Uber data reveals motoring slower than walking in many cities
forbes.com
forbes.com
Update since some commenters seem to be having trouble: this process depends on the travellers "at the margin", that is, the people who are most willing to switch modes to reduce their journey time. Thinking in terms of the average or typical traveller is misleading.
...so cars should this be _slower_ than cars, given these benefits
as pointed out, the reason that cars being shown to be slower than walking in many cases is moot because cars provide benefits which more than offset. 1. Weather protection 2. Cargo transportation 3. Ease of movement for the disabled 4. Additional safety for those toting along small children 5. Some level of protection/isolation from others
The argument in favor of bicycling in lieu of cars falls prey to the same reasons. There are pro and cons so we must always fairly assess them before standing up and declaring one method worse than another. In fact none ever are all the time
So no, cars are not the best means of transport just because you can carry lots of stuff which you usually don't carry...
The CO2 and microparticles are definitely a problem. One which can be addressed by banning non-electric cars downtown.
No need to shower: I just change _all_ of my clothes when I arrive... Cycling clothes on me, business clothes and dress shoes in a semi-rigid pouch in my panniers. Takes five minutes at each end and the total time is still half of what car or public transportation would take !
There are no showers at work, so i do a couple of things to keep clean.
* Showering before you leave so that the sweat doesn’t smell. * Chilling our after the ride for a bit to let your heart rate drop back down. This gets you to a point where you aren’t sweating anymore. * Towel off the excess sweat and put on fresh clothes.
The only real downside is my helmet messes up my hair.
A substantial amount of the microparticles are from brakes and tires, a problem that electric cars don’t really solve. They still have tires.
If you could have some sort of traction assist device like a rubber block on a piston that hit the ground for emergency braking, you could get away with lower traction on the wheels normally, and modern electronic controls could make the whole thing stable and relatively transparent to the driver.
First we'll have to overcome the slow motion catastrophe that is gasoline direct injection.
If you need to wear a suit you are screwed either way. Five minutes standing still outside with a jacket on and you will start getting pit sweat. Just walking out to your car will make you sweat.
That's a big "might" that is conditioned on having a seat and space in which to do these things, none if which is a given.
> Bicycles ... are less likely to have accidents (except with cars)
After three years as a pedestrian in NYC I have almost been run over by assholes on bikes more than I have almost been run over by assholes in cars.
> But infrastructure is much cheaper and easier to maintain then that for cars.
How do you figure? Paved streets are still needed, arguably maintained to slightly higher standards than they are for cars. Signalling is still needed, unless you want a free-for-all of bike traffic (which I don't).
In general, you seem to be comparing the happy cases of bicycles and public transit to the negatives of cars. It's and unfair and disingenuous comparison.
In the past plenty of people read newspapers while standing on trains. Nowadays we have smartphones and podcasts. It’s even easier.
> I have almost been run over by assholes on bikes more than I have almost been run over by assholes in cars.
Looks like an argument for better cycling infrastructure. Cars don’t really go wild in cities because they have dedicated road which are not shared with larger, more dangerous vehicles driven by people who are actively trying to cause problems to car drivers. If we have the same level of infrastructure for bicycles then maybe cyclists will stop competing with pedestrians for space.
Cycling infrastructure can be cheaper than normal roads because bicycles are lighter than cars. It will also need less maintenance for the same reason. It also takes less space to store bikes than cars.
Stand/sit and read my phone is basically what I am forced to do. I don't consider that any more productive than driving, and certainly not "work".
As for podcasts (and audiobooks), I can do that in a car just as well as packed in a train.
Perception, meet reality:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestrian-...
Summary: From 2002-2016 there were 2355 pedestrians killed by bicycle or car in NYC. 2345 of those fatal collisions were car-pedestrian, and only 10 were bicycle-pedestrian.
From mid 2012 to mid 2019, there were 940 reports of a crash with a bike as the primary vehicle and 1+ pedestrians injured. In the same time period, there were 69776 reports of a crash without bicycle as primary vehicle injuring 1+ pedestrians.
Bike infrastructure is cheaper in other ways. You need a much smaller surface for the same amount of traffic, and paved surfaces degrade at a much slower rate with lighter traffic.
You also don't need the sliproads, the same levels of crash barrier, and so on. It's just not a serious comparison.
Are intersections just a free-for-all then? I find congested pedestrian intersections bad enough to navigate. I would hate to see a congested, uncontrolled bicycle intersection.
> Bike infrastructure is cheaper in other ways. You need a much smaller surface for the same amount of traffic, and paved surfaces degrade at a much slower rate with lighter traffic.
I'll grant that people density is higher and wear is lighter. I don't agree with the "much", though, since bicycles not riding in a coordinated group still need a fair amount of space and, as I said, the road surface needs to be maintained to higher standards.
> You also don't need the sliproads, the same levels of crash barrier, and so on. It's just not a serious comparison.
If I am interpreting "sliproad" correctly, that's only a feature of limited-access roads. Ditto crash barriers. I don't see how that's relevant to cities.
Not all pavement costs are equal. A study found road damage proportional to the 4th power of weight [0].
As a pedestrian in Austin, I've been hit by one car and zero bikes. I've been almost hit by many cars; I don't recall any bikes nearly hitting me, but they're less also memorable.
As a cyclist for ~8 years in Austin, I've been hit by two cars (100% their fault) and one bike (100% my fault), and almost hit by many cars and zero bikes that I recall. I've hit zero people/cars and if I come close, it's usually the other person at fault.
Granted, there are a lot more cars to hit me than there are bikes. I'd also say cars are more likely to cause significant damage than bikes when they hit you, though in my case, the 280LB cyclist slamming into me while going downhill got me pretty good. :-)
I think a lot of what makes cycling safe or unsafe is the biking culture. Cyclists are safer when they act like traffic norms matter. I assume they're more likely to do that if the traffic rules are designed in a way that makes sense for them, and when drivers treat them like they belong. (This is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch-22. We might be treated as legitimate users of the road if we acted like it, and we'd act like it more if we were treated that way.)
