Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm | Hacker News Reader

Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

citylab.com

184 pointsjseliger278 comments

Yeah, I live in Berlin and we have an increasing number of car free zones here where people can move around without being afraid of getting killed.

Even children play outside again in such areas without risking their life. Not to mention the lack of noise, pollution and clogged up space with parking cars.

Cafes thrive and people stroll around to spend their time and money. Businesses return from the outskirts etc. It's a dream for everybody. Also crime rates drop as drug dealers can't drive through anymore.

i think crime rate has little to do with "drug dealers driving through". drug dealers live in the cities too, and most of the ones that interact with users don't have cars. i think falling crime rates are more likely due to improve economic vibrancy

I would picture a Berlin drug dealer as being perfectly comfortable riding a bicycle.

Most street drug dealers use bicycles, EU and abroad.

More freedom of movement, no license nor plate.

Drug dealers in Berlin populate the parks and subway stations mostly. Easier to hide in the crowds or shrubbery, if they hide at all. Police usually never bother them.

Yeah, but you only mean low level ones who barely earn enough to eat. I don't mean those. I mean the bigger fish.

Wouldn't advice people to consume merchandise from someone that hangs around in parks.

Sounds like Seattle.

You can carry much less on a bike.

Flip side: if you get caught, it's a lesser crime because you don't have as much on you.

Which hardly matters if your product has an excellent price/weight ratio.

My understanding (not being involved in the field in any role) is that even car-based street dealers carry far less product than one could comfortably pack on a bike.

And a cargo bike could probably move a quite respectable quantity even by wholesale dealer standards.

Interesting.

Whenever there is talk about pedestrianizing a street in my town, the usual suspects immediately claim that this will make local businesses go bankrupt since "people can't drive up to them". Never mind that stopping isn't allowed anyway on those streets. I don't understand the logic.

Toronto?

We literally had an outspoken opponent of a traffic reduction program (not even totally car-free) build an ice statue that flipped the bird to passers-by in protest. In the end I think he cost himself business because of his attitude.

You're not alone in not understanding. The program (called the King St Pilot Project here in TO) has made taking that street as a transit user and pedestrian far more palatable.

Amazing. Sounds like a Parks and Recreation episode.

Here's what the problem was. The King St Project dramatically improved transit. Tens of thousands of people were getting home earlier.

This was good for riders.

However there were a few nice but not noteworthy restaurants that got a lot of evening customers who were people waiting for King St to get moving and decided to give up and have dinner or a few drinks.

Think of it along the lines of airport restaurants suffering due to reduced flight delays and reliably fast security clearance.

That runs counter to the data I’d previously seen. Business owners claimed spending went down when it was reported as going up.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4390635/king-street-pilot-project...

Or see the city’s YoY report, page 16:

https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/8fb5-TS_Ki...

The restaurants that suffered were belonged to the fellow I mentioned and those that aligned themselves with him. He was already a bit of a notorious blowhard.

What you’re describing is what they claimed would happen, but didn’t because more people were encouraged to spend time there.

Even anecdotally I certainly spend more time there after films than I otherwise did because it’s so much better to move through rather than a total blockade of cars every single day rendering it basically a non-consideration—at least on our part.

I work in a small town in the UK that is being slowly killed by people driving through the centre either looking for a free parking spot of just because it shortens their journey by a minute or so. And yes, these are the people who believe their freedom to do so is what's keeping the town alive - despite much evidence to the contrary (ie. many closed down businesses).

Americans are really unaware to how cars ruins cities, particularly how much of the cities after urban renewal were demolished instead of improved to make room for the six lane sroads.

This only works in bigger cities, where there is plenty of heavily subsidized public transport such as Berlin. Most smaller towns that went car free killed their businesses or made them move to shopping districts on the outskirts which are still reachable by car. Leading to "dead" inner parts of town and very unhappy citizens. Oh, and skyrocketing rents in the subsidized cities such as Berlin...

Well yeah, if you get rid of one form of transport there has to be something sufficient to replace it. They could be subways, busses, bikes (think Denmark), etc.

It isn't that nobody thought of busses or trams. Its just that they are always too sparse, slow, limited in times, capacity, safety and comfort. I believe the break-even is of being able to replace cars is somewhere around a 5min schedule over the day and stations in at most 200m walking distance from everywhere.

Oh, and of course being comparable in speed to at least a bike.

That leaves only subways...

Melbourne trams are more convenient than driving and are free in the city centre. It can work just fine.

Do you have examples of such smaller cities that tried this and failed?

I was wondering this myself. I’ve never heard of this before.

Many historical inner cities in europe only allow inhabitant and delivery traffic, the latter even limited to certain hours of the day. That applies to smaller ones with <100k inhabitants too.

It's funny that you are using "heavily subsidized public transport" while using the entierly subsidized road system...

Just about all public road systems are subsidised but are public transport systems?. This will work better in cities with cheap/free public transport

Or if like in some other parts of the world public transit companies can profit off the development around train stations, and then treat the trains as marketing that literally funnels trainloads of people to their profit centers.

> entirely

Forgetting fuel taxes?

Disclaimer: I've been car free for the past three years.

I agree that roads are public infrastructure, but car owners are heavily taxed in Europe, especially some parts of Europe.

In Italy, excluding fuel taxes (which cover 70% of the cost of the fuel BTW) every car owner pays a mandatory "car owning tax" for each car they own, that totals around 5-6 billions euros/year. And it's only the main one, there are several others.

In the US, it's called a car registration fee, but it's the same thing - a tax on owning a car.

Excise tax, Gas Tax, Tolls, Registration Fees, Inspection Fees ... Parking fee's... Cars pay their way to the point of making the country profitable in that regard...

That is what they claim over here as well. Meanwhile business is booming in the pedestrian zone, with shops actively moving there from other parts, whereas those shopping streets that kept cars are indeed showing some empty spots due to (a) the above, (b) normal churn, with new businesses starting preferring the car free zones as well and (c) stall-wards being trounced by e-commerce.

The same complaints playbook every time in every city (commerce, disabled, deliveries and repairs) with the same success stories each and very time the carfree streets and regions are there.

One alternative, if you're not fond of the idea of banning cars altogether, is to do the same thing that you see a lot over here. Basically any street people live on is a dead end, or almost a dead end. Taking a shortcut through a residential street basically doesn't happen.

Take the neighborhood I live in for example, It's all one-directional traffic with tight corners and speed bumps. It has more exiting streets than entering streets. The end result being a decided lack of traffic, while still being able to get a car to your front door when you need it.

Kids can play in the streets safely enough, There's a couple cars an hour most of the day and the few cars that do pass are going slow enough to not hit any kids. The most dangerous time of day is all the parents getting their kid out of school by car.

You sometimes see a commercial vehicle trying out a new shortcut. People only think that to be a good idea once. Going around is faster than going through in any case.

Carless doesn't have to be an absolute. It's a gradient from six lane highways through your neighborhood on one side, and no cars at all on the other. A balance needs to be found.

In smaller cities you can let people park outside and they will be able to walk in within minutes. That's even better than using crowded public transport.

Rents are skyrocketing in Berlin because everybody and their friend wants to visit us or live here. At the same time for decades no new buildings were built. Remember? Supply and demand.

Yet rents are still not as high as in New York, London, Paris, Munich or even Hamburg so that people from everywhere flock here.

Agreed. Particularly in a city like Berlin where cars are worshiped and being pedestrian makes you a second-class citizen (Cars > Bikes > Pedestrian). Car free zones + speed limits will hopefully make the life better overthere for non-BMW owners.

San Francisco had one street block near Union Square closed off for a looong time because of construction, and they put some fake turf on it. Occasionally there would be pop-up events, like a little Christmas fair. I would deliberately walk slightly out of my way to go up that block because it meant no cars and wayyy more room to walk. I loved it and was so disappointed to see it turned into a normal street again.

Sidewalks are stupidly narrow here. Two people walking side by side can make it hard for people going the other way to walk around them. There are poles and trash cans and store front tables that take up even more room. Walking is a pretty dreary experience as a result - you feel like a second-class citizen.

I would love it if the city just took even like.. one street going east-west, and one street going north-south, and convert them to walkable promenades for a sizable portion. I'm curious why this hasn't happened yet - is there significant local opposition? For storefronts or restaurants, the direct in-front parking would be lost yes, but there would definitely be more foot traffic, and there would still be parking on adjacent streets. I suppose the main loser would be homeowners that use street parking.

That was Stockton street, which stretches from Market Street (heart of downtown) to Pier 39 (heart of tourist district).

Three blocks north of Union Square is a tunnel that burrows under China Town/Nob Hill and emerges in North Beach. It's a pretty critical artery for locals as it flattens the route between market st and the northern coastline of the city.

There was a push to permanently close Stockton St in favor of making it pedestrian only, but as Stockton St (and the tunnel) is the (real) gateway to the heart of China Town, that movement was squashed pretty quickly.

That said, I would love to see maybe 10% of the streets north of Market street turned into pedestrian-only, or reduced to one lane, converting the parking on both sides of the street into wider sidewalks and more trees. As dense as Nob/Russian Hill is, only one lane is really needed to service most of these neighborhoods. Retailers claim they need the parking but only once in five years have I driven to a market in Nob Hill.

As a Bay Area resident was amazed to find many streets in Barcelona that had room for eight to ten lanes of cars instead reserve half the width or more for pedestrian walking space/open space outside the touristy areas. Forgot the name but there was one street like this I could see about a mile downhill to the ocean front. The only downside was how many pedestrians smoked.

> I'm curious why this hasn't happened yet

There's significant support for drastically changing Market street to be car-free(er). The Better Market Street SF project was unanimous approved this past October! Starting January they will be closing Market street to private vehicles - no Uber/Lyft, only buses, taxis, and commercial vehicles (for eg, the farmer's market). This $600 million dollar project will add proper bike lanes, separate from the sidewalk, widen the sidewalk, and turn the boarded up storefronts into a flourishing urban environment.

http://www.bettermarketstreetsf.org/

I used to (stopped within the last year) walk, ride a kick scooter, and bike down market all the time. The biggest problem with that street isn’t the cars, but the vagrants. Seeing obviously stolen property for sale on the sidewalk, across the street from a cop who appears to be there only so you don’t get mugged, is extremely disconcerting. There’s barely any traffic on it right now anyway, as someone who also had a car in the city during this period I can tell you I /never/ turned down market, you can’t turn off of it. That sounds like a huge waste of $600M if you ask me.

