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Edit: when people advocate to remove cars, I take it as removing cars as a viable option of transport and then designing the roads, public transport, facility placement, etc to make that a reality.
Take a look at your assumptions.
There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers. EVs are solving the first one, and self-driving will solve the second one.
Think about children! They are stripped of the independence of move, because they can not drive a car. And everything is so far away (school, after-school activities, friends places) so it takes forever to go there by foot/public transit.
And self-driving cars seem nowhere near the production-ready deployment. It's very strange to rely on a solution which may be probably somewhere in the future. Why don't you mention a teleport then?
Self-driving cars will solve that with this decade.
No we don't. Taxis are not a solution because they are INCREDIBLY dirty. You might as well be riding on train-cars worth of coal.
And public transit is worse, because it's inevitably slow and inflexible.
Edit: taxis are expensive not because they are cars, but because they need dedicated drivers. And here in the US even taxi drivers earn a somewhat liveable salary, and as a result they have a huge carbon footprint. But if you're OK with semi-slave labor, then it can work, agreed.
Public transit is excellent when you design for it. It can be fast and flexible. The problem is when the implementation is half hearted. Transit systems are things that become better with scale. The more you invest in them, they better they get.
When you say that "they are trying to push people into dense cities". One should read as "I want the govt to continue subsidizing construction of roads and suburbs.". Because can you really afford that lifestyle without making the ends meet, if you will have to fully pay for all of that?
And will you be able to easily afford a self-driving car, if that will ever come to existence?
And don't you think that you will fully own your self-driving car with open-source firmware running onboard? Most likely you won't. Think more of a subscription-based self-driving feature, which will have unpredictable pricing, and mandatory always-online. Do you really want that "freedom"?
Put another way: car-driven development induces desire for sprawl, but living patterns reveal actual preferences here.
That's fine in an ideal world when you have a low population density and consistent or declining population.
The reality is sprawl in the US coincides with population growth or migration quite often. Person 1 moves to a place where they can be far from people, have a nice forest behind their home, and have open roads. While the distance from their home to their destination is long, the roads are empty so it's stress free driving.
Persons 2 through 300000 think that sounds great, so they move there as well. They all want to be far from people and have empty roads, so they abandon their 30 minute train commute for free living in the city.
The forest behind Person 1's home gets chopped down and replaced by a packed suburb. The main road Person 1 took is now packed with traffic from the other people that moved there dreaming of his lifestyle. His 25 minute smooth commute is now 80 minutes. Construction is constantly ongoing to widen the roads to handle more traffic, instead of reduce the source of the traffic, and this makes traffic worse due to lanes being shut down. Roads quickly become full after construction ends, resulting in more traffic.
This is the story of basically any city in America since the 1950s. People want more space and the freedom to drive to work, and end up in a packed neighborhood and whining about traffic when everyone else follows them. Someone who gets their first taste of it thinks "wow, this is great!" But it's becoming a nightmare for people who moved there 10 years prior. And it'll transition into a nightmare 10 years later for those who are loving it now. The nice nature gets knocked down and you're back to living in a space with too many people, but with none of the benefits of a proper city. You can't walk 2 minutes to a dozen different restaurants, relax by the river, or sit down on transport and read a book while going somewhere. You're stuck in traffic while every tree around you is being chopped down.
And because HN is mostly programmers, most people here probably love the sprawl because they work from home and don't need to wake up at 6 AM to sit in traffic and huff car exhaust from 7 AM to 8:25 AM and arrive at the office at 8:30. But millions in the US are trapped in that loop.
To give you a perspective, one mile of NYC subway now costs about as much as 1000 miles of 6-lane freeway. One mile of new light rail in Seattle will be enough to maintain all roads in Washington state for half a year.
The same story for water, sewer, and electricity. Dense cities are _incredibly_ expensive to maintain because projects become extremely complicated, with lots of project management overhead (more people-hours). And people are EXPENSIVE, compared to raw materials.
Dense cities are common around the world. In most of them, the infrastructure is not particularly expensive.
