New data shows walking down 36% in USA since 2019
traffictechnologytoday.com
traffictechnologytoday.com
I live in a country where the public transport is excellent (Switzerland). The US sounds like a nightmare to me.
When you drive, you can't step into the dining car and grab some lunch and a beer while you catch up on podcasts as the scenery goes passing by, like you can in a long distance train.
When you're stuck with a car you can't make day walking trips from village to village, unless you plan to make a circle to get back to your car. Doing something like the Pilgrims’ Way, a 10 day pilgrimage walk from Winchester to Canterbury, is right out.
Gud is from Switzerland, where there is no need to pick someone up from the airport because all of the airports have excellent transit connections.
I guess you won't visit a random restaurant or historical site in Zermatt, as that's one of the car-free places in Switzerland, and the train you'll take likely won't have the temperature set at the warmth you require.
When you're in a place built for cars, you expect stores to be far away, so need to buy in bulk since you only want to shop for a week. When you are on a place built for walking, stores are also in walking distance, and you can easily go every day or two. But even if you don't want that, grocery stores can deliver - friends of mine in the UK got a bulk Tesco delivery every week.
For that matter, the last few times we got furniture we paid someone to move it for us - I've never had a car big enough to move more than a couple of chairs or some flat pack box from IKEA.
The US has "soccer moms" because their younger teens essentially require a chauffeur to do any after-school activity. For some that idea of being chained to the kids' free time activities is great, to others it's a nightmare. In places with good mass transit, kids have more freedom to travel on their own and be independent.
I dunno. It seems like the Europeans I know have done a lot of things. It helps they have 4-6 weeks of vacation time. And Portugal to Norway is quite a long way.
And, cars take time. They need to be maintained, you need figure out insurance, if there's something wrong you need to get it fixed, and have backup transportation. You've got to deal with traffic jams, you've got to figure who is the DD for the night if you go out drinking with friends, if you get kids you might have to buy a new car - it's an endless list things.
Almost everywhere has buses. What does it take to make them better? How do we know that will work? How much does it cost and how do we make it happen?
they also tax gas heavily, which we don't do (and probably should)
Put the United States in a dryer on high.
"On average, as of April 2019, state and local taxes and fees add 34.24 cents to gasoline and 35.89 cents to diesel, for a total US volume-weighted average fuel tax of 52.64 cents per gallon for gas and 60.29 cents per gallon for diesel" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
In 2019 gasoline wholesale price was around $1.80 - https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
0.5264 /1.8 = 30%
New York Harbor Conventional Gasoline Regular Spot Price FOB is US$2.61 per gallon today - https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=gasoline .
.5264 /2.61 = 20%
Note that the wholesale price does not include the cost to deliver to the gas station or nor storage and dispensing costs at the station, so the percentage at point of sale will be slower than these numbers.
Cigarettes are not a universal good. There is a federal excise tax on cigarettes of $1.01 per pack and state taxes from $0.17/pack in Missouri to $5.35/pack in New York, plus possible city taxes. "As of 2011, Phillip Morris lists total government revenue, including federal, state, local, and sales taxes, as 55% of the estimated retail price of a pack of cigarettes in the United States" and "[WHO] estimates that taxes make up 42.5% of the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the U.S." Numbers and quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_....
That is nearly 100% of the base cost.
Some cities have an extra tax on sugary drinks. Also not a universal good. "Kaplan and his colleagues found that, on average, prices for sugar-sweetened drinks went up by 33.1%". https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/06/1223243...
Note that the additional 33% is on top of sales tax, meaning the total tax on sugary drinks was more than 33%.
So both cigarettes and sugary drinks (in some areas) have a higher tax rate than gasoline.
Bear in mind that some of the fuel tax is used defray the high cost of car infrastructure; "defray" because most of the infrastructure cost is paid by sources other than fuel taxes.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/04/29/mexico-city-bus-rapid-t...
We need to rebuild our cities. Eliminating cars and adding sidewalks isn't enough; without density, you have nowhere to walk to, and transit doesn't scale.
So I am going to buy a detached home as that is the only way for me to fully decide the maintenance of my property.
The few years I spent in somewhat small town College Station, I tried using a bike. For the most part I was biking on the sidewalk because the (often drunk) kids raised trucks would never even notice a civic in front of them leave alone a bike.
There was one particular intersection which led to a highway ramp, and it had a pedestrian walk signal. I have spent up to 15 minutes for at least one driver to notice I’m waiting here to cross on the walk, hundreds of cars will pass by me taking a right on this signal without ever seeing I’m waiting to cross. So why do you think anyone who’s not homeless would keep doing that?