Valencia St is closed to cars one Sunday a month (I forget which one). It’s always a pleasure to walk through.

Then there are also the streets that get blocked off for markets (eg 22nd between Mission and Valencia every Thursday afternoon/evening), also very pleasant.

The more of these the better for our cities.

Part of the change is due to the appearance of alternative powered vehicles. In Tokyo, it seems like every mother is riding an electric cargo bike with covered seating for two kids and room for groceries -- the minivan of bicycles. In Seattle, the morning commute is full of electric skateboards, scooters, onewheels, and wheelchairs. It looks doable.

How do those work in winter? We had electric scooters, but they were all scooped up by their parent companies in October ahead of the coming months of hell.

Mostly fine, sometimes a problem. It's pretty much like regular bikes (or cars for that matter): some might not work well if there is significant snow/ice, but then you will just need one that is suitable for those sort of conditions. The scooter companies are putting out very low end models that aren't designed for any sort of adverse conditions, and they are scared of lawsuits/blowback from accidents.

This sort of transportation is in its infancy. Bikes are in a better place, and we have bikes that can ride fairly safely on full on snow.

I hope e-scooters never make it out of infancy. Bikes are infinitely more practical and capable. They are more stable at all speeds. They can have significantly more cargo carrying capacity. Bikes can be fitted (for the most part) with different tires/wheels to handle adverse conditions more easily than a scooter can.

I hope for the infanticide of e-scooter transportation. It's a grotesque, subooptimal solution than exists in spite of a superior low-cost offering that is faaaar more mature.

I have several examples of both, and ride them to work and shopping. And I completely agree with you. Scooters are a hoot to ride, and if I don’t have to carry more than my backpack will hold, I’d rather commute on the scooter.

But you need both hands, making even signaling a chore, and you can only carry what fits on your back. Scooters are no more difficult to ride than a bicycle, but they are much more difficult to ride safely than a bicycle. Compare to my electric bike with front and rear racks, a rack trunk, and a comfy seat and coffee cup holder.

Scooters pack small, that’s about the only utilitarian plus they have going IMO.

I bought a non-electric, but large-wheeled kick scooter a few months ago for getting around NYC.

I absolutely love it. Bikes are a little annoying to stop and start; "walking" your bike for a short stretch requires physically dismounting. My scooter allows me to constantly transition between standing, walking, and riding as environmental conditions require.

Also... it's stupid, but if I have to wear a helmet to do something, I'm not going to do it. I can't imagine riding a bike without a helmet, because it would be too easy to hit a bump and fall over. On my scooter, however, I feel relatively safe without a helmet. There have been a couple times when I've lost control of my scooter for some reason or another, but because I'm basically standing, I've just kind of jumped off.

I basically agree. In my experience as a rider of one, the main downside of urban kick scooters is that they lack infrastructure. They're too slow to be bikes and play in traffic, but their existence tends to offend and frighten pedestrians, even though their control over acceleration is quite good, about as good as someone running. That quality makes them chimerical, one of the most unpredictable users of the road, and one of the factors in me hanging it up was having my day ruined by people getting upset at me.

The biggest real dangers come from grooves and potholes(I took a spill that needed stitches in my younger days, trying to ride inside a groove) and from using pedestrian infrastructure at speed(cross-traffic can lead to near-misses where the car doesn't expect you to jump out so fast, or the bike expects you to plow through and you stop instead).

The electrics are a nifty invention, but also one that makes their character more like bikes. They fit in a little better as all-purpose transports, but they also lack the simple convenience of a light kick scooter.

Hackerish tip for a fellow kick scooter rider. You can replace the bearings in most kick scooters with skateboard bearings for an easier ride. Most COTS ball bearings, aren’t optimized for force along the radius, skateboard bearings are. Also ceramic bearings don’t have the same thermal expansion which comes into play on a two wheel scooter. I have one of the small-wheeled ones with good bearings and it kicks ass—and it only weighs 4 pounds.

All that said, you are only more comfortable on scooters. I’ve been riding bikes my whole life, and I tend to think the opposite. I have much more control and power on a bike that I’m basically wrapped around then a scooter I stand on. I’ve gotten in accidents on both without helmets and never had anything other than sore palms, also both my parents rode bikes for decades without helmets and neither sustained a significant head injury. Able-ness defitin

> You can replace the bearings in most kick scooters with skateboard bearings for an easier ride.

Does this work even if you have large wheels? I have this: https://www.amazon.com/Micro-SA0034-Black-Scooter/dp/B001L2N...

> I have much more control and power on a bike that I’m basically wrapped around then a scooter I stand on.

If your bike falls over, what do you do?

That's the thing that really makes me feel safer on my scooter. I was riding my scooter in the rain one time, and didn't realize that metal grates would be slippery. My scooter skid and completely fell over sideways. At some point while it was falling, I automatically hopped off and let go†. The result was my scooter lying sideways on the pavement, and me standing up unharmed, and I feel like that would have ended differently on a bike. Is that incorrect?

†I assume that's what happened. It was so fast, I don't remember the exact moment—just the result.

I put my hands in my pockets when I walk down the street because I’m confident if I do trip, I can catch myself on my feet, same principle. If I feel a crash coming (because I hit some road debris, for example) I can maneuver the bike in a split second to either prevent the fall entirely or mitigate it to just looking like an awkward stop. Another factor is that I've ridden enough to read the road and not make mistakes that even lead to tight situations. To extend the analogy, like knowing not to walk on a smooth manhole cover in the rain.

As for the scooter, it looks like, yes it does work. According to the Questions section one person has done it and a separate user confirms its the right type of bearing. Search the questions for “Abec”. Should make a big difference. Have fun.

I agree that bicycles are a superior ride in every way, but a large number of people who don't use bikes do use scooters, and that's enough to make me a fan of them.

Also, speaking as someone who rides a pretty vanilla road bike, the rental e-bikes feel bizarre to me. You call scooters "grotesque" and "suboptimal," but have you ever tried a Jump bike? I can't put my finger on why, but after renting them a few times out of curiosity, I now find myself walking past them and going an extra block to find a scooter if necessary. I prefer my own bicycle over either rental option, but I think rental e-bikes will have to get a lot better before they become as popular as rental scooters. And even my bike doesn't win in all categories. Both rental options (and scooters especially) have an advantage in parking quickly and worry-free at my destination.

In any case, I'm happy to see a variety of options available. I hope rental scooters don't disappear until they are replaced by a better alternative that captures what is attractive about them.

>I can’t quite put my finger on why, but...

99% sure it’s that they all have that step-through geometry.

In many cities bikes get stolen within minutes from parking.

Most e-scooters can be folded up and carried into shops, offices and so on.

> Bikes can be fitted (for the most part) with different tires/wheels

Maybe there's a level of sensitive to being a bicyclist that I realize, but not that's something I've ever needed to consider mid-day at the office for my commute home. It's not like a hilly mountain bike trail suddenly grew out of the ground while I was on my lunch break that I unexpectedly need to cross in order to get home. (A planned detour the long way home is a different story.)

Personal transport evolves as technology changes. From the original iron and wood bone-shakers during the Victorian era followed by the later penny-farthings, to the chain and derailleur drive-trains that are popular today. Bicycles assume that the locomotive energy comes from a person, and are designed around that.

A useful amount of energy can now be stored in on-board batteries, with motors powerful enough to propel a person forwards, some are more powerful than a person can pedal. Some are even powerful enough for cars (requires a lot more batteries though). Electric motors are quieter and don't have exhaust like gasoline engines, either. (We also have self-balancing technology that lowers the learning curve for single-axle designs.)

Henry Ford, possibly apocryphally, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Shoving an electric motor on a bicycle's a faster horse. Maybe with some imagination we can do better than that.

With the right gear, cycling in winter isn’t bad at all, provided the path is clear.

Anecdotal, but I've ridden a bike in winter only once. There was a lot of melted snow "slush". I almost slipped twice. One of those two times, I was right in front of a car when my back wheel slid off to the side, and I caught myself from falling just in time. I've never done it again, it seems suicidal to me. It was a mountain-style bike, and I would have assumed the tires had enough grip. I'm sure you can pick up tricks and get better at this with experience, but it seems at least an order of magnitude more dangerous than summer time biking.

Studded bike tires are common in bike friendly, cold cities. Work great with ice. It's all about the right tool for the job.

Although what a lot of winter bike commuters do in my city is go by bike 95% of the winter, and take the bus when the conditions are really bad.

It really seems to be an activity that takes a special type of person to enjoy - my wife, being an avid summer biker, tried winter biking a single time, and came back with a giant bruise on her knee and a bent pedal and swore never again.

I biked every day of the year for about ten years in NYC with an average commute of about six miles each way. This included a ride over either Manhattan or Williamsburg bridge, which get icy faster and stay slushy longer than terrestrial roads.

Always on regular 23c or 25c road tires.

I usually fell over about once per winter, which always kind of sucked. But by my estimation, riding the subway was a more miserable kind of experience.

You slide around a bit but you get used to it. The bike is usually but not always more stable than it feels.

You must be from Calgary! Unfortunately, scooters and bikes won't work when there is so much snow during the winter.

That's downright insulting! I'm from Edmonton.

Yeah, I fear we have too much snow - while bicycles can still be used by the most stubborn, electric vehicles can't summon up that curmudgeonly spirit that will get them out of every second snow drift.

I'm very sorry to hear that! coming from a Vancouverite.

I spend a decent chunk of the year in Calgary for work and last year they kept the Lime bikes during the winter and on non-snow days, it was actually useful for getting around downtown. But this year they got rid of those too. Car2go is no longer in Calgary either, so transportation options are super limited.

> I'm very sorry to hear that! coming from a Vancouverite.

Not even made - given everything going on, I'm sincerely thinking about heading out that way myself.

Not entirely true: https://www.boredpanda.com/students-bicycle-school-winter-sn...

However I think below zero is better for biking than near zero to avoid remelting.

Is Calgary any worse than Finland?

* https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/never-mind-the-plo...

