No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit | Hacker News Reader

No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

sfchronicle.com

297 pointsluu229 comments

The linked article (1) says the redesign will have "sidewalk level bike lanes".

If there's a way for local people to comment on this, please encourage these to be changed to in-between-road-and-sidewalk level. (Or road level with a continuous kerb in between).

This makes it much, much easier for pedestrians not to accidentally wander into the lane. (2)

1 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-...

2 https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/copenhagen-denmark-...

As a Dutchie blunders like the one you mention are so stupifying... Takes you a ten minute visit to NL to figure out why you need to separate modalities consistently, yet even as close as Germany and France cities are designed so obviously by people who never ever bike.

Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL.

The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.

Don't be too pessimistic. London has seen big improvements in the last few years [1]. It's still early -- many journeys won't join up, so they're less appealing for many people -- but I was surprised at the improvements last time I visited.

They've removed car lanes on some fairly major roads, and successfully ignored protests from taxi drivers etc.

[1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/evolution-cycle-superhi...

I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places.

I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fractured my wrist in my fall when the bicyclist hit me and not only did they not stop, they yelled at me as they cycled away.

Anyway, I too would support limiting the use of cars as well as on street parking in city centres and other similar zones.

Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes falling like bowling pins when the huge crowd was starting to move at a green light).

Getting used to some bad compromise hardly makes it good.

Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower, the walkways need to be wide, and the walkways should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of people (shallow curbs you ride up and down). Look at Osaka, you have almost free reign on a bicycle there. Bikes are slow, cars are slow, but it all flows. Bikes even join foot traffic in shopping precints. But when it's too busy people are no longer on their bikes anyway, because the whole place is walkable.

It takes a level of empathy and cooperation I think doesn't exist in the bike versus car debate, because it has become an "us versus them" debate and everyone is trying to win not collaborate.

For some types of bike riding, sure. But not for commuting or general getting around. Then the whole point of using a bike is to go at a much higher speed than walking.

Cars can certainly share cycle paths, they just need to ride slower, the paths need to be wide, and they should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of cyclists.

Pedestrian areas, yes - people usually don't commute through there. Sidewalks vs. cycle paths vs. car lanes - not a good idea.

When people propose path sharing among pedestrians and cyclists, they often mean cyclists slowing down to speeds (e.g. 10km/h, or even 5-7km/h), which they would find unacceptable for cars, even if multiplied x3 (try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h).

> try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h

It's certainly possible for traffic moving at different speeds to share the road since there's a set of rules drivers of vehicle follow. On multi-lane highways/motorways, faster traffic passes/overtakes slower traffic by moving closer to the center of the road. The same principle works when faster traffic wants to pass/overtake a cyclist.

On the other hand, this won't work when a cyclist is riding amongst pedestrians because pedestrians do not follow the rules of the road while walking.

It is easy and cheap to let people bicycle there, this is one of the most important commuter paths in Stockholm: https://www.google.com/maps/@59.3169808,18.0719185,3a,75y,34...

It's not good, the priority just isn't there to make it better. Overall I think mixing pedestrians an cyclists works, as long as people respect one another, but as you say mixing in commuters really is a bad idea.

I want to be clear, I'm talking about the city metro areas. Not commuting from suburbia. We should have fully separated bike paths for longer distance commute bike traffic, because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster, and unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.

But once you're in the metro area, everyone should slow right down. The dominant traffic in the city is foot traffic.

Cars go at 50km/h through my city, meaning they need to be separated really strictly. Slow them down to 20km/h with narrower roads, and you can reclaim the area for mixed pedestrian traffic, allowing more free movement for everyone in the city. Something as simple as crossing the road shouldn't take 10 minutes for 200 people just so five cars can cross the road.

With narrower streets and slower traffic, you can reasonably cross the road anywhere you want. That also allows bikes to move reasonably along the road but slowly on the footpaths, you open the whole area up for the people using the city.

It's all a balance, not everywhere in a city should be like that. I'm just advocating to move away from the heavy car-oriented lean many places currently have for their city centers.

There is no difference between city centers and suburbia in much of Europe. Apart from that, the Netherlands has a few bike highways now to cater to faster intercity transport.

What you want to do is enable fast biking everywhere (so a bike first infra) and seperate modalities for safety and comfort. Any urban transport research will show that bikes in foot traffic is a Very Bad Idea(tm).

> because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster

Why doesn't it work? I frequently commute by bicycle by traveling at speeds ranging from 10 to 40 km/h (averaging around 18 to 20 km/h) amongst motorized traffic moving at 25 to 80 km/h without any issues. I do something very similar on interstate highways (motorways) where I drive 110 to 130 km/h amongst tractor-trailers moving at 60 to 100 km/h.

> unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.

Bike lanes don't solve anything and they cause problems for cyclists at intersections because they direct cyclists to pass traffic on the wrong side when traffic plans to turn.

Former discussion was about sidewalks, so I wanted to be explicit that having a 40km/h speed limit for cars while sending cyclists to a shared cyclepath/sidewak at 10km/h is not a solution.

I fully agree with displacing cars. If a street has 20km/h limit for cars, I would not mind if it applied for bicycles as well (even though they are safer at the same speed).

Yes, foot traffic should be a priority. For longer distances you need something faster - mass transit, bikes, those e-scooters, maybe longboards, or even segways (there are nice 1-wheel versions), but you don't need fast paths on every street. Cars take too much space to go in significant numbers even near city centers.

> Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower

That significantly reduces the utility of the bicycle in terms of transportation. If one can't ride at a pace that much faster than walking, then using a bicycle provides no advantage in terms of time. It's also more awkward to control a bicycle at slower speeds and you're more likely to fall and injure yourself compared to hist Ealing at the same speed.

I didn't make it clear, but I'm talking about metro areas. Longer distance commuting would be better catered for with separated bike paths. My city is almost there, with separated bike paths for commuting, but then it reverts to car-dominant in the city, which doesn't make any sense.

But you can totally ride faster than walking on footpaths provided they're big enough, and it's easy enough to get on and off the path when needed. Not commute speed, but fast enough for inner-city commutes.

> But you can totally ride faster than walking on footpaths provided they're big enough,

That really depends on how many pedestrians are using the foot path. Plus, why use the footpath when I can use the road and ride at commute speed? Similarly, when I drive my car, I prefer taking the highway/motorway since I can drive faster than I can using surface streets.

> Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars.

Bicycles are vehicles with wheels just like motorcycles and cars. Drivers are supposed to follow the same rules of the road regardless of what type of vehicle they use. That is, stay on the correct side of the road, signal intention to change lanes or turn. Make left turns while keeping to the left of same direction traffic and make right turns while keeping to the right of same direction traffic. Faster traffic passes/overtakes slower traffic on the side closer to the center of the road which allows for traffic moving at different speeds.

In the other hand, none of these requirements apply to pedestrians, so they cannot mix with traffic other than at designated crossing points. These crossing points work for pedestrians moving at pedestrian like speeds (3 to 5 mph -- 5 to 8 km/h). Faster speeds leads to the problem where drivers have insufficient time to see the pedestrian and yield).

As a cyclist this "bikes are cars" myth leads to a very unsafe experience for cyclists. I know it's what the current laws say, but I can't comprehend how folks don't see how false it is. A bike is much closer to a really big person running down a sidewalk than a car or motorcycle. You basically take the person add twenty pounds to them and 12 mph. Versus a car you take a person and add 2000lbs to them and 40+ mph.