Some people might like the city life and choose not to get a car, and that's great. They should do that.
As long as neither group is forced to subsidize the other, I don't see why we can't all get what we want.
I think we can start by just building it. Make it fast, reliable, and safe. Make it go places people want to go. Make it go to the grocery store, airport, and random blocks across the entire area. Look to what we did 100 years ago when a train station was a palace of transport, not a dingy slab of concrete. People want alternatives, they just want better ones than what we have now.
The calculation becomes more complicated: a smaller car is likely cheaper to operate for L, and the cost savings over using a bigger car for L may be enough to pay for a taxi or ride-hail for the occasional times you need a bigger car for dinner, or to pay for a rental car for a vacation trip, or to pay for delivery if you need a large volume purchase.
The US is 7th for GDP per capita among nations.
It is 59th among nations for life expectancy.
These are policy choices, not individual choices.
The mandate is accomplished with parking minimums, federal highway subsidies.
I cannot find an apartment in my community that does not have a parking space--it has been illegal to build such a unit of housing for decades.
The amount of publicly owned real estate that is given for free to car owners to store their cars is worth trillions.
And you tell me I'm being paternalistic :)
"Why shouldn't they buy cars if they want cars?" is a loaded question.
Why do they 'want' cars? For many people it is the only reasonable means of transport. We know even from comments in this thread that some of the people who "want" cars now would prefer alternatives.
When you speak of force, remember that alternatives were often taken away by force, as when a walkable part of town (often where poor and/or black people lived) was torn up to create a highway.
Speaking of paternalism; zoning, backed by the force of law, prevents people from building a granny flat, and prevents someone from converting their garage into a neighborhood corner shop. Paternalism is why we have so many outsized parking space mandates. Paternalism is why modern suburban sprawl is subsidized over old-style compact and walkable so-called streetcar suburbs.
If you are really against paternalism, help get rid of these paternalistic zoning laws, like laws which end up forcing most people to live in single family homes even when they would not want to pay for such expensive housing if other options existed. (And no, not all zoning laws are paternalistic. Don't build a toxic chemical processing plant in a residential area.)
Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots.
You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks.
Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises.
Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability.
The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.
But on the flip side, some are spending that saved commuting time on exercising more, and are healthier for the change.
Even the uptick in 2022 can be explained with 'well we were coming out of a pandemic, and there was an RTO push, but still bad habits are from before are hard to break'.
This is how almost every research publication in every field - from medicine, through psychology, to computer science looks like.
The article talked about trips -- but I didn't see any differentiation between commutes to work and walking in the park, for example.
Poking a little further, it sounds as if they're aggregating smartphone data, though we're not told much about how they get it, or how they adjust for people walking with or without their phones on.
As a driver and pedestrian, I swear I see people staring at their phones while driving.
Probably need phone cupholders — phone locks up unless it’s mounted in its slot and enters CarPlay mode. Have to do it for passengers too, since can’t differentiate
I bought a used car last year that came with 20% all around, and I removed it from the front windows almost immediately. It was so insanely hard to see outside at night properly, especially in dim or unlit areas. How do people with less than that see? I guess they don’t.
There was a decent amount of _talk_ for some time by mostly fringe figures. What major police departments were in _any_ way defunded by any stretch? None. Not one.
> along with decriminalization of “urban camping” around the same time
Again, where and exactly how?
What actually happened is largely that conservative news spent the year talking up crime and blaming the non-existent increase on their favored political foes.
> With public pressure on them, mayors and city councils responded. In 2020 budget votes, advocacy groups won over $840m in direct cuts from US police departments
> Portland, Oregon, cut $15m from its budget
> Austin, Texas, has made some of the most dramatic changes in the country, directly cutting roughly $20m from the police department
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...
1. https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/homeless/austin-camp...
However, compared to 2021, 18 metros observed an increase in walking activity in 2022, with California metros dominating nine out of the top ten spots. New York City ranked 10th
> there’s a noticeable rise in biking trips while pedestrian activity is dwindling as a portion of overall trips.
Beyond that, this seems highly relevant:
> Alarmingly, pedestrian fatalities rose during this period
Maybe we haven't actually made any walkable cities
> Despite this, there’s a noticeable rise in biking trips while pedestrian activity is dwindling as a portion of overall trips.
They cite StreetLight Data as their source. Per GCN (which cites the same source)
> bicycle trips in the US have increased by 37% from 2019 to 2022
GCN is obviously also going to have some kind of bias, but the TTI article clearly does as well.
https://www.globalcyclingnetwork.com/general/news/in-the-us-...