Bike infrastructure is cheaper to maintain, because bikes don't impact the asphalt as much as cars do. Manhattan's Westside bikeway hasn't been repaved for decades... While most of the roads with similar "body traffic" will deteriorate in 5 years in NYC.
You're assuming cars have an impact. Maybe they don't; it may just be heavy trucks.
A set of people will gravitate to each option. But as OP said, it is people at the margin who help equalize times.
It almost certainly will not be faster to bike from a suburb 20 miles out of the city into the city than it would be to drive.
Doesn't this mean, that the real "battle" between the public transportation and cars, should be based on a better experience ?
And since driving a car in traffic, everyday, is a negative experience and will stay so until autonomous driving - in theory, we could create the right public experience, that will win over most drivers ?
And so, why haven't we done that ?
The majority of people, quite reasonably, will not pony up even more money for transit until it can actually improve their commutes. And it can’t, for two different reasons. First, it costs us five time as much money to build a unit of rail as it does say Paris (a city where the majority of people don’t drive to work). That kneecaps your ability to increase coverage of the transit network—making it a viable choice for the majority of commuters. Paris has a dense network of subways and commuter stations, which means that people can take a reasonable walk to a transit station. You can’t build a dense network like that if each mile of track costs you five times as much.
Second, our cities don’t look anything like the cities where most people take transit to work. People are catching on to measuring population density of metro regions in weighted terms (calculating the density in a way that shows the density in the places where most people live, rather than using arbitrary administrative lines). Under those measures, places like Paris and Barcelona have metro are densities of 30,000-50,000 people per square mile. Only New York City comes close. San Francisco and LA are at 12,000. DC, Seattle, Portland, etc. are in the 5,000-6,000 range.
Taking both figures together kills you. When you build 10 miles of subway in Barcelona, you might cover 250,000 people (assuming you get people walking from 0.25 miles on either side). And say it costs you $1 billion. In DC that same 10 miles of subway covers 30,000 people. And it costs you $5 billion.
Oh, there is really a third reason. Because you have to drive everywhere anyway, our job centers in the US are widely dispersed. Google’s main Paris office is in Paris itself. Google’s main Bay Area office is in the suburbs of San Francisco. Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC. Fixed transit networks are awful for such layouts.
Small nit. SF is about 19k people per square mile. (Almost 900k people on 47 square miles of land)
All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless. It is really not that dense and traffic is not bad.
I am sure some areas are different. I was mainly in the area around SFO, and my conference was not hosted in downtown because apparently the homeless problem is bigger there, but at that level of low density and congestion, I fail to see how public transit is much of a win. People will not realistically take public transit if it doubles their travel time. And this case applies doubly to medium-sized suburbanized cities in the central US.
On the other hand, I can see what people mean about a housing problem when there are virtually no buildings taller than 3 stories except hotels in such an urban area.
If you have that big hill between you and SF, all you're going to see is the northern end of the south/west bay, particularly San Mateo.
While there are multiple BART stations in the city, it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is. BART is the regional rapid transit connecting suburbs to the city.
> I was mainly in the area around SFO
Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco. SFO is operated by the San Francisco International Airport Commission, which is a body subordinate to the government of the City and County of San Francisco, but is not actually within the geographical boundaries of the City (or County, the two being one and the same.)
Very possible. I got a good sampling of a 5 mile radius around SFO and sporadic sampling elsewhere. I wouldn't claim to know 1/100th of what a resident does about the area.
However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable". If an area 15 miles away from downtown seems quite low-density, and assuming a 15 mile commute is reasonable (assisted by BART, whose analogue doesn't exist in many comparable cities), I concluded complaints on HN are overblown, especially considering everyone doesn't commute to downtown. For example, YouTube headquarters were pretty close to SFO. Stanford is not near downtown either. Not sure where all the other headquarters are located.
I don't have high confidence in that conclusion obviously because my information is very limited. But I am comparing to cities I know better like DC and NYC.
> it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is
I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars, and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
I've seen lots of people claim that about (especially downtown) SF; the normal claim about the rest of the Bay Area is that it's unaffordable because of the people that want to keep it habitable, not that it is uninhabitable.
> I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars
The San Francisco Municipal Railway operates busses and cable cars, sure, but also surface and subway trains which share several of BARTs dowtown underground stops, but also have a lot more stops in the city that are not shared with BART.
> and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
It doesn't (that I know of, there may be some lines that go out of the city, certainly many non-SF operated lines go into the city); there are many other transit agencies in the Bay Area, many of which have bus lines in the suburbs, including lines that run into the city. The area right around SFO (excluding the airport itself) may be a relative dead zone, I haven't really spent much time there.
I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.
I'm very wary about it too, but the persistent claims that SF/Bay Area has some peculiar kind of dysfunction, rendering it hard to live in, that doesn't exist in other major metros has always piqued my curiosity. It seems like an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
The only real evidence I've seen supporting this idea is very high housing prices. I sat next to a woman on my flight who paid $5K/mo for a 2-bedroom apartment, shared with 2 others. Sounds insane. And of course I've seen more systematic evidence of this.
But after my visit, I wonder whether she, and perhaps others on this board, don't consider the SF suburbs as worthy for a potential living space. Or alternatively whether the claims are true that there is very high demand and these suburbs would be demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments but for zoning restrictions.
This seems like a bizarre data point to extrapolate from. Aren't airports often specifically put away from dense population centers (for obvious reasons)? It's not as if Charles De Gaulle is on the Seine.
Google has 2 (or 3?) offices in DC metro. One is on Mass Ave, in the heart of downtown. The 2nd is in Reston, which is suburban (20 miles out of downtown) but is accessible via rail and a 10 minute drive to IAD.
They might have an office in Sterling/Ashburn, but I think that's a data center, so not a huge employment center.
The Reston office is not accessible by rail. The Reston Town Center silver line station will open sometime this year or next. And even then, it’ll be largely inaccessible by rail to people who actually live in Reston, since the only place the silver line goes is toward DC at one end and toward IAD at the other. From Sterling it’s a 15 minute drive, but an hour and 15 minute trip involving multiple buses. And if you live in one of the Virginia suburbs like Vienna, you can take the train to Reston Town Center, but you have to go in the opposite direction toward DC first on the orange and then switch at Ballston to a silver going back out. 45 minutes or so, versus a 20 minute drive.
