Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

So you really enjoy packed subways that make you feel like cattle pretty much every time of the day? Sorry but Tokyo is the best example of "best in class public transport" being completely over capacity for the amount of people they have to transport every day.

One thing that puzzles me, living in Vienna as an expat, is how much the average Austrian cared about banning smoke in bars/restaurants/etc (which is fine, don't get me wrong) but how little they do about car smog.

Then I moved to a smaller city with a larger suburb area. Within 6 months I had bought the car. The last straw was having had to wait an hour for the bus, carrying grocery bags. At the same time, you find parking spots almost everywhere, and walking was not that easy, with longer distances and in many places not even sidewalks.

It's just two different worlds, really.

Surely you can have city centres (especially old towns) without cars and people living in suburbs, with special needs or whatever to own a car.

I'd love to drive to a city centre and then have a walk without the traffic noise! I'd hate taking 90 minutes of bus instead of 20 minute drive.

I suspect some of it is political, if you are right leaning then you may well view cycling and public transport as a step towards socialism. It probably doesn't have much to do with the practicalities.

(Certainly I couldn't really have done jobs I've had without being able to drive a car and would have missed out on many, many travel experiences including just visiting family.)

One city had buses, which mostly served the college campus. The busses didn't run on Sunday, late enough at night for second shift workers to get home, nor run to the edges of town (where some factories were).

So many places aren't walkable (or can be easily cycled). One place I lived... the quickest route was on a state road, and didn't allow cycling/walking and wasn't safe for it either. The police would stop you, especially at night. The route that you were allowed to take was much longer.

I am now in a place where I don't need a car. (and I forgot to transfer my license while moving to another country, so I don't drive). Walking is safe. Cycling is safe. There are 'shortcuts' for walking/cycling. Public transport is pretty robust, though the overnight hours could be improved. I can even go to other cities - including some not-so-big-cities - using public transportation (trains or busses). It is wonderful and definitely feels like some utopia. It is so freaking wonderful to have such an option.

So when they were younger, there are times when you simply do need a taxi. It’s infrequent — buses, subways, walking cover most of your needs — but there are times when you really need one.

This says a lot. (Only transport which is okay without arrival times is one which has 5 min or less frequency)

It's just so easy to get a car in SF whenever you need it for a few bucks -- sometimes in 15 minute increments.

https://marketurbanism.com/2020/04/19/automobiles-seeded-the...

> New York and other subways

> In multiple other countries, one cannot see the transit cities in the virus infection rates. In Germany the rates in the largest cities are collectively the same as in the rest of the country. In South Korea, the infection is centered on Daegu; Seoul’s density and high transit usage are compatible with an infection rate of about 700 in a city of 9.5 million, about 1.5 orders of magnitude less per capita than in most Western countries and 2.5 orders of magnitude less than in New York. In Taipei, the MRT remains crowded, with weekday ridership in February and March down by 15-16%. In Italy, car usage is high outside a handful of very large cities like Milan, and Milan’s infection rate isn’t high by the standards of the rest of Lombardy.

> However, rest-of-world evidence does not mean that the New York City Subway is safe. The Taipei MRT has mandatory mask usage and very frequent cleaning. German U- and S-Bahn networks are a lot dirtier than anything I’ve seen in Asia, but much cleaner than anything I’ve seen in New York, and also have much less peak crowding than New York. New York uniquely has turnstiles requiring pushing with one’s hands or bodies, and the only other city I know of with such fare barriers is Paris, whose infection rates are far below New York’s but still high by French standards.

> So the question is not whether rapid transit systems are inherently unsafe for riders, which they are not. It’s whether New York, with all of its repeated failings killing tens of workers from exposure to the virus, has an unsafe rapid transit system. Nonetheless, the answer appears to be negative: no evidence exists that the subway is leading to higher infection rates, and the paper does not introduce any.

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/04/15/the-subway-is-...

New Orleans has no metro. It's fucked.

Might have become better since, but 10 years back Paris certainly was not, the public transport inside paris was pretty good (though cycling was bad, that I know is getting better at least), but if you came in driving from the suburbs there was no good way to transfer, no "transfer nodes" where you could easily leave your car and hop onto the metro or your bike.

