unsustainable.
Every generation seems to think their generation will be the last, unless we “do” something. They were likely debating horse carts in England a thousand years ago with equal fervor.
Yeah, money. In the US, new transportation projects are generally financed with federal help, while maintenance is left to the local government. This essentially creates a Ponzi scheme, where cities are going bankrupt due to depreciation on infrastructure, and not even realizing it. https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
In my opinion, roads are essentially underpriced. They're expensive to maintain and given out for free. (Similar arguments apply for parking, expressed humorously here: http://cityobservatory.org/parking-where-we-embrace-socialis...) This bothers me, as someone who doesn't own a car but lives with worse air quality and safety due to those who do.
Elderly and disabled people are often can't safely drive due to either physical limitations (eyesight, reaction time, arthritis, seizures, limited movements, dizziness and fainting, etc., etc., etc.) or practical limitations (a car that accommodates a driver in a wheelchair with hand controls is a specialty item that costs $90,000+, I'm not making that number up, there was an article about it on HN a bit ago). Even if and individual has a ride it can be difficult to transport a motorized scooter in a standard sedan or compact car: going to the park with the grandkids is out without a folding wheelchair, which, depending on the individual's limitations, can make that person dependent on someone else to push them around.
Whereas electric scooters and wheelchairs can navigate easily and independently in pedestrian friendly zones when designed with accommodation in mind. And accommodation is now the law.
Also women and married people don't exactly, by definition, prefer driving over walking, dunno where you're getting that from. In fact, women drive less than men on average.
I think this statement is misleading. The market has filled with SUVs that are adapted from compact and midsize sedans (e.g. Toyota RAV4, Highlander). The giant SUV market still exists, but I don't believe it's growing anything like it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. I probably see forty Rav4's for every Ford Expedition I see.
Google reports the population of the US at 325.7 million, and the population of New York City at 8.54 million. So, your "0.3%" is a tenth of the population of one urban core.
People managed without cars for the vast majority of human existence.
For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis.
change always requires some sacrifice,
By other people, funnily enough
Because outside of cities, as long as people have detatched homes on reasonably sized lots, getting around requires a car. There will simply not be the density needed for efficient public transportation.
While I might agree that the idea of large suburbs with detatched homes is probably not very sustainable, I don't see how they aren't here to stay (together with the cars required to live in them)
Or maybe the hub (outside the city) could have parking, so you drive there but take public transport from there on?
That's how it works. I walk 600m to my bus stop in my suburb neighborhood. So commuting from where I live is no problem. I don't need a car for that. But all the other transportation (driving kids to various sports practices, going to the forest, the lake, going to the school that isn't along a bus route with kids that can't walk very far etc) is harder. There will always be a gap between the transport I want/need and the transport that can be solved by public transport. So some kind of semi-private transport (e.g. shared autonomous cars) is probably required if the suburban lifestyle is going to be possible without cars.
You can have the on-demand voice-activated self-driving car experience right now: it’s called a taxi. Is that viable for all your use cases?
Perhaps for some of the use cases there could be better utilization (meaning cheaper) taxi, e.g. a taxi picking up my kids for school could also pick up a few more.
Eliminate the driver and taxis become way cheaper (probably cheaper than owning a car). That means people like alkonaut here will be far more interested in just not owning their own car that sits idle except when they are personally driving it. Which reduces the amount of space we are spending on car storage.
Why do you think they will be cheaper? Get ready for surge pricing being the norm. If you don’t have a vehicle of your own, you’ll have no choice but to pay. That’s why investors are willing to pour untold billions into this, they expect a massive payoff.
I'm sure that investors will extract a nice sum of money, but it's their ability to outcompete taxis on price that will allow them to do that. Or to put it another way they don't need to extract $30,000/car/year^1 and competition means they won't be able to.
^1 what ddg tells me the average US taxi driver salary is.
It is not good to need a car and having to use it every day for several hours.
