Cars kill cities

But in Hawaii, everyone rents a car, drives it the ten minutes from the airport to the hotel, parks it at the hotel, leaves it there for a week, then drives it back to the airport to get home.

It's a pretty funny and stark reminder of the completely different mindset and attitude towards cars that most americans have. Having a car is so deeply ingrained that the alternatives don't have a chance.

People living in the center either complain their asses off, or ditch the car.

I'm not sure that this really helped people much. Ditching the car means you can't go visit your grandma in that village without a train station on the other side of the country easily. Keeping the car means everything sucks (super-expensive, no place to put it, takes ages to get from your house to the highway). Real solution: keep the car and move away from the city center, the exact opposite from what the OP is suggesting.

Long story short, I doubt there is a simple solution. Back in those wonderful old days, everybody lived 2 miles from their grandmas anyway.

(there probably are plenty non-simple solutions though)

I worked on this set of visualizations on traffic in the center of Madrid a few years ago: http://trsp.net/cow

I found the numbers stunning. Some avenues had an average of 100k vehicles driving through daily.

I've since moved to San Francisco, and find that traffic in US cities is less painful, the cities' grids and sidewalks are better prepared. But still, it's ridiculous how much freedom cars are given. A few months ago traffic in Valencia St, one of the nicest streets in the Mission, was cut off, and it was bliss to take a walk there, even though the street was super crowded. At least some streets should always be traffic free, I dont think it's that much effort to ask, and the benefits in quality of living are tremendous.

Those parking lots are not for cars, they are for flipping real estate.

Real estate in midtown has been booming for a little over a decade as small run down buildings are demolished and 10 ~ 40 story skyscrapers are built. That means huge increases in land value, which attracts speculation. When a lot with a small building is purchased, what happens next? If the building stays, it will have to be serviceable, and a tenant found, which will lock the property up until the tenant leaves. So the building has to go, and the property might need to be re-zoned from single family residential.

If you pave over that lot, not only do you remove unwanted structures and get the opportunity to re-zone, there will be some low-maintenance passive income generated from people using the property to park their car.

So ultimately, those parking lots are good for the city in the long run. They're useless eyesores right now, but are more easily converted into high density buildings, as they have been doing for the last decade. In fact the real problem with midtown is that there has been too much high density construction too quickly, and not enough people have moved in yet.

So as much as I love a naval gazing rant, reality is a little more subtle, and a lot more complicated.

A large portion of current urban plans date to Robert Moses - he essentially built New York, invented the ring of highways system used in DC and other places, and advised places like LA in constructing their major arteries. Moses was in love with cars, but never experienced traffic as his limo was chauffered with a police escort. He built highways and made them inaccessible to public transportation (see the West Side Highway) so that poor people could not use them. He had no real understanding of capacity utilization/maximization for transport and stopped learning long before he stopped designing. He never updated his understanding of the damages caused by simply adding more highways, but retained the power to keep building them.

The most pernicious impact of Moses's style of urban planning is not, however, gridlock or a lack of walkability. Moses decided that he could put roads wherever he wanted, and used eminent domain to put them right through vibrant communities - which he destroyed. He killed the bronx, parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and almost ran a huge raised highway across 34th street.

In any case, The Power Broker is an amazing book to read if you're curious about these issues and why cities are designed the way they are now.

Aside from that, these sorts of analyses ignore the many benefits that cars provide and the many downsides of public transit. You aren't going to get people to switch just by pointing out how much more efficient something is, you have to make it actually better.

When I have to commute I prefer to do so by bus, but there are still a ton of use cases for local travel where I would only consider mass transit as an absolute last resort due to the intrinsic advantages/disadvantages.

Australia is very much like California. Population density is low. Almost all of Australia is car dependent. Land sizes are large. This makes public transport largely uneconomic and unworkable, with certain exceptions (eg parts of Perth, inner Sydney, Melbourne). Even then, that transport is largely limited to going into and out of the city. If you want to go somewhere else it's a huge problem.

Gas taxes are much higher in Australia (petrol costs $1.40-1.50 per litre last I saw and there are ~4 litres to the gallon). I'm not sure if this covers the cost of roads and infrastructure (for the quarter acre dream) but I highly doubt it, especially once you factor in indirect costs.

London is a mix of inner London where public transport is very good and outer London (Zone 5+) where you are car dependent but you absolutely can get away with using car rental when you need it most of the time. The problem is public transport largely stops at midnight (apart from night buses).

Personally I found the light rail in Cologne (and Bonn) great and never felt the lack of a car.

You absolutely do not need a car in Zurich or pretty much all but rural Switzerland. Intracity and intercity transport is superb. Even getting to ski resorts by train/bus is fine.

