Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses
newsroom.co.nz
newsroom.co.nz
People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.
We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.
Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us.
And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.
Or music at 3am. Or anything.
When I bought my first house, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I could finally relax.
It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.
https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/community-and-safety/pets-an...
Regardless, police don't handle noise complaints where I live. Presumably they don't want to bother with the paperwork.
Yes but not in the way you’re describing. Apartments would be part of the single family home neighborhood. Which is good. People who are single for example can live in the community and meet people. Which brings me to the next point:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/9b/26/379b266652e0a2013c0c...
> Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.
Right. Because we choose to live in suburbs and make it so we are this way. We could just, ya know, not do this? It’s like saying well I’m not using Google because Ask Jeeves has conditioned me to use a crappy search engine. Well… just stop then?
If you want to live in a box and own nothing, go ahead. I can't imagine going back to living on less than 8k sq meters. The growing population is a virus encroaching on man's ability to own his kingdom, not something to be applauded and smiled about.
If we reserved a few roads in Manhattan for busses, large commercial delivery vehicles, and people with disabilities, and left everything else for bikes, scooters, and pedestrians, transit would be faster and more pleasant for everyone.
Why be so authoritarian? It's one thing to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm not going to use them", but it's another to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm going to take away everyone else's choice to use them".
It's not a matter of one side being authoritarian, there's conflicting interests.
Wait...these are rights now?
Who do I sue for not having any of these?
Cities can be changed: in Utrecht, Netherlands they removed an entire motorway to restore the old moat and a more pedestrian / bicycle friendly environment ( https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov... ). Many cities ban cars from the city center, restrict them to 30 km/h or one way streets, or make parking prohibitively expensive.
People come to cities because of all the other people there, not because there are so many parking lots.
If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me (because someone decided that narrow lanes are better) decides to step in front of me, not at a crosswalk, avoiding an accident would require me to have a negative reaction time. Are you saying I'd deserve to have my license seized in that case?
You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
> You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
Come on, stop putting words in my mouth. We're talking about city downtowns not the whole US. I'm for restricting car use there, which you claim is authoritarian. I proposed an alternative, one used in the Netherlands, to put the onus of harm on the less vulnerable party and balance unfair externalities. You complain that this is "guilty-until-proven-innocent". If you want to rules lawyer your way to a car hegemony be my guest, but I'll continue to advocate for decreasing the unbalanced harms to non-car drivers on American streets.
> Come on, stop putting words in my mouth.
Here's what you previously said:
> any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure
> and get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault
Are you saying you don't consider that to be a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
That's because not being allowed to drive is a really harsh punishment. Harshly punishing innocent people is even worse, which is why I assumed you meant guilty-until-proven-innocent.
> it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning
Not being allowed to drive doesn't keep you from leaving town, but it does severely reduce your ability to participate in society. Now you can't go to work, drop your kids off at day care, or bring home groceries.
> preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation
That's exactly what guilty-until-proven-innocent is!
We can’t expect the status quo to change without some way to force it off the car dependent pedestal it’s perched on. Lawfare might be the best way. If it inconveniences people they might drive different or stop driving so much and then eventually we get urban change.
Which she presumably had to do to avoid the oncoming double stroller without diving into the pile of trash bags awaiting pickup.
I disagree with the GP, this isn't merely about penalties for drivers. We've allocated an inordinate portion of available space to large metal vehicles carrying just one or two humans each, and left the scraps to be shared between all pedestrians, skateboarders, outdoor restaurants, parking meters, trash bags, trees, and all manner of other things. Because of course, you can't put the trees in the middle of the street, what would all the cars do? And then the pedestrians also spend 20% of their time waiting at traffic lights that are only necessary because cars are death machines that can't stop quickly enough.
The fact that avoiding an accident "would require [you] to have a negative reaction time" is exactly why cars are inappropriate for busy city centers.
I don’t either. I think the suburbs themselves are what is wrong. Having 2-3 cars is just the adaptation for a moronic building style.
From where I live now it’s hard to fathom why any family would need two, or even three cars. Those suburbs that made that a necessity must be considering utter failures.
Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?
I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?
In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.
> there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance
That’s very nice and quite rare, especially for newer suburbs. Some of the older ones had a little Main Street or some grandfathered in stores and shops. Prices are extremely high accordingly compared with other suburbs.
I'm still curious where all these suburbs are that have nothing but houses for 3 miles or more?
Was trying to find some examples and looks like Mesa,AZ is the worst in this sense in the USA:
https://www.planetizen.com/node/92835/americas-largest-subur...
Looking at it in google maps it is indeed sprawling with houses. But I couldn't find a spot in the various neighborhoods where one would be more than 3 miles walk away from a supermarket. The worst I came up with was 2 miles to a supermarket. But then I zoomed in and saw a restaurant only 1 mile away.
Not a thorough research for sure, just spent a handful of minutes on it.
But assuming the article is correct and Mesa is the worst of the sprawl and given I didn't find it easy to find houses more than 3 miles away from (food) businesses, I'm thinking the OP statement that "In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area" is quite an exageration.
Am I wrong? Can anyone name a handful of these neighborhoods?
That doesn't look like suburbs, although there are a handful of housing developments. But these are not in the outskirts of an urban area like a suburb, these are more rural and not attached to any city.
Yes, sure, once you go outside cities into semi-rural or rural regions, it's easy to be way more than 5 miles from shopping.
In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.
Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.
Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.
The "tourist" vs "working" views of a city to the side, I think the big solution isn't revamping existing cities at first, it'll be creating pockets of new development with different goals.
And there's lots of weird things that affect American suburbs - minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.
I've often wondered if a "carmpromise" city could be built - let's assume a ten minute walk is half a mile. Imagine a strip of city a mile wide where cars are effectively banned. Parking garages at the edges provide car access for those who have them, and the rest is entirely built around walking/biking. Perhaps a tram line runs through the middle. Then those who want cars (basically everyone) can move in without fear, and if some? most? eventually realize they're not using them they can save money by eliminating them.
We have fire and garbage trucks in Europe too and we manage to build small scale streets in the suburbs and rural areas without compromising on emergency services. The key difference is we plan these streets for the expected amount of traffic which will be a couple cars per hour at the top and have regular intersections with other streets where, should there be the rare case that a vehicle comes up towards you, there is enough place to act as a bypass. Americans seem to plan all streets as if they would be used at capacity 24/7.
To be fair the streets date from before the invention of the car, so maybe it’s something else.
Or they realize that most public transit here is unreliable junk. It's almost never on time. This isn't a huge deal until you have to catch a connection/transfer and being late by 5 minutes mens you have to wait another 30-60 minutes for the next one. Or that they completely shut down after something like 1am. Oh, and I good luck to people not losing their job when the system goes on strike and you can get to work for a few days.
I would love to have great public transit. Much of these issues are policy or design issues. The policy issues need to be addressed. If only there was some accountability to the public...
Just for a fun story, my car broke down and I had to take public transit for a month. It was easier for me to walk 2 miles (no real sidewalk for most of it and busy roads) than to rely on the bus schedule. It took me 1.25 hours to get to work using two trains and a bus, when in the car it would take 20 minutes.
So as much as we want good public transit, we can't suddenly start using it if it doesn't exist. People have basically given up on it when schedules are a joke and the whole system can shut down for days or weeks.
Separately, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to run busses every five minutes—which is what you really want—you need enough bus riders to fill all those vehicles.
For people to use the system, they have to trust the system. Depending on the city, rail infrastructure can get you close enough to walk to many places. The stuff that crushes trust even then is the rail lines being off schedule and strikes. Safety can be a major concern too, like the woman who was raped on a SEPTA train recently (WTF). These should be simple asks. Maybe we just need to charge/tax more so they have more money (or maybe we need better people making the decisions with that money).
Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it. You want buses to be a pleasant alternative to driving -- since you already have a walk at the beginning and end of your journey which takes time, it's nice if your bus can get priority over car traffic.
And from there, build up the areas with good bus service more and more, add more buses as needed due to population growth, lengthen lines, add new lines gradually as people see the success of the first ones. Incremental implementation is the trick.
Counterintuitively this even is useful for people who have to go by car. A bus has a lot higher density in people transported. By making it attractive for people to use the bus they don't take away space on the road, which can increase the flow of the remaining cars, even if road space is reduced.
I live in Canada and currently just have a hybrid, but it does limit me in what areas I can drive to for climbing
The solution is someone like you who does outdoor stuff may shell out for a 4wd vehicle. That’s OK!! You just park it in your neighborhood or in your garage like everyone else. The majority of people who don’t do these activities just walk and bike around and probably take their hatchback to visit someone once in awhile or pick up a larger piece of furniture.
- Frankenjura - Elbsandstein - Margalef - Siurana - Chulilla - Albarracin - Finale - Osp - Kalymnos - Leonidio - Ceuse - St Leger - Gorges du Tarn - Les Calanques - Buoux - Fontainebleau
As for multi-pitch climbing: almost everything in the Alps is accessible with a normal car and the customary approach (or a cable car).
It's been a while since I climbed in Italy, but I remember it being pretty similar.
Admittedly, the limited climbing in Germany I did had pretty good parking access.
I suspect there are many European countries whose climbing access is more like Greece though.
Of course, most of Squamish is accessible, and Skaha, so yes, there's tons of climbing, but the "well-traveled" areas are realistically <50% of all potential climbing, and not the same experience as climbing remote.
Obviously for electric the range would be pretty limited (afaik) with the current tech, but I'm sure even that would have a market.
“It’s because they have walkable space and public transportation.”
At least, that's the takeaway from the metro nearest me. At least they got a couple of shiny new luxury apartment buildings out of it. Maybe the hope is to gentrify all of the poorer businesses out to be replaced with hipster shops that won't complain.
Got any actual data?
I know of 5 that definitely closed because of it, at least 8 more that were torn down (including a grocery store and a Walmart) to put up a field for a soccer team right on the line (which may or may not have been built without the light rail going in). 3 more that I can think of didn't make it to COVID, but they were probably struggling beforehand and might not have survived anyway.
YMMV.
Public transit is slow and shitty in every city in the world. If you compare travel time by foot to subway the subway merely cut it by 50%. Subways are about as fast as a moving sidewalk. The "better" a city's public transportation the longer the average commute time of workers. Spending two hours a day on the train isn't living. (Nor is spending two hours a day in a car.)
I also refuse to accept that dense cities are cheaper than the alternative. Everything in a city costs 10x and takes longer. London's water pipes leak about 25% of their water. Replacing these pipes is effectively impossible.
I'm hoping remote works kills the dense mega-city and lets people spread out a bit more.
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for us to achieve clean energy and clean transport.
https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...
The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years.
Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.
[1] Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today (ns.nl)
[a]: Don’t forget the $150-300 deposit (that takes a week to disappear). And also being pressured to pay for their $15/day insurance. Rental companies are expensive
I've done this calculation multiple times in my life, and because I mostly get around via bike (perks of living in college towns which have to invest in non-car infrastructure), its never been worth buying a car.
The cheapest rental car I could find (searched kayak.com) is $72/day.
So, renting could only be cheaper if I used a car less than 2100/72 = 29 days per year.
But that's not counting cost or inconvenience/time of getting and returning that rental car. The few times I'd had to rent a car I've had to get an Uber ride to get to the rental place and then back home, so that adds another $20 or so to the rental.
I just looked up (on kayak.com) the cheapest rental car I could get tomorrow and it is $72/day.
It’s much, much more convenient to be able to go where I want when I want.
Hiking, skiing, my friend’s cabin, the lake house, my friends in the suburbs, Costco, that speciality root beer store I like. I don’t even need to plan my trip. I can go whenever I want.
Yes you can rent a car to do those things. But it is indisputably friction. My experience is that my friends who don’t have cars are subsidized by those who do. Either that or you don’t see that friend because public transit makes it too inconvenient.
I takes 28 minutes to a random spot I just picked on the other end of the city, 10km away.
Stockholm has 100 subway stations alone, and probably over 1000 bus stops. I have no idea why you should say that is "a handful".
I can also bike everywhere, of course. Usually way faster than the car over medium distances.
If you're sitting in your living room, and decide "I want to go to $place, it's a 45 minute trip if I leave now and a 20 minute trip if I leave in an hour" I think you could make an argument either way.
Within downtown Tokyo, you can often beat the train by just walking briskly from point to point, and almost always beat it by riding a bike.
Maybe the guy above you is focusing entirely on those worst case walking/schedule-based delays and you're focusing entirely on the best case.
The first bicycle that looks somewhat like a modern bicycle was from around 1880.
And many people prefer the car for the simple reason that car infrastructure has been prioritised.
There's a tragedy of the commons here.
There was recently a thread on HN about why Europe had become so wealthy. Many opined that exploitation of other led to Europe’s wealth, but others observed that such exploitation was only possible because Europe was already wealthy. The same applies here. Yes, the government had many car-promoting policies, but those policies were tolerated because cars were already desired and that desire made the car lobby popular, not the other way around.
"go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently" is bikes and public transit when the infrastructure is not car-centric.
It is not even go far with little effort. It is go far or close without having to mind weather unless it is really windy when trees fall on the roads.
When it is -15 degrees celcious or is pouring rain you don't care, have fun riding bicycle in such rain.
So not caring about weather/elements is not natural.
Most of the time I have to carry ~20kg of stuff with me, laptop, coat, umbrella, some food, some water. Getting groceries on my way back home.
Carrying ~20kg or even ~30kg of stuff around all the time is totally unnatural. Well going 50km away from your home on a daily basis is not natural at all. But a lot of people to make ends meet need to go even 100km away on daily basis.
Yes, going to your local shopping center with a car where you can walk in 10 mins and carry 5-10kg of goods is supper shitty and for 5-10 kg one could cycle with it. Going "all car culture" is bad is not the way to go, because for many people alternative is to "sit in one place and die" as they don't have shopping center available in walking distance.
I don’t understand why you think you need to bring 20 kg of stuff every day. That is what I carry for a several day camping trip.
I don’t buy it. People want cars since our infrastructure is optimized for it. But I seriously doubt that most people want cars specifically as the optimized transit solution for urban environments.
Other people who also self-identity as ME matter too. THEY will still welcome YOU. absent the brum-brum which, in aggregate with other brum-brums, is a massive annoyance to THEM.
Depends on the downtown area.
If there is enough population living within walking distance of the shops to sustain those shops then the businesses will be fine. And the area will be more pleasant for those who do live within that area, so that's nice. It does become exclusionary for those who live outside the area as parent poster said but perhaps that's ok, as long as the population density there is high enough to keep it going.
But many downtown shop areas don't have enough population within walking distance to keep the businesses viable. Those areas depend on people from farther out driving in to spend their money. For those, making parking difficult (too far, too expensive) can quickly go into a downward spiral of shops closing, area decaying, becoming less attractive to visit, leading to even more shops closing, until the old downtown core is a ghost town.
So population density is key. If density isn't there one can't just slap a prohibition on cars/parking and expect it to work well.
An easy solution would be to tax vehicles in relation to how much road damage they cause. If drivers had to pay the weight of their vehicle to the fourth power, then they would all think twice before adding any more unnecessary (and lethal) kilos to their vehicles.
