The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s.
Those that were not as lucky got remade for cars in 1930-1960s, and cemented in that state by zoning regulations.
Europe obviously had a large number of dense cities since medieval times. Even small cities in Europe often ended up dense due to land limitations, and the generally relatively high population density. Cities in the US very rarely faced this limitation early enough, with a few natural exceptions like Manhattan or San Francisco.
Those things affect urban planning a lot.
Its definitely, imo, to the point where it is becoming a responsibility of societies to provide its citizens access to these technologies because of their utility. That means subsidized / free phones and service, imo. Everyone really should have a baseline of digital access as a fundamental right, hopefully this decade. The COVID relief free cell service in the US I think has been an eye opener for me.
But the thing is Street signs and door bells don't take up any space. There's no real benefit in removing them anyway.
Private cars are a big issue but the problem is people commuting from outside the city and shared car schemes are too expensive for that.
I’d always wondered what would happen if the US had a city with an UGB and very unrestrictive zoning.
And here's a nice infographic comparing the density of LA and New York, if you're interested in more than anecdotes:
https://www.its.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/05/...
TLDR; no, LA is not mostly dense, walkable areas. Very far from it.
This one is a better list https://www.walkscore.com/CA/Los_Angeles
I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).
It is ridiculous. In order to have food and shelter you need to be dependent on not just a landlord and grocery store but also insurance companies, car dealers, oil and gas companies, DMV/DPS,mechanics,etc... and infractions against driving law can leave you unable to work, get food, go to the doctor (outside of ER),etc... a traditional city does not require a regulated license for teansporation and you don't spend almost as much as rent on transportation. Especially for low-income people, liquidity is important, it is the reason behind why it is expensive to be poor. Think if all the tragic social cost that can be avoided if people can instead spend money on their other needs instead of cars.
I read somewhere how car makers bribed and played dirty to prevent things like rail cars from being adopted by cities. To me it relfects on how much corporate-run the city is.
But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....
Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)
Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.
That's not plausible... think about how much gas a car consumes per year, compared to the amount of mass of tires and brake pads consumed. Even minimizing my car use, I fill up the tank every few weeks. The wear from my tires is barely visible on a week-to-week basis. I don't think they're even within an order of magnitude.
If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few realistic options given where employers are located and how poor the transportation options that remain. It's a racket.
The part that rubs me is in both Thailand and Vietnam, despite Bangkok and Hanoi being dense with inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation, even the current youth generation still want cars. When I ask "why?", it's still about status and other reasons are secondary.
I hope I'll never have to own a car again.
Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly. The street crossings turn a 10 minute walk, one way, into a half of an hour or longer.
I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.
Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.
It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.
In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.
Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.
These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.
Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.
Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.
You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.
With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th...
Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.
Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.
Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.
Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...
I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.
Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.
The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.
Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.
You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.
With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.
I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.
I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.
Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.
If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.
The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.
Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.
Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).
Where does my comment imply that the US needs anything?
We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than quaint small towns where people have to get along.
There are advantages but in the long run I hate it. And yes I’ve lived everywhere in America. The few that like the more euro model have to pay a 10x premium to live in SF or NYC.
As a general rule, people don't like each other. In places where people live close to one another it's not because they like it but out of some kind of combination between inertia and necessity.
Neighbors on a street in London don't love but do tolerate each other, and deal with the implications of close proximity and shared responsibilites moderately well. In the US it's much easier to move somewhere and get a parcel of land that makes you feel like a sovereign property owner. Your neighbors are not as adjacent, and may even be ignorable.
Obviously this doesn't cover the millions of Americans who live in relatively dense (generally older) cities, but it does impact the millions who live in suburban, ex-urban and rural parts of the country.
I’ll quote the American classic “elbow room” as soft proof. https://youtu.be/aHVx4nqgMPQ
It seems to completely ignore the reality of communities and society (and history, for that matter) for an unquestioning expansion of our domain, all wrapped up in this patronizing metaphor about needing "elbow room".