It's not limited to the US. Even in Europe (at least in France where I live), we have a lot of protests whenever there are measures against cars. A few days ago, there was a no-car day in Paris, you could see people on social medias extremely angry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22
>On why he no longer went to Rigazzi's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
[1] https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:The_Lesser_of_Two_Evils
If not, then it’s not a “good” system. It’s a good system for single adults carrying their Manhattan Portage bag. Not so good for kids in strollers, carrying groceries for a family, people in wheelchairs, elderly with difficulties on stairs. It’s not a “good” system at all.
Zurich’s trams — now that is a good system.
in the Bay Area, they tend to vote for more and better roads (but tend not to get them)
Inside cities that is. One must remember that a lot of the people that move around in a city every day don't live in the city. And for many of them a car is a requirement anyway. For me the car is a sunk cost - I have it for the rare times I need it (I don't need it to go into the city), but buying/maintaining/insuring it is mostly a fixed cost, meaning that the marginal cost of each mile driven is very very small. I wouldn't mind if my city was made car free tomorrow - but I still wouldn't drive any less.
The car still gets used outside work to get groceries, pick up kids from schools and of course at the weekends.
I didn't move because I'm white, I moved because I wanted peace and quiet. Most of the people I know who live around me moved away from the city for the same reason. Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
Your generic suburbs have their own problems – massively artificial, claustrophobic rows and rows of almost identical houses, with zero character and nowhere to go without a car.
> Amazingly, non white people feel this way too...
On this note, almost the entire Asian population of the Dallas area lives in the suburbs, and those who can afford it are starting to move to the exurbs. Only people without the means to leave are staying in the city because the city sucks.
Part of the reason the trend is called "white flight" is that for a long time and in many places non-white people were prevented by bank, municipal, real estate office and HOA policy from purchasing houses or even getting mortgages in the suburbs.
Calling it white flight isn't always an accusation of racism against the people who were fleeing, more against the people who openly prevented people of color from leaving as well.
The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon where white people repeatedly moved from one suburb to another (often in circular patterns) in order to avoid POC after desegregation and civil rights legislation made suburbs accessible to POC for the first time. This was exacerbated by real estate agents engaging in a race-baiting, unscrupulous practice called "block busting".
>"The phrase "white flight" refers to a 1970s phenomenon ..."
No, the 1970s may have seen a recirculation of the original phrase but it is commonly understood that "white flight" refers to phenomenon around the war years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
[2] https://priceonomics.com/the-great-migration-the-african-ame...
Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are making a mess of our city, but it's only a partial fix and it's distortionary.
Meanwhile, people that actually live in Toronto pay way more in income tax than people that live outside of it, and our taxes are indexed to inflation, unlike the petrol taxes. Add in the three way split of the left vote and the FPTP system and we end up with a vindictive moron in charge of the province fucking up representation by changing our riding map in the middle of a city election.
Cars have ruined so many things. The amount of times a car has honked at me for not putting my own life in danger because I need 5 seconds to get to a safer place to pull over with my bike is crazy. I'm not "taking a lane" I'm just keeping myself from getting doored.
Imagine if cars had never been invented and we could have stuck with trains for everything? Way more green space. Way healthier population. Way more 4 or 6 story buildings. Way more parks. Way less time wasted behind the wheel. Fewer deaths. No road rage.
And what would we have to give up?
3000 sqft suburban houses and their shitty pools that get used 5 times a year. Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park.
I don't necessarily think suburbia is the culprit for traffic though. It probably is in North America where suburbs often means "not even public transport available to the city". They were planned for and built for cars! My suburb was not. People lived here before cars too.
I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year - but I use my car many times for short distances, mostly things like picking up kids from daycare etc.
Also, speaking of daycare, that's another thing I really think is essentially stupid. Imagine two different situations.
First situation: Normal family sends 2 kids to daycare. About $50k here in Toronto. Cool. The daycare workers pay their taxes, the family pays theirs after claiming a $6k tax credit. At the end of the day the government gets around $30–40k more in income tax.