As a compact car owner I wind up renting a pickup pretty frequently, and it's already pretty cramped for my son in his carseat. Just owning one is ... alluring.
Some people want cars. Some people like cars. But everyone is forced to have them in most places in the US due to the feedback loop caused by investing in car infrastructure and sprawl.
Beyond that, though, even if something is a necessity, it’s rarely a race to the bottom. Your insurance example is actually an excellent instance of how markets tend to divide up: there’s the economical market (eg save 15% or more!) and the premium market (eg you’re in good hands). Same with cars.
Also I don't understand how the car market is as same as the mandatory insurance market. There is a race to the bottom on the, say, auto-insurance market while the vast majority of car promotions do not mention price at all, at most advertising preferable financial terms.
Re: cars vs insurance, used cars are the economical choice, so new car commercials are targeting the premium demographics.
0: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09658...
Why car manufacturers don't advertise to the "necessary" buyers at all? A new Kia Rio is still cheaper than a used MB GLS.
But, many do due to the lack of alternatives. Especially in the US/Canada, but also in Europe (especially anything built recently). People will drive because they don’t feel safe cycling/walking, or because their destination is too far. Or they will own several cars while they could just go on with one.
I don’t think anyone is really advocating for completely removing cars from the street or cities. I personally don’t own one (and this is a priority for me - I don’t want one), but I do take rides with friends or a cab from time to time.
What most advocates want (including me) is to stop prioritising cars in every single decision. Mixed zoning laws will remove lots of car trips if you can just walk to the shop when you need a couple of items or a coffee. Making streets car free (bar few exception) will make people come out and enjoy the street. Making people pay a fair price for parking will avoid subsidising a huge amount of land for private use. Removing parking will add lots of space on the streets for things that people enjoy. Better public transportation will favour everyone, especially poorer communities. And proper ciclying and walking infrastructure will allow more and more people to do so safely.
If after that someone still want to use private cars, then be my guest.
I'd bike it for sure but otherwise I'd definitely drive.
I just walked about 1km and back to a suburban market to get my lunch.
1. To clarify: none of the barefoot walkers I know does that, they seem to be pretty content with the status quo and are not militant about propagating their lifestyle to everyone hence "if".
This is exactly why I want to live in a bikeable, walkable city! I really don’t consider babysitting a massive 2+ ton hunk of metal and plastic to be low effort or independent. On the contrary, it’s the most draining and stressful thing I do on a regular basis.
You mention “go far”, but I don’t think that’s actually the priority for people. What they really want is to get to their daily destinations – the store, the park, the office, the mall. The distance is a consequence of the car, not the other way around.
People will still want to go places that are beyond biking distance or need to do something that isn’t practical on foot/bike, and that’s fine. For most people, if they lived in a bikeable and walkable area, these would be a minority of trips. But for those minority of trips where a car makes sense, a car should be used. (Note: this doesn’t mean they need to own a car.) Cars don’t need to be eliminated from cities, just reduced and deprioritized enough to make biking and walking safe and appealing.
In my case it's also very low maintenance, maybe equal effort to maintain as my bike - charging batteries, adjusting brakes, lubing the chain etc. compared to filling up gas and occasionally topping off the oil, which is all the maintenance my Jeep tends to need.
What we’re asking for here are things like street and block systems, mixed use zones, bike lanes, buildings pulled up to the sidewalk instead of set back by giant surface parking lots, etc. When you have those things, the preferability of different transport modes change.
They had something bicCle-like, which was less comfortable with way less bicycle compatible roads.
Cobblestone and hills on a heavy bike without transmission? - Not good. Same with a paved bike path and either a lighter modern bike or even E-Bike? - Smooth riding.
That said: Their are cases where a car is needed, given the right infrastructure that need however can be reduced, so that people can make the choice. Which in turn can create new possibilities for the young, disabled or old, which won't be there in a car centric place.
There were places this winter where the sidewalk was impassable due to several feet deep on compacted "snow boulders" from ploughs. I get that you need to allow car access, but not at the expense of pedestrians being able to walk anywhere.
Excuse me? If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit and have been a transit-alternatives advocate for years in 3 major cities, I'm a member of the lefty SF bike coalition, and am also a fan of strongtowns that leans toward the right side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be a left or right issue. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this topic.
We a former football quarterback was killed today because of dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. We lose 100 people in America per day due to, trivial fixable, dangerous automobile infrastructure. It's a death toll we happily ignore, because it's better to just not think about it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-hask...
https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonp...
The article does link to a local newspaper that mentions the cause of death. https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strik...
> Dwayne Haskins, an NFL quarterback drafted by Washington and on the roster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Saturday morning after being struck by a truck in South Florida. He was 24.
I was a Reddit mod for a while, but after I reflected on the fact that Reddit pulls in nearly $200MM in yearly revenue thanks part to my unpaid labor where I primarily deleted Youtube video spam posts and idiotic flame wars in comment threads, I decided to spend my time and energy elsewhere. The next logical step was to stop contributing anything at all of value to Reddit. So every once in a while I'll visit a few subreddits to see if anything new or interesting happens (i.e., sort by Top for the last month).
Unfortunately for r/bicycling I find the content to pretty much just be, "Hey everyone check out this picture of my bicycle!" If it's the goal of the sub to advocate for cycling infrastructure, I question how the top posts from just this past month accomplish that.
* Check out this picture of my bike in the Ukraine!
* Check out another picture of my bike in the Ukraine!
* Truck driver slows down and stays behind cyclist going through a rather long tunnel with no shoulder to keep said cyclist from what seems like certain death otherwise
* Cyclists near bike storage in the Netherlands lining up to leave the station
* Cyclist climbing a steep hill
* Cyclist forcing protesting trucks in DC to go slow
* Check out this picture of my bike! (And I'm depressed!)
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Silly stationary bike that actually moves
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Cyclist holding up a line of traffic on a remote mountain road
* Cyclists riding gravel
* Check out this picture of my bike I got for cheap!
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Calvin and Hobbes comic about bike/car drama
* Video of flying down a remote mountain road
* Picture of a mostly-empty bike storage room
* 50-ish mile bike ride map
* Video of a cyclist riding around for 60 miles
* Tesla crashed into a shop with a sign against bike lanes
* Check out this picture of my bike! And I rode 100 miles
Anyway, you get the idea. r/bicycling could be so much more, but for some reason few visitors there seems to care much about anything except people posting pictures of their bikes, and for a lot of what gets upvoted, I just don't see why it's really even all that novel or interesting.
I don't know how to fix that, or whether it's even really worth trying to fix. Like I said, I'm a jaded former mod on Reddit who just doesn't see much anything virtuous coming out of that platform.
People like sharing pics of their bikes and I think that’s fun, even if I mostly don’t care.
- those who work and live in a "small" area, witch means in bike/foot range for anything do consume far less, yes, but to sustain those sober lifestyle many others run on km and km on gasoline trucks & other transports means;
- European style cities (where from I came from, switched to a mountain area few years ago) are a nightmare in the modern world because being dense means being unable to evolve. There is no room to change because there is no space to move and when something exceptional but not so exceptional happen is a disaster;
- most tend to think living in apartments, very concentrate is efficient, like a big factory tend to be more efficient than various little and spread, that's false actually. Environmental costs of tall buildings is FAR superior to many equivalent (even bigger) single-family homes, those buildings demand structure and infrastructure that single home do not need at all and not only: as dense cities they can't evolve. So we can build a "A-class state-of-art" building today, in 100+ years it will be the same building, probably in a dangerous shape, very inefficient and can't be rebuilt.