> Oulu in Finland and Winnipeg in Canada are two winter cities with remarkably different stories. Oulu is just like Winnipeg – except for the bike paths stretching for miles in every direction and the thousands of people riding bicycles in the snow – says Winter Bike to Work Day founder Anders Swanson

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/feb/12/ice-cycles-no...

Most likely because the batteries would be cold 24/7, which doesn't happen with personal bikes since you can detach them.

Seattle-area scooter rider here. I don’t ride rentals, I have a Boosted Rev and a Xiaomi M365 (what many rentals use). I don’t think the rentals and the Xiaomi are really meant to be used in the wet of a Seattle winter. Even the Rev, which touts its weather-resistance, needs a fender extender if you don’t want to get covered in crap (which makes me question how much they tested said weather-resistance).

That said, it’s just another single-track vehicle like a bike, and all that comes with it. Such as, riding on ice or snow is foolish. But even if it’s just rain, reduced traction means increased chance of locking a wheel and dumping it. Hence the likely reason the rentals went away, along with who the hell is going to ride them in the rain? (Answer: people that went ahead and just bought their own.)

In summary, my only complaint is that by just standing there instead of pedaling, it is kind of hard to stay warm when it is chilly. Otherwise, empty trails make for a great ride this time of year.

Yes, I myself bought an elec scooter after experiencing the one in Los Angeles, & had to park it back in room because of all rain & winter.

Not really when you have 5-7+ kids.

Number or age?

5-7 and even 10 year olds can easily be transported by bakfiets, it happens all the time in NL, besides that when they're 10 they can cycle by themselves (earlier even).

When you have 5-7+ kids, you don't have them all at once. By the time you're having the last ones, the eldest can cycle on their own.

The anti-quint/sext/septuplet bias in this comment is astounding.

Chasing a rabbit trail here but how many parents have >4 children in the US?

Probably less than 1%

This is a findable answer[0], though this only shows 3 or more children. Looks like 7,008,000 families have 3 or more children. Looking at the same site[1] for the number of people between, say, 15 and 49 (the thought being anyone less than 15 probably isn't a "parent" and anyone over 49 doesn't have children living at home anymore, or at least not ones they need to transport), we get 150.67 million "parents".

Some quick math gets us about 4.6%. Incidentally, that's similar to the number of LGBTQ persons in the US (4.5%)[2]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-familie...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...

There's certainly one hell of a shift from between 3 and 4 though. And much less for...5 kids which the comment calls out.

That is true, and I will concede that.

To be fair if you have 5-7+ kids you already gave up on a lot of things. In developed countries very very few families have more than 3-4 kids

Which is not the norm in any developed economy where the average person can even consider owning a car.

For those claiming this can’t be done in the USA: the article talks about streets, not roads.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/street: "a thoroughfare especially in a city, town, or village that is wider than an alley or lane and that usually includes sidewalks”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/road: "an open way for vehicles, persons, and animals, especially one lying outside of an urban district”

Street implies relatively dense building and, historically, implied people walked and kids played on them.

This doesn’t claim you won’t be able to drive a car between neighbourhoods.

Iowa City has a pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown and it's the most charming, lively, interesting place in the city. Not to mention, it's safe, fun, and pleasant for all ages. There's music, dancing, a playground, food, etc.

Iowa City and their pedestrian mall is easily one of the best places to spend a couples days at in the Midwest. Being a college town, it’s a bit of an oasis in the Midwest for all sorts of fantastic local restaurants, arts, and people. Without the pedestrian mall, it wouldn’t be half the city it is today.

https://thinkiowacity.com

I get an unsecure error viewing that site on mobile.

Sorry about that, for some reason, this site requires www.

https://www.thinkiowacity.com

Currently living car-free. Pedestrian only streets are a godsend for quality of life. But considering that a couple generations worth of capital went into building a nation dependent on cars, I don't expect car-free streets to be too widespread and certainly not in the places I would really want them (e.g. I would love to have a pedestrian-only path feeding neighborhoods to train stations, so my morning commute isn't subject to the dangers of the car commute that I wanted to avoid. But it won't happen.)

Car free streets are mainly in downtown shopping districts where cars never made sense in the first place (and everyone just goes two blocks over to grab an Uber so it's not really freeing congestion from roads or anything)

> When asked what they like most about a city they have visited [...]

It's the people who live there you need to ask. People visiting a city generally have different goals and different constraints than people who live there.

If I can't drive to near my destination, I'll not likely visit that city.

Honest question: why?

It seems patently absurd to me, especially when you're visiting. I'm visiting Berlin right now. It's a car friendly city in a car friendly country and I wouldn't want to drive anywhere here if you paid me. Too much of a hassle. Besides driving is so incredibly boring. If you're visiting, you're not going to really experience the city from behind the windows of a metal box. Maybe Northern American cities are different, but I haven't yet visited a European city where driving would be clearly preferable.

other options in USA are

1. Being abused by TSA

2. Take amtrak and get left middle of nowhere at 1 am , 2 days late.

3. Take greyhound/

But that's between cities. Fwiw, I'm in Berlin by train. But by car would have been an option, too. But in the city? There are so many better options!

This is a depressingly accurate assessment.

Other bus companies have come up that are both cheap and reasonable nice. I used to take BoltBus all the time.

If it's a city I'm flying into (or taking train to), sure. I don't want to drive in a city, especially one I'm not familiar with, when I don't need to.

But a nearby city I'm driving to from home? I'm far less likely to go in for the evening if there aren't good parking options. I'm even near a commuter rail line which works pretty well if I have a daytime event. But it doesn't work for evening things.

I have really liked driving in Europe. The true benefit of driving is seeing what is in between cities.

Depends what part of Europe. Around the mediterranean, sure. But in the industrial north / Benelux - not so much to see, but the cities are gorgeous.

Strongly disagree. My wife & I cycled from Copenhagen to Skagen to Amsterdam to Paris. We loved both the cities and the countryside.

If I may ask, how did you do so? How did you handle luggage? (Or did you have none?) Were you part of a tour, or just on your own?

We carried our luggage along in panniers. Lots of people do Europe with just a backpack; a bike can carry more weight & volume easily.

We did it on our own, mostly staying in campgrounds, although we also used hostels and crashed at friends & relations a couple of times.

That's true - cycling is a completely different experience in that part of Europe, it's quite lovely.

Public transit, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I'd have to pay to park (including time spent trying to find a decent spot), walk a non-trivial distance to the station, coordinate movement of multiple people (including young children) amid crowds, wait for transit arrival, board, find seat (!), wait, stop at every station before exit, switch transit multiple times (repeat wait/board/sit/wait), be in close proximity with strange/unpleasant/criminal people, finally walk considerable distance to destination ... never mind cargo issues. If you're acclimated to this, you don't grasp how repulsive it sounds to many.

That vs what is (to us driving-acclimated): get in car, drive there, get out ... with plenty of cargo space. Take the dog if you like.

There's a reason I live suburban and yearn for rural: I don't want to be shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers much of the time, transit included. A few rare cases aside (Munich was nice), I don't want to "experience the city" - most are dirty overcrowded bastions of hyper-dependency. A car is a refuge; transit is exposure.

Wait, you forgot the bit where you are stuck in downtown traffic for hours and you can't find a parking space near the location of where you are going. Then, what if you want to go to multiple places a day, each a mile or two away, the whole ordeal repeats.

It has nothing to do with acclimation - many European cities cannot operate in a car-dependent manner.

As for being in close proximity to strange/unpleasant/criminals ... that's the American thinking. Yes, there are many places in America where getting a bus is very troubling, stinks, dirty ugly etc.

But then there are plenty of public transportations options in Europe and elsewhere that are almost free (for a day's parking you can travel for a week on every mode of transport), clean, fast, efficient, not crowded. Incomparably simpler, easier and better than driving - especially if you are going a mile or two away.

Car ownership, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I rely on the city to massively subsidize my car parking that takes up tons of space for a vehicle that is used for about an hour a day. The rest of the time it is just sitting there, doing nothing.

I have to buy a car, pay for insurance, pay for gas, sit in traffic for an average of an hour a day, deal with strange/unpleasant/criminal drivers, never mind the dealing with car robberies and damage.

Jokes aside, but rural/suburban life is much more dependent than city-dwellers. 100% dependence on a single car every day, depending on subsidized roads and gas, etc.

The comments so far don't seem to be very generous to your position, but honestly I can agree with at least some of your points. I basically refuse to ride buses these days due to the experiences I've had on them, as well as their overcrowded nature since the world has decided to really stick with this 8-5 schedule, and I dislike the idea of being jostled around while the junkie next to me tries to cook his spoon.

I do however, love a good light rail system, although even the best of them seem to suffer the same 8-5 cattle car problem. The light rail system in Portland had its fair share of weirdo's and whatnot, but it was easy to plan, easy to use, and even when crowded pretty friendly. Plus the rest of the city is "fairly" walkable, so if I didn't feel like getting stuck on a train I could just take a longer stroll.

> first paragraph

It's hilarious how you can tell from those comments which people come from USA or from Europe. These experiences sound like bad fiction to my German ears (except for the overcrowding during rush hours, which public transit is affected by just as much as car traffic).

I'm sure that's true of a lot of people. But I'm not sure it contradicts the parent. If the residents and businesses in a city want to exclude cars--even if that means fewer people want to visit the city from the outside--that's their decision.

Well, that's you. I plan entire vacations around the idea of not having to drive anywhere while on them.

And yet, cities which are mostly made for walking and public transport or even discourage cars are among the most widely visited (including Amsterdam and New Amsterdam aka NYC) and most loved, and cities which you only get around by car are mostly US backwaters...

Well, that only excludes you from every premiere city in the world.

I've read that, though never personally asked, people in manhattan rarely own cars and all the traffic is from outsiders and construction workers. I can't verify this but I suspect this is probably a pattern that is replicated in many major cities since most of the residents understand the functionality of the local public transportation system.

Only about 22% of households in Manhattan own cars. But there's also a huge number of cabs, Uber/Lyft, limos, etc., many of which are taken by locals. Also a lot of traffic comes from delivery vehicles, buses, and so forth.

We get it citylab, you hate cars, and think everyone lives in the downtown of a metropolis. Meanwhile, the rest of us have places to be, and 99% of my country has no public transport. While I agree that city centers need more walking room, the categorical exclusion of longer distant transport options will just create more parking lots at the border of such areas. The more modern planning ignores the forest (countries) for the trees (big cities), the technological and class divide will only widen.