Second situation: Family A has two kids and so does Family B. They take turns watching each others kids, reducing each family's working hours by 25%. Assuming both parents earn the same base income in both families, but that only one of them wants to raise kids all day, the government loses about $11k in tax revenue per family, or $22k total.
The only thing that stops this practice from being widespread is that most employers want full-time workers.
In my case (Sweden) the daycare subsidy is much more significant, 2 kids is $3700 (Canadian) so the incentive to work full time is absolutely massive in comparison.
As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!
No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants to live in miserable close quarters paying exorbitant rent for the freedom to walk to convenient overpriced services.
A home and a yard allows those who need it to live with a measure of dignity. It's pants and you're trying to argue that everyone would be fine with shorts.
Ironically I live in NYC right now which is even worse in most of those respects, but at least the pay/COL ratio is better. Public transportation is better too. In the end if I buy a home it isn't going to be in either city.
A lot of freedom to travel.
Many of the cities in the US that are dense enough to be reasonable walkable/bikable are also incredibly expensive in those areas.
One size doesn't fit all. What is your personal preference may not be others' prefereces.
Making a blanket statement like cars "are not effective in today's society" is profoundly off base.
Personal preference is largely a reflection of the status quo, and in the US the status quo heavily sculpted by federal policy that has favoured car-oriented development for 60+ years.
The last thing I want to do is walk to a grocery store and carry home food for a family in the 95 degree heat and 95% humidity.
This is an honest question. I live in a city with public transport now and I much prefer it for myself, but when I think of how I was brought up it's hard to imagine that working without a car.
Well there are six stores (from very small to a supermarket) within five minutes of walking from my apartment. There’s a gym 500 meters away and another 1 km away. Cinema is 10 minutes by metro. A huge park and a forest are also about 10 minutes away each. Density is convenient!
Better to look at cities that are better adopters of bikes, such as Copenhagen. There just about everyone is on or in a bike, including many children. They love their cargo bikes over there. See https://triobike.com/ and http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/bicycle-culture/copenhagen...
As far as sticking kids on bikes, you got many options:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/01/oregon...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3SP1Y98KhQ
https://www.survivalistboards.com/showpost.php?p=3482606&pos...
I currently drive a Volt...and it's wonderful. Chevy is really missing out on a lot of potential free press by not putting a bigger emphasis on it. I went from spending over $400 / month on gas to about $20 / month. You get the ability to cut such a huge amount of gas usage without the need for any additional infrastructure to support them like pure-electrics that are out there.
My guess is that when clean energy is used to produce fuel cells, a lot of the conversations around the negative impact of cars in general will dry up.
This might be shocking to you, but I'd like to get to work in 15 minutes instead of in 45 minutes while suffering the bodily odeurs of a hundred co-travelers, overlaid with the subtle smell of my wagon having been used as a urinal for a decade, thank you very much.
They pretty clearly weren't effective in the old cities, either, at least in the U.S., since we had to more or less raze them and move everybody to the suburbs to make cars work.
"Mass transit": Shared and claustrophobic space with other travelers. "Biking lanes": Requires exposure to the elements. Depending on where you live this is already a non-starter if you don't want to arrive at your destination drenched in sweat. "electro-scooters": I've been on one of these in Vietnam. Doesn't carry 2 adults well and has the same weather problems as the peddle-powered version. "Elevated footpaths": I live in an urban conglomerate in Asia with ~1.1 million people. A typical day of running errands can easily rack up ~50+km of driving because of the distances between either people I know or businesses carrying niche products. There's no way in Hell I'm covering that ground on foot, in 34deg C weather with 90% humidity.
The city in the article is (1) miniscule at ~85,000 people and 15-20km across at its widest and (2) possesses a pretty mild climate. All of the transportation assets you propose as "solutions" are fine....if you live in California or a similar "Mediterranean climate". Most humans don't.
"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society."
Why so quick to jump to sweeping, society-altering prognostications based on conclusions which you yourself recognize as applicable to a small-scale and optimal use case?
