Human-sized cities: Cutting cars from our urban fabric | Hacker News Reader

Human-sized cities: Cutting cars from our urban fabric

nytimes.com

21 pointsmediaman57 comments

I posted this because I've lived without a car for seven years, and I never would have realized how relaxing it is not to have to worry about it (though I do use the ZipCar service).

And ultimately, as we reach peak oil and energy costs rise, I would like to think that we will re-evaluate how we build cities and make them more "human-sized", which could counteract many of the negative trends we face today (obesity, lack of social community, etc.). Of course, the alternative is that we find a sufficiently cheap source of energy for our cars beyond petroleum, and we continue on building our merry suburbs -- but maybe, just maybe, it doesn't have to be that way.

Out of curiosity, what city are you currently in?

I'm currently in NYC, although I used to live in Seattle carless as well. Honestly, one of the big reasons it's easier in NYC is due to social norms.

Seattle wasn't bad, but NYC is definitely a lot easier to live without a car. One of the main reasons: You're not expected to have a car.

In Seattle, people just assume you have a car and are surprised when you don't -- i.e. you have to explain why you can't just make it out to some random place to pick something up, etc.

In NYC no one expects you to have a car (at least not in Manhattan and most parts of BK, etc) -- so people don't make assumptions that you can get somewhere if it's not near public transit, or that you can haul something somewhere.

Obviously, there are other things that make NYC quite nice for carless life (delivery services, density, flat topography to name a few).

I live in Chicago currently, which has a decent public transit system (although there's no shortage of complaints about it).

I'd be interested in your experience being carless in Seattle. I might move out there at some point and it would be nice if I could maintain a similar lifestyle there.

There are only a few neighborhoods where you can do it without really inconveniencing yourself: Belltown, Capitol Hill, and Downtown (Pioneer Square / Pike's Place market area). Other neighborhoods don't have as much density or public transit coverage.

It's funny you should mention ZipCar. I use their service, and it's very convenient for me in some cases, but really it just reminds me of how obnoxious it is to drive around the city (I live in Boston). Before I moved into the city, I never drove within it: it was always easier (and cheaper, considering the difference in parking prices) to park at one of the several T stations at the edge of the city and ride in. When I use Zipcar, I don't get that option.

I usually get there faster than I would on the T, but the time on public transit is not wasted (I can read), while the time driving is. Unfortunately there are still things the T can't do, but I find the hybrid approach works well for me. The few occasions where I do drive only remind me of how well.

"which could counteract many of the negative trends we face today (obesity, lack of social community, etc.)"

I had an odd serious of thoughts about your inclusion of "obesity." First, I thought of how you must be alluding to the fact that without cars, people will walk more and burn more calories. Then I thought of the study showing that almost all of the increase in obesity can be attributed to Americans eating more food over the past decades, not to exercising less.

Then I wondered about how being able to throw all of your groceries in the trunk and drive them home could lead to eating more than having to carry all your food from the neighborhood store to your house.

Which is interesting, but I still managed to gain weight in Brooklyn from knowing where all the best bakeries were (I got to the point of picking different bakeries for different kinds of cookies and pastries), despite not owning a car. :)

I'll give you three more reasons why going carless will help people lose weight.

1. For people who are overweight, the huffing and puffing (and in summer, the heat and sweat) would kill their appetite for a while. Plus, nobody wants to eat a heavy meal if they immediately have to walk five minutes to the metro station, possibly spend fifteen minutes standing up at the station and on the train, and then walk ten minutes home.

2. For people who are overweight, the extra effort and side effects would be a constant reminder that they're fat. Nobody wants to hold up their friends on the street or be sweaty and gross on a day when nobody else is. It's easy to eat when you can avoid thinking about the downsides, but if you're still embarrassed by pausing on the stairs at the metro station that morning and stinking up the office when you arrived, you'll have a fresh reminder of why you should pass up the free donuts in the break room.