They are called Citylab, after all.

80% of Americans live in an urban area

Many of those live near and around a city, rather than in it, and commute daily.

That's one of the things that need to be solved, rather than celebrated. Commuting -- no matter which transport you're using, is a waste of time and energy.

I agree, but I also don't want to live like a sardine in a can, packed in with millions of others, living in a small box, having no green space, etc. I'm generally a social person, but don't like living that close to that many people. Many others seem to agree.

There are livable and afforable alternative to Manhattan style density and there are plenty of working examples. We just refuse to build that way.

Look at many continental European cities.

A mid-sized German city will be full of low to mid density buildings and walk up apartments, few skyscrapers. Mixed use of retail and residential, and very good transit by American standards, connecting to intercity rail transit. Highways frequently terminating or routing outside the city. Plenty of greenspace.

Leipzig, Germany https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leipzig,+Germany/@51.33310...

Even the US used to have this, though they are long drowned in sprawl. Any city that was of decent size pre-WWII usually has street car suburbs - a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments usually built around a transit node that connected to the core and region. Look at Shaker/Cleveland Heights and Lakewood in Cleveland. There is a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit. You can see the pattern they developed around, even if it's vestigial at this point.

I think you have a very different definition of low density than everyone else.

Low density means there is at least a full building worth of space between houses and ideally several buildings worth.

It means you can stand on every side of your house and look and have difficulty seeing your neighbor.

That's not low-density. Maybe not everywhere is as bad as Manhattan, but that is indeed very dense. Note that you twice described your ideal solution as dense:

"a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments"

"a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit."

Not a big fan of that kind of density, nor are many others. I'd at least like to have my own backyard, and not have my neighbors peering in from a second story.

This is misleading to most people. The US census counts the suburbs as urban. I don't believe most people referring to urban areas are referring to people in the suburbs.

"To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/about/faq/...

As I tell people, together with my two neighbors I live in the middle of about 100 acres on a road with no sidewalks. This counts as urban as far as the census is concerned.

The US is big. That the above is urban makes sense in the context that I'm only about a 15 minute drive from a small city and am only about an hour drive from a large city. There are lots of places in the US that are 100+ miles from the nearest Walmart.

Dense urban areas are harmed by cars, but where do you draw the line? Suppose I can drive through the suburbs of Philadelphia, but not the city center. What happens to the area around the restricted-driving zone? Does it become an crowded parking lot as people trade their cars for transit?

I'm not suggesting that there are no solution here -- I'm genuinely asking what the solutions are.

Ideally there would be expensive parking lots right at the edge of the area, and cheaper parking lots further out. So you could park and walk right at the boundary, or park near the Broad Street Line and take that in. Or you could park at a Regional Rail stop even further out and take the train all the way in. Or you could Uber right to the boundary. Depending on where exactly you live and how much you value time vs. money, different options will make sense for different people. But considering that the people who will be getting dropped off right at the boundary would have otherwise been driving to the city center, it doesn't make traffic any worse.

The car-free zone makes sense if it's smaller than the area that has public transit. Note that even in the complete absence of public transit, you can still comfortably implement about a quarter-mile radius of car-free area, since a quarter mile walk is only 5 minutes.

In the US what we're mostly talking about is closing individual downtown streets to through traffic (like, say, Market between 5th to 13th, ignoring the City Hall death circle). On NYC 14th street, any car is allowed, as long as it turns off within 2 blocks. This greatly limits the usefulness of the street to through traffic, (and therefore makes it a much better pedestrian and bus environment) without changing the parking situation at all.

Part of the solution might be using the local population density to inform how much of the street you devote to cars. For example, in rural areas, two lane blacktop with no shoulder and 100% devoted to cars is ok, because there aren't many cars, so people can still use the road even if they aren't driving. In the suburbs, car travel lanes should begin to narrow, sidewalks should appear, bike lanes should appear, etc. In the densest part of the city, the streets should give space to transit, delivery/infrastructure vehicles, low speed transport like bikes, scooters, etc. and people. Primarily people and transit

"urban" is a very imprecise word.

You're likely quoting the census, who defines any town with more than 2,500 people as urban.

I promise you, if you went to a town of 2,500 people, you would not have the word "urban" in your head.

EDIT: After a little reflection, this really blows my mind. Over 60 million Americans live in towns of less than 2,500 people. This country is massive.

Claiming that I live in an urban area does not suddenly make my commute walk-able or produce new public transportation options. I live in an urban area and still need transportation. My city does not allow mixed use buildings, which would go a long way toward reducing the need for transportation.

I live in an urban area of about 2M people. It takes me 40 minutes to get to work on a good day, driving on an interstate. The closest mass transportation option would require me to drive about 25 minutes to get there. Most people are like me.

This is absolutely true. If the goal is to move people, "just banning cars" is not the solution. Living inside a city is simply too expensive, and that sort of position is reserved for those with cushy jobs and a very specific life style. It's the ivory tower shouting down at the un-educated, un-washed masses once again.

In a Western context with our property situation perhaps but look at Japan. 91% of the population lives in an urban area and even in the most desirable metropolis Tokyo it is relatively affordable: https://www.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-estate-a...

Not every city in the world has to be like New York or San Francisco. Cars should be banned (more or less) in cities. And it should viable for someone to live in a city if they so choose or in a rural area with a car if they so choose. We're failing on both fronts really in America...

It's expensive to live in a city that's 40% asphalt to move cars around and park cars in. You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space. Great way for car companies to force externalities onto everyone else. Don't like cars? "Oh well, you're paying for the road and parking anyway. You can't beat the problem, so you may as well join it."

If induced demand is a problem for cars, might it not be a problem for cities? A higher potential density will lead to a higher density.

People appear not be a space filling curve anymore. It looked that way prior to the Industrial Revolution and the advent of Birth Control. But it doesn't look like people will infinitely fill all space available to them anymore. Perhaps it's because we're running out of space (artificially, by not building) in places where there's till opportunity. But I'm not sure we have convincing evidence of that. We do have evidence that people aren't wildly reproducing in almost every advanced economy, though.

In Portland, OR, there is substantial transit infrastructure, but the results are a bit mixed. Everyone agrees that it is easy to get around most of the city, but its suburban areas tend to experience the same low-density/high-prices phenomenon that is seen in other coastal cities.

Why? Last I read on the topic, it's because the market is factoring in the potential value of each parcel when built out according to what infrastructure dictates, but without actually building it. So small garages built 50 years ago are getting priced like 8-story apartments.

Actually building to meet the demand is the thing that lowers the rent, and that comes down to raising the inflow of building permits each year. That's the part that has to be solved.

One of the things that Japan does besides having a lot of trains is a standardized national zoning code that makes planning and permitting much more straightforward. Building in Japan is much more of a commodity, and the prices reflect that. And an example of relaxed building rules in the USA is Houston, which has long had a cool yet expanding housing market, but a car-centric one.

The effect of the combination of the trains and low regulation in Japan is that you get dense/cheap cities - and with fast trains, all of Japan acts as a "suburb of Tokyo". Trains and regulation gives you PDX. Cars and low regulation and you get Houston. Cars and regulation and you get regional SF.

By comparing these different outcomes something like a coherent theory occurs: population in the industrial era always tends to urbanize. If we restrict the flow in some way, we get high priced urban areas; the specifics of infrastructure choices are just one factor, and not necessarily the biggest. But population growth itself is a national issue and comes from other demographic factors(immigration, childbearing rates, death rates). And although Tokyo still gets bigger, which is indicative that urbanization isn't "done", Japan as a whole is on the decline.

> You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space.

That would be the case if constructing and maintaining roads would be as expensive as constructing and maintaining housing, which I don't think is true.

The car free concept is strictly about city centers, and has nothing to do with those who live in the suburbs or rural areas. Absolutely no one is advocating removing cars from those areas. This has nothing to do with elitism, and everything to do with optimizing transportation for different environments. Proponents usually advocate for better metro transit networks, which would benefit those who live outside the city centers.

>Absolutely no one is advocating removing cars from those areas.

You'll find plenty of people here who will be happy to argue that living outside of dense cities is unsustainable and has to end. They're wrong. But it's their opinion.

I engage pretty heavily with civic & transit planning, and I've never heard someone argue that in my entire life. If that is an opinion held by some, they are certainly a minuscule minority.

Search HN comments for something like "unsustainable suburban" and you'll find plenty of hits from people arguing basically that suburbs have to (somehow) end.

https://mobile.twitter.com/graue/status/1202843516256145408

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21764675

On this very thread.

Mind you, I would agree that it's an opinion held by a minuscule minority. It's also wrong. But it's out there. It's even here on HN.

Even in Japan, which has wonderful public transportation and was actually a joy to navigate, there are cars everywhere and frequently there are times when you need a car or your ability to get to places outside of the cities becomes expensive and takes a long time if it's possible at all.

Living in/around Tokyo, I had the exact opposite experience. Cars, trains, pedestrians, and bicyclists are in near-perfect balance.

For the most part, people live within walking or biking distance of a train station that takes them to work. Around each station is a cluster of shops and restaurants. Commercial traffic is well-separated from places where people live, meaning that on neighborhood streets there are virtually no cars. And the result? Children playing. Kindergartners walking themselves to school. Birds chirping. Green spaces. Peace and quiet. All in the middle of one of the world's largest cities.

Outside of Tokyo, the balance is slightly more in favor of cars, but the country's extensive train system means you don't need to own a car to get yourself there. It's easy enough to rent a car locally for a few days when you really need one. Cheaper too compared to the cost of purchasing a car and paying for insurance, parking, maintenance, etc..

Agreed. Additionally:

All of my co-workers had a car, but they only used them a few times a month except for the couple of coworkers who had hobbies that took them out into rural areas.

And there were buses everywhere. You could take transit from the middle of Tokyo to that onsen in the middle of nowhere. It wouldn't be convenient or fast, but it could be done and we did it all the time. You just had to be careful with your scheduling and have something to read on the bus or someone to chat with.

Nobody used their cars to get groceries. The 7-11 on the corner is crazily well-stocked with reasonable prices, and the grocery store is by the train station you walk to and from every day.