Your suggested alternative transport means all severely restrict your freedom of movement compared to a private automobile as they come with range and/or comfort compromises. They would shrink the options of citizens for long-distance ground travel as well (say goodbye to road trips).
"Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like"
Yes, and given that 22% of humanity lives in urban areas of 1 million+ [1] and 40% of humanity in cities over 100,000 [2], it might be premature to call people to political action to hasten the death of the automobile when you don't have a solution that scales well.
[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.URB.MCTY.TL.ZS?view=... <br> [2]http://www.newgeography.com/content/005933-world-urban-areas...
Pontevedra is in Galicia, northern Spain. Here it rains like UK, and even worse. No Sun except a very few weeks a year.
Not all Spain is sunny, and not all the US is like California, Texas or Florida. You would freeze in Castille or Aragon in Winter. You would pray to see the sunlight in Asturias, Galicia or any region of the Bay of Biscay.
The last 10 years there are no longer rains, and the sun is here from late May to October, last year we have big wildfires in the last weekend of October, water restrictions from Sept due to the drought.
I remember when I was 10 years old rain a lot, nowadays no more than London ( I lived in London for a year).
Regards
And where I live on a tropical island in Asia has 25% more rainfall (2000mm annually), annual daily mean temp is 9deg Celsius higher (with 29deg C average highs June - September), and 25% fewer hours of sunshine.
So yeah, Pontevedra's climate may not technically be Mediterranean by Koppen classification but it sure as Hell is "mild" compared to where I live.
Please, get your facts straight. This is ridiculously inaccurate
Yes, but there's also a geographical difference. Countries in Europe are rather small, and a long history has restricted some land use. In many areas of the US land was almost a non-issue, so people settled more sparsely, and even cities became sprawls (e.g. Houston, LA).
I get your point, but it is not a good reason why we cannot do things better.
Central planning can theoretically avoid some growth pitfalls "skipping to the end" but in practice it has often had limited success beyond zoning promoting the obvious - high traffic areas are good for retail and often annoyance to residents. I am no expert but it seems predictive design performs best with planning.
I see that as the problem. We have limited resources and don't care very much about the future of them. Current value vs long term value.
But a lot of American cities were built around the automobile, so they would need a lot of changes to function in a post-automobile world. That makes such a transition much less likely. I think it would work better in older, East Coast and mid-western cities that largely predate the automobile.
I uber home when it's late and I've been drinking but that's really the only time I'm in a car.
I know I've got a somewhat special situation as I chose my apartment based on it's walk ability. However I've lived in other parks of the city and I had similar a similar experience. It just took a little longer to get places sometimes.
I believe eventually cars will be a shared service. Automated cars that will arrive whenever I need one. That will be the day.
"In Scottish geography, a Carse (the modern form of older Scots kerse) is an area of fertile, low-lying (typically alluvial) land occupying certain Scottish river valleys,[1] such as that of the River Forth."
I am forced to agree.
You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city.
This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open space and beautiful nature, it's super awesome and amazingly freeing to just go wherever you want to on a whim. Wake up Saturday morning - let's head up to that state park with the cool water falls and hike around for the day. 10 minutes later you're on the road and an hour or two later you're surrounded by nature. Real nature too, not some small 10 acre park somewhere.
There's real freedom in being able to go where you want, when you want. It's not just a "convenience" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Doesn't sound so outlandish to me.
If you want to see the endgame for cars as a primary means of transportation check out San Francisco.
We tried to go to Tahoe one weekend and gave up after waiting in line to get on the bay bridge for 2 hours and moving only 2 blocks.
Another time it literally took 10 hours to return from a ski trip and it’s supposed to be a 3 hour drive.
We don’t go anywhere in California now. If we want to ski, we fly out of state.
The problem is cars don’t scale.
Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countless small population centers between them for any kind other kind of transportation to provide a feasible solution. It's not a matter of "engaging in democracy."
I say this as a local who has gotten into countless arguments with friends and family on the subject. I probably believed it as well a few lifetimes ago before I moved to NYC for 13 years and have since been completely converted.
