Cars in cities, let alone designing cities around cars, is one of the greatest tragedies of modern life.
I am an European who studied at OSU in Columbus for a semester and it was absurd to me how on one side there was lots of work downtown, yet you could live 20 miles of it and it would take you two hours by public transport to get there, an odyssey.
People without a car, insurance, poorer parts of the society were cut off from the job market for not having a way to connect.
Suburbs are cute, but they are a tragedy of city planning, let alone the tragedy they are on a social level, where people will put everything in their houses including movie rooms, entertainment rooms, anything to avoid having to go out and socialize. Terrible.
It emits particulates locally and power-generation-related emissions at the fossil fuel plant that provides the majority of my grid power.
Is it better than an ICE? Probably. Is it “basically zero emission”? Nope.
This is a solved problem in countries with modern public transportation. In Japan for example you can go across the entire country without needing a single car, and indeed it's both cheaper and more available than doing so while driving. If you need to go somewhere really far out of the way that is not reachable by foot or bicycle, then you can rent a car.
All of this results in a system that is far cheaper for you and far more open for the average individual.
There is some awful HN bias here where young healthy well-paid tech workers live in some boogie part of SF/NYC/Boston/etc and enjoy the "car-free lifestyle" (and I've been there), without any idea how the other half lives.
Just because the system we created means that currently the only affordable place for the working poor is in suburbs where they must rely on cars doesn't mean that it needs to continue to be that way. You can support building infill housing and adding transit to eventually reduce the need for so many people to have cars.
It's one thing to call it "bias" and use that as an argument to not make things better instead of coming up with ways to help make car independence available to everyone across classes.
But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
(I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogot...
Bodega does have a growth boundary, per google. (IMO the lack of that is the 'root of all evil' of USA development patterns.)
> But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia:
- Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone.
- Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway.
- Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody.
- That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities.
- Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa...
- This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such.
- In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them.
- Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such.
- Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure.
- In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars).
- Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes.
- Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan.
- The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w
- Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax.
- Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part.
- Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car.
- Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings.
- If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia.
- Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built.
I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research.
Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work.
Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different.
I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag
> Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development.
Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia. I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars. You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
> Change your zoning code and other access regulations (etc)
Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
(Meanwhile, my urban SF neighbors are arguing about what paint colors should be allowed, like it is a HOA or something.)
> Develop a 50 year rail plan.
We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I didn't, I read your comment. I think you are just haven't done the necessary level of research or you just have a doomer outlook.
> Yes, the poor always lose out versus Hypothetical Utopia.
But they are not comparing to Utopia, but rather the comparable situation where changes have been made. Or to the same city before and after some change.
Unless you are making the argument that no objective knowledge can exist, the research is pretty clear.
> I'm referring to reality as it exists in the current and near future where many many poor & middle-class people need cars.
Nobody is questioning that. Literally nobody. That why its called 'car centric design'. Who are you arguing against?
> You can't just take them away because of a dumb student-type notion that "cars are only for rich people".
Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
The argument is to encourage policy that will make people want to live without cars in the future.
Unless you think, restricting parts of the city center or closing some urban highways is 'taking cars away', you are literally arguing against nobody.
> Yes, I would love to tell Silicon Valley how to zone, but even the popular governor is having trouble doing that.
Yes, all of my suggesting involve politics. And of course not all of them can be implemented practically depending on location. This is always true with literally any suggestion about anything political.
But your claim wasn't 'its politically difficult' rather your claim was 'nobody knows how'.
> We have that, but it doesn't actually help because it's mostly about building rail out to new suburbs where people can get into city center office jobs (and the rail agency can get tax money). In the meanwhile, we built an urban subway with 3! stations.
If be 'we' you mean California, yes there is one. And that is already a lot better then what many other places have. You might not think its enough, but it better then nothing. And the claim that it is bad because its only 'new suburbs' is also factually wrong as part of the rail plan you just had Caltrain electrification, and future improvement to existing rail Caltrain. I'm not an expert on California rail, but the claim that it serves 100% new subburbs is certainty false.
> Like I said, it's a trillion dollar problem, and there's no easy button. Just incremental improvements.