And you're correct that if you don't live on the rail, nothing is rail accessible. And even if you do, it's hub/spoke, so only useful for going downtown or to IAD, there's no matrix of lines to get from Tysons to Bethesda or similar without going downtown and transferring first.
That said, I think Google is opening a new office at Reston Station (Wiehle Road), which is currently accessible by rail. I don't know if this is an additional office, or if they're moving/expanding the RTC office.
I'm so glad I live and work in Reston, walk to work, and can mostly ignore this stuff. Except for when the weather turns to crap - then I have to deal with traffic on Sunrise and Reston Parkway with everybody else (and it's only getting worse as developers turn all the parking lots into new high-rise developments). I wish Fairfax County's bike lane implementation wasn't so half-assed - many of the areas could be bike-accessible in reasonable time frames (my old Herndon-Fairfax commute was 30 min by car or 45 by bike and saved me working out some other time).
Same spending, 5x the transit.
So-called "cost-disease" spans infrastructure, education (public & private!) and medicine (again, public and private). All of these things cost 10x what they used to and 10x what they cost in other countries.
There are a few exposés and studies that try to explain the issue but IMHO none of them are satisfactory:
NYT tries to answer the question for NYC (but then why is cost disease a thing in other cities with different contractor/union/transit authority interactions?)[0]
Alex Tabarrok says it's growth in demand and slowdown in productivity growth (but then why is this a US only phenomenon? Does it really "jive" that infrastructure costs 10x what it used to because of "increased demand and slowdown in productivity?" I don't think it passes the smell test) [1]
Slatestar codex says "beats me" [2] and [3]
[0]:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[1]: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...
[3]:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
[4]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...
Metro is prioritizing building into dense areas and state government and developers want nothing more than to focus new builds around these rails and get these areas one day near ktown density levels. The thorn is NIMBY neighborhood councils and the city councilmen beholden to them that want to plug their ears and hope L.A. gets back to 1960s era population levels by some magical force of collective cognitive dissonance.
The fact is, people are moving to L.A. in droves because they are getting hired in droves, rooting against that is rooting against economic growth of the city.
That's disingenuous. The driving infrastructure includes both what the state provides as well as what private funding spends (i.e. that cost of the all the cars, fuel etc). The transit infrastructure funding is entirely public in nature.
I do have some hope this is starting to turn around. In the myriad construction I've seen going up in my local area, especially near the already-established major transit lines, there's been mixed zoning, with shops at the ground level, and apartments or offices up top, as an example.
Though now that I type that out, it sounds like a chicken/egg problem. Until transit lines are in place and established, there's probably going to be less incentive zone things to make transit worth using. And until things are zoned to make transit worth using, there's probably going to be less incentive to build out transit.
I don't have an easy answer here.
it seems like the government could apply zoning for work places?
In cities where public transportation is a huge success, it's because driving is completely impractical due to congestion.
Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car.
An autonomous car or a chauffeured car beats it hands down, because public infrastructure is never going to be as clean or as luxurious as an individual can afford.
I love public transport and I want it to do well because, well, it's ultimately the only thing that's going to scale. But it's just not acceptable to say "oh well the train is warm and smelly, deal with it". Unless it's a cause that really matters to them, most people who can afford it are going to opt out of that.
For longer travels, a train is always better than a car for me: I can read, watch a movie, study. The time of arrival is known in advance unless there are delays and I can just relax.
You seem to assume that everyone prefers to be in a car, but this is just not the case
The thing I'm getting at here is not whether you, or I, personally drive or not.
It's that public transport is built (necessarily) for the public. It's lowest common denominator. Very, very few systems worldwide are actually comfortable places to be.
A car that has air conditioning, your own seat, space, etc is more comfortable than a tube carriage that's crammed to the rafters and is 30+c.
A specific individual might prefer the cost/time/whatever tradeoff of one over the other. But to pretend that cars are just strictly inferior is only true in a situation where public transport actually works properly - which is really vanishingly rare.
Even in a place like London with its' fantastic tube network, it's completely normal for people to stand armpit-to-armpit in a sweltering carriage. A car might be slower, but it provides an opt-out for that discomfort, and some people will choose that unless you literally ban it.
I can't find the source, but in 2010 or so, there were about 250k people traveling to London daily for their work. (That figure was 350k in early 2013.) In 2019, there are something like 850k people doing the same.
Even if the numbers were only vaguely there, that still means >200% increase in required commuting capacity in a decade. Don't know if any transport infrastructure could support that kind of expansion.
Considering your apparent location(England) - a car is the slow option.
No one is able to enjoy their latte and "read", people are crammed together and have to keep moving further back to allow for others to join in.
Have fun not missing your exit station..
I strongly disagree. On a train you can stand up, walk around, go to the bathroom, etc. and the ride is usually smoother than anything short of brand new shocks plus pristine road conditions.
* I have Jeep Cherokee and the space I get is less than first class rail.
Even better, they would be insulated from the weather, which is by far the worst part of the pedestrian experience in big cities, IMO.
Cars on surface streets are quite probably the worst approach possible from an efficiency standpoint, but they appeal for experience reasons.
It would seem to be an outlier so it would be interesting to see some data.
Edit: Excuse the stupidity. I read Cologne in my head.
Cycling lanes exist for the cyclist's convenience but there are no rule that make them mandatory
The plan is to make it so cars won’t drive through the city, but still be able to reach each spot.
[0] (german) https://dejure.org/gesetze/StVO/2.html
On the other hand, I've had good success with driving a car like I ride a bike here in less rule-abiding places to fit in.
Rule-following seems to be a function of the sensibility of the rules. When the rules don't work for you you stop adhering to them, and the rules for bicycles often don't make sense in a car-centric world.
Also, the busier parts tend to be in places where it's not useful to go in the car lanes anyway, or they're already mixed-mode (in which case it's the car traffic slowing everyone down because they end up stuck behind one slow cyclist, but 20 cyclists are stuck behind the car.)