I absolutely miss the 7-11s (and other convenience stores) from Japan. I was shocked at how well stocked they were and how high the food quality was.

Parking lots at the border is, in my opinion, much better than parking garages in the center. At least that way the city streets won't be clogged by people coming from out of town. After they get to the city they don't need the cars, so leave them at the edge.

And there's (3 times the change in radius) more space to put the parking lots at the edge... That seems fine!

With lower costs to acquire and build in these areas to begin with, freeing up space to build and densify the core (lowering real estate costs there).

Honestly I'd be fine with a model where city centers are primarily pedestrian and there are big parking garages on the borders of those areas. Less parking space would be needed overall since each residence and business wouldn't need it's own set of parking spaces that aren't always in use.

America is certainly decades (if not centuries) behind in public transportation. However, these CityLab articles are doing a great thing by highlighting our unhealthy dependence on cars and making it a part of everyday conversation. If we're ever going to change we need to start by agreeing there is a problem and discussing realistic solutions.

I don't quite understand your point about the "technological and class divide" widen[ing]. Good public transportation (as in places like Japan) drastically reduces the cost of moving around the city/country. In the United States, for most people, owning a car (an expensive up-front cost with expensive monthly payments) is a prerequisite to finding and keeping a job. Public transportation adds to our social safety net.

> America is certainly decades (if not centuries) behind in public transportation. However, these CityLab articles are doing a great thing by highlighting our unhealthy dependence on cars and making it a part of everyday conversation. If we're ever going to change we need to start by agreeing there is a problem and discussing realistic solutions.

Then let's discuss some realistic solutions: Outside of densely populated metros, public transportation is a wash. In my area, small-ish city, we have pretty solid mass transit options but it's still a massive pain in the ass because you end up scheduling your entire day around the bus schedule. And if the bus isn't running when you might need to run an errand out? Oh fuckin well.

People parade around mass transit like it's the end all be all of great things we can do, and being a liberal around most things, I wish that was true. But even the stories about Japan's awesome mass transit make me cringe; stuck in a train for 45 minutes each way? Pass. The hardest conceivable pass.

You know what my commute is? I get in my car and drive from my suburb to a business park. It takes 10 bloody minutes. Even driving my pickup truck, I use roughly 30 gallons of fuel every three weeks.

When I want to run errands, or pop out for lunch, or whatever, I can walk outside and use my vehicle. It's there all the time, 24 hours a day. No app required. No booking required. Certainly no waiting on someone to drive over and get me. There is simply no mass transit option that can equate this, end of.

I'm not saying there aren't improvements to be made and I'm certainly not saying that all mass transit is bad; but to put forward mass transit as a realistic option to get rid of cars, you look like a complete fool to anyone who doesn't live in a city. Pie in the sky fucking nonsense.

To me this appears to be a straw man. Nobody is suggesting outlawing cars wholesale.

The primary observation is this: densely-populated areas of human habitation require denser sorts of infrastructure. The most obvious example is housing: by definition you can't have dense habitation if all you have are large-lot single family homes. Transportation is similar: one person per four-door sedan simply doesn't support the density of a city.

For areas that aren't densely populated, like the backwoods and suburbs where I spent the first 28 years of my life, cars are a great solution. But cities require different solutions (which happen to become economically feasible because of their density, benefiting from economies of scale).

I sympathise but I think this post has a few contradictions in it. For example, I'm not surprised the bus in your area is inconvenient schedule-wise because I assume you aren't the only person in your city who drives ten minutes to work. Ten minutes? Wouldn't it take you about thirty minutes maximum to walk in that case?

If the walk would be unpleasant or otherwise not viable, can't that probably be blamed on car systems as well?

I don't think anyone thinks we can get rid of cars entirely. I'm from a country with the same land area as Japan but with ~115 million fewer people. You can't get rid of private vehicles in a place like that. But you can make urban areas less wasteful and more enjoyable.

Ten minutes? Wouldn't it take you about thirty minutes maximum to walk in that case?

You can go a lot more than 1.5mi in 10min if there isn't bad traffic. If 3/10 of those minutes are on a highway that's probably an hour or worth or more of walking.

>If the walk would be unpleasant or otherwise not viable, can't that probably be blamed on car systems as well?

Houston will be hot and Detroit will be cold for several months of the year with or without cars. Having air conditioned boxes that can do last mile transportation is part of why the southern US is as developed as it is. Obviously there becomes a density point where it makes sense to offload a lot of the transportation needs onto public traffic by many cities and suburbs are not there yet.

Regarding weather, that will always be a factor too. I was going to mention it, but I did that thing where I thought I included a sentence then it wasn't there when I reread what I'd written.

I see my position as not car-hostile or car-eliminatory but efficiency-maximising. With that said, this:

>Obviously there becomes a density point where it makes sense to offload a lot of the transportation needs onto public traffic by many cities and suburbs are not there yet.

Is a bit hard to swallow when car-default systems allow indefinite suburban growth. Feedback loop.

Virtually no one (or at least no one with any sense) is advocating for the elimination of automobiles anywhere aside from dense urban areas. This article is from CityLab, who are chiefly concerned with those sorts of areas, and the article only discusses city centers.

You are arguing against a strawman here.

> People parade around mass transit like it's the end all be all of great things we can do, and being a liberal around most things, I wish that was true. But even the stories about Japan's awesome mass transit make me cringe; stuck in a train for 45 minutes each way? Pass. The hardest conceivable pass. You know what my commute is? I get in my car and drive from my suburb to a business park. It takes 10 bloody minutes. Even driving my pickup truck, I use roughly 30 gallons of fuel every three weeks.

Hey that's pretty great! It sounds like you could be in an area where cars are the right solution to transport. Maybe that's due to population density or roads that were well-planned to get people where they need to go. Unfortunately there are also a lot of places where those things aren't true. In suburbs around Atlanta, Detroit, or Seattle, for example, many people commute 45+ minutes one way in slow-moving traffic. Car insurance can cost $250+ per month, plus gas and maintenance. Personally, I'd much rather spend 45 minutes in a train where I can read, listen to music, check emails, etc.. than in a car where I need to be fully alert. It's much safer too.

> In my area, small-ish city, we have pretty solid mass transit options but it's still a massive pain in the ass because you end up scheduling your entire day around the bus schedule. And if the bus isn't running when you might need to run an errand out?

I don't know the geography / economics of your particular area, but do you think people would be more inclined to use buses if they were more reliable? Adding routes and increasing the frequency of buses might restore some trust in the system. Existing subsidies for cars (public roads, mandatory parking minimums, etc.) could be redirected to public transit for greater effect.

I think we are generally in agreement that most American cities aren't currently set up in a way that makes public transit practical. When I talk about these issues, I'm not saying we should try to retrofit a train system to cities that are otherwise doing just fine. My hope is that articles like this will sway public support in favor of future developments that put an emphasis on people first, not cars. Suburbs originally developed to get away from the danger/congestion/smell of urban areas. But if we can design better urban spaces where people are more comfortable spending time, we can reap the advantages of higher population density. Of course, we can't just copy Japan or Europe. We'll need our own unique system that works for us.

> There is simply no mass transit option that can equate this, end of.

Sure there is - for some situations. There is something called "rapid transit". The working definition is "faster than by car". You actually have that in a few places - Chicago, or New York, for instance. But for it to work, you need a couple of things. It has to go many of the places that people want to go. It has to be very frequent - so frequent that you don't check the schedule. And it has to be somewhat slow to use the car.

> When I want to run errands, or pop out for lunch, or whatever, I can walk outside and use my vehicle. It's there all the time, 24 hours a day. No app required. No booking required. Certainly no waiting on someone to drive over and get me. There is simply no mass transit option that can equate this, end of.

Ever lived in a real city ? Walking 3 minutes to take the metro and take 5 minutes to get to your destination for something that'll take 15 minutes by car is common in cities like Paris ;-). And it prevents you from becoming fat from not doing anything.

They are like a doctor complaining about my i unhealthy dependency on water. I just had to drive 40km between cities for a meeting. There is no train, no bus, no electric skateboard alternative. Sure, maybe we could do the meeting remotely and implement digital signatures on the documents, but that isnt a legal option at the moment. The car-free utopia lies on the other side of countless other revolutions in how society works. Forcing revolution C before revolutions A+B isnt going to win anyone any friends.

How often do you have those meetings? If it's once a week or less, you'd probably be better off with a carshare rather than owning a private vehicle.

No single mode of transportation solves every use-case. My car is suboptimal when I'm going downtown, as well as for trips longer than 300 miles or so.

Except ... cars do solve every use case. Suboptimal, yes, but I can get whoever & whatever I need to practically every square kilometer of this country (4200 x 2500) within 50 hours (5400km). Public transport simply can't, because it can't have stations within anywhere close to each of 10,500,000 square kilometers - and even where it does, I'm waiting (maybe hours) for service, and am severely limited in cargo options.

The thing is, right now our cars-first city planning means that things like groceries, schools, shopping centers, etc. are built far away from where people live so that you NEED a car to get there. Places like CityLab are advocating for future development that places these daily necessities within walking distance of where people live. Cars are great for long-distance travel, but it would be great to spend less time in them!

That is mainly a density issue. Most people don't like density.

At an ordinary population density, supermarkets are about 2 to 5 miles from each other, which is probably 3 to 7 miles by road.

Large stores require many customers in order to remain in business. If supermarkets are closer, then they lose efficiency. Prices must be higher. Variety drops; you'll get just 2 types of cheese and 1 type of apple if the stores have to be smaller.

Without a car, large shopping trips become impossible. A young healthy adult can carry 1 or 2 shopping bags about 0.7 mile without major difficulty, but that just isn't enough. Stores would have to shrink by a factor of 20 to 100 in order to get them close enough, but the efficiency still plunges. Think of the portion of each sale that must support the manager's salary, or the number of stores at which each delivery truck must stop.

Without a car, frozen food can only be purchased in winter. Hot food, such as the fried chicken my supermarket offers, would never be able to get home in good condition.

Well put.

Couple days ago I literally counted >100 varieties of marinara spaghetti sauce in the store. There's no way a walking-distance grocery is going to carry anywhere close to that (ripple effect on to all the people employed in making each specialty) AND do so at Walmart prices.