I have no idea why you are claiming its a 'trillion $' problem. That can be said about not doing anything at all too. When we are talking about the infrastructure of 300 million people (assuming we are talking US) then of course, any decision you make its a trillion $. But in that context 1 trillion $ also isn't that much.
And if you actually look at the research you will see that actually many of the suggestion I have SAVE MONEY. The idea that all of this cost unbelievable amounts of money is simply not true.
Lets go threw examples:
- Saver roads pay for themselves because accidents have a really high cost. And the new safer roads will decease avg speed, leaing to easier to maintain roads. In the US today there is a massive amount of overbuilding of incrastructure that simply isn't needed if you were builing roads according to modern scientific principles, rather then some book some engineer wrote in 1960s that just so happens to have been adopted as 'the standard'. And the principles aren't that hard or expensive to implement. This is a clear money safer. Think about all the idiotic lights the US uses at every intersection, each set of lights is expensive, sound road planning would eliminate many of these.
- Closing down urban freeways increases property taxes. Gives the city new land to redevelop and sell, or keep as parks. Also reduces maintenance burden on state level.
- Rezoning pays for itself many, many, many times over, its not even close.
- Increase parking price can raise money for the city. If you don't want to remove them. Removing them is very easy and cheap.
- Putting down protected bike lanes with simple concrete protection is very very cheap and tons of research shows that it is very beneficial. More people on bikes means less car, means less time wasted in traffic. It has also been repeatedly shown that it improves retail on those roads and it also improves property prices.
- Setting up pedestrian zones is also incredibly cheap. Literally a few concert blocks or at most a few bulliards that you can fold down for emergency access. Incredibly cheap, increases property prices and retail.
- Increasing prices on suberbia to reflect actual cost, raises money, rather then losing it.
- Redeveloping stroads is a bit more expensive, but I'm not proposing building anything new, but rather changing the way access and priority works. Cost money but not that much and in the long term it saves a lot of money.
- City buying and developing land does cost money, but since the new mixed use areas will be popular they can actually make a lot of money. Money for this can be raised by cities.
- Setting up a bus network is also really not that expensive. That is some amount of running cost, but if your buses have good priority lanes and are frequent you can cover a lot of the operation. This certainty not a 'trillion $' and each city can handle this themselves, like the do in most of the world. And again, this is increasing tax revenue along bus routes as has repeatedly been shown.
- All the revenue increases are doubly relevant if you switch from property tax to land tax.
The only thing that is at all expensive that I proposed is a long term rail plan. But in terms of your long term transportation plan, you have a lot of cost anyway. And rail is a better long term investment.
I formulate all of my points specifically so they were something cheap that can be done. I didn't propose building huge new parks, or huge metro systems. Or high speed rail. Or anything like that.
You can literally do 95% of what is needed by with paint, concrete blocks, a bunch of buses and bus drivers and a few legal chances. The city will actually increase its revenue a huge amount over time.
The current model of trying to support ever increasingly distant suburbs is what is actually bankrupting cities.
I suggest you look at the detailed research from Urban3. They clearly show how cities that have done many of the chances I propose, are good for the cities finances. In fact, some cities have implemented some of these changes specifically because they are out of money.
So please do not spread the idea that American cities can't change because its to expensive. That is the sort of thing far-right wing people spread, the whole 'we can't afford bike-lanes' nonsense.
> Again, literally nobody is arguing that! You have constructed a complete straw man of urbanist.
I actually made my post to head the scarecrows off at the pass. Otherwise these HN threads tend to just turn into reddit fuckcars.
I also know of a tourism industry company that is buying up older hotels that are no longer competitive in the local market to use as seasonal worker housing.
There are solutions other than having someone drive a beater for 45 minutes to get to a low paying job.
Please just....stop. Stop trying to talk about how poor people lived or live.