In the US, where most bike lanes are half-assed attempts (no physical separation, no signals, poorly conceived traffic crossings at turn lanes), a crowded bike lane quickly becomes unusable and bikes spill into the traffic lane.
- highways, speed limit >= 100. Cyclists can’t go there (but alternative, cycleable routes always exist)
- main arteries into cities, speed limit 50, with separated cycle tracks.
- ‘last quarter mile’ roads, speed limit 30, where cars and bicycles share the road.
So, if there is a bicycle lane, it typically is separated from the car lanes by a barrier (row of trees, parking spots, etc)
That makes switching from bicycle lane to car lane or switching back to the bicycle lane when the car lane gets busy hard to do.
Also, you may be more likely to get a green light when riding in the bicycle lane, as the the induction loops there are designed to detect bicycles, not cars, and, on top of that, cyclists may be preferentially give green lights on crossings over cars.
I like to play a game where I pick a distinctive car 3 blocks ahead, and see if I can catch up to it and pass it. If the car does not turn off the road, I almost always do, and by a wide margin.
The key really is to move the marginal traffic that can switch. The key thing I see reducing cars is the absence of parking. Being at your destination, but unable to park (within a few blocks) is often enough to convince people not to drive.
I had a play around with some travel times in London on google maps (using the look-ahead function by one day):
Shortish journey (Waterloo to St Pancras)
- Drive: 12-35 mins
- Walk: 46 mins
- PT: 27 mins
Longish journey (Wimbledon to Arsenal)
- Drive: 50-120 mins
- Walk: 4hrs
- PT: 56 mins
And trying to get to my SO's house by bus takes a 15 minute trip up to about an hour and a half of walking and transferring.
(We shall exclude all of American cities from any consideration, because even in NYC the public transport is pretty bad)
Waterloo to St Pancras will never be a 12 minute drive, even at 4AM - that's practically impossible with the amount of traffic lights.
Let's presume that you're a wealthy Lloyds Group banker(City of London office) living in Holland Park area. Your commute is 35-1:30 by car or 27 minutes by public transport.
Or you're not so wealthy Canary Wharf worker living in Southwark - stable 20 minutes for PT and 30 minutes driving.
Demonstrated humorously by Top Gear here:
People might also be willing to trade some extra time for less exertion, but this depends heavily on the terrain.
We use car sharing, but only if we have to buy something that really cannot be transported via bike or public transport, like furniture, or for trips to remote places that are very complicated to reach via public transportation. I tried driving to work a few times (~8 km across town), but it takes me roughly 35 minutes by car, compared to 25 minutes by bike, and is much, much more stressful than using my bike. If the weather is very bad, I take the tram. For groceries, we usually walk to the nearest supermarket.
Truth is, at least in Europe, I cannot think of any reason why you should own a car in a town with an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing.
There are some people like that everywhere. People who will never walk or cycle or catch PT.
>I cannot think of any reason why you should own a car in a town with an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing.
Because you don't want to waste an hour or more every day standing around waiting on a train/bus? Would like to regularly visit friends and family on the other side of town? Would like to not have to plan your life around transportation schedules?
I could maybe see getting by in Europe, I've one friend in Germany that is quite happy taking the train a half mile or so from his apartment for most stuff but even he still owns a car for getting to work, doing groceries, going to his postal box, bringing home stuff for art, going to the woods etc.
I cannot fathom life without a car. I'd say my closest friend is 10 miles away, two I go to see fairly regularly are 50 miles away. If I want to go see a movie it's 3-20 miles depending on which theater I want to go to, work is about 10~ miles from my apartment with my two gyms between me and work that I'm at 4x a day each and at another a 5th day. All of the performing arts theaters around Indianapolis are downtown, on the east side or north of Indy in Carmel - all of which are a 20-40 minute drive for me probably 15-25 miles.
I can go to these places above in 5-60 minutes in my car, public transportation would require multiple transfers and probably 4-5 hours, with some of them running fairly infrequently, for some of them and a couple of them I simply could not get to with public transportation.
Without a car I'd also have no way to get to the meetinghouse of my Church, or to singles firesides at a meetinghouse on the other side of town.
Without a car in the spring and summer I'd show up to dates, or to hang out with friends, sweaty and smelly. It will be 86F with the humidity reaching a high of 87% today.
Without a car, I couldn't go shooting if I wanted... I can't get on a bus with long arms and a few bricks of ammunition and be like "hey, I know that isn't a stop up there, but can you drop me in front of that range... this stuff is heavy". I couldn't go hunting, I couldn't go fishing, I couldn't go mushroom hunting in the spring, I couldn't go hiking because buses don't go to the woods.
I'll give you a few other examples:
* If I want to go see a movie in town, I can take the tram (20 minutes, runs every 5 minutes) or the bike (10 minutes), or car sharing (5 minutes walk to nearest station, 10 minute drive, 10 minutes searching for a parking spot in a garage, 10 minutes walking from said garage to the cinema.)
* If I want to visit my parents, it is a 2.5h car drive or a 3.5h tram/train/bus ride with 3 changes. Time lost in car: 2.5 hours. Time lost with PT: at most 30 minutes waiting at stations, the 3 hours in the train can be used for reading or working.
* If we want to visit the parents of my wife, it is a 50 minute car drive or a 80 minutes tram/train/bus ride. Time lost on car: 50 minutes, time lost with PT: roughly 10 minutes.
* If I want to visit someone in a remote village, or take a leisure trip to some remote place, or go hikin, I walk 5 minutes to the nearest car sharing station and take a car from there.
The same goes for audiobooks: it may be possible to listen to shallow fiction in a car, but anything that requires true attention and concentration is very hard to follow while driving without putting yourself in danger, at least in an urban environment or at high speeds.
Depending on how you value your conversation and your lives.
Distracted driving isn't only caused by conversations on cell phones and there are studies behind why many states have limits on passengers riding with young drivers.
If you're the passenger, you should hope that the conversation is vapid enough to not distract.
Not to me it isn't. I listen to podcasts and/or music and/or YouTube videos I don't need to watch and have saved to my watch later list for listening to. And I'm alone in my car and will occasionally just sit in quiet enjoying alone time where I don't have multiple people blabbing in the background.