Finland is tiny. Even Helsinki is a bit less dense than Seattle, and almost 10 times less dense than Manhattan.
So yep, sparse cities are much cheaper and efficient than dense cities. That's exactly my point. The sparser, the better.
Typical Helsinki consists of medium-density residential areas separated by large parks and forested areas. The urban core is dense but not particularly tall. The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
"Urban areas" are poorly defined in many cases. In some cases (e.g. "Greater Houston Area") they match what people think about "Houston", Seattle metro area does not.
> The kind of suburban sprawl you often see in American cities, with massive areas with a low population density but little undeveloped land, is largely missing.
Yes, and? Helsinki is still sparsely populated, so new infrastructure is cheap enough. The costs go up, once the density increases.
Population density figures should be reported as averages over people rather than averages over land. They are usually not, because it's difficult to calculate them that way. If you have a residential area with 20k people in a square mile next to an undeveloped square mile, the population density is usually reported as 10k people / square mile. But from the perspective of the people living there, as well as for the purposes of infrastructure construction, the actual population density is closer to 20k people / square mile.
At some scale we aggregate processing and trade latency for bandwidth (busy poll versus hardware interrupts). We trade the ability for everyone to start their journey _right now_ for the ability for lots more of us to get to our destination via a common carriage (be this packets or people the pattern is the same).
Where land is cheap and commuter traffic isn't an issue maybe roads make sense but that doesn't mean sprawl is cheap in time-spent.
The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
(This is true even when the subway is obscenely expensive to construct, as the 2nd Avenue line is. But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.)
It's not.
> The amortized cost of a commuter journey on the subway is a tiny fraction of the cost of and on roads, for all parties.
Nope. Roads in sparse cities are cheaper on per-commute and the building cost.
> But treating deep-tunnel construction under some of the densest and most expensive real estate in the US as the norm is essentially dishonest.
Why? Ever-rising costs is the inevitable result of densification.
Roads are cheap on paper, and expensive per commuter-mile. Mass transit is expensive on paper, and cheap per commuter-mile, especially in dense cities.
Well, Houston carries about the same number of commuters. At a fraction of the cost.
I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips.
> Scale matters, and mass transit is the definition of scale.
Yes, and multi-dozen billion dollar corruption on public projects is also the definition of scale.
> I genuinely don’t believe that Houston carries “about the same number of commuters” as the NYC subway. It has a quarter as many people; you should cite a source. I can’t find one for that.
I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
That's just the subway. Add another 100 million for MNRR and LIRR, plus another 100 million for PATH and NJT. And those are all post-COVID numbers; you can roughly double each to get an actual picture for the volume of mass transit needed to run NYC.
> I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston".
The NYC Combined Statistical area has 23 million people in it[1]. Nearly as many people commute into just Manhattan as live in the actual city of Houston[2]. You simply do not get those numbers with road-based transit.
It doesn't matter how you cut this: Houston is operating at a fractional scale, and will continue to do so as long as roads dominate its development patterns. Houston's government appears to be aware of this[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
[2]: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhatt...
Is that freeway going through the middle of the city? I think not. Any construction in a dense city becomes expensive. But you need to divide that by the number of people using it as well. Everyone in the city can use a subway. Only that one house on top of the hill is using this pretty expensive road that goes to the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere.
Dude, that's literally the point I'm trying to make. Thank you.
But yes, living spacious with a private garden and not to close to your neighbors is very nice. I would love to have both.
And?
> it requires a lot more energy
This is the _only_ problem, and it's being solved by switching to EVs. They are more effective than buses and are competitive with rail.
And the household energy use can be offset by solar energy (individual houses are great for it!).
> and it makes using healthier transportation like walking and cycling a lot more difficult.
I can get my 10k a day steps in a nice sprawl with shady tree lanes much easier than in Manhattan.
Are you allowed to have shady trees on road sides? I would think that they would be disallowed since they block visibility and force drivers to slow down.