I live close to the grocery, and there's still no way I'm going to carry supplies for 4 that far (recall as a child doing similar with my mother, that was quite a trek made possible in part by not having a job).

Y'all who want pervasive public transit and no cars, yes I see your point - and really don't want to live that way. Do as you like, just don't do it in a way that compels non-urban living to comply. 'scuze me now, I have to get the kids from school - driving them because herds of children on mass transit is a haven for bullies.

Funny... I prefer to avoid the big stores precisely because they have so many varieties of basically the same product. I prefer to get groceries at a local small grocery store or Aldi—they have 95% of what I need.

It’s not even a population density issue, it’s just a bad planning issue. Where I live (in the middle ring of a large Australian city) we have density comparable to an American suburb, but I have several mini-downtowns within walking distance.

I did the maths a while ago; even if every house has a quarter-acre block (subtract actual street space from that to get a slightly smaller block) you can fit 4000 houses, about twelve thousand people, within a 1km radius of a mini-downtown point. Twelve thousand people is certainly enough to support a supermarket, a bunch of restaurants, cafes, specialty stores etc (think of what a town of twelve thousand people looks like). The only trick is actually zoning rows of shops in appropriate places.

Of course I still drive to the supermarket anyway, unless I’m only buying a couple of items. This isn’t an argument against cars, it’s just an argument that low(ish) density housing and walkability aren’t incompatible.

More broadly I think that Americans looking for solutions to their city-planning problems should look less at Europe (or god forbid, Asia) and more at Australia, since I think we’ve done a decent (though as always imperfect in implementation) job of combining European and American city planning virtues.

By that notion, walking also solves every use case except for long-distance travel. I can walk about 150 miles in 50 hours. Add a hand cart for getting groceries.

I think you are being disingenuous. Yes it is suboptimal but we don't need public transportation covering the entire country. When you are trying to solve for the use case of dense urban areas it is far more efficient and optimal to have a functional public transport system

Car-free is about dense urban centers, not transit between them. That's an entirely different problem (or potentially not a problem at all).

Again, this feels like a strawman argument. Nobody is advocating that we outlaw cars altogether! Urban reform advocates are (correctly) pointing out that car-centric cities promote a self-fulfilling prophesy. In my book, changing that is revolution “A”, and very few people are advocating the nationwide ban on cars revolution “C”.

"ban cars" is a very popular sentiment on urbanist twitter.

The EU is over 3x as population dense as the USA. Any plan to make the USA transportation system to look like the EU's is doomed to failure from the beginning.

You need to be realistic. You are never going to win hearts and minds by railing against cars - Americans love their cars, and for good reason. A bus is not going to pick you up at your front door the second you walk out, and it's not going to drop you directly where you want to go. Cars are a tremendous convenience. And they are not nearly as expensive as people seem here seem to think - they are certainly cheaper than city rent.

It may make sense to reduce the number of cars in city centers, but so few Americans live or go near city centers. You have to understand that HN is not a representative sample of the world population. Not everybody is a single, young person trying to start their own businesses.

And most people I know in Europe--especially those who are not just out of school--have cars. Europe is hardly some carless utopia even if public transit is, on the whole, better than in the US.

It becomes a 'right tool for the job' situation.

When we lived in Italy we:

* Walked to the grocery store, nearby pizza place, kids' schools, doctor and barber. Because it's not illegal (zoning) to build those things near where people live!

* Rode bikes downtown when the weather was decent

* Took the tram downtown with the kids.

* Took the car to go hiking in the hills or go visit my wife's parents in a small town 30 minutes away.

YMMV. Most of the people I know in Paris either don't have a car, or use it very seldomly (think once a month)

I think it's more about city vs countryside than europe vs US

That's probably fair. Most of the people I know in Europe are a bit older and mostly don't live in e.g. central London.

My experience as well from traveling to Europe. Plenty of cars, crazy traffic and no parking.

HN is definitely not a representative sample of the world population. But HN is definitely not all single, young people trying to start their own businesses.

How about we just stop subsidizing the shit out of cars? Let them pay their own way.

Also, we do not need 'one size fits all' solutions for the entire US. What's appropriate for Wyoming might not be appropriate for the California Bay Area, which is plenty dense.

They already do pay their own way. Gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration, emissions fees, license fees, premium taxes on car insurance, traffic tickets, parking tickets, parking meters, sales tax on the purchase of a car. Very few things in the United States are taxed as exhaustively as private vehicles.

I'm not sure when "subsidizing" came to mean "giving people something back for the money you took form them in the first place".

I'd love to see a less auto-dependent society, but it's not accurate to say that drivers are subsidized. Perhaps one answer would be to get rid these myriad taxes and fees and just privatize the highways - make it fee for use. Right now, very few drivers ever see the true cost of their transportation choices because it's a little bit here, a little there, and so on.

No, they do not:

https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ &&

https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

Drivers are heavily subsidized.

Those are pretty interesting links. Thanks for sharing.

I wonder if there's any way to come up with a net value overall for those subsidies? For example, pre-K education is fully subsidized in some states and it looks like the total economic results over a long time are very positive. How would you go about figuring out if those road subsidies are too high or too low?

Good question, and a tough one.

You'd want to look at total benefits (easier movement of people and goods) vs total costs (environment, sedentary lifestyle health problems, wasted space in cities).

I am under the impression that gas taxes (which is the majority of the money you stated) considerably fails to cover the cost of building and maintaining the roads.

Cars kill ~40000 Americans annually. Is that cheap? Criticizing cars is the only way to wake people up to the damage they have caused in our society. Sure, cars are wonderful for people with mobility issues. For the vast majority of us to design our cities around two ton death machines is a tragedy.

Our cities would be dramatically cheaper to live in with fewer cars. Less parking and road space allows higher density. Transit is cheaper. Walking and biking is healthier and will increase life expectancy.

Not everyone is driving-age, can afford a car or can afford to have parking. Car drivers are not a representative sample of the world population.

> Criticizing cars is the only way to wake people up to the damage they have caused in our society.

It's a way to make you look like an out-of-touch loony, who therefore gets ignored. If you want to reduce car use in the US, dial down the rhetoric, and work on increasing the convenience of not using a car. You're going to win more hearts and minds by making available something better than you are by constantly carping about the existing situation.

Hard to mince words regarding the statistics on cars. You read and responded to the comment, so they clearly drive engagement.

Walking, biking, taking the bus, carpooling are incredibly convenient for anyone willing to try, and I certainly support efforts to improve the facilities for these at all opportunities.

There are uncomfortable truths that need to be addressed about cars, however, and you don't get anywhere by avoiding it. Imagine if there were an easily preventable disease causing ~40000 deaths every year that would actually save us money to solve and help the climate situation as well. Would you ask to temper the rhetoric?

Yes, because your rhetoric is counterproductive. People don't like being yelled at, and people don't like feeling forced. To get change, you need to persuade them to pull in your direction, not to give you the finger.

Look, you need to say that we can prevent these deaths. You really do. But don't say it the way you did. You don't get buy-in that way.

I'm not sure if "convenient" is really the right word for it. I recently moved to a new job, and my commute is now 20-30 minutes by car. My new office has bike facilities and showers, and isn't too far from public transit, and is generally about as optimal as you can get for non-driving commuting in this city.

I still drive because biking is A. pretty physically grueling in a number of common weather conditions ( greater than 100 degree or less than 32 degree temps for much of the year, carrying my bike up 2-3 flights of stairs... ) B. Going to take 2-3x the time per day, before time spent showering on each end of an hour-long ride in brutal heat... Public transit is a 1+ mile walk/ride on either end of it (same problems as above), means I can only get in/out of work at specific times, and still takes 2-3x longer than driving.

That's before we get into the 2000 serious injury-causing accidents that people get in on bikes per year in my state, many of which are in my county. I really hate cars, but I'm mostly driving slow and on low-speed roads. I'm very unlikely to die or be seriously injured. That's not something I can rely on on a bike commute.

I'm looking to move closer to the office so I can mitigate some of these because I earnestly hate driving this much, but I wouldn't claim that that's going to make biking/walking "incredibly convenient", just acceptably less inconvenient.

An e-bike would go a long way to materialize the convenience promised by biking. Prices are coming down quite a bit as well. Maybe look into that, they're fun too.

I'm not totally sure it would. Going 20+ MPH on a bike only makes the safety issues worse, without making the commute all that much faster in a way that would reduce how long I'm in the hot/cold/rain.

Except this isnt an easily preventable disease, nor is it an easily curable one.

Tempering the rhetoric in place of actually presenting facts and ideas in a non combative way that offers something of actual tangible value to people will vastly do more to accomplish the goals then trying to shame or beat down ppl.

There is value on both ends. If you are too kind and effeminate on the causes you care about, no one will listen to you either and will think it doesn't matter. You need a mix of both voices in any movement.

Uh, effeminate?

I meant effeminate as weak. Apparently it has a sexist connotation, I actually did not know that it meant that until you pointed it out.

I keep training equipment in my car which is not allowed in my workplace. Unless work changes to allow them, not having a car to keep them in just isn't tenable. I was informed in an earlier HN discussion that in some states, they would not even legally be permitted to make such a change.

And that's even assuming that it would be allowed on public transportation.

It would be good to hear some kind of solution, rather than just being swept under the rug. Or pushed under the bus, so to speak.

I am very against cars and very pro-biking, and yet I find your comment immensely simplistic.

You seem to be forgetting that buildings can't be moved and big infrastructure projects go into the billions. The USA was build with cars in mind, you can't simply undo all that and now ask people to simply get rid of their cars when everything was built specifically for cars.

The more roadways you build to accommodate cars, the more cars fill up the roadways, as long as more people have cars in the city. [0] On the other hand, public transit can be designed to ease congestion and allow movement between densely populated areas. Moreover, cost of building public transit keeps on increasing [1].

The solution is not more roadways to magically reduce congestion. It's to build public transit today before it gets more expensive. See the success of the Delhi Metro in India, for example, where New Delhi was never built with a local subway system in mind. [2]

[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive... [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/04/why-new-york-... [2] https://www.globalmasstransit.net/archive.php?id=26471

I do not disagree with anything you say. If I was in any position of power, getting rid of cars would be a top priority. My personal favorite country in the world is the Netherlands, specifically for its cycling and public transportation.