Some of the best laughs I've had are from driving and reading bumper stickers and vanity plates.
I don't want to be working on something 24/7/365 like people on HN seem to want to do. There's no exercise I'm going to do on a bus or a train as I don't walk around with hundreds of pounds of bumper plates, a barbell and a squat rack/rig or chalk (I'm a strength athlete so light calisthenics aren't even warming up for me).
As far as biking, yeah good luck riding a bicycle in central Indiana in the summer, you will show up to your destination completely soaked. I don't remember if I said it in this comment chain or another but the temperature today will be in the mid 80F's (29-30C) with 87% humidity. Go stand still outside for 90 seconds in that and you'll be sweating, do physical exertion and you'll be soaked. Want to bike somewhere in the winter? Past few winters the actual temperature has gotten down to -17F/-27C with copious amounts of snow and ice. Compare that to Hamburg which has an average low -0.5C in January vs -7.7C and seems to see an average high of only 22.7C in July vs 29.4F in Indy.
That... seems very specific.
> the temperature today will be in the mid 80F's (29-30C) with 87% humidity
Ice and snow is one thing, but that doesn't sound too unreasonable for casual cycling. You might not want to do it for a job interview but it ought to be viable for many journeys.
Dealing with personal sweating seems like it should be an easier job than dealing with global heating.
> And I'm alone in my car and will occasionally just sit in quiet enjoying alone time
I'm sure that's true, but moving a few tons of environmentally-controlled metal a few kms twice a day seems like a wasteful way to achieve this.
In the train (or while waiting for the train) I can read, listen to a podcast or audiobook (with full concentration and no interruption), eat, and even work. That is not a waste of time for me.
Driving, now that is a waste of time.
An efficient car sharing infrastructure can easily alleviate the need for the odd drive.
Living in rural area - you need a vehicle and a gun. That's true for people in Europe as well as in US.
The problem with midwest, is that sprawling poorly connected suburbia was a form of social engineering. Most old world cities have grown organically, not with someone's "grand design" in mind. Thus - in US, outside of NYC, you don't have an option to not own a car.
I used to live in a ~350k city in Germany. It has public transport - given the college in town, probably also one of "average" quality. Unless you live very close to a tram, you are bound to use a bus which will get you into the city center (~3 mi, 10 min by car), which was scheduled every 30 mins and took another 30 mins. From there, you might get a train (or another bus!), often times scheduled in such a way that you'd have to wait another 30 or so minutes for it.
For me, getting to see a friend in the next town over (~15mi) would take me 25 mins by car, including traffic, and 1hr to 90mins by public transport. Going to work, a solid hour by car due to really bad traffic, took 90mins to 2 hrs using public transport (~30 miles).
Not to mention common trips that take me from store A to B and back home - every single stop requires you to wait for a bus and often change lines as well.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love more public transport in the US (we have some, but it is horrendous where I live). But even for Europe, saying you don't need a car is a very narrow-minded outlook.
I apologize for my misleading post, my experience is based on living in multiple major and / or university cities in southwestern Germany, 3-10 days visits to smaller and larger towns all across Europe and frequent visits to Switzerland.
> But even for Europe, saying you don't need a car is a very narrow-minded outlook.
You seem to confuse me with a no-car evangelist/fundamentalist, because I have never said that. I have merely stated that if you live in a town with some sort of car sharing and an average public transportation system, you do not need to own a car. From what you describe, I would consider the public transportation system in the city you lived in edge-case average for a 350k city, but certainly not optimal. However, a 3 mile distance to the city center (where the train station appears to be) is easily covered by bike.
> For me, getting to see a friend in the next town over (~15mi) would take me 25 mins by car, including traffic, and 1hr to 90mins by public transport. Going to work, a solid hour by car due to really bad traffic, took 90mins to 2 hrs using public transport (~30 miles).
I would also choose a car for visits to your friend. But you do not visit you friend daily, so why would you need to own a car for that? Even if you visit him weekly, car sharing might be enough, and less overhead. Your daily commute may indeed be a reason for owning a car. However, if I would have to choose between a 1h car ride to work, or a 90 min PT ride, I would still choose public transportation, for the reasons stated below (you can do stuff on PT).
In my experience (I'm from the West), the southern cities in Germany have better public infrastructure compared to what I lovingly call the German Rust Belt. I have been to Hamburg and Berlin for work, where using public transport was a lot easier as well, but those cities are not comparable in size.
> From what you describe, I would consider the public transportation system in the city you lived in edge-case average for a 350k city, but certainly not optimal.
It is decent for folks living close to any type of train, as a lot of my friends do who are still in college. Car sharing did not exist when I left, that might have changed. But even if it does, the problem of the famous last mile pertains - if the area where I live is too much of an edge case for any type of public transport, it is hard to profitably provide supply. Here, I can at least get an Uber in fairly remote locations (as the car picks me up wherever I am, albeit for a premium).
> However, a 3 mile distance to the city center (where the train station appears to be) is easily covered by bike.
Not in a suit or when it rains, not to mention medical conditions. However, I agree, that is a good point.
> But you do not visit you friend daily, so why would you need to own a car for that? Even if you visit him weekly, car sharing might be enough, and less overhead.
Yes, that is a good perspective on it. However, this serves as an example - in that region, a lot of the interesting places are fairly spread out, often across cities. This quickly becomes a view of opportunity cost and convenience. As long as public transport doesn't offer enough incentives - reliability, flexibility, quality, and price - I am personally very willing to invest the money for a car, as I generally value time and convince more than money.
Doing anything on PT often proves challenging. I personally cannot read or work on a bus (get horrible car sickness), but I know other people can manage just fine. On a train, it depends on the availability of seating and WiFi - which, in my experience, is a huge gamble. If those were true, see above, one could justify the extra time invested.
But to your point here, yes, need becomes a subjective term in that regard.
When I'm traveling, if I ask the hotel staff to recommend any restaurants "within walking distance", they'll grimace and say there aren't really any, even while Yelp informs me that there are six within a kilometer.