When I lived in Germany, I'd see little towns of a few hundred people that were more dense and walkable than US cities 100x their size.
And bikability is even worse, sub-garbage level. People don't do it because it appears to be insanely dangerous because our infrastructure is generally shit tier, like painted bike lanes (though off street trails are often okay, where they exist).
People are mostly rational when choosing day to day transportation options. If biking was supported well they'd do it. But it's not, so they don't.
All the "Vision Zero" announcements were mostly politicians doing politician things with no real oomph behind them. There are things that can be done quickly and effectively, but the political will usually isn't there due to our horrible cultural momentum.
In Atlanta, for example, many parts have been removing car lanes for bike lanes and parking has become a real problem in some neighborhoods. Places that used to be free to park in charge a small fortune at times and there are not as many options to park your car in these areas.
Instead of doing development with adequate parking, they don't provide enough and charge a fortune for what we have. Between the climate and the poor mass transit it is the worst of both worlds but hey.
When I was visiting downtown Austin recently it seemed like a similar story from what I observed.
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
- Most places do not have the population density required because
- Places are designed in a car-centric manner, with strict zoning laws that enforce low-density suburbia because
- Everyone has a car because
- Public transport sucks because
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
1. That's an entirely intentional choice. A big country means you'll inevitably have lots of space between cities, not within them. Our metro areas are low density due to zoning regulations that we intentionally chose. Most residential areas in the US, building densely is literally illegal.
2. You could still have decent biking in many suburban and urban areas even with current density levels. Just takes protected bike lanes and intersections (and the occasional off street trail) but we don't do that. Instead you get painted bike lanes in the door zone as drivers buzz you two feet away. Of course hardly anybody bikes in those circumstances, they don't have a death wish.
In my native bay area, I'd see painted, unprotected bike lanes on goddamn expressways where cars are going 50+ mph, it's completely insane! Who the hell thought this was a good idea?? That's how dumb and bad bike infrastructure commonly is in the US, it's one step away from Futurama-style suicide booths.
Specifically, in the context of retail, what a retailer stocks (e.g. in a supermarket) or produces (e.g. a sandwich shop) is a function of how much space they have to pay for and how many customers they can get through the door.
For example, our expectation of a supermarket is one that carries everything we may possibly want on our grocery list. Whereas our expectation of a regular market, is the limited selection that covers most of what we need. Apologies for the contrived example but the point I’m trying to make is those of us who live in denser areas are used to walking to one of these locations, or making more frequent trips, or both, but it’s not the same feeling for the other.
Putting a bike lane next to a supermarket isn’t going to dramatically increase the number of cyclists nor customer foot traffic in relation to what the store already receives. The people coming to a large supermarket are potentially buying a large weight of items across different categories.
Even if there was a targeted approach that was marketed towards cyclists (“50% off your entire order if you show up in a helmet and racing attire”, or something extreme of that nature), I don’t think that would move the needle meaningfully because the resulting transactions wouldn’t achieve a hypothetical ideal kg-per-customer ratio (or even a repeat customer multiplier).
This would create a situation in which the store has too much product or if you go in the opposite direction of purchasing less product: unappealing empty shelves.
So as long as retail density remains low due to limits on how small a landlord is willing to subdivide available space for a tenant, the retailers will continue to engage in business activity that potentially encourages driving via loading up bulk/heavy items, or casting a very large advertising net to attract people outside of walking/biking distance to pack a place. Both of which the end goal is to at least cover their overhead.
When you examine dense European cities, I’m not sure you find retail shops that have the same square footage compared to American retail shops. They’re sized (and configured) to cover their overhead by servicing a small amount of customers at a time. If you were to offer an American-sized lease to a European retailer, my guess is they would turn it down unless they were already a very, very popular spot with lines out of the door.
In these conversations, I think the general focus should be on what’s occupying the physical destination (and its size) rather than availability/quality of public transit. Since in some places, the transit exists but the impetus to actually use it is minimal.
Although you do see some smaller grocery stores in the US: Aldi, Lidl, and Trader Joe's come to mind. I live close enough to a Safeway, Trader Joe's and a Whole Foods for biking to be viable, and I have an ebike, but I don't bike there. Why not? The bike infrastructure is shit to get there, and parking lot/front of store area is not designed for bikes at all. Fix those two things and I'd start biking.
Biking to local grocery stores and getting through them when I lived in Munich was generally much faster than doing the same now that I'm in a typical US suburb using a car. Getting onto and off a bike, parking it, and getting from there into the store is much faster than the equivalent for a car. Finding things and getting through the store is also much faster than in the US because it's smaller. In total, grocery trips for basics tended to go significantly faster there.