The European conquest of north America and subsequent repopulation with immigrants (alongside a vastly diminished indigenous population) created an ethos and an opportunity for people who wanted to live away from everybody else to do so ... by pretending that the continent had been empty, and because of the need for natural resources, this was relatively easy to do.
But alongside that process, Americans were building some of the largest cities in the world, developing and improving "urban technologies", and generally pushing the boundaries of what cities could be (a role now largely taken over by SE Asia).
Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.
You might not like cars but everyone else does. They like and want cities this way and in reality it’s people like us that are the outliers. We aren’t right. We are going against the tide.
We built cities around cars Because we like cars — because they put distance between us and our fellow American we don’t particularly like or want to tolerate.
> Any explanation for the structure, placement, demographics and dynamics of American society that focuses on single reason for things (whether it is "elbow room", "Robert Moses" or "racism") is going to be wrong about most things.
to which you respond:
> So cars did this entirely on their own. Come on
Is there something that unclear about what I wrote?
Look people left cities in the 50s because they didn’t like other people in cities. It’s a well known and established fact. It’s called white flight. And it continues to this day.
What's more, until not so long ago, US cities looked differently. Then a lot of what was already built got destroyed to build motorways and huge parking lots. If you look at aerial photos of US cities from around '30s[0], you will see much denser, more walkable cities. Then take a look at what General Motors proposed with its Futurama at the World's Fair; it is the essence of what cities in the US are currently, albeit cranked up to 11.
Some of Europe's cities took the road that GM pushed, and one very prominent example has been Amsterdam[1], which is currently known as one of the least car-oriented cities in the world. The changes have been reverted in the EU, but not in the US, and that is the current state of affairs.
On the last note: US historically has been a place, when local communities had to be strong, strictly because of its roots in colonizing the continent. Without local communities that then shaped into larger organizations, the history would be very different, and States would be under Britain's rule for much longer, maybe even to this day.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/bkkfww/1930_aerial_... [1] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...
And you are making my point. If we wanted to shift back to carless society we could, others have.
We don’t. Because…
It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being.
American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car being the future was popularized - in large part due to very successful advertising by the automotive industry - that policy was written to heavily subsidise car-centric development to the point of making everything else illegal. There's even real, convicted conspiracies of the automotive industry purposefully buying public transportation just to kill it.
We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.
We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, they are a product of us. We weren’t brainwashed we weren’t forced into this. There is no cabal that made it this way. We choose it. The sooner we accept that the sooner we can evaluate real options for change.
Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby.
Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each other, or a multitude of other possible reasons, we generally no longer do.
Moreover, many of those older city neighborhoods are considered extremely desirable to live in, even today, so much so that they have become very exclusive areas available only to those with plenty of income or wealth. That doesn't imply that most Americans would necessarily make that choice even if they could, but the continued elevation of housing costs in the best of these "old world" neighborhoods suggests to me that your thesis is at best incomplete and at worst just incorrect.
But I live in Pacific Heights, one of the most desirable old world communities in America, and it’s mostly empty and full of ghost capital homes.
People like it for a while but they leave for the suburbs pretty fast and go looking for elbow room away from others. And it’s mostly because the energy under the surface of the beautiful homes is rude, selfish and inconsiderate. From the owners to the workers that come to service the homes. Regardless of class we are really angry people.
but ...
The current situation in uber-expensive real-estate markets when it comes to high-end housing should not be over-interpreted as having more to say about what most Americans want from the places where they live.
Pacific Heights current situation is also very similar to wealthy old neighborhoods in cities across Europe. London at the very least is full of such examples.
> I don’t understand what you are refuting.
>> We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t.
There are multiple studies and historical accounts documenting exactly this TsunamiFury. Car lobbies are actually clearly tied to many city planning decisions, combined with white flight and corresponding government loans to create suburban communities that essentially cut others out.
Additionally interstate commerce in a comparatively intensely large land mass like the US did create a need for additional transportation, but the sprawl has indeed been very much tied to the factors PaulDavisThe1st and others have pointed out. Its not 'not liking' each other. Its money + racism + poor representation of the populous. Like a lot of things.