Which brings me to NYC. NYC for me has the ultimate public transportation system. It's cheap, goes almost everywhere, runs 24 hours a day (HUGELY important IMHO) and unlike every other example listed above, cabs are actually relatively cheap, although there are oddities to the system (eg the peculiarities of shift change make it somehow impossible to get a cab to the airport in Manhattan at 3pm).

NYC also has an extremely large commuter belt covered by trains and buses such that no one I know drives into the city for work.

I live 7 minutes walk to work, which I love. Actually the idea for me is about 20-30 minutes walk each way because that's just about the right balance between time taken and getting some exercise (IMHO), particularly for us engineers.

What I don't see in this thread is the issue of people (like me) who don't have the option of driving a car. For this reason I can see myself largely living in either NYC or one of several European cities.

Charging homeowners fairly for their infrastructure costs is a hugely divisive and problematic issue. For example, hiking gas taxes would have all sorts of unintended consequences, not the least of which is inflation (since that cost is built into transporting food and everything else).

It seems fair(er) to build maintenance costs into property taxes and initial capital costs into land costs.

Peak oil [1] is either here or soon will be (IMHO we've already passed it). Arguably cities produce lower per-capita carbon footprints [2]. At some point people are going to need to realize that their gas-guzzling ways can't (and won't) continue forever.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/01/nature-journal-study-pe...

[2]: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/31/new-study-shows-t...

After moving down south I realized how little social interaction I get outside my specifically chosen work group or actively seeking out social engagements. Mass transportation is sparse at best here and walking to the dry cleaners would take half a day.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/17/parking-dat...

Basically, all 3 cities had been steadily increasing the number of parking spots they had, until Cambridge deviated and banned creating new parking spots. Cambridge grew much faster than the other two after this change was made, and the chart correlated fairly closely. This may have been because of rent-control or other issues but the case for parking rules is strong.

Automated taxis solve the problem. They will spend much less time idle, can be parked more compactly, don't need to be parked near a destination, and can have a size distribution that matches the needs of individual trips (i.e., mostly very small.) If they're cheap enough, then they'll be widely used, and wait times will be small. Because they will be automated, they can be taken in and out of service very quickly, and there will always be about the right number available. Also, they'll be much safer for cyclists and pedestrians to share the road with, and they'll use less of the existing road space, allowing us to add and widen bike lanes throughout our cities.

All of these reasons for needing a car are caused by infrastructure to support cars. Therefore the only way to break this cycle for the public good is to make driving less economic. Gas tax seems like the obvious choice, but it is usually not done because of purported public opinion. But really it actually would be fair as onemoreact said the maintenance for roads is so expensive, that without gas tax you are really just subsidizing driving.

Cars improve the lives of drivers with increased range movement, more time independent movement (start your journey when it suits you, not when a timetable allows you to) and allow for more freight to be carried.

When cars are criticized for bringing down the quality of life it is mostly an issue in urban environments. People in rural or suburban areas rely heavily on cars. The car may even have saved the quality of life in rural areas (ie stopped/slowed down the flight from those areas into cities) while it's what makes the existance of modern suburbia possible. It therefor provides cheaper housing and a broader choice of how you want to live (Not everybody needs five starbucks and a movie theatre in the neighbourhood). They also slowed the population increase of cities.

Adding costs to drivers in urban areas mean higher burdens for people that have to commute by car, since suburban/rural areas are too thinly populated to allow for efficient public transportation.

The quality of life argument often tends to demonize technological progress and romanticizes the past. The funny thing is, that this romance is only possible because technologies provided us with spare time. So did motorization. People who lived back then, would have always opted for the new technologies.

That being said, cars do decrease urban quality of life in certain ways. But it is important to not let generalization allow for bad policies. Light Rail for instance is alwas proposed, while it costs more than individual motorized traffic and while rail tracks usually decrease nearby quality of life more than any road could.

I'd propose simpler measures:

1) stop providing free parking. Allow the parking space usage to be priced at what the value of that land would have provided in real property taxes, if it had been tilled with a house. There's an interesting book about the "cost of free parking" by an UCLA Professor http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

2) get rid of cab driving restrictions to dramatically lower cab fair prices. cities with limited amounts of cab driving licenses have higher fair costs. A NY cab medallion is considered a better investment than gold http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/ny-cab-medallions-w...

3) If property owners where to decide, they'd propably opt more likely for narrowing the streets and expanding sidewalks as it would increase their properties value. BID (business improvement districts) often do this. Enable more owners to make those decisions.

4) start with yourself and ditch your car if you don't need it. Do you really need more range? Do you really need to be able to start your journey every minute and not just every 10 minutes. And do you always need to be able to haul up to 4 fridges? And thus do

5) car sharing. i'm a very satisfied user of http://www.car2go.com/ and similar services.

