It’s going to be a challenge to come out of this crisis in car-centric American cities. Even a small mode-shift to private cars in somewhere like NYC will cause insane gridlock, air pollution, and quality of life issues. Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.
The city's failure to plan is resulting in many people buying cars — even though it is physically impossible for everyone in central neighborhoods to buy cars.
> Compare to NYC, which has no cohesive plan for people movement without public transit.
Yes, NYC is far too dense for cars, but how is this a contrast with London trying to reduce car use, and which is only a little bit less dense?
> Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.
Biking should be public transit, as storing bikes in houses and offices is a waste of spaces and bicycles. The city should have taken over from Motivate, at which point it would be political suicide not to expand to the rest of the city immediately.
In particular, let me rant on this a bit. The equitable way to expand is to cover everything within `x` feet of subway, along with the densest areas not covered by transit. What they've done instead is blatantly prioritize areas where out-of-towners move to. Note this is about social class not economic: starving artists moving east to Bushwick get their bikes before rich native New Yorkers in Forest Hills, or more native but closer to a transit hub Sunnyside.
In the vast majority of American cities a large portion of workers drive to work during normal conditions. They already have the road capacity, parking, etc needed. The car-centric American cities are actually much better suited for this crisis than NYC is.
* Used congestion pricing as a tool to reduce pollution/returning traffic/mode-shift to cars
* Shut off large areas of their city to cars
* Rapidly built pedestrian/bike networks to accommodate for non-car movement
While NYC has:
* Indefinitely postponed congestion pricing
* Defunded bike safety and public transit improvement initiatives
* Not built any cohesive bike or pedestrian systems to encourage non-car transport
Of course in pre-COVID times, NYC severely lagged in both pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure/investment, and famously has some of the most expensive public-transit construction costs in the world.
re: car-centric cities, agreed that somewhere like Nashville is not going to have these kinds of problems. However, a large swath of Americans live in public transit or carpool-reliant cities (NYC/SF/Seattle/DC/Chicago/Southern California, many large southern cities). Mode-shift to private transit would increase traffic 10-20+% in most of these places, which I think we can all agree is not ideal for pollution, gridlock, parking needs, public health, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/riding-bikes-...