It would require an enormous investment in public transportation and real bike lanes - I mean protected bike lanes like they're doing in NYC, not two faded white arrows in the rightmost lane - and then a generational shift where we convince the younger generations that car-ownership is overrated, wasteful, and terrible for the local economy.
But Americans care too much about comfort and convenience to do that. SUVs rule here.
You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.
It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.
There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.
From Wikipedia: "There was a dense system of inter-city railways in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but after the decline of passenger railroad in North America in the 1960s, the inter-city lines decreased greatly and today the system is far less dense."
Wisconsin used to have inter-city rail servicing most/all of its population centers and even many of the smaller towns: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701p.rr006200/?r=0.514,0.298,...
Yes, today cars are the default, but that took a long time. Things will continue to change and it's hard to predict exactly how.
Your overall point is correct about how car-centric cities are in the USA vs Europe, but just wanted to point this out.
Based on how people talk about the EU, I thought it would be different, but it looks about the same as the US to me.
https://www.bicycles.net.au/2012/09/cycling-promotion-fund-r...
I like the idea of large cities improving their public transportation systems and having parking lots on the outskirts but it doesn't make financial sense in the smaller size cities. There are lots of people like me that live in a small down and commute into a city (60k people). I'd love better public transportation but it only makes financial sense in the "downtown" areas.
Private vehicle ownership isn’t about solving society’s transportation issue. As far as consumers are concerned, a car is one of the most significant and life changing purchases they’ll ever make. It gives them far more than just a solution to a ‘transport problem’, it provides the freedom to pretty much go anywhere and do anything at any time. If your idea is ‘convince people they don’t actually want cars’, then your idea is going to fail.
Sure they do, just not in all situations. I'm all for walkable city centers, downtowns, parks and such, but I also very much love to drive my car. I'm happy to vote for more pedestrian/public-transport friendly metropolitan areas (and do), as long as there's also non-metro areas for me to live on my privately owned land and drive my privately owned car as I please.
Health care is included in any well paying tech job.
Please list out the other "etc" that makes up for $100,000+ difference.
Where I live, the median house price is about $170k USD (avg rent is just under $900/mo) and the median software engineer salary is just under $100k USD.
Plus, taxes in the USA can be pretty low.
I'd move to Berlin in a heartbeat if it weren't for that
The problem with US healthcare is the cost, not the quality. If you can afford it, you can get some of the best healthcare in the world here.
How did you manage that?
Disposable income for a senior developer in a major market in the US is likely to be much higher than their counterpart in the EU.
There may be other harder-to-measure cultural or quality-of-life reasons that make the tradeoff worth it, but I don't think "free healthcare" and a few weeks off comes close to making the case quantitatively.
* Dutch American Friendship Treaty (self employ in the Netherlands)
* Working Holiday visa Irealnd (one year and have to be within a year of school or in school, but if you get a job that sponsors you can stay)
* Germany. Germany is just supposed to be a relatively easy place to get a visa, comparatively. Be sure to look up blue cards.
* Ancestry. Got any history in a European country? Start looking at grandparents' birth certs
Also, a lot of people have mentioned pay. It's true, pay is lower in Europe - in tech. OTOH in other fields there's less of a disparity, or it's higher here. My wife does not work in tech and makes more here (or did before she decided to stay home with our kid).
In Ireland, at least, a normal dev would make very roughly 60(ish), someone versed in ML, etc. closer to 90, and to get to six figures you'd need te be fairly senior. Jobs posted on http://irishtechcommunity.slack.com/ recently have been everything from 40k (junior) to 150k (senior at FB). It's more common to include ranges in job postings here.
Europe is big though and salaries are MUCH different in Portugal than in, say, Finland.
In some places (Norway), you can just look them up - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
I would have recommended Ireland in the past but now, if you're interested, you'd be wise to steer clear of Dublin. Housing has gotten really scarce, but worse than just being expensive it's just really hard to actually _get_ (no surprise given that rent control is bad policy).