I'm not advocating for bikes on sidewalks, but it seems less ludicrous to me than bikes on streets with cars. I'm for the standard line of though that bikes and friends belong in a 3rd flow of traffic like the Dutch do it.

I'd just like to point out that we've known that mixing classes of traffic in the same space is bad for safety since the industrial revolution brought heavy rolling objects to the workplace. This stuff is well known. It's a politics and resources problem.

If you bother to build the cycling lane then differentiating it a bit more obviously from the sidewalk is not such a big expenditure. Loot at this [0] setup (just outside of Copenhagen). Simply having a few centimeters of difference in height between the 3 lanes (pedestrians, bikes, cars) makes them very obvious and a lot harder to accidentally cross them. It also allows treating the cycling lane as another traffic lane with its own road markings and everything. [1]

It doesn't feel like the extra kerb is a matter of cost as much as of "sharing" the environment. So the expectation is "there won't be too many bikes so pedestrians can just use the entire sidewalk when needed". This just leads to more cyclists trying their luck on the street with the cars which are more predictable than pedestrians.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6450742,12.4589657,3a,75y,28...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.614447,12.475333,3a,75y,294....

Do drivers actually respect cycling lanes like the first one? In the US we have much more separated lanes which are routinely disrespected by drivers.

Delivery drivers park half-in-half-out of these lanes in the city sometimes.

Otherwise, they're respected. I don't think I've ever seen someone driving in one. It seems a strange question. Do American drivers not respect the sidewalk? It's the same construction.

I think the police would come down very heavily on anyone they caught driving in the cycle lane without a very good reason. The only good reason I can think of would be to move slowly aside to allow an emergency vehicle to pass -- and the same reason would justify pulling onto the sidewalk -- although either action is still illegal.

https://twitter.com/lorichung/status/1098411580130320384?s=1... https://twitter.com/richmintz/status/1225465820387725313?s=1... https://twitter.com/KostelecPlan/status/1232868760513470464?...

There's (literally) one street in a nearby city that, during a redesign a few years back, basically embedded a bike lane in the sidewalk. It's sort of a hazard. It's moderately busy for both pedestrians and bikes and, given that this is an extremely atypical configuration, pedestrians are simply not used to looking out for bikes zipping down this bike lane (sometimes even in the direction that they're supposed to be traveling on a given side and maybe with lights on at night). I'm there often enough that I'm careful but I've still come closer to being hit a couple of times as a pedestrian than I'd like.

The Rue de la Loi is Brussels is notorious for this. They removed a lane of traffic a few years ago and added a bike lane at the same level as the sidewalk. Incredibly dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists.

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8445626,4.3736092,3a,75y,270...

This is actually even worse than that. Because of trees, the bike lane sort of goes down the middle of the sidewalk.

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.358207,-71.0988444,3a,75y,20...

In the street view, there's even a bicyclist avoiding it altogether and riding in traffic.

They tried to paint one like this along some of the main walks at USC. Absolutely no one realizes it's there, cyclist or pedestrian.

I also live in Graz now and as much as it loves to advertise itself as a bike friendly city, outside of the inner city center and student quarters biking here is very dangerous due to poor infrastructure cyclists have to share with pedestrians, cars or trams and cyclists not respecting any rules (crossing on red lights, never hand signaling a turn or a stop, etc.).

Compared to the Netherlands or Denmark, biking culture and infrastructure in Austria is a national embarrassment.

You've reminded me that there's a five-way intersection next to Uni Graz. Some years ago they basically removed all traffic signals and most signs, basically ceding the whole area to priority for pedestrians. When I first came across it the apparent chaos was a little concerning but after walking through that place on more than one occasion I was surprised how well it worked. I've not actually been to that part of town in some time, so now I wonder if it's still like that.

I'm not sure that would work in many, much less every intersection but it really made me stop and question what sort of unrecognised assumptions I had about traffic safety. This stuff is important and I think there's way to many rules and practices that are in place because of assumptions that got made back in the dawn of time... it's likely that they're not correct now but it's even possible that they were never really correct. We need evidence based policies and not so-called common wisdom.

Yes, the intersection is alive and well without traffic signals. That's my favorite intersection in Graz, the five-way intersection of Zinzendorfgasse, Halbärthgasse, Schubertstrasse, Leechgasse, and Beethovenstrasse. The Google Maps street view has a nice view of pedestrians, bikes, and cars sharing the intersection. Buses also use the intersection, but I couldn't find any in the Google Maps view.

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0761111,15.4503833,3a,75y,31...

My second favorite intersection is on the left side of Erzherzog-Johann-Brücke, where pedestrians, bikes, trams, and cars intersect with only one traffic sign (northwards on Neutorgasse).

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0710439,15.4355343,3a,75y,20...

Learning that there are people who have favorite intersections really made my day.

That intersection[1] works so well without signs by accident not by design, since it's in the most central and densest part of the city with lots of cafes that's crawling with students and cyclists coming from every direction so drivers have no choice but to drive slowly and carefully. They can't replicate this in other parts outside the city center where cars pick up speed.

[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/WeN2Q2MhVdA8Y1RK8

In most cities it would be enough to ban roadside parking on larger roads to get enough space for safe bike lanes. That's very different from banning cars.

Vienna has a few roads recently been closed off to cars, and there are more coming. I'd say the cities of Austria appear to be paying attention to the advantages of this approach, generally a little more these days ..

I'm a Dutchie who's also spent time in Salzburg and the percentage of people riding bikes is different. If Salzburg had to support the scale of bicycles that Utrecht does it would require a radical redesign of the roads in Salzburg.

Can't speak for other Austrian cities other than Salzburg, though.

Why do you think it will never happen? It did happen and is happening in several places, like Brussels at the moment.

I was in Brussels a few weeks ago. And, while the work is still in progress, my reaction was that the area near the Bourse was much more inviting than in times past. I've actually been sort of negative on Brussels previously and I didn't feel that to the same degree this year.

Car-focused infrastructure planning was intense in NL too -- separate bike lanes were a very late addition (after the famous "stop murdering our children" campaign against pedestrian deaths)

Yes, I saw a video recently talking about how stupid it is to use the common term "vulnerable road users". It lumps cyclists and pedestrians together even though their needs are very different.

"We'll just put all the vulnerable road users off to the side here. Cyclists don't mind if they have to cross a road at every single junction right?"

IMO: you don’t to see that, you just need to have ever driven a car with other cars on the road to understand why vehicles going different speeds shouldn’t share the same lanes.

Which is why drivers typically change lanes to pass. Unfortunately, most bike paths are rather narrow and preclude that possibility when you get stuck behind a slower cyclist or pedestrian.

You don't have to go as far as the netherlands. On the santa monica bike path people absentmindedly stumble into it, imagining it to be a sidewalk, and cause chaos when 80 rental bikes and 15 electric scooters begin to pile up and all attempt to merge and pass the wandering geriatric in the path at once.

The curb is a hazard to cyclists, more so than a crash with inattentive pedestrians. The majority of Dutch cycle lanes are level with the sidewalk and how often do you hear of accidents (not caused by mopeds)?

> The majority of Dutch cycle lanes are level with the sidewalk

That doesn't fit with my memories of visiting the Netherlands, or a quick Streetview-tour of The Hague.