We need a certain density because transportation costs and social life, idea sharing etc demand a bit of aggregation but we all know pushing aggregation is a vary bad move. Actually the dominant idea is "small and smart cities" but even these can't really scale because today we can build them (well, at a hyper-big cost) for today needs, tomorrow we will be still unable to evolve them because of density. IMVHO the sole scalable model is the Riviera one, where living and working buildings are spread together but residential parts are single-family home with enough room to be rebuilt on generational change, and factories except for those who demand a certain size, can be single-purpose areas so something that can be rebuilt at a certain point in time with enough ground around to do so. That's also have another positive aspect: it stop the possibility to concentrate to many people in small places making them nightmare like many modern city-states.
In the Riviera model we have schools like campus where students can aggregate to develop ideas and social life, but again they are single-purpose complexes so easy to rebuilt/change as needed, there is a bit of travel but not too much, a bit of aggregation perhaps less effective than a dense city one, but without risk to became too dense etc.
In medio stat virtus. A lesson too many forget.
I don't think r/place has caused this. There has been a massive increase in an anti-car sentiment in the last few years.
Maybe the cause is people staying home more often now, so they care about whether their neighbourhoods are nice?
I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site
I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination)
edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.
They have executed pretty well with one glaring exception. Nearly everyone needs a weekly supermarket visit. Until fairly recently the city had no supermarkets for a population of 650,000 people. Recently a Whole Foods opened downtown as well as a couple of supermarkets on eight mile on the edge of the city.
Those eight mile supermarkets were created to cash in on a multi-million dollar incentive offered by the state. However it was poorly worded, so while they're technically in the city the suburbs are right across the street.
Many affluent highly educated people live in downtown Detroit and are forced to own a car so they can travel to the edge of the city to buy groceries.
A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents.
Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.
Both stores appear to have a very strong business. So why doesn't either company create one in downtown Detroit where the demand would be a multiple of that in Lansing and East Lansing?
Living in downtown Vancouver, I would go to the grocery store every 1-2 days to get food, because it was close by so there was no reason to "stock up". However growing up in the suburbs, we would go to the grocery store once a week to get all the food for the entire week.
A large scale grocery store/costco style simply doesn't make much sense as the place you go shopping every 1-2 days. So its better to put it in the suburbs and have people from downtown go out of the city every few weeks to stock up on specific items.
There is no bad weather. There is only bad clothing!
But it is wild how easy it is to see Detroit's lack of grocery stores: https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery+store/@42.4272993...
Want to do anything an hour out of the city - you're either begging for a ride or trying to fight the absurdities of renting a car.
I now live in a cheaper area, more outside the city where it makes even more sense to own a vehicle, and its definitely worth it. All that being said, all of the shops I most frequently patron are walkable from my home or work.
https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html
This was fun too: https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures...
They also displaced whole neighborhoods to build highways and bridges https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/
Add in the collapse of the American auto industry that was keeping Detroit relevant and these days it all adds up to be a place I never see myself going back to in this lifetime, and an example of how bad in so many different ways a city can be.
Bonus: they have an above-ground train that goes between places no one actually ever goes between https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointl... it’s like if BART went between the SAP Center and Levi’s Stadium with no other stops.
I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!
Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.
Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).
Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!
That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
"Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time."
At the end of a rather long reply to throw0101a's comment on my original post, in passing I mentioned that things were somewhat different in Europe. (My reply to throw0101a was principally in reference to his link to the book High Cost of Free Parking by UCLA professor Donald Shoup who has an underlying Georgist philosophy in connection with these matters.)
My original post wasn't well accepted by about half the voters (upvotes and downvotes in about equal numbers) and I expected that when I posted it. I mention this specifically as my original comment was made from my perspective here in Australia; here the 'average' shopping conditions are very different to both the US and to much of Europe (I've lived in Europe and I'm also very familiar with US roads, shops and shopping conditions).
In essence, I've little doubt that the original story is correct when it comes to US conditions, and I've no doubt that your experience (and the article) are correct when it comes to your experience in Barcelona. Here where I am it's a mixed bag but the vehicle/parking/shopping problem is nothing like as bad as it is in the US (in that shops are far more accessible from roadside parking (despite my earlier cynical assertions seemingly to the contrary).
I'll avoid a lengthy discussion involving examples so I'll just say this. The issue that cars detract from spending in the US and the Barcelona setting is, I reckon, pretty clear-cut. It's not so clear-cut here and in some other European cities. For example, in a German-speaking city (which I won't name out of deference) where I was living for quite some while has shops with easy walking access à la Barcelona and people actually shop by walking around—and public transport is as good as it gets (I've seen no better anywhere). That said, the number of cars parked in the side streets (and anywhere else their owners can find to park them) is quite unbelievable—it's nothing to see cars parked at 45 degrees across the 90 degree junction of two sidewalks if that's the only space available—moreover, it happens all the time. Most people who live there DO NOT need a vehicle and yet they have an obsession to own one (seems as if their psyche remains unfulfilled unless they own a car even if they rarely use it). So much for eliminating cars by providing easy walking access to shops! Despite this and excellent public transport—which they all use with gusto—it still hasn't eliminated the vehicle problem.
It seems to me that we need to be very careful how we measure the benefits of planning our cities to be more human-friendly. There seems to be no one-plan-fits-all, generalizing seems a risky business. If there's an underlying car culture as there is there (and here where I am now) then the benefits of good planning and having ready access to shops by foot may be much harder to realize than it first seems.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the same problem arises when it comes to invoking Donald Shoup's underlying Georgist philosophy which underpins many of these new ideas about planning our cities. (I know, this is somewhat esoteric matter but unless we can genuinely equate it out of the discussion then it might come back to bite us).
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/300528260/roa...
But even so, the business owners losing business shouldn't matter at all for such decisions. Business only exist to serve their customers. If customers don't want or need them, then they should disappear. The real concern is whether customers do still want shops there but are unable to access them because of lack of parking.
It bears no resemblance car usage in cities at all.
"Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction."
It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way…
I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
When an area is being (re)developed, the planners try to figure out many of the details. How should be public transport and parking organized? Where are the walking and biking routes? Where should the parks and commercial spaces be? And so on. Older European cities are not as much organically grown as planned and replanned over centuries.
I mean, I don't disagree on the overall point, but one could do with reading up on people like Haussmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eug%C3%A8ne_Haussmann
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_Country_Planning_Ac...
In particular it means that owning land does not automatically allow you to build on it.
I feel like you're almost making a moral statement there, it doesn't have the nuance I think exists.
1) You have people like my parents, siblings, and friends in the Midwest. The idea of living somewhere where they don't have the practical privacy of living on a farm literally horrifies them. I can't convince them otherwise, I've tried. They view me as simply "weird". Literally no hope, but maybe you can convince their kids.
2) You have people like me who love the energy, convenience, and stimulation of high density living but still end up driving and having a car because the cost differential is just way too extreme to logically justify living where I want to.
There's a mystery to me in it. I spent time in Bangkok and Shanghai and why does it seem really easy to rent a centrally located place in a quality tall building, as if it's just normal, and without a prices that seems insanely disproportionate to other life expenses? Yet in the US, it's very rare. There's not enough demand? Labor costs are too high? Laws like building hight limits in the US prevent it? I've heard there are taboos in Europe for high buildings as well.
I think there is also an element of culturally dictated space demands that comes into play. You can have these nice dense places in Bangkok because people will see 300 SQ ft and still rent it. In the US people told me I was brave for trying to survive by myself in "only" 500 SQ ft. They could never "stand not even being able to breathe". You won't have an easy time changing people's minds about this. Personally I'm willing to live in 150sq ft if I'm at the heart of the fun.
There aren’t enough of them because in huge swaths of the country it’s illegal to build anything denser than a single-family home. There’s plenty of demand for it, there’s just not enough supply.