That's true. I would rather live in a house that's more spacious than not. But more than that, I would rather live in a house that allows me to buy an ice cream if I have 5 minutes of free time than in one that makes that ice cream buying an hour long trip filled with smoke and noise.
You can have spacious houses without having to live all alone.
> There are some problems with cars: gasoline use and general unsafety due to human drivers.
You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient. I don't have the exact numbers but you can fit way more people in a bus than you can a car. And of course, you can fit even more people on the street if they are walking on their own feet.
> EVs are solving the first one
They may solve the gasoline problem but they aren't solving the space one.
> self-driving will solve the second one
I am not gonna hold my breath.
There is another way that could solve both of those problems, you know. Make cities more compact. With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much. And if all your destinations are close by, there is no need to allow cars to go to 100 KMpH. In fact, limiting intra-city driving to be under 60 (or lower) KMpH would be safer, fuel efficient, and less noisy (I think). You could even make the roads thinner then since everyone is moving at a slow speed, which opens up more space inside the city.
But that's not true even for most of the very dense Manhattan!
But if you relax your 5 minutes requirement to 15 minutes, then you can do that _anywhere_ in Salt Lake City.
> You missed another problem with cars: they are space inefficient.
Again, so what?
> With compact cities, you don't need to drive that much.
Sorry, but that's a total :facepalm:
You simply can not drive efficiently in dense cities, because of everybody else!
If you are in a dense city, you don't need to drive at all. If my workplace and my house were separated by an hour of driving and no transit means other than a road, then I would have to drive. Along with the thousands of others who also have to live so far away from their offices. I live a 10 minute walk from my office. I don't even own a car (or any vehicle, for that matter)! Neither do at least half of the other people who live nearby. While the rest of the people are stuck in 10 minutes of traffic jam, I can walk through them and relax in my air conditioned cubicle.
I do not know Manhattan. I do not live in Manhattan. I live in India. I have lived in my hometown, and in Delhi and Hyderabad (two very big cities). I can only talk about the specific areas within those cities. I can definitely buy ice cream within 5 minutes of walking. And not even fast walking.
It gives the commons the freedom of movement, it's hard to control them when they live and work where they please. Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
That was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious; though I'm fairly sure a number of the people with anti-car agendas actually believe this.
If you're living in an exurb that's becoming suburbia, and the city propose you to close your septic tank and attach yourself to the suburb water management, only do it if you really, really trust your local politicians. And I mean, really.
Wow. Toxic propaganda is really successful.
If you read ACTUAL analyses, the dense cities are not really that more efficient: https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/5/3/69
In particular, water and sewer costs don't go down a lot. An anecdote: I live in Seattle which is fairly dense, yet my sewer+water costs 5 _times_ more than in sprawling Boise, ID.
My mother used to live in a small village near a small city, an exurb. Now, it's becoming suburbia, but not the good kind, the 'full detached home' kind (not joking, there isn't even a single semi-detached home here). I see how it changed everything, in the wrong direction. It killed the local bar/dinner in exchange for a monstrosity old people cannot access. It killed the community, the traffic tripled, you had to attach yourself to waste management (and now they have issues). My mother had to add a wall/fence to break the sound of the road, when trees and plants were sufficient, and during rush hour you still feel like you live in a city, without the city access advantages.
I would typically call most of Seattle suburbia. It does not seems as sprawly than Stockton (that I actually visited unlike Seattle), but it doesn't look good.
Also, high rise is as bad as suburbia in my opinion, I hate it with less passion because I only had to live in high rise building temporarily. But the cost each time you rise 3 meters is exponential for everything (except electricity), so if your city is 10% high rise, 80% detached/semi-detached homes, no shit it'll be expensive.
Is Boise, ID a suburban sprawl? Or is it a fairly dense city without a shit ton of high-rise units?
Seattle is 8000 people per square mile, Boise is 3000 people per square mile.
I don't know why, I end up on French Wikipedia when searching for known US cities. I'm sorry, I'll be careful next time
> These results indicate that a 10% increase in density would reduce operational costs for fire protection by 1.3%, streets and highways by 2.7%, sewer by 3.1%, etc.