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0645825,4.2251355,3a,75y,172...

That is considered “level” - pedestrians will wander into it anyway (mostly tourists) since there is no perceivable barrier unless there is enough traffic.

It may be worth noting that there are so many bicycles in Dutch cities that, as a pedestrian, you learn very quickly that you have to be every bit as aware of them (if not more so) than you are of cars. It's mostly a pretty different situation that the occasional bike bombing down an unseparated lane on a sidewalk.

It can work OK when you have wide paths that have lots of different types of users on them. It's less good when you have fairly narrow sidewalks.

> "The curb is a hazard to cyclists..."

not if the curb is sloped (american suburbs tend to have these), so that you could ride up (or down) it in a pinch.

i'd support such a little "mound curb" separating cars and bikes at the same grade, which would likely be less expensive to install than building 3 different grades for cars, bikes/scooters, and pedestrians (which i'd also support).

> The curb is a hazard to cyclists, more so than a crash with inattentive pedestrians.

Numbers, man, numbers. Link to some hard data "or it didn't happen."

A crash is hazardous to inattentive pedestrians more so than a cyclist who is better protected (helmet/gear).

What to do, what to do?

Cyclists in NL do not wear any protective gear.

Indeed. We have pavement level cycle tracks in the part of East London I live in - I tend to stick to the roads since if if I'm doing 16-18MPH and a pedestrian wanders into the cycleway, it gets tricky.

I absolutely do not blame the pedestrians - its all too easy to do.

From the perspective of a pedestrian this always feels like a really bad pattern. The cyclists are going full speed past pedestrians who might only be a foot or so from them because, after all, they're in a marked bike lane. Meanwhile pedestrians are walking on a sidewalk, maybe not paying much attention, and probably not expecting something to slam into them if they moved over a bit or changed their direction at a crosswalk. A lot of people are not really trained to look both ways before crossing the sidewalk.

Something I found in Japan was that it seemed like abnormal number of people rode bicycles on fairly busy sidewalks. I found I needed to really train myself not to change directions without looking behind me in case there was bicycle back there.

You can somewhat rectify this by bumping where pedestrians and cyclists are expected to cross between the bus stop and sidewalk, a mini-speed table of sorts: https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/DSC_0775...

In Japan however people seem to cycle at a more casaual pace.

I haven't been down there since the change, maybe I can do it today and post a lil trip report.

FWIW, This was brought up in the public comments on the project. The bike lanes seem to be between the sidewalks and the bus stops in several places, and overall there isn't a firm physical distinction between bikes and pedestrians. It seems to me that you're going to have to ride more slowly than you would if we had proper bike lanes, and there are going to be a lot of accidents with bikes hitting peds.

Also, cross traffic is still going on and the center of the street is reserved for buses (if I understand correctly) and light rail, and there are still cars (taxis, &c.), so from a bike-commuter POV I don't think it will be much more convenient than before, however, it's potentially much safer.

But again, I haven't actually been down there yet myself.

San Francisco has a few areas with the "sidewalk level bike lanes", especially near the waterfront from the Embarcadero towards The Marina. I've walked in there as a pedestrian and have ridden a bike in that area, and honestly the area has wide-enough sidewalks that that style of bike lane isn't too bad for pedestrians or cyclists, at least in my opinion. I imagine what's envisioned for Market Street will end up being similar, though the sidewalk along the sections of Market I see regularly (around the Powell Street Bart) is narrower than in the waterfront areas.

But I tend to agree with you overall: with (most^) cars taken out of the equation, a street level bike lane is probably better for everyone.

^ I still see people mistakenly turning on to Market sometimes.

I"m not a fan of riding a bike at Embarcadero. I would like to see more bike/walk areas like the one on Townsend between 7th and 5th where there is a clearly marked bike only and walking only section.

The last time I rode my bike to the Caltrain, which was admittedly a while ago, everything was being ripped up on 5th near Townsend (I think it was 5th at least -- it was one of the nearby numbered streets); is that all finished now?

Nope.

Real bike lanes make a huge difference. They finally started doing it in Vancouver and it completely transformed the neighborhoods.

It is the single cheapest/easiest thing a city can do to improve a street.

unfortunately we have several such elevated bike lanes and they are UPS truck loading zones, which car free market street will not likely prevent.

Just the fact that riding a bicycle got more attractive and 25% more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars.

Not to mention the people who are exercising by using their bicycles will have health benefits as well.

I don't think it implies that 25% more people are using bicycles. It looks like bike traffic on this particular road increased 25%.

Will 25% more cyclists have much of an impact on the number of cars on the road?

25% more of a small number is still a small number.

Market Street is a busy cycling route. During rush hour I'd often ride in a pack of 20 or 3 cyclists.

According to MUNI, cyclists peaked at 650/hour before the change. That's in contrast to 400 cars per hour. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-...

It will have an impact on congestion. For instance in Brussels, a 10% reduction in number of cars on the road translates to a 40% percent reduction in traffic jams.

Which seems like it would translate to at least 10% more people being willing to drive...

And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than driving a car once the city has been designed that way.

I'm one of them, and many of my friends are just waiting for the infrastructure to be further improved to make the switch. More space, better markings (…), just more reasons to drop the expensive, polluting, stressing space-taking cars and take a breath of fresh air while commuting.

> And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than driving a car once the city has been designed that way.

Most people aren't going to find cycling more pleasant than driving in inclement weather, cold weather, hot weather, low traction conditions, uphill, or carrying cargo.

There are public bike counters along Market St. with displays. If you live here you can go and look at the numbers yourself, there's one not far from Twitter's office.

I don't know what the overall daily ride count is now. About 5 years ago it was something like 90K trips/day, and had been on a more or less linear growth path.

As the number of cars drops below critical saturation, the flow can transition to intermittent to smooth

Of course, that makes car use more attractive again.

As a former but not current car user, congestion does not factor into how desirable car use for commuting is. I don't keep my eye on how many less cars there are, waiting for that moment when I can finally get another one because my hypothetical commute time dropped 5 mins. If it's even on par to not drive to work, that's what I'll do, and I'd pick a job in such a place that allows it. Driving to work sucks.

If your commute is a twenty minute race on an empty Autobahn, most people wouldn't mind, and some people might even enjoy it.

The more of a slog it become is stop-and-go traffic, the more people will have your (and my) sentiment that driving to work sucks.

You are right, that for individuals 5 minutes more or less is not making much of a difference in their choices---most of the time. People have thresholds where it gets too annoying, so they stop completely if they can at all (like you suggest).

Average over lots of people, those discrete thresholds look much smoother.

Yep. Physicists laugh at economists, but this is the same underlying structure that explains how even though everything we use is now more energy efficient, we use more energy overall.

Flat out wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States

The US is today consuming less energy than it was in 1970.

Your linked Wikipedia article suggests that we may have shifted some of our energy usage to other countries (e.g. by making use of manufacturing done in another country).

Edit: Perhaps the actual total energy usage is lower. However, the article doesn't give the impression that this is obviously true.

What time in the past are you talking about?

Funny enough, the total amount of physical stuff churning through the US economy has declined since the 1930s (or so?) just in terms of sheer mass.

Btw, your observation sounds much less surprising when you say 'transistors got cheaper since the 1970, yet we are spending more in total on transistors than ever'.