...while also declaring that "used cars are a must" for poor people (if you can afford a car in a city, you're substantially above a huge number of people, and car ownership rate goes up dramatically with wealth. It rises higher than 1 car/person once you start hitting the single digits. A huge number of service industry people, not to mention students, get around on foot or bicycle. They just don't commute 9-5, and they don't live in your neighborhoods, so you don't see them)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalization about where transit does and doesn't go (in my city, poor people get busses, rich people get trolleys and light rail and commuter rail, and it's pretty clearly purposeful that it is very difficult to get to the rich residential parts from the poor residential parts)
...while also making wildly sweeping generalizations that working poor don't work downtown, and only work in "industrial" areas in cities. It really goes to show how invisible we all are to you....even when you're wagging your finger at the rest of HN for not understanding people like us, lol.
Downtown, who exactly do you think handles all the cleaning, maintenance, repair, delivery, food service, retail, etc in the "downtown" area of a city?
Who do you think delivers the paper towels and bottled water and k-cups? Everything around you in your office - every single fucking thing down to the carpet you're standing on - is there because a poor person put it there.
Who do you think is driving the busses and taxis and trucks and vans?
Who do you think works the "gig" "jobs" delivering everything from dry cleaning to laundry to a fancy lunch for to those "young healthy well-paid tech workers"? (and FYI, your boss/admin assistant/office manager, when they order that big lunch from the fancy place across town? They're shit tippers. And bad communicators. And take forever to show up to grab the order.)
Do you realize that even in the "boogie" (sic) part of the city, the guy running the cash register at that hip coffee joint is making as close to minimum wage as the company thinks they can get away with, which is likely, at best, a buck or two an hour more than average?
Who exactly do you think fills all the entry-level jobs, including in tech companies? What do you think the front desk receptionist is paid? The desktop support person?
I feel like you all think that someone who cleans the offices for the big dot-com or white-shoe law office...or someone who dishwashes or busses or does prep work for a fancy restaurant where a plate costs $50, is getting paid anything remotely proportional to the difference in cost from a restaurant a plate for $18 or the hourly rate of that law firm.
It's the opposite - the fanciest places and the biggest name corps squeeze people the hardest. That's how they got to where they are.
It's also important to note that the extreme cost of living in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn is relatively recent. My friends that grew up here in the 80s, taking the subway to school, were far from bougie. They were living a car free lifestyle then and now just because that's how the environment of many parts of NYC is built. It's not like NYC was constructed as a walking paradise only for wealthy people in the 19th century.
By the way that's not something I'm making up, it was literally told me by several people in struggling neighborhoods, lacking a car can be easily make a difference for many between being able or not to have different opportunities in life.
Might be different elsewhere but it made sense to me.
Anyway, there's an abundant literature that links inequality with transport opportunities.
But those topics are so touchy for you Americans tbh, it's like arguing about weapons, it's too heated of an argument for rational discourse.
European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's. But I know little about the details, so don't really have any commentary, other than not all of Europe some glorious bike/transit boogie utopia. (And some ppl get "touchy" about that.)
Do you have source for this? I believe this could be true now but I find this kind of arguing dismissive and missing the point.
I'm not from environment you have described. Still remmeber people in my East European corner were able to easily commute to work by bus/train without car. However since they got richer they adopted American commuter patterns more and this led to deterioration of public transport outside of urban areas.
No wonder people get "touchy" because you are not really arguing for those who are not "young healthy well-paid tech workers". But against them. It is not about just ditching the cars but changing whole design of living around the need of cars - which is the point that actually started this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666410
So as soon as you start considering cost and return on investment services tend to be reduced or shut down.
Great, some discord found this a couple days later and wants a google-a-thon. Since I don't know anything about "Europe", I don't care who is "european" enough to qualify for the 50% or 70% or whatever. Just that they have much better public transit, but still largely drive to work.
Hilariously untrue. Using the bus and bike to go to work is normal here. Buses and cycle paths are full of people during rush hour. In the US using those gets you weird looks. Depends on what part of Europe and what part of US we're talking about of course, but in general this holds true.
Also, I use the bus and train to go downtown and places where it would take an hour to find a parking spot. I even lug big bags of food from Aldi on the crowded bus at rush hour weekly. I don’t know why it has to be either you drive everywhere or never need a car in these discussions. Use what you need to use given the situation.