Yesterday I ended up spending about 15 minutes waiting for a bus that was late. Someone else spent about the same amount of time as me waiting on that normal street corner, and then got back off the bus about 5 blocks later. So, that makes ~15 minutes standing around waiting for the bus and $2.25 spent on a fare, in order to save a 5 minute walk. I assume they're at least as able-bodied as I am, because, unlike me, they didn't opt to sit on the bench during the wait.
I just don't think the US has a culture that considers feet to be a valid mode of transportation.
it almost as if we've had decades of social and political lobbying to get people to walk less and use cars
And right now we're fighting a battle in my hometown (small town) where the city and a developer wants a hotel downtown and a group of citizens are fighting that it should be 5 miles away out by the freeway where there is nothing to do and you would have to drive everywhere. For some reason people actively and loudly enjoy not being able to walk from store to store.
I did something similar the other day, and it wasn't because I was lazy. There's 2 key points that you miss, the existence of monthly bus pass and the fact that the bus was late. If you are close to a bus stop, and the bus is going to be there on time, you could save some time. Let say it takes 5 minutes in bus and 10 to walk, if he is in time, you saved 5 minutes, if he is 5 minutes late, you lost nothing, but if he is 10 minutes late, well, you just lost 5 minutes. The thing is, that's always true at any given point. After waiting 5 minutes, the same rules apply because you still have the 10 minutes walk.
In the end, I started walking about nearly 10 minutes later. I should have done it before because there was others stop on the way (and could have taken the bus at theses stops instead) but I neglected that. I did the right choice by about 30 seconds though, because I reached my final stop just before the bus. It was a 7 minutes walk.
In some cases, I've found that to literally be true. I used to live a few miles from a large suburban mall (well, Castleton Square Mall is/was technically within the city limits of Indianapolis). I decided to walk to the mall one day, what the hell, good exercise. There were no crosswalks or signals to cross either the N/S nor E/W roads. No sidewalks. I recall no bike racks once you got there. It was as if (and I imagine literally true) there was no consideration given to any other means of transportation but a car. Other examples abound, but that one particularly stands out in my mind.
There's a reason why the most coveted retail real estate is in pedestrian accessible areas... not parking only strip malls.
People here seem to optimize for low effort more than their time. Same reason why people stand on escalators. If they cared about time they'd walk up it.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/madrid-spain-...
Granted there's some infrequent edge cases where you need to move a sofa. Maybe we still allow occasional delivery vans. And bonus - they'll be able to get there more efficiently, because the road won't be choked with cars.
The title of this article wasn't "Uber data reveals motoring slower than using a wheelchair".
Even with the most progressive, pro-active/public transport systems in the world, which we should totally aim for, there will be a need for some level of taxi-like service at a minimum.
I invite you to walk at 1am, everyday, through the dodgy parts of London with your smartphone in your pocket. Please, report your mugged or stabbed rate in a year.
(If anything, by segregating neighborhoods and exacerbating wealth inequality, cars make the problem worse.)
If you get dragged into the dirt between parked cars for some extra brutality then none of those people driving by in their cars are going to stop and intervene. You are hidden by cars and in that peculiar filth that cars bring to the street. Plus noisy car dominated roads mean that everyone in residential housing shuns the street, so there is nobody looking out.
I felt sorry for the gang that picked me off but I felt a lot of anger and resentment thereafter to car drivers that expressed forthright opinions on the matter with an air of 'knowing best'. As if any of them had a clue or direct experience.
If everyone hides in cars because the area they are gentrifying is 'not safe' then you only end up with vulnerable people on the street getting preyed on by the more violent members of society. Everyone ends up terrified. Streets become walled off behind rows of tin boxes and there is no community. Excessive car culture is part of this climate of cowardice.
Bikes, buses, trains would work so much better in London without the tin boxes cluttering up the place. Kids could play in the street. They could know their neighbours. Regular taxis can work fine, there is no need for this gig economy Uber nonsense.
Oh, so what about the disabled? Well, people would be able to visit them for a change. Delivery vans, people moving houses and all those whataboutisms? All that can be resolved easily when we drop the mentality of people having to be in their own armoured tanks for security.
We have gone past 'there is no such thing as society'.
Yeah, crimes in London is on the rise. And at the same time, people also keep getting hit and killed by cars. The diesel exhaust is filling people’s lungs, and the constant traffic noise is certainly putting a strain on people’s mind.
And instead asking Londoners to spend lots of money and get a car which they will have nowhere to park, what about reverse the police budget cut that left us with 22,000 fewer police officers?
Or maybe it's 100'F and merely existing makes you sweat. Hello, large parts of the United States right now!
Either way, walking is no longer feasible if the distance is more than a couple miles.
Walking in the sun is too much effort and makes you sweat ? Buy sunscreen, bring an extra t shirt and stop making excuse. Sweat is a perfectly normal response to heat, your body knows how to deal with it. God damn it, some kids in africa run 10km to go to school every day while eating 5 time less food than you and they probably complain less.
Rain is a viable excuse for burning fossil fuel and moving 2 tons of steel to transport a 80kg meat bag ?
Unless you're disabled or commute 30+km a day you're better off with good gear and an electric bike. It's cheaper, better for your health, better for local and global pollution, &c. ICE vehicles have nothing to do in city centers. Good public transport + a fleet of government owned electric taxies would solve every issues.
As it happens I commute by bicycle but that's by the by.
Don't think about this in terms of your immediate personal situation, think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
It can be done by changing but a single variable: cost. Make driving more expensive, and people drive less. Make driving cheaper, and people drive more. With a sufficiently high cost, the majority of people will seek alternatives.
"If we tax the poor, they'll decide to be less poor"
It won't work. The suburbs are predominantly filled with people who could not afford to live places with functional transit in the first place.
If you make driving more expensive, the few people who are wealthy enough to choose the city, will do so (driving sky-high prices even higher). And for the 99% of suburban people who already can't afford cities, these people will have even less money for housing, so they'll be forced to buy cheaper housing, which will be even further away from the city, and you'll exacerbate even more sprawl than already exists.
Suburbs today (not 1950, but today in 2019) exist almost exclusively because of failures of their cities, mainly in housing, education, and transportation. To suggest "people shouldn't assume they have to live in a suburb" is to suggest that people should assume they'll be allowed to live in a city.