This is generally called Jevons paradox: When you make something more efficient, demand rises because it is more efficient, which in the end leads to using more of the base resource (but getting a lot more for it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

Not true at all, like all paradoxes its loosely defined and not quantified, so should not be taken too seriously. Demand I crease assumes that demand is perfectly elastic, which it isnt for ant real world case - price of shoes dropping 100x would not result in demand for shoes going up by same amount. In fact many demands are totally inelastic, I.e. food consumption does not change much, because people have to eat the same amount of calories.

Secondly the price of a good is made up of more than its base resource, it's people's time, arketing, opportunity cost etc. So a 2x increase in resource efficiency of shoes manufacturing does not result in shoe price dropping 2x.

I'm sorry, I was not trying to imply that it always happens that way, just that it (paradoxically) sometimes does and it has a name. I agree with what you wrote.

> the total amount of physical stuff churning through the US economy has declined since the 1930s (or so?) just in terms of sheer mass.

That’s an extraordinary claim to me, especially given population growth, and I would need some rigorous evidence to believe it. Cars are bigger, homes are bigger, people live further apart, and people travel more. How can the sheer mass not be more simply because of the mass of all the extra fuel?

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) for a start.

I remembered reading about a comparison with 1930 as the peak. The Wikipedia article just mentions:

> Between 1977 and 2001, the amount of material required to meet all needs of Americans fell from 1.18 trillion pounds to 1.08 trillion pounds, even though the country's population increased by 55 million people. Al Gore similarly noted in 1999 that since 1949, while the economy tripled, the weight of goods produced did not change.

If you follow the references, or Google some more, you can find more.

If its measured in pure mass, I would assume construction, concrete and coal consumption to have biggest effects. iPhones don't weigh much.

Quite a bit has happened since the 1930s other than iPhones. Such as population increase of 2.5x. And the interstate highway system. The more I think about it, the crazier the claim is.

> more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars

It doesn't follow though

More people using bikes is not a direct consequence of less people using cars

It could be, but there is no cause-effect relationship

For example in Milan where I live more people are using bikes because many people moved in recently and owning a car is expensive here and the weather has improved since climate change started showing its effects

But they are people that weren't driving before, they used public transport

Most of them don't even hold a driving license

> Most of them don't even hold a driving license

This is absolutely not true in the UK, and probably not in most major cities. The overwhelming proportion of cyclists here are adults, and many have decided to take up cycling after already going through the normal rite-of-passage of learning to drive.

Base on data from the national travel survey, it's estimated that 83% of cyclists hold a driving license in the UK[1]. Given that figure, an increase in cycling traffic will definitely cause a proportional decrease in motorised traffic.

1. https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics

Where does op says they are not adults?

My fiance is an adult and she doesn't have a driving license.

Because public transport allowed her to move without driving

You are misunderstanding my point - I'm saying that because the majority of cyclists are adults, who got into cycling after they turned 18, the majority of them have learned to drive (at least from my experience), not that the cyclists OP is talking about aren't adults.

I do not hold a driving license either, aged 29, but I am in the minority. I am also learning to drive this year, to stop burdening my friends and family members.

My point is that in modern cities you are not a minority anymore, or not by a large margin.

I have a driving license, I've been driving for 20 years, but I gave up on cars 3 years ago.

Now I use other means of transport, mainly the subway and my feet. I walk a lot, but I don't use a bike because

- I don't like biking when it rains and in Milan it rains a lot

- I don't mind the cars, but I avoid sharing the road with trams and their rails, and Milan has a lot of them

- I mostly go out at night and I think biking at night it's too dangerous, even if there were no cars around

- Milan is very flat, it makes it good for biking, but also for walking, which I prefer

There are a lot more bikes in Milan then in Rome, but the people that are biking to replace the car entirely are a small minority, they either live a few minutes away from their workplace, are students or use it as a way to do sports, not to commute

Finally, air quality is bad and biking make it much worse

One thing I noticed is electric scooters are having a boom because they are easier to drive, transport and are less messy (if you're a woman in a dress or a man in a suite biking can be very challenging)

> Most of them don't even hold a driving license

Maybe true in Milan, but not anywhere in the US. Driving is near imperative in all areas of the country, unfortunately even in big cities, meaning everyone who can get a license, does.

I live in the U.S., and I've been surprised to hear from several people I know that their kids refused to learn to drive and get a driver's license. They all live in the suburbs, so it's utterly impractical and in every case took their parents completely by surprise. Their reasoning is, driving is harmful and passé and everybody knows we should live in dense cities and take public transit. They've never lived in a place where it's practical, but the place and way they live already seems like a relic of the past to them.

To me it's stunning how powerful that presumption is, that suburban teenagers will forgo the independence that a car would give them because they perceive it as a relic of an age when people didn't know better. It gives me a lot of hope that in the future there will be political support for more radical changes than we've seen up to now. I love where these kids' idea of normal is at. However, it also makes me afraid of the degree of political and cultural polarization we're headed towards.

There have been some changes in attitudes. But give them a few years. Most kids in college don't have cars anyway. And, when they graduate, they may find not being able to drive rather limits job opportunities. Most people aren't in the position of some tech workers who can pretty much pick and choose based on where they want to live.

It's not just about owning a car. A lot of even white collar jobs depend on driving. (Think just about any sales job for example [that involves meeting with customers].) Leaving aside for a moment all the recreational and social activities I would have missed out over my life by not driving, I've had jobs where I absolutely needed to drive.

Its not so much about owning a car, as it is about using it daily for commute. And cities should be designed in such a way that it's not necessary - all residential areas in prague, including suburbs, are covered by public transport. It is much cheaper to use, than owning and maintaining a car.

That what the whole planning process is for.

> the independence that a car would give them

If the car incentivises continued population of sparse suburbs, making them even more dependent on car travel, is it truly independence?

Suburban teenagers also haven't been exposed to the realities of life. In my case, there simply isn't enough time to go to all the places I need to go on weekday mornings and get to work given the among of distance I have to cover if I were to ride my bike with the trailer and child seat as opposed to driving my car.

Is driving an imperative even in cities like NY and SF? Where would you even be driving to or from in cities like that? Where would you be parking? I wouldn’t attempt to drive in NY in a million years.

NY (Manhattan and certain areas of Brooklyn in particular) somewhat uniquely don't really require a car. Partly it's because owning a car is a pain/expensive and partly because of transit. But it's also because there's a general mindset that as a professional 30 year old, you're not really expected to have a car and activities and people's expectations are set accordingly.

In other cities--and there are other cities that have better transit options than SF which is actually fairly poor--you can get by without a car. But Uber, Zipcar, rentals, etc. only take you so far for weekend activities and visiting the friends who probably don't live on transit lines. You can manage but you adjust activities accordingly. [ADDED: Also, lots of jobs are actually outside the city and you mostly need a car to get to them.]

FWIW, I know a couple who live in SF who don't own a car. But they make heavy use of Uber and car rentals of various types. Short-term rental and rideshares make not owning a car more practical for a certain class of urban dweller than it used to be. But not even having a license reduces your options, including both work and recreational options, a lot.

This really overstates things. I am car-free in San Francisco, and prefer it. It is cheaper, less stressful and generally my life is just noticeably nicer than when I had one.

I use Zipcar maybe once a month. I rent a car overnight maybe once every 2 months. All in, I pay less than $1500/year on on transport. I don't have to worry about parking, parking tickets, broken windows, or street cleaning.