However, as I said, I believe you (and greenonion) are oversimplifying a complex problem. If you've ever been to any US city, you will see just how much influence the car has had in the development of the entire country. From the principles that you are stating, and that I believe are empirically correct, to the implementation of any viable solution there is a gargantuan gap, and I don't see any solutions being presented. Just "cars are bad, we should use public transport".

I am telling you that the problem in India was just as complex and the political system there is also democratic.

And yes, I have been to US cities multiple times, and I don't see why the challenges there are so very different. New Delhi is denser than New York. Its traffic situation was as bad as New York. I am not saying implementation is easy. I am saying implementation is feasible. It's a matter of public and political will. What's holding it back is not that somehow the problem is so complex that it can't be solved.

Adding to the point of induced demand on traffic, thankfully it works the other way too. The traffic situation does not get significantly worse when roads are reduced. The Alaskan viaduct highway in Seattle is an example of this.

Edit: And I have seen the transformation of Vancouver to accommodate bike lanes too, and while Vancouver is nowhere as dense, my point is that the traffic situation did not actually get worse when bike lanes were introduced.

There's no point in comparing the EU and the US as wholes. What matters is the density of a particular urban core. Many American cities have dense cores. Beyond the obvious big three off the top of my head some cities I have visited that could support some closed streets in the core: DC, SF, Baltimore, Philly, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Portland, Honolulu, Charleston, Dallas. No one is suggesting changing everything everywhere, but large cities do exist in every corner of the country.

Sure if you include rural areas. Some places in the US are just as dense as European cities, just woefully inefficiently managed. You can't fix LA traffic without getting people out of cars.

You can't have both, you can't complain about congestion yet talk about how Americans love their cars. You get both the congestion and deaths and pollution and GHG's with over-reliance on cars and there is no magic fix to it other than having less people drive.

Even having public transport doesn't mean the car is useless. Public transport fails if you have a lot of groceries to deliver, or some big products. Also public transport often takes much longer than a car, because it's stopping at every little stop, while a car can go directly, or even take a shortcut in some cases.

If you have big products or groceries to deliver or otherwise truly believe that public transportation can't meet your unique needs, you should be STRONGLY in favor of additional public transportation to reduce traffic.

Car share works pretty well there. Let insurance on my car lapse months ago and I’m getting buy fine without it

> Public transport fails if you have a lot of groceries to deliver, or some big products.

That's commercial traffic, car-free policies are usually designed with support for commercial vehicles. It's really about eliminating private automobile traffic in city centers. If you mean going to the store to buy large items, delivery is probably the solution there. Deliveries like that can be grouped into a smaller number of larger vehicles, or done at off hours, or only on certain roads, or all sorts of different things.

Car-free isn't the greatest moniker in the world. It really means eliminating private automobile traffic, not eliminating vehicles altogether.

> Also public transport often takes much longer than a car, because it's stopping at every little stop, while a car can go directly, or even take a shortcut in some cases.

This isn't typically true in dense urban areas with high quality transit networks. Those are the areas that are suitable for car-free. Certainly most places would suffer greatly from the elimination of cars, but those areas aren't the target.

Does it? I cook almost every night and managed to survive without a car for 6 years in Manhattan. Yes, you go to the grocery store more often because you can only take home what you can carry. But the grocery store was a block from my apartment, it took less time to do a round trip there on foot than anywhere I've lived in the suburbs with a car.

> the technological and class divide will only widen.

Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society. You are required to have parking for those cars, both at home and at your work.

Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive.

>Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society.

Great, so if we can't all have something, none of us should have it! Forget the fact that the vast majority of families own and benefit from personal transportation, the important thing is that we're all equal, even if the equal case is on average worse for everyone, right?

>Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive

Is it also repressive to "force" people to hold down jobs to participate in society? To "force" people to commute to work? What about the fact that some people have the luxury of working from home? Should we make that illegal as well?

I do not understand how people can be so focused on equality as to totally ignore the average, greater good. The nature of modern civilization is such that some degree of inequality is inevitable if one optimizes for median welfare.

> Great, so if we can't all have something, none of us should have it! Forget the fact that the vast majority of families own and benefit from personal transportation, the important thing is that we're all equal, even if the equal case is on average worse for everyone, right?

This is entirely the opposite of what the car-free movement is trying to accomplish.

Car-free is strictly concerned dense urban areas, where private automobiles pretty strictly work against the common good. They are noisy, dangerous, polluting, and fail to create efficient transportation networks. In such places, there is very good reason to believe that car-free would improve quality of life and median welfare for residents.

Obviously car-free is not a realistic option in suburban, semi-urban, and rural areas. No one who is advocating car-free is suggesting we do it there.

Any increase in equality that comes along with it (honestly I'm skeptical it would make much of a difference) would be purely incidental.

Impression of the "car free" movement is complete elimination of vehicles, urban and rural alike. "Move closer to a train station" seems axiomatic.

Your impression is largely wrong here. The goal here is to make dense urban areas safer, cleaner, and improve the quality of life in those dense urban areas where getting around without a car makes sense.

That may mean people who live in sub-urban and rural areas have to stop at the fringe and catch a bus, walk, or pedal the last leg of their journey, but it doesn't mean they need to give up their cars for transport outside those dense urban areas.

> Any increase in equality that comes along with it (honestly I'm skeptical it would make much of a difference) would be purely incidental.

"Equality" is perhaps a poor choice of words here. I will say that for people on the cusp—mainly young and poor people—having a car break down can spiral into a really bad situation or even homelessness. When you can't afford to fix your car and your car is required to get to your job, the situation can become untenable quickly.

GP was merely refuting the one point made by GGP, that a lack of cars would somehow widen the class divide.

> Is it also repressive to "force" people to hold down jobs to participate in society?

Yes.

> To "force" people to commute to work?

Yes.

> What about the fact that some people have the luxury of working from home? Should we make that illegal as well?

No, that reduces traffic making places more livable.

> Great, so if we can't all have something, none of us should have it!

This is a false dichotomy. I didn't suggest "Everyone must give up cars", only that the world should not be designed to FORCE everyone to drive cars.

> Is it also repressive to "force" people to hold down jobs to participate in society?

Hyperbole much? The two concepts aren't even remotely related.

> I do not understand how people can be so focused on equality as to totally ignore the average, greater good.

As if requiring cars is the greater good? It has been demonstrated in many many places that designing infrastructure which enables people to move around safely and reliably without the use of cars improves the quality of life for everyone.

> The nature of modern civilization is such that some degree of inequality is inevitable if one optimizes for median welfare.

I just can't get over how dystopian this comment is. Aside from being untrue, it is just horribly wrong headed and borderline evil. Essentially you are suggesting we cement the bottom quartile of society into eternal poverty.

Not only is this cruel, it is ultimately terrible for society as a whole as the poor and homeless become increasingly desperate, and turn to crime and drugs; becoming an ever-increasing burden on society.

You can have a high average but have the majority of people suffer, just have a really long tail. I don't think you meant what you said.

Regardless, your arguments that public good doesn't matter also nullifies the OP comments argument of widening the class divide by claiming class divides don't matter and should not be ameliorated.

Not to mention making a car a requirement for transportation doesn't just exclude those who can't afford it - it excludes children, teenagers, elderly and disabled who can't get a license or car themselves.

A small thing, but to grind my own political axe here, but a topic that comes up a lot on HN is infantalization of the youth in America. I personally believe that sprawl (forcing children and teens to stay home since they really can't go anywhere if they can't drive) helps perpetuate it reducing their agency. It also as dashundchen leads to isolate elderly people and people with disabilities.

Decreasing someone's range increases their costs, a lot, because it effectively makes real estate more scarce and removes distant retail competition (in addition to increasing the real estate cost of retail).

My intuition says the effect size is going to be a multiple of what it costs to maintain a cheap car.

This has been demonstrated to be false.

Probably one of the biggest reasons is real estate increases in the denser areas as parking infrastructure gets phased out. Parking is a massive waste of land.

Oh? Link me.

My guess: real estate costs go down short-term if you add a bunch of supply by getting rid of parking, and then they go right back up, plus some, once the market equilibrates.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to enjoy having 5x the space at half the cost as when I lived in the city, with 5 grocery stores 10 minutes away instead of 2 grocery stores 30 minutes away. Not to mention parks, trees, and nature trails for running.

The problem you describe is a fabricated hypothetical which has never happened in the real world. It's proven false by every single bike/ pedestrian friendly city in the world.

Similarly, increasing range has had little to no positive effect on housing prices. Look at the insane real estate prices in the California Bay Area or LA which are both very car-first locations.

> Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive.

You're right. We should charge them thousands of dollars per month so they can live downtown and walk everywhere instead. Problem solved!

Support a landlord near you!

(Just kidding, you can't afford to. Enjoy your hike! Maybe in 30 years they'll get public transit working where you need it. You'll promptly get priced right out again, but at least you'll know your taxes went to a good cause!)

We should improve public transit and urban design so that walkable places aren't in such short supply.

.... or have a functional mass transit network so that they don't have to live downtown.

A bike costs less than $500 once and reliably gets you several miles fairly quickly. eBikes get you further faster and are also a fraction of the cost to own/ operate than a car.

And in the winter you're cold, in the summer you're sweaty, and in the rain you're wet.

It's not like people buy cars because they want to waste money. A car is an absolutely massive increase in QOL, especially for the majority of Americans who dont live in city centers and who don't want to live in city centers.

> A car is an absolutely massive increase in QOL

When you build cities which requires cars to get around then owning a car is almost essential. When a city is built around other forms of transportation, not so much. All the insurmountable problems like rain and sun happen in the places where bikes are common, it turns out people are just fine without their cars when the infrastructure is good enough.

The big problem with car friendly infrastructure is it takes up so much space, it makes almost every other form of transportation more dangerous and slower.

One popular attack on public transportation is to tie it to class and race issues, in order to prime people to think in zero-sum, tribal terms. Another is to place the burden of solving every transportation problem upon those who would dare propose any modification to the status quo.

Once you see it, it stops working so well. (More depressingly, you see this cynical strategy repeated elsewhere and repeated by people who don't actually realize what's going on.)

“Ban cars” is shorthand for a much bigger societal problem. It’s not an attack on a person or what they need to do to survive. These articles are about us as a whole, not the individual.