And that's simply not true. That's never a safe assumption, effectively that's impossible for most people in the US. Just in housing alone, they're already priced out for at least the next decade or more. (Even in "cheap" cities, even in the South or the Midwest, etc)
> think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
Manhattan residents would have to be ok with all property losing 90% of it's 'fair-market value' overnight. Same for Seattle, and San Francisco, and Boston, and Minneapolis, and every other city on earth.
Oh, no one in Manhattan is OK with that? Then, effectively Manhattan residents are guaranteeing "car-dependent" (read: cheap/affordable) lifestyles for everyone else, are here to stay for a while.
I cannot be in the office with pit stains and BO and expect to be treated with respect and have the same career advancement and pay as if I show up fresh, with hair combed and no BO or visible sweat.
Today, our hygiene standards are higher and for many of us, driving to work is part of "the cost of doing business" because of this.
The same goes for if it's snowing..walking around in soggy or salt-stained boots is not a thing I can get away with doing.
People do it, but I have a job where I have to meet certain (yes, partly self-imposed) expectations on appearance and hygiene and I can't meet those expectations if I walk 20 minutes to work in 80 degree, snowy, or rainy weather.
I'm not a dandy or a snowflake or whatever. I love sweating and I love hiking. Being outside in the rain can be a sublime experience. But that's just not compatible with a trip to work.
I don't like it but as I said, it's part of the "cost of doing business" in society.
If you worked in a formal environment you'd probably have to bring extra pants too. But most people bring a change of clothes to the gym anyways, so it's not like it's a completely outrageous concept.
It's really not that big of a deal. In formal businesses ladies have done this forever with having comfortable shoes for traveling and high heels for the office.
I find this historically inaccurate.
Wool suits were common middle class and upper class wears throughout the 19 and 20th centuries. Turns out that a jacket covers pit stains. Wool is also breathable, moisture wicking, and anti microbial/ anti odor.
And inaccurate by occupation - based off of understanding of clothing. Many landscapers and builders wear long pants and long shirts. In part for the physical protection they offer, but also because of the air volume they hold.
Do you really have no place to change at work ? No public transport at all ? Not even car sharing ?
I bike to the gym before work, change there and head to work on my bike, I'm perfectly presentable no matter the weather, and that's in Berlin where it rains 50% of the year.
To my surprise, it was a total non-issue. Hundreds of thousands of people got to work without a car in my city and still managed to get to work looking perfect. The vast majority of days, an extra 20-30 minutes outside was a blessing. The very few days it wasn't I kept an extra shirt and pair of shoes in the office. And if I got a little wet on the way to work, so did everyone else. And this is was in a city with rain, hail, snow, wind, heat, and humidity. It just wan't a problem and there was no way to justify owning a car while I had 2 working legs.
All that to say, I know where you're coming from. I've been in that head space myself. But if people in NY, London, and Paris can deal with a little weather and still make SVP, so can you.
So someone flew me out to San Francisco last June to meet me and have me talk to a few people. I landed during the pride parade at SFO and was staying at the Proper (that place felt decidedly John Wick - the Continental and their chicken liver mousse hnnghh), I'd literally no idea nor did my uber driver that we wouldn't be able to get to the Proper. He got me within about 2 miles before the crowds and road closures and was like "I don't know how long this will take or if I can get you there" so I got out with my suitcase, in a city I'd never been in, with throngs of people.
The road immediately outside of my hotel window was the road the parade was on and was ultimately between me and the hotel. I had no idea there were subway entrances that I could get under the road with. Walking shoulder to shoulder, crotch to butt, butt to crotch, trying to protect my phone, wallet and suitcase, literally stepping over people passed out on the sidewalk (if not overdosed) that were being somewhat trampled. The heat in those dense pockets of people was insane, I had to keep craning my head up to try and get cooler air.
Yeah, even if there hadn't have been so many people, wondering around with a suitcase trying to find the hotel would not have been an enjoyable experience... especially given the alarming amount of human excrement, phlegm, gum etc I kept having to dodge.
I got to the hotel finally, opened the door and was hit with a wall of air con and was like "ughhh yassss" making it to the check in counter with my beard all poofy, my shirt soaked, probably looking like a vagrant and getting a weird look from the person behind the counter until I said I was checking in. First thing I did in the room was peel out of wet clothes, crank the air down and had probably the 3rd best shower of my life while I killed time waiting for the hotel restaurant to open since there was no way in hell I was going back outside into that mess to try and find fast food or a convenience store.
Not to say we should abolish all motorized transport. In any modern city there should be half a dozen ways of getting around that are all faster than cars. Light rail, buses, casual bicycles, and electric scooters spring to mind.
I love walking, sometimes spend hours on long walks since I live in a very pretty place but forcing everybody to adhere to your own vision of car-less cities without offering a proper alternative (not those you mention in this thread, they are far from enough)... sucks.
It's going to be 100 Fahrenheit (40C) next week. It's 93 and rainy today. This will continue to happen regularly from now until September or October.
When I talk, I'm going to sweat, especially where there's no shade or if I walk beyond a slow saunter. Being in shape does nothing to prevent that.
https://now.tufts.edu/articles/big-road-blues-pollution-high...
There's be a fraud problem though, and it could make it difficult for disabled people in practice (they may not be able to easily get the right badge, or be believed when they do, they wouldn't be able to benefit from car infrastructure…)
That's a non-argument. You could say that about any regulation. I assume regulating transport for disabled people isn't that hard cause we already have system in place that deals with disabilities.
I would expect that that kind of environment is actually a net improvement to accessibility for people with disabilities. It's probably quite annoying for people who use wheelchairs to get around a lot of places without a car, simply because the sidewalks are so frequently blocked off by people who've parked their cars across the sidewalk. There's one man in my neighborhood who frequently has to go out in the street to get around those sorts of obstructions, and is then stuck out in the middle of the road until he can get to the next wheelchair ramp in order to get back on the sidewalk. Limiting private car usage would admittedly only remove a portion of the sources of obstruction, but it would get rid of essentially all of the safety hazard that he has to take on in order to get around them.