I lived in Brooklyn for about a decade, too, and yes, NYC has better public transport, it isn't close. And to some extent, transport does effect where I go regularly. But I don't consider this a bad thing.

Kids would change the equation, but I don't need those in my life, either.

I lived for over a decade in downtown SF without a car. I can't imagine having owned a car, or needing one, or wanting to deal with the hassle of actually using one. Things certainly got better with rideshares, but transit was abundant and taxis worked fine too (sort of).

I think a lot probably comes down to lifestyle preferences. I don't live in a city but, if I did, I'd almost certainly want a car because I'd be visiting people/doing things outside the city on a regular basis and it's pretty common that I go hiking or boating a few hours away for a day or a long weekend.

There's no way I would want to feel restricted to a city especially somewhere that there are as many natural possibilities as the Bay Area.

Maybe short-term and standard car rentals would suffice but that starts adding overhead whenever you want to go somewhere.

I used BART (regional transit) or just rented a car. A weekend car rental wasn't exactly cheap, but it was basically my only meaningful transit cost, so I didn't mind.

It's not mandatory but it's quite common because it's been so heavily subsidized for the previous century. Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are?

Here in DC, the figure is something like 40% of residents not owning cars in a city with well above average transit options by U.S. standards. That leaves a lot of people driving and if you follow the local news there are perennially tons of complaints about any change which removes even a handful of parking spaces because so many people are used to driving being the only mode of transportation which is taken seriously.

>Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are?

Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes.

Some of the most walk-able and bike-able places (at least in the US) still have street parking in their residential neighborhoods, there's just not much of it relative to the number of people so people use other options.

I was specifically responding to the “Where would you even be driving to or from in cities like that?” part — the huge demand for local parking makes it clear that many people have answers to those questions even if they're often “because the city has neglected transit infrastructure” or “the city chooses not to enforce traffic laws or design roads which are safe for non-car usage”.

There was a world wide meeting on transportation similar to the Paris climate change one, same result, almost everyone but USA committing to better standards for future - https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721 The USA response that the market and self driving cars will fix this was pretty delusional.

Any responses from the US from about 3 years ago to between 1 and 4+ years from now are going to be delusional.

Studies? Just check out how we do this in the Netherlands. It works great here in most bigger cities.

You live in a flat country, were cities are quite densely populated and you don't have to travel a lot.

Mine is not.

The flatness is almost entirely canceled out by the relentless 20km/h+ wind

You get pretty strong winds in southern Europe as well, without the flatness

The core of SF is fairly dense and hills are nicely compensated by electric bicycles (which are also very popular in the Netherlands for different reasons).

E-bikes! They're amazing. Bicycle with small assist engine.

You start pedaling, and the bike engine helps you, so going up hills is easy.

Riding one feels like you have super-strength.

Ebikes still cost way too much. You can get a really great bike for £500. An ebike is going to set you back £1500 or more.

I think the price will come down but I don't think they're a great solution yet.

Fortunately they don't need to be a great solution. In all but the hilliest places plenty of people will bike if the cycle lanes are there. Loads of people cycle in Bristol despite it being quite hilly and not really cycle friendly (but they are very slowly improving).

Flatness definitely helps but it isn't the only thing that matters. The Netherlands was completely car based until the 70s for example, and it was just as flat then.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/02/e-bike-sales-continue-...

The market for ebikes has overtaken that for regular bikes in the Netherlands. It was a billion euro market last year and the average price is around 2K euros. There are a lot of company sponsored programs & tax benefits as well. Cheaper bikes are available but they generally have less range, comfort, and build quality.

I'm currently in Athens for a short vacation and what strikes me here is the insane number of petrol run scooters that are loud, take up lots of space, and pollute the city. Most of these could be replaced e-bikes easily and it would probably transform cities like this (this is a thing all over southern Europe). This is more or less exactly what's already well underway in Asia and these things are being mass produced by the millions already. Of course, Greece is a lot poorer and it will probably take quite long for them to catch up. A lot of the scooters here are obviously very old and I imagine their second hand value is very low. Of course fuel cost is a thing but they run quite far for just a few euros.

Sure but an e-bike is allowing one to replace a car, not a bike. In that case, L1500 is a steal.

Why does the difference cost £1000? The electric assist bike conversion kits I see in the US are $300-500. Are the purpose-built ebikes tons better than the conversion kits?

Because it's not an honest comparison. A £500 bike is still a relatively budget adult bike, and an ebike is a relatively luxury product still and is probably more comparable to a £1,000 normal bike.

Decathlon (giant French sports chain) sell an ebike for £650.

The density could be fixed in lots of cities.

How?

How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities.

It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives

Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike

You fix it over time, by allowing (but not forcing!) people to build taller.

Also check out http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

And get rid of parking minimums.

Compare 'The High Cost of Free Parking'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

you really only need to price it properly.

one approach would be to require landlords to list the cost of parking separately in their lease agreements, and allow renters to opt out of that cost independent of the rest of the lease.

edit: oh, and have city-wide permit parking as well, so that municipal street parking is priced properly too.

Roads are public spaces in Italy, only the state (the city) can charge for public parking

And major cities are already charging as much as they can

That's why people with kids usually move out, that's why they need cars, that's why telling them to go by bike is unimaginable

Are you saying high cost of parking is why cars are attractive?

I'm saying people are willing to pay the price and the state makes a compromise: discourage its use without making it impossible

Prices can only go up to a point, if they go up too much, you'll get street riots, like in France.

People would perceive them as another social injustice that favours reach people that can pay for the access or parking, while probably not needing it.

Bikes are cool, but are for bikers, and it's better like that

I've seen so many people almost kill themselves just because they thought they were good enough at it, but biking is not really an easy thing to do

Of course without cars there are less incidents between bikes and cars

In Netherlands cycling fatalities make up 30% of all the road deaths, which is a lot

In most cities we should promote public transport, which is not optimal for the single individual, but it's easier to deploy and really makes a difference for the community

It doesn't fix the problem of having to drive 40kms a day to go to work and the fact that many people don't live in the city because it's more expensive.

So now you have two problems: you have to convince them to bike and to live in smaller houses spending more money

I don't see how that follows?

If anything, we'd be suggesting bigger houses. Tall and with nice and large flats in them.

In the city centres where that makes commercial sense. Just allow tall buildings, and let developers worry about whether they _should_ build tall.

> In the city centres where that makes commercial sense. Just allow tall buildings

You have to consider that we in Europe live in very old cities where what you're advocating for is impossible and even if it was possible, it would be crazy.

I live in Italy, Rome, Milan, Florence, Bologna, Naples, can't build taller in the city centre without ruining the city forever.

Turin is not Rotterdam.

Milan does it a little, but a skyscraper can't solve the problem of the literally thousands of people working for the big companies (mainly banks) that are building them.

They can at best concentrate _some_ of the commuters by concentrating the higher level managers in the same place.

That's it! And it took Milan 10 years to get it started by renovating areas of the city close to the stations and not too far from the centre that were once almost abandoned.

With the renovations going on prices have skyrocketed, so more people go to live further away, that's why the larger companies have offices near the highways, where it's easier to gather people scattered on a large territory and build giant parking spots and that's why people in the end need cars.

There is also a large number of people that could use the public transport, but are not using it.

They are not going to bike anyway.

So housing is only part of a larger problem that is not context neutral.

I thought more about adding a few stories on average everywhere, and less a few skyscrapers.