Doesn’t even have to be high-rises, in most places it’s illegal to build the sort of mid-rises that are everywhere in European cities.
EDIT: Oh, and it’s also usually illegal to put a business in a residential area, which forces things further apart and forces people to drive to get to anything.
> 2) You have people like me who love the energy, convenience, and stimulation of high density living but still end up driving and having a car because the cost differential is just way too extreme to logically justify living where I want to.
Right but those places are so expensive because they are so rare. Why are they so rare? Because we don’t build them.
> I think there is also an element of space demands. You can have these nice dense places in Bangkok because people will see 300 SQ ft and still rent it. In the US people told me I was brave for trying to survive by myself in "only" 500 SQ ft. They could never "stand not even being able to breathe".
This is another end of a spectrum, one which I don’t like either. We don’t need skyscrapers. We can build with a great level of density and have the best of all worlds.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/9b/26/379b266652e0a2013c0c...
This is in Columbus. You can have a car, you can even have two, you can have a garage, or park on the street. But you can also ride your bike to work or walk. These aren’t 500 square foot homes.
“Yea but all of that is so expensive” yes because we don’t build them. There is no reason this isn’t affordable except that we simply choose to not build like this. That’s it. We just choose to amputate our mobility and pay outrageous amounts of money to have the privilege of driving. The high prices of these homes demonstrate that they are desired.
I don’t advocate for skyscrapers. They are an anti-pattern enabled by cheap energy and oil. The other end, the car-driven suburb is bad too. Ideally we’d have towns like they do in Europe with rural communities surrounding them. So your family can have their space and farm. And everyone who wants a town can have that too.
People who don't live in cities still go to cities occasionally, and most anti-car proposals negatively impact this use case the most.
Maybe we should buy the land surrounding their farm and just place apartments and Wal-Marts and tear down the trees? They can live next to the city they wanted. Oh and that way I can go visit a farm whenever I want, easily and conveniently and feel like I’m on the countryside. Similar to a farmer getting to feel like they are part of the city or town. This cuts both ways.
“But Eric this is already happening”
Yea because we build suburbs, and have to spread everything out.
People who live on farms are feeding the rest of us. They're kind of important.
Even when it’s not explicitly illegal, it can be stymied by people who were appointed who simply can’t imagine people wanting to live near public transit and not own a car. Just recently in Boston, a building that was 5 stories high, and a 5 minute walk to an excellent subway station, was rejected by the Zoning Board of Appeals. [1]
The arguments made included that the building was too high, and that it lacked parking. At 5 stories high, it was 1 story higher than a very nearby building, and 2 stories higher than many residences near it, which are 3 stories.
And it’s a 5 minute walk to a subway. That’s exactly the kind of place to live and not own a car. But the city zoning board didn’t think that was an acceptable way to live, and they chose not to… partially because the law gave them the ability to choose that, because not having minimum amounts of parking is illegal when building a new place to live. It’s illegal even if you live a 5 minute walk from a subway stop.
[1] https://www.universalhub.com/2022/board-rejects-apartment-bu...
And in western countries there seems to have been a general erosion of the kind of local level government authority you need to deal with the one household that is a chronic noise problem for the hundreds of people they disturb around them.
These discussions tend to gloss over the fact that more density is going to require tackling antisocial behaviour head on, and local government are neither willing or able to do so.
Most of that noise is from the cars.
Edit: and motorbikes, fuck motorbikes. I'll give you that one.
Noise can be managed with sound insulation, but the biggest problem with density is the crowds. Big lines and waits for everything because there are so many people. I'm very happy to live in a borderline-rural suburb. No lines anywhere, no traffic, no waiting anywhere. It's so nice.
How could that work? Do you own anything? Do you have any hobbies? I'm having trouble imagining how that could possibly work.
That's smaller than my office and my office only contains two desks, a few ikea shelves and a handful of computers and books. No beds, no kitchen, no bathroom (there's a bathroom in the office building elsewhere), no personal posessions, nothing.
I'm european and I've lived in several european countries. It's definitely how a huge percentage of the european population lives day to day.
Not even 40% of the european population lives in cities. 30% is towns + suburb and 30% is countryside/seaside/mountain/rural.
That's 60% right there where car is the de facto daily way of moving.
And even in cities like Brussels or Paris you have those who do use their car on a daily basis, for short trips (like going to drop/pick the kids at school a few kilometers away). Insane statistics (x% of all car trips in Brussels are for less than y kilometers with both x and y being very low: although I forgot the numbers).
I guess it depends on who your friends are but around me, in the various place I've lived in Europe, the car is totally king.
Generally people who want to reduce car dependence are advocating for this zoning alongside their advocacy for transit and bike lanes.
By car it's a 5 minutes drive. So 50 minutes vs 5 minutes. Bicycling would be 15 minutes then 15 minutes back but I'd be toast due to the hills.
Closest highway: 45 minutes drive.
Closest city: 1h15 minutes.
Driving my kid to school in the morning: second closest village, 12 km / 7 miles. By bicycle? More than 40 minutes just to get there. Car: 12 minutes.
Of course I don't get the "vibrant" city life.
But I do get shitloads of nature and a sky so clean at night I can not just see stars but the Milky Way too.
As to where it is: I won't give the exact location but let's say "somewhere on the french riviera" (think Sonoma County vineyards meet the mediterannean sea: a little piece of paradise on earth with ultra-low density of population).
But that’s not how cities in Europe are laid out. The closest grocery store to me is 3 minutes by bike (1.19 km) and I live at the edge of my particular neighborhood (shops are usually concentrated near the center of neighborhoods). Even the city center (where the more specialized shops are) is only about 8 minutes by bike (or about 15 by car due to traffic).
Especially within the city a bike is always faster.
Then women started working more and more, and they had less time to shop for food, so the supermarkets happened here too - much later than in the US though, because of space and legal constraints. But there is still an attraction for the traditional way of life that keeps a significant amount of smaller and more central stores in business, keeping shopping more distributed: one day you buy fish, the next you buy meat, and everything fits in your bag.
Have you visited a place where there were multiple stores within a 10 minute walk? Once I started living in places like that, my way of life changed in ways I never would have predicted.
Walking home from work meant I walked right by a grocery store, and I could grab something quick. Would I always? Nope. Did I sometimes still do big grocery store trips? Sure. And would I sometimes even bring my car if I had a bunch of stuff? Yes, because I lived up a tall hill.
The reason I mention this is that your well-established may simply change in unexpected ways that you never would have imagined.
It also means you get fresh products. I’d hate to have to eat week old bread.
I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
Exactly.
All of your friends have to take highways to reach a grocery store? That's nuts! Is this some kind of international agrarian hermit club?
Or are you saying you don't have many friends? There are more possible friends to be made in more populous areas. Come, join us!
Flash delivery is only available in the big cities but the rest is pretty standard.
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean here, but my nearest grocery store in London is 3 doors away. My second nearest in 3 mins walk away. My 3rd nearest, 3 mins 30 secs away. My nearest big supermarket is 10 mins walk away. That's the alternative here.
> ... the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
Places like this already exist (ie. basically any major urban center), but I don't think the intent is that every place needs to be like that. Small steps toward better options (eg. allowing limited commercial redevelopment in residential-only areas, improving the safety/speed/accessibility of alternate transit options) should be the short-term goal, and we can work slowly towards them. But societal pressure (eg. from NIMBYs and zero-sum car-first people) often makes even small improvements glacially slow or impossible.
> “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.”
So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M.
Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.
Meanwhile the large outdoor mall on the city outskirts is thriving, because of the easy parking.
It doesn't need to be much, decent size parking building with an arterial access actually in the CBD would work. Let people drive to the CBD and wonder around when they get there.