Why wouldn't you want your kid to be independent like this? Why force them to have to rely on you and your car if they want to go out and see their friends? It inconveniences you and makes their life much more dull and restricted, not to mention the health benefits of taking the bike vs sitting in a car for a kid.
The secret to successful urban living is tolerance, but sadly that is in short supply.
Robert Moses infamously made great use of infrastructure and urban planning to reinforce redlining.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
"The story: Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from using the highway. The truth? It’s a little more complex"
If you're gonna claim something don't cite an article that's all about debunking that thing.
They will lie about how much they hate them but ask them to actually change their behavior and you get nothing but a litany of excuses.
My wife rides a bike. In the suburbs.
We chose a home that has grocers, schools, and dining within a walk or bike ride.
We own cars because there are things beyond ~2 miles and transit options aren’t good.
Sadly, doing this usually requires money. Lots of it.
Since private cars scale badly, you want to encourage people to take other modes, but in order to change behaviour, the alternatives need to be attractive - cycle layouts that are safe, buses and trains that are frequent and reliable, city layouts that don't involve a long drive to buy food. You can't convince people out of taking the rational choice. You have to build it
If you really don’t like cars, you’ll find a way to minimize use of them.
If you really don’t mind cars that much you’ll make up stories about how if buses and trains and bike lanes were more attractive then people would use them more.
I guarantee that if every American city had an ideal bus and train system, people would still find excuses and reasons to justify driving their cars.
Saying "people love cars" is false. Some people love cars. Those are the ones doing their own work/maintenance/restorations etc and just spending time in the garage with their cars. A few more people love driving, they don't just love cars for their own sake, but they will go and just drive for fun. But most people don't do any of that. They just use cars as part of their boring, routine lives.
You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
Yeah, you’re getting it.
Nobody will say they love washing machines but they clearly do. We see it in their actions. Same as with cars. Everything they do tells us that they love cars. They drive comically short distances. They spend money they barely have to buy them.
Cities do need to be reconsidered for more public transit and more opportunities to walk, but other issues (delivery, emergency, disability, etc) have to figure in.
A lack of foresight is also very human.
Let's call it what it really is. The stubborn unwillingness to consider scalability in our designs and planning — even in an era where a machine can do calculation for us.
Translates to a little over 30 deaths per year per million, so not a lot, though I suspect the number would have been much greater adjusted for distance travelled and even without that it's more than some countries achieve with their traffic.
Once that's reduced by say, 50%, everything becomes much better, but nobody gives up convenience voluntarily.
https://www.amny.com/lifestyle/new-york-city-ranks-2nd-in-a-...
Families are not second-tier citizens, and currently the public transports are not suited for them. On top of the other problems, such as the pleasure of having to deal with crackheads and various homeless people in the metro when you have a baby.
Paris biggest infrastructure project for the past 20 years is called "Grand Paris" and revolve entirely around the whole metro. Actually there is literally no urban planning not involving the whole metro. And yes, lowering the speed limit involved multiple consultations with the prefect and the region because it impacts the whole metro.
Considering Paris without its metropole doesn’t make sense. Paris intra-muros is ridiculously small, one eightieth of London, 80% of San Francisco.
Besides, what your say about the speed limit is false, the mayor didn't wait for the State's answer and decided unilaterally. The State and the region didn't agree with her: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/09/09/anne-hid... https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/la-region-ile-de-france-ref...
You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified. The result is that Paris has an anti-car policy, but the neighboring towns are very pro-car, creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
> Besides, what your say about the speed limit is false, the mayor didn't wait for the State's answer and decided unilaterally. The State and the region didn't agree with her: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/09/09/anne-hid...
The article you quote says the opposite of what you pretend. I invite you to read the paragraph "Une décision sous le contrôle de l’Etat, rappelle le ministère". It explains in details than the mayor could do nothing without the state agreeing to it.
> You can consider as much as you want, it is not unified.
It is unified. The city and its suburb are one economic unit. Where do you think all the service workers live? You have to be an extremely narrow minded inner city dweller to fail to see this.
> creating a system where Parisians can't own one, but have to bear their neighbor's who use them to get into the city.
I kindly invite you to check the average salary of Paris inhabitants vs the one in the suburbs then take a minute to think about what you just wrote.