What does temperature have to do with skyscrapers, though? Those Italian cities you mention ain't colder than London, New York or Chicago (or Beijing); and they build tall building just fine.

I thought it would be mayhem but traffic overall didn't change at all. It's exactly the same.

That's because most cars were taken off Market St in 2015: https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/turn-restrictions-mark...

Since then most cars on Market St north of Van Ness seem to have been Uber and Lyft. Now they're finally banned. If buses are actually running faster--not just a consequence of less traffic during the winter months--it goes to show how much Uber and Lyft have contributed to traffic in the city. They drive slow, erratically, and stop in the middle of the road on main arteries to pick people up and drop them off.

It still doesn't make sense that they let the "yellow" taxis continue driving on market. They are on average much worse drivers

There are fewer of them and they are more efficient, running at higher passenger utilization.

This can’t be true. Taxis often run with zero passengers, whereas a private car never does.

I could only find two studies on capacity utilization:

* Judd Cramer, Alan B. Krueger, "Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber", 2016, https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083

and

* Y.M. Nie, "How can the taxi industry survive the tide of ridesourcing? Evidence from Shenzhen, China", 2017 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X1...

Both seem to confirm that ride-hailing has better utilization rates, though Nie qualifies that--e.g. sometimes too many private cars might turn out. However, at least in San Francisco all the licensed taxi cabs also use ride-hailing apps, so their utilization should be at least as good as unlicensed cars.

The real issue with ride-hailing is induced demand. In places like San Francisco public transit took a huge dip, and ride-hailing simply isn't anywhere as efficient as mass transit. Studies have shown that ride-hailing has contributed to a substantial increase in traffic and traffic delay: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670

Ride-hailing can even be worse than personal cars because a personal car has a 100% utilization rate at minimum, whereas the average utilization rate for ride-hailing, even accounting for multiple riders (e.g. >100% for any particular trip) is <100%.

Ride-hailing only pencils out for the last mile--to and from transit hubs in a local vicinity. But too many people take it to cross town. It's hard to blame ride-hailing companies, though. Cities need to be build more subways. Perhaps companies like Uber, if they were allowed to build subways as cheaply as The Boring Company can do (i.e. small diameter tunnel, though still larger than London and Budapest; no red tape; no extravagant stations) and to capture the revenue, would invest the money. They'd finally be able to ditch drivers, too, because driverless cars will probably only ever work, if they work at all, in moderately dense residential areas.

Personal car usage doesn't have a 100% utilization: lots of time is spent cruising for parking and coming back from some out of the way parking. You can't really count that as being productively utilized. It's the opposite.

It can be true if enough taxi time is spent with 2 or more passengers.

> They are on average much worse drivers

How do you know?

It's a bit weird that some people (not you) single out Uber and Lyft when talking about congestion. A congestion charge would solve the problem in a principled way, with no need for exceptions for special vehicles.

Buses and even fire engines and ambulances could just pay the congestion charge, too.

If you have a nearly full cup, and someone dumps a bunch more water at it, who do you blame for the mess?

Perhaps. Though I don't see how they are adding congestion? If people would take their own cars instead, that would congest the streets just as much, plus use up parking space.

The logical fallacy comes from the implicit nature of it being your cup rather than a shared cup. This is more like "if the park is crowded and a big family decided to celebrate their birthday there crowding it even more, who do you blame for the crowd?"

Or "If you've got four bicycle stands and four of you bike to work but then a new guy joins and he bikes to work too".

Of course you can still apportion blame/responsibility based on idle time, personal v commercial use, but who came first is less convincing when equal rights apply.

I had a car for several years in the city and never drove down market a single time. Always faster to take the one-ways mission or howard.

Market St. has never been a significant thoroughfare for private cars. Of course there’s no traffic impact.

Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you’ll see a very different story.

As somebody who cycled Market Street every day for a few years, I beg to differ. Private cars were always my biggest safety worry. Per the MTA, it was 200-400 cars per hour during morning commutes. That's half what's on Mission, but it was still plenty to contend with.

I cycled Market every day too. Far and away the scariest thing is a bus on my tail. Far and away the most frustrating thing is a bus in front of me. I switched to Howard because the trucks forcing me to weave in and out of the bike lane were less of a hassle. Excited that Market is eventually getting a dedicated bike lane as part of this project, though.

The changes to Market Street may have been gradual enough that you didn't notice, or by "never" maybe you mean only the last 20 years. I remember it was packed with cars in the '90s.

Exactly, this wasn't an overnight change. It was a gradual process which is how it should be done. Banning cars on a major road overnight with no plan in place will obviously result in chaos. Nobody is suggesting this.

Never? It’s hasn’t recently mostly because the city has been changing traffic flow in Market exactly to reduce car traffic. They put in dedicated bus and taxi lanes, then mandatory turns off of Market. All of that reduced regular traffic, exactly so that banning cars didn’t have a huge impact. We could to the same thing in other parts of the city.

You'd be surprised.

Vancouver shut down its core arterial streets to traffic during the 2010 olympics (Broadway, Hastings) and spiked transit funding to compensate. Nothing bad happened and people shifted their behaviour pretty easily.

Did Vancouver's experience result in a shift in transportation priorities long term? Or after the Olympics, were people eager to go back to the prior status quo?

The funding went away so things went back to normal. Of course with any available roadspace, it will be filled up and used.

Later on with a new government transit funding increased and transit has subsequently been seeing double digit growth.

The entire exercise makes me feel pretty confident that you can close off road space and so long as you're funding viable alternatives things are fine.

It's really just a question of efficiency. People don't take the subway in nyc because its fun; it can still take an hour one way if everything is working out for the mta that day. They take it because driving in would take two hours.

People take whatever is easiest, so in cities like LA it's no suprise that millions of people would rather sit in traffic hell for 45 minutes one way a day when their transit trip would be an hour and a half, if everything works.

If you want less people driving, then you need to provide a better alternative beyond transit just being the civically minded thing to do. It also doesn't help when its not perceived to be the most safe alternative, in terms of crime and harassment.

Can you clarify your point? I read the article but don’t see any mention of trying this on any of the streets you listed. It looks like the city of SF made a good call here and the first part of your comment supports that.

I believe his point is that this is kind of non-news. Yes they picked a good place to do this because it's kind of obvious that there wouldn't be an impact, but that also makes it not really news-worthy because it does nothing to support the idea that "getting rid of cars on streets is a good thing everywhere".

Doing this for Market St. is basically free. There are no real risks or tradeoffs. Of course it’s a good call.

But to frame this as a triumph against critics predicting doom is just weird. No one was seriously predicting doom on this one. The only people driving on Market are confused tourists. But then it’s going to be held up as an example for other streets that actually do have risks and tradeoffs.

The news media kept hammering the potential for cArmageddon.. which was weird. It was a non-story, and it still is, but I guess someone needs content to promote.

> Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you’ll see a very different story.

Probably not. More car lanes = more cars. Less car lanes = less cars. People switch modes, drive elsewhere, don't take trips, etc. Time and time again (Paris, London, NYC, SF, Portland, Seattle, and many many more) cities have taken space from cars without carmageddon.

There are numbers on speed, but are there any on throughput?

Throughput doesn’t change with speed, just like with cars the rate is the same at 5 or 75MPH because the spacing in terms of time stays constant. What improves is the latency for individual riders, and the reliability of the bus arriving on schedule.