This toot explains it well: https://mspsocial.net/@t54r4n1/100699058171393417

Its a very common failing of architecture fans who want to decide how the masses live without actually asking the end users.

Dane here. Most cities of 15k or more has what is essentially a couple of streets worth of strip mall with no cars allowed (except for deliveries). This works really well as long as there's ample parking around - which there usually is here.

> just create more parking lots at the border of such areas

afaik, most proponents of car-free streets or dense urban development regard parking lots at the border of the dense area ("intercept parking") as a good idea to be encouraged. The point is not to wage war on cars, it's to make downtowns a safe and pleasant place to be.

This is exactly why I left the field of urban planning. Practitioners were wildly out of touch with the way the vast majority of people lived that it rendered the field irrelevant. The job was basically a continued effort in trying to coerce people into living in pre-WWII style cities, when the fact is that most people who live in the suburbs are quite happy with the arrangement, even if 24 year-old me found the idea of suburbs distasteful.

My city of roughly a half million was mostly developed post-WW2. Even the denser areas are not really walkable. They tried painting bike lanes on existing roads, but that has just increased the number of bike fatalities.

Maybe expanding bus service 500-1000% and having it run 24/7 would work. Anything less means low-wagers will still need a car.

Passing a Fair Scheduling Act and giving low wage workers a daily $10 to $20 dollar Uber/Lyft credit would do more to dramatically improve lives than mass transit spending. But that is less fun to think about.

A lot of research found painted bike lanes don't help without protection.

Some cities simply can't do this, such as Los Angeles, Dallas, and Atlanta. It's not in their DNA. Things are simply too far apart and the infrastructure couldn't hold it. Other cities are moving toward "no cars" by simply allowing gridlock to make driving a car worthless. I visit NYC very often, and we used to take cabs all the time. Now, we never do, unless we have so much luggage we can't manage - it's a nightmare getting a cab through Manhattan. They might as well close most of Broadway, it's just a quagmire.

One thing I'll add, the "allowing gridlock" is like "allowing water to fill a container". It more or less is what an incompressible fluid does which is essentially what traffic is. That's why road widenings don't neccessarily decrease congestion, when you take into the non-linear effects (induced demand).

> which is essentially what traffic is

No, not at all. Traffic is quite compressible, it just slows down when you do that. Which is the issue here.

> induced demand

Oh no, more people can get to their destination by their preferred mode of transportation! How horrible!

There's an important difference between having car-free areas and being entirely car free. The Santa Monica Promenade is actually a good example of this in practice. For several blocks near the beach it's pedestrian-only, and this has made it a destination for shopping and general hanging out. I used to work right near there and it was extremely nice to have somewhere to stroll and people watch without worrying about cars.

The average U.S. car carries an average of 1.56 people and weighs an average, for new cars, of almost two tons.

Yes, and ... ? What's exactly your point?

Just thought I'd toss it in there as a sort of topping or garnish for the article.

Private cars in urban areas are incredibly inefficient from just about any direction you choose to view it from.

All cars are inefficient, they use most of their power just to move themselves. Biking on the roads between my house and my work is suicidal.

Well they're efficient for use cases that any other transportation option doesn't work for. Just like a bus is very efficient at moving 80 people in one direction, a car is efficient at moving one person in 80 directions.

If we didn't have private cars, businesses couldn't efficiently do things like deliveries, and individual people couldn't make trips that are outside the scope of public transit. So to replace them entirely we still need to fill those gaps.

Maybe my British English is hindering communication of my point here, because by "private car" I meant "car for private personal i.e. non-commercial use"

as I've noted elsewhere, in many areas there is no way around use of private cars due to the lack of population density.

I read it as cars don't belong in urban areas. They are incredibly inefficient energy and space wise.

Look at the average downtown area of an American city and see how much is devoted to surface parking lots, garages, highways, interchanges, arterials.

Take a look at this site and you'll see aerials of American cities before and after cars, and how incredible amounts of density, productivity, and housing were destroyed:

http://iqc.ou.edu/2014/12/12/60yrsmidwest/

https://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8...

It's a loop with positive feedback - the more space given over to cars, the less dense destinations become, the more cars become required. Conversely the denser places become, the easier it is to makes places bike, transit and pedestrian friendly, and the more difficult it becomes to drive.

The point is, of course, that it’s one of the least efficient modes of transport ever devised, while at the same time there are more people around than ever before. That’s an absurd equation.

US cities have repeatedly tried this. Around 85% of the time, it has been a complete failure and they go back to allowing cars. [1]

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2013/07/25/16th-stre...

From this article, it looks like pedestrian malls are an important piece, but they can't do all of the heavy lifting on their own. There has to be adequate density and multiple purposes so people are organically there at different times of the day to create a sense of safety. This is addressed extensively in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

I would love to see more streets like this.

The US has tons of car-free business districts, and they're well integrated into the cities and suburbs. They are surrounded by parking so that people who must drive can get there, then leave their car to walk around the shops. And they often has bus transit centers so that people can reach the area by public transportation.

Except we call them shopping malls, and they're all privatized, meaning they're owned by big corporations who set the rent, access is controlled (no homeless), and freedoms are limited (no protests, so no free speech).

In re:

> Heading out west, San Francisco’s government has voted to close Market Street to cars. Market Street is one of the main thoroughfares in the city’s downtown

It's not closed to cars, just private cars, if I understand correctly. There will still be cars and buses, and car traffic will still be crossing market street.

http://www.bettermarketstreetsf.org/docs/bms-vehicle-circula...

- - - -

Edit: The more I look into this the worse it seems. I thought I was reading the picture wrong, but they have bike lanes running between bus stops and pedestrians:

> At curbside transit stops, the protected bikeway would be placed between the transit stop and the pedestrian through zone. Boarding and alighting transit customers would be separated from the bikeway with a raised railing-like feature and provided a designated place to cross the bikeway. On the sidewalk between the bikeway and the pedestrian throughzone, there would be the 3-foot buffer zone provided except at the aforementioned designated crossing places where there would be crosswalk markings and other features.

~"ResponsesToComments_Vol1_Better Market Street.pdf" from https://sfplanning.org/project/better-market-street-environm...

It seems to me that the new Market St. would maybe be safer, but it will be much less convenient for each mode of travel. It seems to me to combine all the right elements but in all the wrong ways.

E.g. the "protected" bike lanes aren't really separate from the pedestrians, so bike riders are not going to be able to go fast on them, because there will be people there.

This obviates the bike path: If you can't ride faster than pedestrians anyway then you might as well just mix the two kinds of traffic and let people sort it out naturally.

The new plan doesn't seem to me to help people commute by bike.

The only real reason why we don't have car-free side streets in Philly (the ones that are too skinny for a car to get through anyway, forcing people to park on one of the sidewalks) is due to handicapped people becoming immobilized. I like the concept, but I'm curious how it will be implemented whilst also solving the problems for a large percentage of the population...

I might be way off base, but wouldn't those people have electric wheelchairs or something similar?

There's a middle ground where someone isn't wheelchair bound but does have a lot of trouble moving around where people fall through the cracks without cars or other vehicular transport.

Electric trike?

The little mobility scooters? They can help a lot. They're a pain to get from place to place though in the few time's I've been with people using them.

It depends but having kneeling buses helps.

On the other hand, a third of the population doesn’t drive, either because too young, too old, too poor, too handicapped, etc. Making things more walkable certainly helps that group of people.

Washington, DC, has one car-free street: the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 15th and 17th Streets. The odd thing is that the street was closed after a man crashed an airplane on the White House lawn.

(I except the case of blizzards--with a couple of feet of snow, you can ski or play tackle football in the middle of a main street.)

> When asked what they like most about a city they have visited, almost no one answers: “The cars whizzing by on the streets.”

Hi from no one. I bet folks interested in cars often mention seeing the different makes and models as highlights of foreign travel. I know I do.

We can only pray. Oh, and petition, comment and vote, too.

Not in the suburbs...

cheap automated taxis are a way more realistic idea for reducing traffic. Not just for last mile either. Switching transportation in the middle of a trip even once wastes a ton of time and adds hassle.

> Not in the suburbs...

Which, as a reminder for urbanists, really translates to "Not in the only place 90% of the nation's population is allowed to live"

Basically any city that isn't one of the biggest four or five, and even then just the core. Lots of mid-size cities, like Portland, are nearly 100% suburb.

I understand drawing that line there, but the "suburb" of a good portion (half?) of Portland is the urban, neighborly sort that isn't the post-WWII culdesac sprawl. I mean, I guess suburban sprawl is the [awful] norm in the U.S., but then there's the non-sprawl suburb stuff like Portland's walkable grid with narrow streets…

It's more like 27% rural, 43% suburb, 29% city.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/18/americans...

~80% of the people in the Census Bureau's "29% urban" figure are actually in a suburban neighborhood, that happens to lie within the legal boundary of a urban-designated "city".

It's like saying "Manhattan and Long Island are both in NYC, so they're basically the same".

> Switching transportation in the middle of a trip even once wastes a ton of time and adds hassle.

Does it? When driving into Boston, I’ve found it almost always better to park in a big garage on the edge of town and ride a bus/subway in, rather than spend ~20 minutes looking for parking near my destination (or paying for one of the massively more expensive in-town garages.)

It varies a lot. In my experience - it takes a lot of time to switch because the parking lots aren't always directly next to boarding on the train. Getting in and out of those lots can be a nightmare if it's a busy time too. (This is why you'll see people running to get to their car as soon as the train starts deboarding - they want to avoid the traffic in the lot!) So, naturally, you need to add a buffer in for parking, getting to the station, making sure you paid for a ticket, etc. This is an automatic show up early. And then the damn train is NEVER on time except when you show up late to the lot... then it's so on time that you miss it and have to wait 30 minutes or an hour for the next train.

You might spend 20 minutes looking for parking but that usually indicates unfamiliarity with parking in the area. That happens maybe the first or second time visiting a place. After that - you know what has high to low availability and you'll go to streets that optimize for availability + distance.

I really think switching is terrible and it's why I don't do it. I live in the bay area and avoid taking public transit here because it's horribly behind time except at the starting destinations and the infrequency of trains coming by is why I don't ride almost ever anymore.

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