For multi-modal to really work you need easy and cheap ways to transfer between modes, e.g. parking on the edges of the dense public transport network which is either free or included in the transit pass to encourage use, otherwise the incentive is to keep driving inside.

Remote working, better public transportations financed by taxes on private transportation, there are plenty of ways to do this without disrupting anyone's life, but since governments aren't stepping up fast enough, citizens have to take the initiative.

That's a weird supporting argument. Can you name any urban centers that have not seen significant population growth since 1950?

They do however have once a year, for about 8h, car free streets (only 4/5 but still). It’s such a delight on these days. Everyone is out and about, cops are at every intersections to turn cars away, and you can even hear the birds sing!!! But yeah that for a grand total of maybe 10 km of main streets, 16h a year.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cycle-lane-superhighway-em...

My feeling is that there is a failure to communicate somewhere here. At the risk of just digging my grave deeper, if only because I'm horrendously short of sleep, let me try a second time to explain what I mean.

Our demographics have simply changed a great deal. It's not unlike saying "We can't weave what you want us to weave. We don't have the right material for it. That's why attempts to recreate the fabric you love have big holes in it."

When I was growing up, there were lots of kids out and about to play with in my neighborhood because most families had more than one child. You mostly don't see that anymore. The suburbs are ghost towns, with no children playing in the streets. Now, one child is quite common and parents have no choice but to join clubs or similar to intentionally create social connections for their child when that would have happened organically a few decades ago.

I was a homemaker for many years. I'm not against the nuclear family. It's just reality that our demographics have diversified, yet our architecture hasn't kept up and it's creating problems.

What I'm saying is the single family detached house was designed for a certain type of lifestyle and it's a lifestyle that relatively few people can arrange anymore. It's a cog in a machine and it no longer works for current demographic realities and we aren't changing it out for something that does work.

I'm sorry that I don't know how to say that more clearly. These are not really points I see made very often, so I'm not aware of well-developed language and standard protocols or mental models for conveying what I'm trying to say.

As noted elsewhere, I'm pretty short of sleep, so I no doubt could have said some things better.

Yes, some of what I'm describing is very US-centric. But not all of it.

When I was growing up, most of the world lived and worked on farms. Within my lifetime -- in fact, within the lifetime of my children -- that changed and we now have more people living in cities worldwide than on farms.

The world has changed, but we still cleave to certain mental models that no longer serve us well. That's the super short version.

But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs?

Mostly, no. The suburbs actually built in the 1950s aren't so bad. A larger problem is the policies that era fostered in the US and the direction things have gone since then.

Average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and held about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is more than 2400 square feet and holds about 2.5 people.

There have been a lot of other changes as well in what is typical for a new home, but those details right there are enough to let you know that our homes have grown larger on average while our families have grown smaller. Meanwhile, we have a growing homeless problem (which people on the internet routinely want to claim is unrelated to housing supply issues and the high cost of rent, but the data doesn't support that conclusion).

Our family size has shrunk. Our homes need to also shrink and we need to return to patterns of development compatible with fostering walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented design. Adding public transit to existing suburbs won't really achieve that.

The general assumption in the US is that young people should rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get a bunch of roommates to fill the extra rooms and split the rent. Then we make horror movies, like Single White Female, about basically what a nightmare this is. The internet is filled with horror stories of the roommate from hell and questions about "How on earth can I survive this or get out of this???"

We have eliminated about a million SROs. People object to SROs a "slum" housing. They are literally more comfortable with having people out in the street than with building housing that isn't upper middle class as our baseline expectation without providing jobs and incomes to support that as our baseline expectation.

While eliminating small homes that people could potentially live in as a single adult or childless couple, our millionaires are actively planning to eliminate jobs and create permanent unemployment. After eliminating jobs that paid on average $20k to $50k annually, our rich people here would like to institute UBI paying between $10k and $18k annually with an expectation that we will have 80 percent permanent unemployment.

Given that we have eliminated most housing across the US that costs less than $500/month to rent, there are a lot of places where $10k won't even pay your rent for the year, much less feed you. Without resolving our housing issues, there is no hope that some ridiculous scheme like UBI will do anything but shaft most Americans.