I take the 5R nearly every week day. Anecdotally, it seems like it’s been better lately (though it’s always been adequate), but I didn’t connect that with the market street car ban until now.

Great for buses, bikes, taxis, cars that accidentally make a wrong turn, and bikes running red lights to slice through crossing pedestrians (sometimes avoiding collisions sometimes not).

Chicago tried this decades ago with the State Street Mall project [1]. It turned out to be an overall flop, with stores seeing reduced traffic, and by 1993 it was gone and good riddance. As a pedestrian, I hated it when I worked downtown.

Maybe they'll do something on Market Street that will work better, or perhaps it might be a better fit there than in Chicago, but I wish them luck, because they're going to need it.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion...

Nobody is on Market to get to a destination on Market. You can’t park for the vast majority of it, and there are literally no driveways. This change mostly eliminates through traffic that drags down bus service.

King St. in Toronto is a kind of hybrid project[0] where cars have local access, but must turn either right or left at a bunch of intersections. On-street parking is gone. It's been a resounding success specifically for local businesses, which is interesting (and not surprising to me, but opposite of what you say happened in Chicago). More comparable climate to Chicago too.

[0] https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/planning-development/...

The weather in Chicago is markedly worse for being outside for half the year.

Probably more like 10 months. I imagine there's a shoulder season in the spring and fall where Chicago is more desirable, from a weather standpoint, than cool and windy SF, before it gets too hot and humid in Chicago's summer.

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

There seems to be an alternative interpretation the State Steet project and its failure here: https://www.wbez.org/shows/dynamic-range/the-short-sad-life-... but you have to listen to the recording of a radio program for all the details, which I didn't do.

Anyway, I live in Vienna where we have had pedestrianized shopping streets since 1971. Before every single project there is a huge discussion that this will kill all commerce, and in these 49 years that has never happened -- quite on the contrary. These projects are so successful and popular that recently even the chamber of commerce, previously a huge opponent, called for more of them.

Is the US that different? Maybe. Or maybe it just needs its own learning process.

The main problem with Market Street for pedestrians is the heroin and poop, not cars.

There is an impact for some retail businesses. I tried shopping near market street for items that require a car to transport. I gave up trying to get through traffic, and instead did my shopping online. This is an acceptable trade off for me, and demonstrates how some retail businesses may need to adjust.

The only redeeming feature of that part of Market Street remains the subway.

I don’t notice any difference on Market from before the car ban. I also see cars driving on the street all the time.

>His conclusion: When cities shut streets off to cars, people drive less. The myth of a “carmageddon”-style traffic jam is apparently overblown.

This seems to completely ignore the fact that what actually has occured here is that the reduction of drivers is a negative for those drivers. Those drivers now either have to cycle or use public transport instead of their cars or have to move. That might seem positive to the people who don't have to make those sacrifices, but it's a massive negative impact on the people effected by this.

Well, and the externalities of the driver's carbon emissions are a massive negative impact on all of us. In a city as dense as San Francisco, transit, walking, or biking can easily cover most people's transportation needs. The more we build safe and effective infrastructure for those modes, the more people will use them. And that will be good - in the end - for the remaining few who do absolutely need to drive (though I believe that if we get creative, with things like bike rikshaws, we can even cover that segment with out cars).

If we don't change these sorts of habits, the climate will change them for us.

> Well, and the externalities of the driver's carbon emissions are a massive negative impact on all of us.

This is just one part of it. 40,000 people are killed every year in the US, and over 4 million seriously injured or disabled.

I'm not advocating for designing life around increasing car ownership. I'm pointing out that re-designing existing systems to disadvantage a specific group of commuters is more than a little problematic. Let's put it this way - how would you feel if we shut down your nearest train station and used the money saved to give everyone a tax break.

We can also decrease carbon emissions by just shutting down every power station in China, but targetting a single group of people to take the vast majority of the cost of fixing climate change is not reasonable.

Your point is that changes can be bad for some people while being good for others? I'm pretty sure everybody knows that.

Given that they spent 10 years planning this, and given the enormous infrastructural support cars get, I'm quite sure the city was aware.

You're right that this will negatively affect some drivers, but it's not necessarily true that every driver removed from the road is worse off. Some of the 25% increase in cyclists may have been drivers who preferred to cycle but did not feel safe doing so.

Anecdotally, I feel that way here in NYC -- I'd almost always rather bike (and it's often faster), but will sometimes take an Uber/Lyft because I don't feel safe biking in traffic, thus becoming traffic myself and perpetuating the vicious cycle.

Yes, there are winners and losers. The "loss" here is pretty tiny, but I'm sure there are a few people, by accident of where they live/work, for whom this is very inconvenient.

I don't mean to be crass, but, so what? There are zero-sum tradeoffs made by cities every. single. day. In comparison to, say, adding a new road, this is a tiny inconvenience for a tiny group of people.

I think it is strictly the novelty of drivers "losing" for once that brings this sort of thinking out. Things have been tilted towards cars for so long that if they aren't treated as entitled to environmental dominance always and everywhere, it seems like a status attack.

Yes, things have both pros and cons. Now list all the negative externalities of designing life around 5 passenger vehicles occupied by 1 person.

Massive? That's a pretty weak negative here. Cycling and walking feels good when there's no car around, public transport is a great time to relax, read a book or meet people. And it's only one street, people can still drive close to where they want to be.

At -20 feels great...

You'd be surprised if you tried cycling at -20. I have, it beats cycling in 30+C. Just don't forget cold protection and you'll be fine.

on ice? spiked tires or chains?

Ice is not that bad in the city.

In winter you want to change your breaking habits. Your rear break can become an insta-lose-your-traction lever; front break is safer (your mileage may vary, obviously).

It's when things start to melt that you may consider not biking: melting snow on ice creates a nasty surprise!

In San Francisco?

> it's a massive negative impact on the people effected by this.

The people who switched are the people at the margin. Previously, taking their cars was slightly more convenient, now it's slightly less. Anyone who would be massively inconvenienced is still driving, because they still have that option.

And those people who strongly prefer driving now have less competition. They are also winning.

We're talking about one street. Is it seriously a "massive negative impact" to drive down the next street over?

I thought it was a routing problem -- the one street half bisected a peninsula, so if you want to get from one side to the other it wouldn't mean "driving down the next street over," it would mean driving down twice its length and dealing with traffic at the squeeze point. Did I misunderstand the geometry?

Yes you misunderstood - you can cross the street at many points but not drive along it

That makes much more sense, thanks! Less useful for the pedestrians -- but also less apocalyptic for traffic.

Yes, some traffic is being taken off Market but it's a long way from being made into a pedestrian mall. I'm not sure you'd want one on Market anyway. It's not a very pleasant stretch of the city for the most part for reasons that are only somewhat car traffic related.

This brings up an interesting question. What street(s) in SF would be best for a truly automobile free pedestrian mall? My first thought would be the embarcadero, but it already has a very nice wide sidewalk and I think closing it to cars would be a pretty large hindrance to traffic.

Yeah, the Embarcadero is already pretty pedestrian friendly and it's a rather essential thoroughfare that can't be easily bypassed.

In downtown-ish area? Presumably in and around Union Square somewhere. You already have a mini restaurant version in Belden Place. There's a lot of traffic through there but it was already being messed with by lots of construction for ages.