What studies or books lead you to your conclusion?
Blockbusting was a real phenomenon in which real estate agents would move a black family into the neighborhood to get white families to fire sell their homes, and it worked because they could no longer legally isolate minorities from their children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
We know that this happens today, even with minority groups that are affluent and do well in education metrics. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/silicon-valley-whit... (And before anyone accuses me of "wokism", the original story was broken by the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not a "woke" publication.)
Specifically white Americans want to avoid living with brown Americans. Once segregation was no longer law, it launched a wave of destruction for public infrastructure: pools, schools, transit, even things like sidewalks all became things to oppose if they had to be shared.
I don't know that it's uniquely American thing either, I think this happens anywhere that different cultures come together. Humans are deeply tribal.
Check out Shellings model of segregation [0]. Global seggregation doesn't necessarily mean that local decisions have strong preference for their race.
e.g. for two types it's enough to have preference "I want at least 33% of my neighbours to be same type as me" to reach segregated global result.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segrega...
That’s definitely not perfect (and it’s like, say, Chinatowns weren’t raided or sacked) but that option of coexistence wasn’t on offer in much of the country.
The GM conspiracy bought streetcar companies to replace them with buses, not to eliminate public transportation.
The reality is that streetcar companies were already unprofitable, killed by infrastructure cars and poor urban planning. So it was already easy for GM to buy these companies.
What seems to me to be a good takedown of “public transit must be profitable or be dismantled”, or “the US post office must be profitable or be dismantled” is: How profitable is the US military?
A streetcar enhance economic activity and transportation, especially when built with proper urban planning, and may even make a profit.
With the profit, the public transit agency can use the fund to improve infrastructure with hopefully less political influence in order to further it missions.
You could of course make a trade off and not mandate the agency to be profitable and subsidize it, but it's a political tradeoff.
Public transport is unprofitable pretty much everywhere, because the explicit transactions don't offset costs of operation. However, the cost of not operating public transit is that you end up with awful car centric cities, more respiratory disease from increased traffic, lost efficiency from congestion, higher real estate prices in walkable areas, etc.
Additionally, there's a ton of positive externalities that are not factored in when judging profitability. Effective public transport increases foot traffic, which increases economic activity.
Even if public transit was 100% free, it would still be worth running. The market is awful at evaluating long-term large scale effects, and just disregards them as "externalities". You can't blindly trust markets to build your cities.
* the aforementioned highway boom, but this is not enough to actually kickstart the whole thing; most European nations also had a highway boom around this time with much less sprawl
* lending standards. Prior to the Great Depression, banks are wholly in control of mortgage lending. The collapse of the economy also collapses the banking system and the housing market; banks have to foreclose on properties that are no longer worth anything. As part of the bank stabilization efforts, the FHA creates national standards for loans that it will insure. These standards are restricted to single family homes, and to properties without commercial (small businesses have a really high rate of failure). This has the effect of encouraging banks and developers to stampede into single family suburban development; the cost of financing is a lot cheaper because of the Uncle Sam guarantee, and it's a lot more profitable as a result. No other type of property is given this kind of preferential treatment to this extent, and this still more or less persists today.
* desegregation. This is the big one; prior to the civil rights era, suburbs are expanding rapidly, but cities are still growing. The moment Brown vs Board of Ed passes in 1954 all hell breaks loose. The real estate practice of blockbusting gets into full gear, where real estate agents spook the white people out of a neighborhood by having one black family move in; they proceed to buy the houses on the cheap from white people fire selling as fast as possible, and then take advantage of black and minority sellers. Whites move into suburbs in droves, because it's "where the good schools are" without the minorities they used to be legally separated from. And this is a national phenomenon. Even today, we see whites flee school districts with increasing minority populations; they do so even in districts where the minority groups are affluent and educational metrics remain positive, like Cupertino, CA or Johns Creek, GA: https://psmag.com/news/ghosts-of-white-people-past-witnessin...
One of those opportunities was a good PhD education that taught me how to spot bullshit.