I mostly can't get people to really listen to me. They are too busy listening to multimillionaires and failing to see that those people are actively and intentionally planning to create a permanent underclass that will have no hope of accessing wealth ever again.

I was homeless for nearly six years while active on Hacker News. Simply being allowed to run my damn mouth in the same space as all kinds of millionaire businessmen absolutely didn't fix my life and lift me out of poverty and so forth. So I'm quite convinced that the entire point of wanting to create UBI is so that asshole rich people can wash their hands of poor people.

It's quite horrifying and I don't know how to stop it.

On the upside, the pandemic seems to have fostered some of the changes the world has been talking about for years and not accomplishing, such as reducing our carbon footprint and reducing pollution. So maybe we will find solutions anyway, in spite of bulling our way intentionally and on purpose towards a dystopian vision of intentionally shafting most Americans and telling them to fuck the hell off and forget about ever having any kind of a life.

SROs are going the way of the dinosaur and a lot of people no longer know what they are, so here is the obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

This comment is a little more on the ranty side than I really like. I'm just really short of sleep and tired of trying to be polite to people who literally don't care if their callous BS results in my death. So it's probably time for me just stop talking and attempt to go get some sleep.

What it can bring is lower average house prices cities and gentrification of neighborhoods farther away from the city center. People could move farther from the city center because they don't have to commute to work every day. (This is EU specific)

I live at the very edge of a large city. Fortunately, I don't work in the city, but if I were, it would be a 30 minute train ride. Sure, I could also do that by bike, but it would take me ~90 minutes. That's not a realistic alternative. Scooters are fine if they are to replace buses that you'd take for two or three stops, e.g. a kilometer or two.

And we still occasionally get bad weather. I predict that scooter and bike usage will drop extremely fast once it rains for a week or two, or, god forbid, we get a real winter once again, with snow and sub-zero temperatures. People want comfort, and riding a bike in bad weather, even if it's an ebike, isn't comfortable.

Right, and yet it will get parroted each time the subject surfaces here (i.e. twice a week).

I never had a car. At the moment, I live in a municipality of less than 750 inhabitants. I've lived in small towns of less than 4000 inhabitants, in areas below 1 inhab. / km². I've never had a problem, everything has always been 1 or 2 minutes away with a bike, or less than 10 minutes by foot. In such places, the farthest possible shop would be a mile away, at worst. By definition, we might say! since the urban area doesn't spread farther.

Density is not needed and it often doesn't makes things better.

In dense areas, things are sometimes closer (which improves walkability, but has little effect or bikability), sometimes not. But everything is slower. Not only cars, but also cycling and walking. Cycling: because of all the cross-roads every 100 yards, with traffic lights or without, because of the need of taking care of the erratic behaviour of pedestrians, of parked cars, of cars going in and out of parking slots, because of traffic jams or traffic density causing irregular pacing, etc. Walking, the same: traffic lights again, erratic movements on the pavement, being limited to pavement and a very limited number of crossings, which lengthen the route. I can ride over 10 km and visit 3 villages in the countryside, in the same time I needed to ride 5 km in a city (not even in the centre of the centre).

Hell, American suburbs should be perfect for cyclability, if not for walkability. Either the hard grid type with its huge number of streets/lanes/alleys every 100 yards with very very low car traffic; or the smooth shaped housing estate suburbia with its super-wide and empty streets; even on inter-blocks streets, the car traffic is much less dense than in Europe because those streets/roads are 3 or 4 times as wide as European streets/roads with similar role! Yes, there isn't a small shop at every street corner of American suburbia, but even if a supermarket/mall world, almost of the suburban area is with 1 mile or 2 of distance of one of those supermarket or mall, which is perfect biking distance; in most cases you'll have something half-a-mile away from home. Yes, there are also places where people chose to build a fancy house in a fancy estate on a hill-side, which make everything harder, but the bulk of suburban area is not like that.

I am not advocating for urban sprawl, I just say that arguing that walking and especially cycling would be only possible in dense areas is plain wrong: both suburbs and countryside small towns and villages can be plenty bikable.