Not sure about you, but this is the exact opposite of "doesn't go down a lot".
If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income:
* https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/lafayette-la/ * https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/ * https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/south-bend-in/
Not only do these show the urban areas being much more efficient, the suburban areas are so inefficient they're not even breaking even.
> Holcombe and Williams [25] found mixed results. They found that for cities with population less than 500,000, higher population density was associated with lower per capita expenditures on highways and sewers, but this relationship did not hold for larger cities. Further, per capita expenditures on services, such as police, increased with density for cities with population above 500,000, and there was no relationship for smaller cities. Their general conclusion was that for cities larger than 50,000, per capita expenditures are not associated with density. Further research by Holcombe and Williams [26] found no relationship between sprawl and highway expenditures and, actually, a positive relationship between population density and highway expenditures.
...
> Fewer studies have shown reductions in costs for water, sewer, or sold waste, though this may be expected. Some costs have also been shown to increase with density, such as housing and community development or police.
My own research (will publish on Github once I validate it) finds similar results. Municipalities peak in efficiency around 100-200k people.
> If you want actual urban-to-suburban comparisons there's the case studies done by urban3 who map fine-grained expenditure and tax income
Woohoo. Yet another propaganda outlet. Note that it tracks _tax_ _income_, which is misleading. It's skewed towards Downtowns, simply because that's where companies are registered and pay taxes. But people who _work_ there don't typically live nearby.
In fact, if you look at total _personal_ income taxes per zip code collected in the US, it's not even close. Suburbs are paying for most of the US.
My reasons for being anti-car is simple. Where I grew up, residential and commercial areas don't have much separation. My own family runs a small cloth retail business right out of our house. There are grocery shops, barbers, electricians, everything you might need right outside of my house. If I wake up in the morning and realise I am out of tooth paste, I don't even need to open my eyes. I can just walk outside and buy it.
My sister moved to a bigger city. She owns an apartment in a pretty big complex. It has, like, 30 towers, 10 floors each, with 10 apartments on each floor, each one being nearly as big as my own home. But, since its a residential complex, any commercial activities are not allowed inside. Since its so big, it had to be built outside the city limits. Now imagine if she's in my situation. She would have to take a car, drive for at least 20 mins, then another 20 back, all the while dealing with the disgusting feeling of unbrushed teeth.
Or perhaps, she has a kid. He's very young, let's say 10. If the shop was right outside, he would be able to go and buy the toothpaste. Now with the whole driving problem in between, he can't do anything other than complain about the lack of toothpaste.
> Controlling the commons becomes much easier when they are densely packed into singular locations.
Please explain what kind of control you are talking about here. In my opinion, it would easier to control them when they are so spread out. You can easily target one single house when it has its section of the road, its own utility connections, etc. It would be a lot harder to single out a single dissident when it would mean harming many other neutrals and turning them into dissidents as well.
In what universe has it failed? Certainly not this one.
Go and do that.
Things like: going grocery shopping, going to sports/hobbies activities, entertainment, going out to restaurants and bars, meeting friends at parks, etc.
So I did something else: dropped random points inside the cities and plotted routes between them using biking, transit, or cars. In every city I tested (even Berlin!), cars win. And often by 3-5 _times_.
It's understandable, transit is optimized towards traveling to a small number of destinations (typically Downtowns) and lateral travel is often hard.
To try it out I just plotted a simple route from Schöneberg to Mauerpark, it takes ~42 min with transit, ~28 min with a car. With a car you need to find parking (and pay for parking). The same route is ~32 min on a bike.
From Charlottenburg to Lichtenberg (cross city) it's around ~42 min on a car, ~1h10m with transit + walk, or ~1h on a bike. Again, without factoring in times for parking, etc.
Those car trips are estimates with no traffic on a Saturday noon, any other time with more traffic and these estimates should get ~20-30% longer.
> even this activity adds more mileage to your car.
Why should you care about that?