The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine.
The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives.
The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.
Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars.
I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow.
Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged.
As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it). As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet).
All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max. If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same. However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour.
As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years.
Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option.
And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it.
As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours.
Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people.
So it really depends on your situation.
On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.
That's to be expected if you get someone from Trinity to draw up the plan!
Cambridge is becoming an incredibly hostile place to get to and around in if you don't live in the city. Partly it's a function of the population growth, but it is pushing people like me to spend more in towns like Bury St Edmunds rather than deal with Cambridge.
Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest).
This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total.
So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses?
That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.
Car traffic hopefully slows and makes things safer for pedestrians crossing the road and much safer for cyclist.
The wikipedia only lists a few examples where it has been implemented:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet#Examples_of_implemen...
If you didn't have buses that go places people need and lots of them then converting a lane to bus only might not be useful. People make exactly the same claims you do about seattle but the bus system here is really effective.
Though the examples do show what I consider progress, the tiny amount of changes reinforces your point, like deafening silence.
(N.b. there is a plan to add a lane to portions of the outer ring highway, so "more car lanes to reduce traffic" still has some advocates.)
There's no way this is true. Housing density has increased within cities themselves. Generally things have also become more CO2 efficient within the cities as well. More people live in cities than 20 years ago. If someone in the suburbs drives, it's the same (or less with modern cars). If they use transit, it's less. If they move out of the suburbs or stop commuting, it's also less. Where does the CO2 increase come from?
It's also important to remember that these trends vary vastly depending on the city you talk about. High density cities with good existing public transit infrastructure have very much succeeded and improved public transit, not destroyed it. LA is very much not a good example due to the sprawling nature. I lived in LA for 6 months and would not call it a city but rather 13 connected suburbs. A bus there is indeed a failed project. Heck, even the Expo line they just built to connect the west side is a lot of travel time and not much coverage.
Using Silicon Valley as 'the perfect example' of anything that is supposed to generalize to the rest of the country, or even within 100 miles, seems... bizarre.
This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich.
The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.
In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030.
The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.
Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.
In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.
Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.
For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.
Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.
So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.
I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.
With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.
I live in a suburban area where outside commuter type service there is no mass transit into the city.
So as the city restricts parking I worry about accessibility. Park and rides are also usually a commuter hours only option too.
> The problem of the US is that outside of major cities...
What urban setting does the US have outside its major cities? Arguably, that is one of the major problems.
Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Also the stores are thriving. Now the part that was kept as street feels odd. Change is difficult.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariahilfer_Stra%C3%9Fe#Mariah...
It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble.
If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation.
It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.
The biggest argument against that around here is that eventually, all stores want to move to these new business areas which causes the town's center to lose attractiveness. That's why it's usually difficult for city administrations to decide about the locations of individual businesses.
There’s a store near me that sells just hockey goalie equipment. Moving to pedestrian-only would be a net negative for them since most of their business isn’t local foot traffic.
You can still get close by car, you just can no longer drive along or cross over the shopping street. You also have access to pretty good public transport options in the area (underground, bus, tram, …).
I can imagine other scenarios and areas where a change like this might be strictly bad for some stores. From what I can tell I don't think this was the case here. Happy to be corrected though if someone knows more.
Or they deliver, e.g furniture.
People that want to fill their car with goods in one trip will continue to do so, but it won’t be in the city centre.
Perhaps all along they shouldn’t have, but it was possible/practical before.
Now they will go to the city outskirts to buy larger/bulkier/more good. The sellers thereof will suffer and/or be replaced by car-free friendly businesses (restaurants, cafes, light-weight goods).
That’s all fine long-term, but I’m shedding tears for the businesses that did exist and may not when the environment suddenly changes around them.
Not only those, the fans of bicycles and public transport also suffer when they have limited options for shopping at particular places that are only present in the outskirts. In Vienna, IKEA is now opening a store near this "Mariahilfer Straße" at Westbahnhof, where there's also a huge public garage and a huge shopping centre was built a few years ago - you could say that real shopping is moving where the cars can still go in the city centre, while the former shopping street is slowly turning into a tourist promenade with bars, clothes and souvenir stores.
In reality there are much more nuanced solutions. E.g. if you have a small street with people living in it and the majority of the streets traffic comes from cars taking a shortcut between two main roads, maybe closing that direct connection and creating a dead end is the better solution that boosts the atractivity of the whole street, while at the same time making it more friendly to pedestrians, locals, cyclists etc. Cars can still enter. They just have no reason to do so, except if they live there.
The only downside is the loss of a shortcut, which might have impacted traffic on the main roads negatively.
In traffic there are often situations were all involved sides win if you take something away or encourage certain uses while discouraging others. On other paradox occasions, everybody can lose, if you add more lanes to a street.
In case of Mariahilfer it might be still possible to deliver, but the attractivity as a pure transit street got reduced, simply by showing what the priority is. If this impacts other transit routes also in a positive way, I don’t see why Vienna should do more of this thing — especially if it is willing to win the title of “City most worth living in” also in the future.
Some people do, others don't. Currently they are complaining about homeless and drunk people hanging out there.
To be honest, it's more crowded and looks desolate now. The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd. And everybody complains about bicycles going 30 Km/h and endangering pedestrians.
"desolate" means the opposite of "crowded".
> The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd.
So the shops are missing the kind of people you would like to see shopping, but full of a "different" kind of people. What kind of people are those?
No, it also means:
: showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED
> What kind of people are those?
Bums, poor people, slob tourists.
That's a curiously selective reading of that definition.
> Bums, poor people, slob tourists.
And who are these desired, non "Bum", non-tourist wealthy people you wish were shopping there still?
Big cars are another dimension of this problem. American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues. You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.
Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).
I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.
[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/30/breaking-upper-west-s...
The value of a typical 17 square metre parking space in Manhattan is about $400k [0]. If you want to park your car on the road, rather than paying for a commercial garage, you should be paying for that land.
[0] 22.83 square miles of land in Manhattan is 78304708.32 square metres. Parallel parking space is 2.76m by 6.1m according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-size-of-a-standard-parking...
There was a big hooplah in my neighborhood when a nearby government building converted to being leased from a developer, who immediately started charging for parking. Most of the employees found places to park on the nearby residential streets, annoying the residents due to the added congestion and traffic, including on a street that was already a designated bike thoroughfare.
I certainly support better urban planning, and I get around town by bike whenever possible, but I'm also sympathetic to the short term disruptions that people have adapted to parking arrangements that can change overnight.
Thing is, historic districts don't make up most of cities, even before the post-war rebuild/new cities expansion.
The pattern will repeat with flying, decreasing population growth, and moving the economy from producing so much disposable stuff.
But we're still in the stage where everyone thinks of what they'll miss, not what they'll gain.