Valencia! Imagine 16-20th or 20th-24th as pedestrian only. Mission and Guerrero can handle the traffic and there’s no need for cars there.

Maybe it's a massive positive for people who were driving because they didn't feel safe on the road and can now cycle.

If it inconveniences a lot fewer drivers than the number of cyclists and public transit users who benefit, then it's a clear-cut and uncontroversial net win, isn't it?

Where do you get 'massive negative' from? Cycling and walking are much healthier, so it might even be positive for them.

Am I the only one disappointed that the author was NOT referring to the PC game Carmageddon in the title.

Expected summary: "Well, we were pleasantly surprised that shutting down the streets didn't lead to a rage-induced, car-killing-spree murder rampage."

Translation of the first couple paragraphs: "SF street traffic is already abysmal, and yet we still managed to make it a little bit worse."

Market Street was already pretty devoid of non-bus/taxi traffic before "a month ago". If you want a better test, try closing off Van Ness or Embarcadero and see how well that goes for y'all.

"No carmageddon"? SF is already a carmageddon.

A big traffic jam would be nothing like 'Carmageddon'

An extremely popular series of computer games starting in 1997, where u race around smashing into other vehicles and running over pedestrians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmageddon

Why do they keep saying carmageddon????

I think you could call that moderately popular at best. 20+ years ago.

They keep calling it that for the same reason the game got that name: it's a cute term that quickly conveys "giant automotive disaster".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_405_(California)#%2...

There's some other precedent for the word Carmageddon other than an old game that a lot people haven't heard of.

They're not talking about the game? The game didn't create the term, the incredibly simple adding of the letter C to the word Armageddon?

I'm always wondering what about people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women, families with four kids, etc.

Sometimes the public transport for such people is problematic and using taxi all the time is too expensive. Total banning cars makes a great space for the healthy ones, the rest is happily ignored. And this is sad.

I like decreasing the number of cars, not forbidding them at all.

>people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women

Are precisely the kinds of people less likely to be able to drive. Accessible and convenient public transit is a better option for them, provided of course that it's accessible and convenient throughout their journey - that means sidewalks, intersections, transit stops, building access, etc.

If families with 4 kids don't need a vehicle at all, it's a huge financial benefit for them. Here in Canada a mini-boat on wheels large enough to accommodate such a family is friggin' expensive. Cities tend to have free or very cheap tickets for kids, so if you can get away with doing commutes by transit and have a Corolla for weekend errands and groceries that you don't have to shove all 4 into, you win $1000s every year.

I'd like to add another thing to consider: good urbanism, specifically mixed-use development, which reduce the distances immensely.

I live in Montreal and I use my old used "mini-boat on wheels" maybe twice a month to see my family outside the city. I intend to sell it actually. I travel to work on public transport because most of the city is covered 24/7 with a pretty acceptable bus and metro.

Everything is close enough that I can simply walk, even in winter. There are 5 schools, 4 parks, 3 pharmacies, 2 grocery stores, a bunch of shops and restaurants, two medical clinics, two metro entrances, several of my friends, etc, all within 15 minutes on foot.

And I don't even live in a "dense" area. It's actually considered a food desert compared to the rest of the city.

> I like decreasing the number of cars, not forbidding them at all.

No one plans to.

That aside, cars also pose major problems to all those groups you mention. Elderly people feel unsafe driving and unsafe walking because of cars. They're the primary victims of car-caused accidents. Elderly people in bad health can also be a danger to others when driving.

Kids cannot go anywhere on their own - in large parts because traffic is a killer for them, too. This places a large burden on families, as the parents need to drive them everyplace.

Nearly all of the groups you mention would be better served if you'd remove cars and use the space to improve public transit. For example using dedicated bus lines - improving both speed and - more importantly - reliability. Or build tram lines.

With or without traffic, those groups do not feel safe out on the streets of San Francisco. They are easy prey for bad people. They don't handle the hills well; they might fall and break a hip.

Public transportation isn't safe either, even before the latest elderly-killing virus. Cars work. People too weak to drive can have family members drive them around.

It's much safer and easier to navigate around in a wheelchair without cars zooming by honking and splashing you.

A world designed around cars is extremely hostile to the elderly, disabled, and children.

Dangerous to all people not in the cars--those people are just affected more.

Parent here. I would love better public transit in more places. Herding the family around on buses and trains is relatively easy, and the kids enjoy it. It's visiting grandparents out in the suburbs that sucks. Cars are expensive enough as it is, and cars big enough to accommodate a family of more than four can be a real financial hit.

Back when I lived in a town that had a car-free street, it seemed like the people at the retirement home on that mall had it fairly good. Even the folks with limited mobility were still out on the sidewalk, living in the world and interacting with the wider community. Compare to my grandmother who's living in an area with no sidewalks. She basically never goes outside - can't go outside - except for brief moments when going to and from the car. It's a life without much sunlight. It's bleak.

My suspicion is that a lot of the fewer cars whataboutism comes from having never known anything different, and therefore being stuck imagining that a world with fewer cars would be the kind of environment they're used to, minus the cars, and not much else. It can be so much more than that, though. It's amazing how much great stuff a community has to forego in order to make room for all the cars. They take up so much space. Physically, but also financially and psychologically.

> families with four kids

We're talking about San Francisco here.

It would be awesome if you had something like a bicycle, only more comfortable that could hold you, a friend, and some of your things. You could enclose it to protect you from the weather, too. For longer distances, or people with disabilities, you could add some mechanical contraption in case you can't pedal that far.

That'll be the day.

Some of those already exist! At increasing levels of car-like-ness:

* https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/

* https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-des...

* https://www.arcimoto.com/

(Studiously ignoring parent's intended snark)

In all seriousness, I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge

"I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge"

Don't motorcycles already serve that purpose? Its already the chief form of personal transportation in most of the Earth's population.

The problem I see with all the concepts you posted is that they have all the drawbacks of a car and a motorcycle. They would fare as well as a motorcycle in a crash, and have almost the same footprint as a small car. Also, a motorcycle will handle much better than a trike with narrow tracks and short wheelbase at higher speeds.

Then, there are electric assist bicycle. They have two main problems that small motorcycles/scooters don't suffer from. A 350lb scooter/motorcycle is much harder to steal than a 50lb electric bicycle. I own a rather expensive electric assist mountain bike that I don't feel comfortable parking it out of my sight. You can't travel on the highway with electric bicycle unlike motorcycles.

I think you might be underestimating the size of a modern car -- they're huge!

By small car I meant Smart ForTwo, or Fiat 500. These not-a-car trikes/quads have comparable footprint to these cars. Which isn't small enough to fit in-between 2 lanes.

Sure, but those are exceptions to the modern car size, and the median car size on the street is far bigger than that. If everyone would switch to Fiat 500 sized cars, that would be an amazing start.

It seems to be very hard to produce such a vehicle that is affordable and doesn‘t look like something only seniors would use. Most attempts fail at both. The Pedilio https://www.pedilio.de/ looks quite ok but will be too expensive from what i‘ve seen. The cheapest new cars cost less than 8000€, making an ebike more expensive than that is a hard sell.

Riding a bike is also comfortable and fun, you should try it! I regularly see people with disabilities use all kinds of modified bikes in my city, as well as parents dropping off kids in cargo bikes. Yeah it doesn't work for every usecase but the bike is a pretty amazing piece of tech thats been around way longer than cars and will likely outlast them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com