My family and the dozens I see every day in the Paris public transports beg to differ.
I suggest you might be a bit prejudiced (well more than a bit to be fair).
And with less space reserved for cars and only cars, there’s more space for wide/accessible sidewalks. Less chance of being run over by a car. Less air and noise pollution.
My initial post was that in Paris, they removed cars but did not improve public transports, so buses are overcrowded and hostile to strollers.
I don't understand this part, I read it quite often but... well, we are a family with young children, and although we do have a car we only use it once a week to go to the grand-parents that live 100 km away from here.
A city with less cars is great especially for families (though I would argue that cities themselves are not so great for children, but the comparison here is between cities that are car-centric or that are not). It makes going out easier and more spontaneous.
It's much less of a hassle to hop in the cargo bike and go wherever (including stopping en route if you see something interesting) than having to use the car, sit in traffic, hope you can find parking space at your destination, and pay for it.
Or when you need to go to the doctor. Or when your wife is sick. Or if you have an urgency. So, as a family, you still need a car.
I also use it for groceries. Sometimes using both the cargo bike and a bike trailer (on two different bikes). We don't buy nearly at many things though it seems. When I do use my car (doing groceries while the children are with the grandparents) I have to transfer them from the car to the bike anyway because I can rarely park close to my home.
My doctor (and my wife's doctor) is certainly easier to reach by foot than by car. And I guess I never have the kind of urgency that would require me to use a car in the city. If there's something urgent a bike is always faster in this city.
(I lived in a streetcar part of SF, and loved it, fwiw. But the only reason it's still there is a tunnel.)
You know, the less radical solution.
I think you're making a different argument, where trains attract a more well-heeled commuter. Which is why many cities have brought back LRT as part of a redevelopment plan.
But _at the time_, buses were very competitive with trams; there wasn’t all that much other road traffic, so they weren’t really slower (and they could use the tram lines, while they existed, as a right of way), the trams of the time were non-articulated, so buses had similar or higher capacity, and they were more flexible. It’s easy to see how it happened, and it only became apparent that there was a problem when it was far too late to reverse.
There are really two problems with buses vs trams; buses are slow when there is lots of other traffic, and, _with modern articulated trams_, higher total capacities are achievable (one of Dublin’s modern tramlines has trams that take over 400 people with a frequency of under 3 minutes between trams at peak, which is a level of capacity that you just can’t really get with buses). Neither of these were factors when the first-generation trams died.
Very few tram systems worldwide actually survived from the early 20th century to today; while there are lots of trams today, most are second-generation systems put in from the 80s on.
However it is impossible for the operational and maintenance costs for a bus service and for the roads on which the buses go to be cheaper than for an electric streetcar, unless some prices are fake.
It is true that I have seen enough cases where electric streetcars have been replaced by buses, but I cannot see other explanation except bribes, because it was extremely visible that the buses were more expensive, both because of the fuel consumption and because of the much more frequent repairs both for the buses and for the roads.
Bribes and the mafia may have been a factor[0], but that's how American cities do things.
[0] eg. https://www2.startribune.com/streetcars-buses-minneapolis-st...
So ripping out existing serviceable train tracks is stupid (or alternatively: evil) if you think in the long term.
From the second link:
> It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles, half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages. Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
> Moreover, horse-drawn transport was not safe. Road traffic deaths from horse-drawn vehicles in England and Wales between 1901 and 1905 were about 2,500 a year. This works out as about 70 road traffic deaths per million population per year which is close to the annual rate of 80 to 100 deaths per million for road traffic accidents in the 1980s and 1990s, although we must not forget that many people who died from injuries sustained in road accidents in 1900 would probably have survived today thanks to our A&E departments.
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer, unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse and trap.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2]https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
Disability needs an annotations for only specific disabilities that don't inhibit driving. Which is a small subset of disabilities.
Delivery of most things can be done with small cars/trucks.
"Pure sadism!!!"
Yeah I'm sure everyone is real miserable, which is why they just voted in a referendum for more car-free streets.
Amazing how out of touch with reality the car-dominance types are.