6) if there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are, this need could have already been eliminated by using more buses for public transport.

Rush hour traffic in the center of Amsterdam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

It is really striking to see how many bicycles and buses there are.

As I live in Norway I'm seeing a stronger focus on public transport here as well, but nothing compared to e.g. Amsterdam or Copenhagen in Denmark.

Likewise in the city a car sharing service that worked like that would be great. We need the car to visit our son's grandparents, and paying by the hour would easily come to 20 to 30€ per visit, while the car is mostly just sitting there waiting.

Meanwhile I can only wait for autonomous cabs, I suppose :-(

I'm walking more, which is healthier, have no need to find parking, which is less stressful, and no need to pay loan-payments/gas, which saves me a ton of money every month.

Halving density increases average distance by sqrt(2), not double.

I agree that they can be a burden if you live in a major city with an average or slightly-above average income because parking becomes an issue. However, I am probably not on the same page as everyone else because I'm a huge automotive enthusiast. I'm the kind of guy that would go on vacation to go driving in another area. I could easily spend more money on renting an exotic car than what I would pay for the hotel. Nurburgring anyone?

Just because you live in a certain area where walking from A to B is possible or even preferred, doesn't mean the rest should/can follow. I live in Kansas City, a place where owning a vehicle isn't a convenience, but a necessity. My residential neighborhood doesn't have any sidewalks to any convenience stores or main roads. I have to walk on a narrow two-way road, which is a tragedy waiting to happen. I simply cannot WALK anywhere. I could opt-in for public transport, which happens to be very inefficient because nobody uses it, and wait 40-50 minutes for a bus to arrive. The irritating thing is that I'd have to drive to the closest bus station. This scenario is pretty typical for most suburban neighborhoods in KC. I even tried biking at some point, but people here just don't understand it. They'll honk at you, flip you off, run you off the road or throw stuff at you.

Commuting by foot has never been popular here. Therefore, the city infrastructure never saw the need to support it and likely never will, unless people start mass-croaking from heart failure. So, when someone start a BS rant about cars killing cities and the need to abolish personal transport, I immediately close the browser tab. You guys need a reality check.

Of course, what I'm saying is science fiction, we don't have self-driving cars capable of driving 30mph to pick us up.

http://udacity.com

I'm pretty sure that buses, delivery trucks, ambulances, and police cars need roads, so a significant fraction of the road cost (in cities) is required even if there isn't a single private passenger car.

I do take some issue with the title of this article however. Whilst agreeing with the general sentiment of the article (US cities need to generally focus on more accessible development), cars dont 'kill' cities. Cities couldn't survive without cars (and trucks) - this is important. Cars kill pedestrianisation, but this is a different story - only small parts of our cities (even European cities) are (and have to be) attractive and enjoyable for pedestrians....

As a resident of Atlanta, I disagree with many of the assumptions this article makes.

http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB_5TBZQNRY

Also the cars are automated - self driving. They don't have to deal with pedestrians and traffic, so much easier to automate driving.

"How the Dutch got their cycle paths" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o

Most cars sit idle and unoccupied for 90-95% of the time. That represents a huge opportunity to increase the productivity of each car while reducing the price of access and the cost in money and wasted space of storage (i.e. parking).

The solution is called "jitney transit". It is illegal due to taxi medallion laws. So the real problem is special-interest groups (such as taxi cartels)—and a political system that encourages their formation.

The bus and bikes are at full capacity. The Cars are at 1/5th capacity.

Do you think you are living a "cars nightmare", then believe when I say this: "Never come here pals!".

Civic/Vial culture is absolutely absent. Public transport is a surreal dream, I would say... an adventure (not an enjoyable one).

"Urban planning" is not a known term for people on charge.

We are a troubled city in a troubled world.

In short, create a new manhattan on a desolate location, and the increase in real estate prices could be extreme.

"Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo

For example, if it would take 20 minutes in a car vs 1 hour in a bus I've saved 40 minutes. If I bill at $75/h that's $50 worth of time or $100 round trip (assuming I work instead). Do that a few times a month and the car has paid for itself.

You can make a reasonably well working mass transit that everyone will use. People would still buy cars to stay in traffic for hours.

But the real long-scale problem is that cities discourage children. People living in a big city tend to have two to zero children and that makes country population unsustainable. On the upside, you can always find a good school for your few children if you care.

In recent times I don't see many children on the streets. It seems that children are being turned into indoors pets. This is sad. Adults feel obliged to drive children around to their activities. The pedophile hysteria being promoted by media doesn't help either.

In other word, it's sad.

It would also seem city planners design municipalities for cars first, not people. But it's bad planning for everyone, and even bad for business: http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are...

You say you like tall buildings? Then enjoy your damn traffic and shut up.