So to confirm what is happening here for a neutral observer, are just cooking up things when you say Americans hate each other more.
I would say Europeans hate each other more. They had two world wars centered around Europe in the last century and way too many real secession movements: Brexit, Catalonia etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...
I would love to know how you determined that.
Rural life has always been hard and rough but it’s sad. Their towns are dying and they look, act and feel miserable to each-other.
The way American communities were laid out by previous generations was not caused by the recent political strife.
I'd say it has much more to do with available modes of transit when the place was settled than it does any national characteristic of incivility.
First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week).
Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.
If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.
Even given a decent commuter rail system it doesn't help for those sorts of activities.
So it's not really getting around the city but getting anywhere outside the city that isn't on convenient mass transit.
They could do more for sure, but all the bridges and roads that are now public transit only are quite the breath of fresh air.
Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D
Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.
For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.
Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.
But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available.....
Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well!
POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.
People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc, and that there are now a bunch of previously car centric cities that have been deliberately and fundamentally changed very successfully.
Cars are not the problem: it's their aggregation in dense city + their pollution. Remove the pollution, people stop dying, we can then discuss your dream of perfect public transport for optimization's sake.
I'd want to see some numbers to support that. What does it cost to provide round-the-clock availability of secure, climate-controlled public transport to every possible location, urban or rural? Bullet trains on standby at 0100hrs to take 1 guy from Osaka to Kanagawa would cost a fortune. In comparison, while PARKING and roads definitely have costs associated with them, the hardware/infrastructure is largely concrete, and inexpensive to maintain when operating below capacity. So 1-2 people can hop in a car and take a road trip at a far lower net/civilization-wide resource expenditure.
Japan has great public transport. Japan also has great cars and a very healthy car community. What part of Japan's transportation approach classifies it as "unworkable and unrealistic" to such an extent that completely banning cars is the optimal solution?
I think for instance we can't possibly build enough railway and bus network to serve every inch of the territory and it's simply to allow fast speed individual transport to distribute the load. It can be even automated with no pilot control, but it's impossible to schedule-base every location in a city without displacing people, rebuilding cities entirely around specific common transport etc. In Europe and Asia, where we build a lot of cities organically, it seems silly. In the US, where cars are even MORE prevalent to the point cities are built for them rather than humans, it will never disappear.
I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London.
Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout.
Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.
There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward.
I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.
The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since.
Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.
As a result of this history, today, the social democrats (just like all other parties) pay lip service to environmentalism, curbing emissions, fighting climate change etc etc, but the truth is they rely heavily on the utterly car dependent rural, small town and suburban voters they themselves have created, and are thus constrained in how much they can really push policies that meaningfully reduce car dependency.
---
https://mhrf.se/broschyr/hjulspar
När väl vågorna efter andra världs- kriget började lägga sig blev vår in- ställning till bilen och bilismen oåterhållsamt positiv och Sverige blev det land i Europa som hade det snabbast växande antalet bilar per in- vånare. Det blev snarare det övriga samhället som fick anpassa sig efter bilen än tvärtom. Dessa hjulspår kan vi idag se lite varstans, inte minst i våra städer och tätorter som så småningom fick genomgå genomgripande förändrin- gar och i många fall till stora delar byggas om för att biltrafiken skulle fungera rationellt. I samband med det stora genom- brottet under 1950-talet förändrades synen på bilen. Man såg den inte längre som en lyxartikel, bilen kom till och med att bli en byggsten i folkhemsbygget. I skriften ”Har vi råd med bilen?” slog socialdemokraterna inför valet 1956 fast att bilen både var leksak och nyt- tosak och att den inte längre enbart var en angelägenhet för överklas- sen. Bilen kallades till och med för en demokratisk kraft...
...Man drömde om att komplettera folkhemsidyllen med en lagom stor bil – kanske en Volvo PV 444 eller en Saab 92.
---
https://www.tekniskamuseet.se/lar-dig-mer/100-innovationer/b...