Rather safe, living and cozy streets for the inhabitants, than easy access for the suburbians.
The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
At least that's when paid parking properly works and allows one to almost always park close by (provided one is willing to pay).
I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places.
My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.
Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.
This sums up my complaint about Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, etc. They want to do things that will make driving impossible (or at least miserably difficult) now, and only maybe later do things that will provide alternatives for everyone.
Now how do you get from A to B? At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars. This might mean removing travel lanes, and it might mean removing on-street parking, but regardless, that is a necessary step to get to street B.
That point is where people complain, "you're making driving impossible!" But you can never get to street B if you never make that step. And at the point you do, there generally also won't be that many people biking or taking transit, because you haven't changed the street yet.
Why couldn't you just build transit that's above or below the existing space for cars instead? Sure it might be more expensive or difficult to do, but at least it wouldn't be making people's lives worse the whole time.
Local governments are not rolling in cash. If your town substantially raised your taxes to pay for that project, would you also complain about that?
It's basically free to paint a lane red and declare that it's only for buses. Tunnels can cost billions per mile.
And I believe that if ride sharing is effectively forced through capping the traffic to non-congested levels, there would be a practical solution to the issue of organizing ride-sharing for the trip back home late at night.
Like, some sort of dynamic bus network using normal cars (Uber Pool w/ having to switch cars at suitable "hub"s either end of the freeway portion of your trip, or even along the way if any of the resulting legs of your journey would be too-low-throughput to meet realistic latency expectations of yours), at least for the time it takes to manufacture better-suited public transit vehicles. Software for this can happen in at most a couple months to get something that works, so just make the tolls under this system take half a year to activate after getting enacted for the region.
Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any.
What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?
As one developer told me -- that simply financially makes more sense for them to build an apartment instead of parking. Why should they solve other people's business?
At first I was outraged, but now I kinda see a long term benefits of that, even thought it's harder for me to own a car. Hopefully that'd lead to improvement of public transportation or invention of new ways to move.
People live like ants.
I currently live in a rural-density zoned part of the US, and the car is basically the only access one has to virtually anything. Businesses here can pretty confidently state that close to 100% of their customer base arrives by car.
Toilet paper? Doubtful. You are paying mortgage + property tax on the pantry space used to store it.
Not to mention gas to drive and get it. And vehicle insurance. And car maintenance.
A bidet seat (heated water, $150 at Home Depot now days) has a better ROI.
Good luck with that. Even with an off-brand, you're looking at much closer to twice that if you want any kind of heated water.
But checking prices, they are around $250.
If you have the space anyway, you're not paying any extra to store stuff in it. And it's expensive enough to move that it's not economical to do so just to have the lower payments from 1 fewer square foot.
> Not to mention gas to drive and get it. And vehicle insurance. And car maintenance.
If you stop at the store on the way home from somewhere else that you were going anyway, the additional cost of those things is basically zero.
I drive maybe 200 miles a month now. I walk down the street to a supermarket to get toilet paper when I run out.
But still pay full insurance presumably?
I've been fighting this with the insurance company ever since the pandemic started. We no longer drive anywhere daily, working from home. But the insurance company wants to maximize profit so they won't approve less than 6000 miles per year, a number they made up, and keep raising prices.
His name was Yauch.
I myself am doing fine with one or two backpacks a week (on the way home by bike). 2-3km distance to supermarket
When I was living 200m away from a supermarket, I used to buy spontaneously when I wanted to cook something
This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street.
This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.
What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.
I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated.
But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country?
Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value.
Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve.
I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.
In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
still, probably not as extreme as US standard...
The most pragmatic proposals I've seen revolve around optimizing for the most common trips, rather than trying to completely eliminate cars. Optimizing for the easiest 80%, if you will.
For most households, the easiest 80% to mode-change would look something like: - schools within walking distance - shops/cafes/restaurants within walking distance (either by removing euclidean zoning, or creating new, small retail zones) - better public transport specifically targeting the most common destinations (e.g. a central business district) - improving walking/cycling infrastructure so people aren't risking their lives when doing shorter trips
People are still going to want/need cars to go to the beach, home improvement store, etc, but that's fine, because these make up a minority of total trips taken.
Auckland is very suburban outside the center, but the older and newer suburbs have mixed use zoning which manages to support a few cafes, restaurants, shops per suburb. The middle-age suburbs are the worst for walkability. The population of NZ is increasing, and most of the cities are expected to increase in density, rather than size, which should mean more retail can be supported within a shorter distance to everyone. It remains to be seen enough mixed-use/retail zoning gets allocated in existing suburbs though.
I'm not sure how this would play out if the population was stable though. Possibly then like belval says, it would take 50-100+ years as housing stock gets rebuilt in different configurations.
It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen.
In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses).
Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway.
In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option.
The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost.
I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.
Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
The houses that are close enough to town centers to live that way are highly prized and unaffordable to almost everyone. By removing the possibility of driving to a town center like Mountain View or Palo Alto, you are actually disadvantaging people who can't afford to live close enough to casually bike to Whole Foods on a Sunday morning.
Look, this is a complicated issue. It's hard to get there from here because a lot of things have to change at once; there's a chicken and egg effect here. I can imagine a different Palo Alto or Mountain View, but I can't imagine how neighborhoods could change without drastic social upheaval. And if I have to handicap the NIMBY power of well-to-do homeowners to keep your plans from taking effect, I'm going to bet on them. Not because they're better, but because they're likely to win.
But location aside, there is very little of the city that is more than 20 minutes by bike away. I used to commute to Palo Alto, and then later Sunnyvale, both were less than 30 minutes. If I made the mistake of trying to drive to work during rush hour, it took about as long.
Now I'm older, with kids, and have a health scenario that precludes biking (Getting a trike soon to be able to cycle at all). This area is probably one of the most bike-friendly in the US. But still, are you going to bike a week's shopping for a family of five? Costco? Ikea? Dressed up for dinner? Visiting grandparents 10 miles away?
I tried to buck the trend. A full year here with just 1 family car. On good days, it sort of worked, but eventually we had to break down and get a 2nd car. Between rushing to get kids to school, working long hours at a startup, even walking the dog in a nice field so she could run -- we just had too many hiccups with a single car. That is just how CA was conceived and built.
I think it would be more productive to accept that there is a demand for the suburban lifestyle, and come up with creative solutions that fit that demand, but also address issues of housing and climate.
You could make the analogy to architecture. It doesn't work to look at a city and say "This is all wrong", then build whatever suits your aesthetic. You try to modernize but also blend in. Work with the structure you are given. It never works to say "This sucks, burn it down and start from scratch".
Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.
On Google maps I see that it takes 9 minutes to a store 6km away by car. It takes 36 minutes by public transport, however it takes only 20 minutes by bike (almost everyone has a bike here). However a lot of roads are bike-only or similar (esp in parts of the city centre), which (imo) makes it super frustrating to drive.
On longer distances yes cars do get much faster. Amsterdam to Rotterdam by car is 52 mins (74km), vs 1hr18min by train, however this was station to station. Once you add the time to go from the station to your destination it's often longer.
Edit - re:costs, it feels moderately expensive to me as an Indian. It's €5.4 from Rotterdam to Den Haag (Hague) station, which is 21km by road (20 min by road, 30 min by train). You get 20-30% off passes for monthly use I believe, though that's only useful if you use it a lot.
This is almost always going to be true, regardless of the country. Living in the countryside is always going to mean inefficiencies in terms of transportation. I couldn't say how you'd solve this, just increasing buses and trains is just too cost ineffective given how sparsely populated most of these areas are.
I do align with the whole anti-car crowd when it comes to cities though. We should encourage and enable people to use literally anything other than a car for city movement. Anecdotal but I know plenty of people that'll take their car for all kinds of stupid small trips that could've been at most a 10 minute bicycle ride.