And, especially now that cars are going electric and getting quieter and quieter, I would guess that restricting unnecessary car usage could be a big boon for blind people who want to be able to leave the house without a chaperone. I had one acquaintance who would essentially Uber everywhere - at great expense to herself - because she just didn't feel safe even trying to cross the street.
(Heck, I'm sighted, and sometimes _I_ don't feel safe trying to cross the street, especially later in the evening when a sizable portion of drivers are intoxicated and really are not watching for pedestrians.)
Able bodied people in wheelchairs are the easy case - just pave the roads with enough smooth transitions.
This even applies to the "some of us want a yard" rebuke of suburbanites. Houses nearer cities can have more land if there isn't an 8 lane highway.
Green spaces aren't to be sniffed at though, even for hayfever suffers.
I was more speaking to the, every acre of land we pave over is one less acre sequestering carbon and ensuring biodiversity...
"Green spaces" also have psychological and physiological benefits.
Ideally, when the customer and the person doing the explaining is the same person.
Same for gods delivery. You bought a new freezer, washer or other heavy gods? You can pick it in the store in the fringes. No deliveries into the city, you need cars for that.
We (me and my wife) were just renovating an apartment in a city center, where the traffic limits apply. The problems the craftsmen had are real, and I speak from my own experience. Many times the solution was be bold and hope cops will be sympathetic. They were, though we got the recommendation to sell everything and move somewhere else, where there are no such problems.
The only things which couldn't be delivered this way were joists, which came by a small electric lorry.
That’s pretty crazy when you stop to think about it. The space isn’t actively being used all day, I’m guessing these folks just know the right time to get there early after street cleaning to get a spot they can sit in all day because it’s cheap. Is there really no better use for this public space on some of the most expensive land in the world? Surely they could unload their equipment and then go park in a garage around the corner.
So to your broader point, yes obviously there needs to be some way to get heavy equipment, furniture, etc into cities. But there’s no reason it needs to be the extreme it is today, with so much priority given to private cars and parking.
Also depends on time of day. In the early hours a car is definitely faster than a bike in 95% of the city.
In some places walking a few hundred meters puts you in a much better position for pick-up. Same thing in destination, propose a location that minimizes total travel time.
I once got off a night bus in Asyut, hailed a cab, hopped in and asked to be taken to the train station. The driver pointed out the window to the giant sign on the building across the street reading “Asyut Railway Station”.
Travel wouldn’t be the same without making silly mistakes like this. It’s where our stories come from.
In cities like London, it’s often half an hour for every option, so the decision comes down to whether it’s raining and how well the tube entrances line up.
On a bicycle you have options when the traffic is slow, including getting off to walk. But the place would be that densely packed with buses, motorbikes, taxis and actual cars that this was neigh on impossible. If you did walk then you would be waiting for lights, at least by bicycle you have the Highway Code on your side.
Before the top bit of Trafalgar Square was pedestrianised it took 27 lane changes to go from the Whitehall side to the Charing Cross road exit, by bicycle using the bus lane shortcuts.
Even though you could see where you were heading you could emerge from the hell of Trafalgar Square to make it onto easier roads to then see a clock, e.g. Big Ben. Only then would you realise that navigating the square had taken twenty minutes as half an hour had gone by since leaving work.
The other vehicles would take considerably longer. But that is motoring, there is no expectation of forward movement, sitting in traffic spewing fumes and blaming the world for the predicament is par for the course. If you are on a bus you can just dibble with your phone so it doesn't matter. People put up with it.
Many people who drive around in urban centers aren't really trying to get from one part of the urban center to another; they just happen to be in the same car they just drove in from the suburbs. That trip as a whole tends to be much faster than walking, and it takes quite a bit of time to park somewhere other than your destination. So if you're optimizing for speed, it can still be rational to drive all the way to your destination.
But if I’m driving in from where I live for dinner and theater in the evening, yes I drive, including through congested areas.
Yeah, bullshit. Maybe that's true of this particular "anonymized" dataset, but Uber did the anonymizing. They absolutely have the data to track and sanction speeding drivers. They just don't care to. Why would they?
Or it gets passengers to their destination faster and they can charge less. Lol
Would you want your car to do so completely insensitive to current contexts? Especially if the road data winds up inaccurate in areas. I have had several GPSes tell me that I was "speeding" by going the 45 MPH because it thought it was a 25 road.
There is an expectation of servicing the user - if they did that they would be called Orwellian and lose drivers enmasse. It would also fail to address speeding in general as they would speed without tracking then.
[1] https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/03/us-cities-are-becoming-mor...
The feet are superior everywhere except highways, especially if you are not known in the area and need to get familiar.
I also enjoy walking, when I am at home I take 1-2 hour walking trips in the forest by the house while listening to audio books almost every day.
Since I currently live in the countryside I need a car for large item transportation and things like that, but I have never owned one when living in a city.
What a clever, considerate American, making use of energy-efficient transportation and stopping to offer rides to strangers along the way!
> The feet are superior everywhere except highways
Try walking to work in business attire on a few 100 degree (38C) days and then tell me how you feel about that...
Yes, he was really nice. Americans usually are from my experience :)
> Try walking to work in business attire on a few 100 degree (38C) days and then tell me how you feel about that...
I'll concede to this point. I don't have to wear that kind of outfit very often and the temperatures here rarely reach that high luckily.
I usually grin and bear it but I know plenty of older people who don't tolerate heat well. Men especially seem to suffer since they run hotter and they're not allowed to wear skirts and sleeveless shirts to work (or, if they are allowed, it's still not quite culturally acceptable enough yet...). A lot of "professional" workplaces don't even allow men to wear short sleeves, and they definitely don't allow shorts.
Weather/tempature. We live in FL and sometimes walking more than 5 min outside brings you to a full sweat. Conversely you may want it to take an uber because it is way too cold.
clothes - if you're in high heels or a dress you may not want to walk as far.
We really need better journalism than using statistics to make up lies to get clicks...
If you want to get places fast in London, as the article suggests, you want to be on two wheels. Cycling is probably the best option, but motorcycle or scooter also works well.