Med det utbyggda vägnätet och det stadigt ökande antalet bilar började samhällsplanerarna övergå från att anpassa bilismen till det gamla samhället till att istället bygga ett bilsamhälle enligt förebilder från USA. Bilen ingick nu i ett gigantiskt tekniskt system där motorvägar och bilanpassade köpcentra med väldiga parkeringsplatser ingår. För att nå fram till bilsamhället började också Sveriges städer omvandlas — stadskvarter revs, vägar breddades, parkeringshus byggdes och städernas förorter utvidgades allt längre från stadskärnorna. Resultatet blev ett kulturellt och ekonomiskt bilberoende.
What surprises me more is that big Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka chose to build enormous rail networks (above and below ground) instead of wide, fast boulevards and raised expressways.
I live in zone 2 though. Probably things would be different if I lived further away.
The way to solve it is by finishing the bypass (Förbifart) Stockholm and an eastern ring connection and then start greatly limiting traffic going through the center.
Completely agree outside the inner city. You can feel that it was designed in the 60s and 70s and then never touched again.
Oddly the Isles of Scilly, which are tiny, and lack a proper vehicle ferry to the mainland, has about 50% of the population with a car or van. The furthest you could actually go would be able 2 miles.
a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is
b) their city is completely unlivable without a car
Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).
Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece.
But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.
public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between.
livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)
Punctuality is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if frequency was good, but it's not, so...
It can be pretty unsafe and unpleasant.
Basically, it's "OK" in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get.
Some trains have special brushes or water jets to clean the tracks
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2860418/End-...
Having said that, I agree that nothing beats the walkability of European cities, quality of living wise. US has a lot to learn from that.
Anyway, it’s been over 20 years since I visited Tokyo, and I’ve been to many major cities since. Tokyo remains my favorite.
This is incorrect. China currently holds this spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
Even so, the US historically took the number one spot for both total greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases per capita. If you look at it from a perspective of a longer timespan, the US is basically number one.
It is only in recent times does the US now currently take the number two spots for both categories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx85qK1ztAc
The US come in first, my home country Germany takes the fourth spot.
You're not wrong, but your plan involves either uprooting people or sending out so many buses that it would create an ecological catastrophe far greater than we have now (assuming you want to cover all of the suburbs mentioned by the op).
Personally, I'm guilty of this (except the huge house part). I want 5 acres of land and don't want to see my neighbor.
You're not making Greta angry enough, don't you want a personal Olympic-sized swimming pool as well??
I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
Aside, NYC’s train system is, besides being filthy, unreliable, slow, poorly maintained, and a pain to switch between transit agencies, it’s also unfriendly to anyone who isn’t fully able bodied (the escalators and elevators are always broken and only present in a small fraction of stations), and neighborhoods are often designed in ways that lend places outside of the Manhattan core to be more dangerous and unpleasant than they have to be. Not to mention the usage of land in and around stations is very poorly used (the ~2 shops in Times Square station are a hilarious joke for what’s ostensibly the financial capital of the world), and any expansion of the system is prohibitively expensive for stupid political reasons.
But I suppose it’s still better than the transitless wasteland that is most of the USA.
Shibuya?
In Manhattan it's more like the constant blaring of horns and near-constant sirens of various types.
If you like it fine, can't really say either's objectively better, it's just really quite different and I suppose you likes what you grow up with or are used to.
This is not America's fault. They have a resource most of the world lacks: space. Too much space and you cannot make a real city.
Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without lots of space. Some people want that and so they will pay to buy it. It's not like city planners are laughing in smoke-filled rooms like, "haha! this will be our most sprawling city yet!"
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.
I would wager that the vast majority of the folk here that are pushing this romanticized idea of car-free european city have actually grown up in upper middle class US suburbs and bulk of these attitudes are really just subconscious rejection of their parents' lifestyles.
Having grown up in one of those car-free european cities myself, I can vouch that the US set up is, on average, far more convenient, which is also why you see car/pool/detached house/garage ownership rates increase with income and GDP. People that have the means clearly choose to avoid communal setups.