Getting to sit in your car and pressing a little pedal sure is comfortable, and I feel like it's impossible to get people out of the mindset that using another mode of transportation is better for them, as well as everyone around them. All these little trips such as getting groceries once a week, driving across town to go see a friend, etc., really do accumulate to be a problem and you end up with cars littering streets left and right. And then we're not even talking about health yet.
In a city at least, the benefits of car ownership for the individual, take far too big a toll on a the livability of a city as a whole.
I have never understood the idea of people who live in the city taking the car within the same big city to do stuff. That just makes no sense in most cases.
I think if I lived there I'd definitely own a car.
This is probably dangerous.
I guess I don't blame them for thinking about it a lot, since in a particular niche circumstance it is probably disruptive and worth worrying about. But for those of us living in suburban cities, it's really not something on the radar.
You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.
You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology.
Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.
I've never even gotten an answer, just silence.
Sounds like your city needs to write and enforce its parking rules better.
I suppose it depends on the particular city block size, but we use angled parking and certainly get a lot more than 10 cars in a given block.
We managed to save our local mall before it completely died, and now it thrives. They turned it mostly inside out, there's still halls inside but all of the popular stores now face outward so you can park right in front of them.
Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold?
First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon.
I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else.
Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid.
The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.
I can probably get close to 22% as long as Covid keeps my long distance trips suppressed. I thought when people were saying “I bike everywhere” they meant like 80% bike 20% walk or something.
We use rain jackets, ponchos and/or waterproof overtrousers, depending how heavy the rain is. It's generally fairly light here, so my overtrousers don't get much use.
Temperature is not a problem, just add or remove clothing according to the temperature. (Is this not obvious? I sound like my mum when I was 8 years old "it's cold outside, wear a coat!").
Now I need to figure out how to handle a much longer time in the temperature and rain, plus windchill (the other day when I tried out my ebike it took 3 minutes for my eyes to stop watering, I’m hoping that is just an acclimatization thing).
I did realize I can probably get some plastic bags to keep a change of clothes in inside my backpack.
I’m sure I just have a bad attitude but I’m working on it over here.
The most bike commuting city in the world is Copenhagen, Denmark. They manage the winters just fine. That said, getting from here-to-there is challenging for most novice bike commuters, and having experience friends in the transit alternatives community is the only way for this knowledge to be passed from one person to another.
In effect, the fact that the dressing for weather has been nullified by cars for three generations has effectively hamstrung us all because of the loss of cultural knowledge.
I have found that riding my old bike always gets me sweaty outside of narrow temperature and humidity bands in the spring and fall, but perhaps I’m not using the gears correctly. It is a hybrid not a road bike though.
I’ll be parking it inside at work so I’m not worried about it being stolen there. If I try to replace some grocery runs I will want to lock it up outside there and will definitely want the electric assist.
Come on, Parkdale is just behind Little Portugal and near Dufferin Mall, all very walkable areas, how is this a surprise? Repeat the study w/ Yorkdale Mall near highway 401 and those car numbers will shoot through the roof.
The reality is that areas closer to downtown that are a hassle to park at will attract downtown folks and more suburban areas with big parking lots will attract suburban folks with cars.
What's the point of cherrypicking one area and try to draw general conclusions about parking from that?
That makes perfect sense. People who drive far are looking for better prices. They will buy one or two things they know are usually cheap or often on sale and then get other things in some other store that's along their route to wherever they are going.
The walkin' locals are going to be the more captive customers.
Do any of these advocates have an ownership stake in any properties or businesses in the affected area?
* https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/the-latest-evidence-that-bi...
On two separate streets (Bloor above, Queen below):
* https://www.fastcompany.com/3067515/why-local-businesses-sho...
Making it easier for cyclists and transit users has often been found to increase business:
> Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study. Researchers studied 14 corridors in 6 cities -- Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis -- and found such improvements had either positive or non-significant impacts on sales and employment. Essentially, adding improvements like bike lanes largely boosted business and employment in the retail and food service sectors.
* https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422151318.h...
Meta-review:
* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01441647.2021.19...
It's been 5 years and places are still closing as their leases expire. The place never really recovered and people are still complaining about it.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/02/14/reston-town-center-...
https://wjla.com/news/local/merchants-association-weekday-pa...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nova/comments/sp6hfr/clydes_reston_...
Perhaps the stats support this, we'll see (but I'm suspicious). What I am certain about is that I'll shop where there's parking for my vehicle—and that's how I go shopping. It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I've bypassed certain shops/businesses because there's either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.
I find it very hubristic to think that a single study is more valid than years of observation from people whose livelihoods depend on being right.
I forgot what city implemented this (may have been San Francisco) but they made street parking triple the price and only for 15-30 minutes. As a result businesses in front of street parking got more customers.
I'm trying to search this on google, it may have been a paper put out by strong towns. I remember an episode of econ talk discussing it here:
https://www.econtalk.org/donald-shoup-on-the-economics-of-pa...
"What if street parking was more reflective of the actual costs and drastically limited the amount of time you could park?"
Where I live now I'd suggest it's the opposite, as the cost of parking is outrageously high. What I didn't mention was that I'll also bypass the shops unless the available parking is close—almost outside the shop I'm going to—because walking time from where I park to the shop adds significantly to the expense (every moment counts)!
Some years ago I was in New York and was staggered that the price of parking there was about one third of where I live. I was so impressed (and outraged) that I took a series of photos (around 34th & 8th) then did the same here at home for comparison to ensure people would actually believe me. To ensure my locals couldn't accuse me of fudging the photos I made sure the Empire State was visible in a number of the photos (the difference in price was so great they otherwise would have through disbelief). Shame I can't post them here.
I'm the first to agree that what I do is far from ideal—clearly, using a 100kW-plus engine to propel me to my destination is inefficient but the naysayers only ever put one side of the story. Hiking parking prices to fit the need/demand is only one lopsided part of a much-needed better solution.
I honestly don't know what you're trying to insinuate outside that you own a car...
You're saying you wish you could park in front of the stores with street parking to do shopping, but lament that there's never spots available so you don't. I don't understand what you're trying to propose here.
Introducing political idealism to deliberately hurt people just because one can is counterproductive and in the long term will do more damage than good (for starters, it's extremely alienating and likely to turn people off even a quite noble cause).
I've predominately used means of transit other than cars over the last decade. That means that stores that are located more remotely with less dense parking are less likely to get my business.
In addition, "high parking" stores are very frequently built in areas where pedestrian access simply doesn't exist because of a lack of sidewalks, cross walks, etc.
I think it makes sense to accommodate both use cases by promoting centralized, density preserving parking structures even if it requires car users to walk a little further their final destination.
If there's no parking available it means that it has not been priced properly. For optimal use of parking space, at any given point it should priced such that only 85% of it is being used (thus always allowing for new arrivals), but not cheap enough so that people spend an "inordinate" amount of time taking up a spot.
See the book The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup for details and references:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
Vox has a short video on the topic:
* https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-f...
"It incorporates elements of Shoup's Georgist philosophy."
Funny that, some years back I was a member of the local Georgist group (I've even some old newsletters to prove the point—again, it's a same I can't post some front cover images here for you to see). Yes, I understand the argument well.
Again, these matters are never as simple as they first appear. For starters, these plans rarely take into account the different abilities of different citizens to physically access shops and or their actual needs when they do (how often are the forced to go shopping, etc. — say versus window shopping just for an outing).