By the way, the French metro's air is highly polluted, due to tire degradation and brake dust, making it unfit for children or pregnant women.
So yeah, it's manageable for young people. But when a baby arrives, it's hell. Same if you are old. Or disabled.
Anecdotally, kids are also much happier when they can just bike to school/sports/activities with their friends instead of having their parents drive then everywhere on the back of the family SUV.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territ...
Yes, people outside of urban cities like that (which, basically by definition means the majority of people in the country) still need cars to get around most likely, but at least we can ensure that inside the cities themselves, there are good alternatives for people to get around that benefits every single person who finds themselves in the city not inside a car, which will be the overwhelming majority of people.
I live in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the single best thing the gov't did a few years ago is rip out the highway that was in the city center and instead turned it back into a canal surrounded by parks [1]. Literally nobody who has ever been to Utrecht would argue we were better off with the highway.
[1] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2020/09/16/utrecht-correc...
We lived in Munich for five years as a family of three with no car and it was fine. There were definitely some times where a car would be more convenient (going to Ikea or the mountains) but overall getting around with our electric cargo bike or public transit was fine.
Mobility in families is actually higher, since each individual has sturdy legs, and highly likely, a bike after they’re about 5 years old. Kids often travel to school, after school events etc on foot, bike or public transport, not dependent as in many car-centric places on parents and their cars.
Grandma is as likely to bike over for dinner with the grandkids as drive.
It's funny how much the car-dominance folks do their best to ignore that countries invariably have spent at least an order of magnitude more on cars than bikes, and typically more like two orders of magnitude.
The bike infrastructure the Dutch do have is very cool, but let's be real, one of those fancy "bike interchanges" is absolutely dwarfed by the cost of a highway interchange, and there are far more of the latter than the former.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
As for the excuses:
> they are a small
What does a size of a country have to do with how their cities are designed?
> dense
Same as above, unless you mean city density in which case there's nothing special about Dutch cities.
> flat
Yes, and?
> an oceanic weather
Yeah, it rains all the time and yet they cycle.
These sound like...car problems.
The people who live in the city don't want cars because it's the people who can't afford to live in the city who need them to get there.
What are you talking about. Paris's public transport reaches out 60km away from the city, and that's not including mainline trains (including high speed). The people who can't afford to live in the city have taken public transport to get there for 50 years.
Most small, and large, businesses would happily pay a small fee if it means half the transportation time. And it does, because traffic isn’t linear. Just a few more cars can be the difference between coasting at 30 or not moving at all.
Meanwhile doing it through financial deterrence requires that someone is actually deterred. And then is that going to be poor people and small businesses or rich people and major companies?
It's a compulsory fee charged by the government not based on income/consumption. That's the most regressive tax. Even sales tax is less regressive than that.
> it primarily assists commuters and small businesses
Relative to any alternative that reduces congestion without charging fees, it doesn't. Even relative to doing nothing, the people being deterred are the ones paying the cost, and the people being deterred are the most price sensitive ones, i.e. the poor.
[EDIT]: since I'm being answered that it isn't true, here is a chart made by the city hall about the decreasing speed on Paris' roads:
https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2024/07/12/original-4ee2d20dafdc9...
EDIT: Okay, to expand, it's true that speed limits in progressive cities have been falling for a while. This is meant reduce the number of pedestrain fatalities and overall make the cities safer and more pleasant.
HOWEVER, this does not mean that traveling by car is worse. These, in combination with anti-congestion legislation, make driving faster. The thing about driving is that broad roads and clear visibility encourage bad behavior, like speeding and tailgating. This actually increases traffic. It's counter-productive, but reducing speed can improve flow.
https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-ville-la-plus-embou...
And even some of those can use bikes depending on the specific thing (some delivery workers).
Meanwhile you live in a world where petty wars are fought over resources to enhance the wealth of an extreme minority of the population. That's an actual tragedy.
I am very curious to hear yours.
That is literally the opposite of reality.
… Eh? The city I live in has been here for a thousand years, and that doesn’t even make it a particularly old city. _Outer suburbs_ are a somewhat car-dependent phenomenon, but cities certainly are not.