If I were looking myself right now the top of my list would be Utrecht, because I love cities where my kid can cycle to school and not die.
Unfortunately, this only works for relatively recent migrants. Any documents before 1900 or so are hit-or-miss. I have a very, very unique last name (in the US) and the documents on the country of origin for my ancestors vary between Russia, Prussia, Germania, and Poland depending on who filled out the forms. Then there's the issue of misspellings.
> Dutch American Friendship Treaty (self employ in the Netherlands)
This was my first thought. I was hoping to move abroad for some time before quitting my remote U.S. job.
> Working Holiday visa Irealnd (one year and have to be within a year of school or in school, but if you get a job that sponsors you can stay)
I'm going to check this one out, thank you. I have a few classes I'd like to take, plus the GI bill to pay for finishing my degree (I have a semester left).
> Ancestry. Got any history in a European country? Start looking at grandparents' birth certs.
My wife's mother was born in Italy (well, Sicily), her family migrated to the U.S. when she was just a few years old.
Thank you!
There are a zillion things that can go wrong in software development and problems arise that require creative solutions. That’s the engineering part I suppose. But I have no interest in it. I’m stuck being a teacher at a community college. It’d be great if my job, in its current form, could be found in Germany or Switzerland but I’m stuck where I’m at.
My wife is a physician and she’s not doing residency over again just to live in Europe.
(There was nothing wrong with this comment, but the discussion it led to is extremely well trodden.)
Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.
Which it is fine.
But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it.
It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative.
And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
Of course, I would say that this is an excellent use of public space as opposed to infrastructure dedicated to cars.
I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".
We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?
Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.
[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.
A simple requirement would be a strict upper limit of 1m²/passenger at all times for vehicles and pedestrians. Trivial to fulfil for considerate means of transportation and quite impossible if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you.
I beg to differ - this doesn't gracefully handles special cases. Both my disabled neighbor or my friend taken by ambulance to the hospital (made up examples) would fare far worse than in the current system.
We already have have a better system to divide that among people - those who care highly about particular issue can reserve more space or whatever with small green tokens.
>if you want to lug two tonnes of steel around with you
An easy snark, but this two tonnes[1] reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs. Prohibiting it by governmental fiat would surely give us various nice well understood savings, but would cause a lot of loss, both direct and via lost opportunities. I'd be much more reliant on service providers - typically large companies - that would provide the service at the time, cost and quality level I would have little to no control over.
Thanks, but no thanks; I don't want to be any more dependent on goodwill of businesses than I already am.
[1] 1090kg in my case, to be exact.
All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is based on Netflix and Amazon and Uber Eats in an apartment full of stuff that just magically appeared sure they don’t need a car, and no one is forcing them to buy one. But they are so vocal that everyone who hasn’t chosen that lifestyle should be penalised, and they can’t even clearly articulate the alternatives. An hour outside London “public transport” is one bus in the morning and another in the afternoon. But yeah, let’s all get self-driving trams or something on every B-road...
Right now I enjoy the perks of having everything near by in the city center, but if my city went pedestrian-first, I would move to the countryside and simply drive to customers when the need occasionally be. But that's feasible only because after all those years, only since I'm in senior technical position in knowledge based sector, and could easily work remotely, and also could work 20hrs-week and earn well enough.
But that's not possible for everybody right now.
No such luck for young people who are just launching their careers, or who are for whatever reason having local responsibilities like, for example, a sick parent. Doubly no such luck for people in service economy "gigs", working for peanuts and by necessity having to perform labor at their workplaces.
Truly, a perspective of privilege.
Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.
How many lives has the road system saved, by the way? What do ambulances drive on? Or even ordinary drivers taking sick or injured relatives to the hospital themselves?
> In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans
> “Listen,” says the mayor, opening the windows of his office. From the street below rises the sound of human voices.
Noise is the #1 problem with cars. Walkability and space issues via parking are #2.
You do have to agree that not having to walk under a urine-soaked freeway to get to the waterfront is an improvement to the city. The tunnel would have also been fine, of course.