For example, would the elderly or infirm have privilege or advantage? Would you penalize or add an extra 'flag-fall' to the parking charges of someone who usually does online shopping and has all the facilities to do so—because they could have saved the shopping trip by shopping online? Now take the case of someone who cannot do online shopping (there are many people who cannot for many reasons)—should they be subject to the same parking penalty by default? And if a differential rate were applied to advantage them then how would you police it to stop abuse?
Where I live none of these issues has been thought about let alone implemented.
The obvious question that arises is why was Henry George so popular in the 19th Century and these days so very few have even heard of him—except oddballs like me (and obviously Shoup). (Yes, I even a copy of Progress and Poverty and I've actually read it although I've not done so for at least a decade.)
If you read between the lines of my original post then you'll see my comment was pretty cynical (as well as being self-centered). Well, I thought about this at the time the Georgist Society was folding and I came to the conclusion that it's just not possible to implement Georgist ideas in a modern society without a great deal of restructuring—everything from the bottom line of banks (mortgage changes etc.) to the way our governance is done would have to change and that's a too bigger ask. Simply, the economic order would have to change and at present there's far from sufficient disruption to the present order of things for that to happen (and a lot of powerful fat cats would miss out).
Whilst many would agree in principle with Henry George's ideas there's always been something that's been holding people back from actually implementing them. I'd argue that this was true in the latter half of the 19th Century when Progress and Poverty was first published for that's when his ideas were at their most popular. I'd further argue that in the modern economic world people's beliefs about Georgist philosophy are even more antithetical in the sense that in their minds they've further separated the ideal world from the day-to-day pragmatic one. That's to say when it comes to the rights and wrongs of parking, cognitive dissonance is alive and well across large swathes of the population.
Thus, to put parking into perspective, whilst many will support Shoup's notions in theory it will be damn hard to implement them in practice. (Though I'd add a mild caveat here, I'm primarily talking about the Anglophone world here, having lived in Europe I can attest that views are somewhat different there.)
It would be interesting to psychoanalyze Shoup. I'll bet he's an idealist.
Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
And I think it's pretty apparent that quite a lot of restaurant employees rely on public transit, or feed a substantial portion of their income to one car, whose breakdown causes loss of employment. Forcing people to need cars from arbitrary point to point is a regressive tax.
they both have roads, the only difference is that the 20th century ones were built around car culture. car culture is not talking about people delivering food for the residents.
Please take five minutes to look on Google Maps before commenting about neighborhood design in a country 5000 miles away.
What are you trying to say? You obviously don't need freeways and 6 lane roads running through city centers to deliver supplies to stores and restaurants.
It would be great if even rural communities didn't need expensive, polluting cars to be able to live their lives, but AFAIK they're not a priority now. Cities are where it's all falling apart.
Obviously before cars were invented it was impossible for people in rural areas to bring food to people in urban areas, so all the people in urban areas starved to death. /s
Humans managed to feed urban areas for millennia before the internal combustion engine was invented. I'm sure if city design was changed such that people could walk, cycle, and take public transit to work and to shops, various ways of getting goods (including food) into urban areas will be thought of.
And putting emphasis on urban layouts where people can get (say) 90% of their day-to-day needs satisfied without relying on automobiles does not preclude cars being available for the remaining 10%. Such layouts simply turn cars from being a need-to-have to a nice-to-have item in one's life.
We're talking about changing the emphasis of urban design. Most "bans" on automobiles focus on person transportation vehicles, and not eliminated commercial delivery. It may in fact be easier for deliveries since all the single-passenger cars will be reduced, thus potentially lowering general traffic volumes.
See the Not Just Bikes channel for various videos by a Canadian who grew up in a car-centric suburb to people-centric Amsterdam:
Urban societies have existed for millennia, and before cars, people weren't all riding around on horses to accomplish their daily life. Personal transport was the exception, not the rule.
People in the US think that stroads and roads and cars are the only way to live, because we have outlawed other forms of living. Our lack of low-car city designs isn't because people don't want them, or because they aren't conducive to modern life, they simply don't exist because they have been banned from the marketplace.
If people really wanted to live packed together like a hive of insects, we would not have suburbs and small towns. People live in high density situations because they have (or perceive that they have) no other choice.
Places like NY have extremely high densities of cultural resources and extremely low densities of housing. This doesn't mean people like the housing, it just means people like the cultural aspects.
This begs a big question: why do we pack all of our cultural institutions into a small area? Is it more cost effective? I would have a hard time buying that due to how many restaurants, businesses, etc close in Manhattan for not being able to catch up with rent. I think it's a cyclical issue we see in other areas. Why is Shenzhen the "only" place that manufactures electronics? It is likely a network effect causing this. Factory A can sell to B, C, and D which can all sell a similar fan out. The same likely happens with cultural institutions. Starting a restaurant supply company? Well, you'll look for the place with the most restaurants. Starting a restaurant? Look for the place with the most supply companies. Want to find a place to live? Look for the place that has the best optimization of {Rent, Entertainment, Food, Employment}. For me and many others: this is NYC (actually NJ with a commute to the city).
A bigger follow up question: Does it need to be this way? I don't think it does. Living in Manhattan/Brooklyn/etc is way more expensive than living in the suburbs of NJ even factoring in double taxes and commute. I currently pay $1,500/month in rent for a 1br 1bath. A friend who lives in Brooklyn (with a 15-20 min shorter commute) pays about $3,500/month and needs to pay $300/month in an MTA card while also spending way more on groceries and cost of living stuff than I do.
If you owned your residence in a suburb even with taxes my guess is it becomes much more financially beneficial even if you need a car. If we got a little smarter and built trains, street cars, buses, subways, etc in suburban areas with sprawl we may not even need cars for most Americans.
If we have separate single-family dwellings than the damage fires and poor maintenance can cause are limited (blast radius). We can, as a society, gradually "roll-forward" new standards in electrical codes / eco friendly by renovating homes as people move.
The only reason we don't have a single family home to give to everyone who wants one is because we haven't built them. Once everything is said and done though the cost of building an apartment complex in NYC is not much cheaper once you factor in the huge fees for doing any sort of construction in NYC.
I personally think that if we, as a country, decided to build walkable small towns that were interconnected by fast moving and reliable public transit and forced businesses who could work remotely to do so many people would much rather live there than in the city.
Something doesn't add up.
I live in Bay Area and people here think that EU is a utopia where cars do not exist and everyone just walks. They have a cartoonish caricature of EU in their minds.
While I was still living in the Bay Area, once I thought I could walk from the car dealership to the rental car company, because on google maps it looked quite close... big mistake.
Oh, and potholes. I feel like it is a secret plot by the city to punish car owners.
Btw it does depend where you live but in the Netherlands you can get by without a car mostly fine if you live in a city. The biggest issue is transporting larger goods (basically any IKEA trip), but it's certainly possible (eg by renting).
Only in New York have I met someone like that here; even those who majority took public transit had cars or at least a license.
I would be curious to see what the usage patterns are. A quick google shows that the average mileage for Europeans is around 7k, while the average American drives 12k. So it would seem that Europeans drive about 60% less despite the same access to vehicles…
Asking low quality questions is poor form. Generalisation about questions: You usually improve the conversation if you do some work: for example google your questions, and post your answer if you think it is interesting to others. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb
I've seen a city center with hundreds of shops die out because businesses shut or moved to the newly built mall outside the city that has a huuge parking area.
There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.
And there will be even more accidents, pollution, traffic jams, stress, further loss of green space and social contact. And together this will cost the society more than making the original city center walkable and convenient to do business in.
> There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.
Consider this: There is no reason to build a mall anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands in the CITY.
It's funny how the alternative for having an actual, functional city center is letting it die (or not building it in the first place) and then building an alternative city center called "the mall" where people can socialize, walk around without the fear of being crushed by a 2-ton SUV, window-shop, have a lunch or watch a movie.