3. Psychology. I've lost a lot of weight "through exercise" because I overeat less when I exercise. Many people who exercise regularly find that they feel miserable, and eat more, when they stop exercising for some reason (injury, time, whatever.) I feel kind of like an exercise addict -- I know I'll feel down and gain weight if I don't do it. I suspect this exercise addiction is inborn in a lot of people, not created by exposure (like addiction to crack, for example) and is therefore more of a basic human need than an addiction. Adding twenty minutes of walking to everybody's day would boost the mood of all the unwitting exercise addicts and reduce their compulsion to eat.

Many people who exercise regularly find that they feel miserable, and eat more

Yes, I'm like this. Oh, actually you meant the reverse. :)

However, I do want to eat more when I'm regularly exercising, even though apparently that's not the approved response. One reason it's difficult to keep exercising regularly is that I know that even when I get to the point where what I'm now doing is easy and I don't feel miserable doing it, I'll have to push things until I do feel miserable or I won't be getting the benefit of exercise! There's no end to it; the task is never actually done; you have to continue to make yourself miserable 3-4 times a week, forever. That's very discouraging.

Oh no, you'll continue to get the health benefits even if you let your performance plateau. You only have to push yourself if you want to keep improving your performance, and if that's your mentality, you will start to get weird satisfaction out of the misery, which compensates for the... misery aspect of the misery.

When you think about it in isolation, our culture of commuting seems crazy. Imagine designing a system in which people live far from their workplaces, wake up every morning and drive en masse to their destinations, and then do the reverse in the evening, devouring huge amounts of natural resources in the form of energy and time in the process. You'd be laughed out of the room. And yet, here we are...

Austin is currently developing a number of mixed use communities roughly of the New Urbanist school, usually a mix of 3-4 story condos/apartments and restaurants/shops. I'm hoping the trend continues.

Here's more info on New Urbanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism

Where are they? I'm aware of developments like the Triangle and the Domain, but they feel like a love affair between plasticky high-end retailers and a captive audience of consumers. The yuppie d-bag quotient at the Flying Saucer was ridiculous last time I was there. I think the problem is that the Domain and the Triangle seem to be planned by the same MBA types who plan malls, so they feel like malls with housing attached for people who really, really like the mall. By contrast, I like the pedestrian culture on South Congress and even South 1st, even though those areas were designed for cars. I'm more optimistic about old neighborhoods evolving in dense, pedestrian-friendly ways than I am about synthetic neighborhoods having any significant effect. (Maybe it's just because I don't trust real estate developers.)

On another note, living far from workplaces is a given if you want people to have reasonable job mobility and reasonable home stability. You need a public transit system so people can live ten years in the same place without being tied to a single, possibly crappy job for that long.

I think this is an Amwrican thing. I live in Copenhagen, and have never owned a car. Neither have many of my friends, and it isn't a problem. There are probably a few reasons for this

- Many European cities don't have the American version of suburbs that basically require you yo have a car. Homes and businesses are generallly more intertwined and have sprung up over the ages around a town center.

- Public transportation is a lot better. In the rush hour it's often quicker to use public transportation than a car. A bike is the fastest.

- It's socially accepted. As mentioned many people don't even have cars, and it's not because of a lack of money.

"Many European cities don't have the American version of suburbs"

That's because most European cities don't have remotely this kind of population growth, let alone the space to accommodate it on the fly.

I don't think it has much to do with population growth. I think it has more to do with planning in advance where you want your growth to be. In the US we just let developers put new houses pretty much wherever they want, which turns out to be where land is cheap, which is usually far from existing developments. In Europe the govt has more direct involvement and only allows development to happen where they want it to happen.

Copenhagen has also consciously moved in that direction for over 30 years. Lots of little, incremental progress adds up a lot over decades. The American method tends to change every 4 to 8 years and look for a big bang within that time frame.

First of all, I should disclaim that I love cars, own 5 of them (only 3 are registered/insured at the moment), so feel free to view my comments through that lens.

I believe that the car allows workers a significant freedom to choose employers not based on which ones are within a few miles bike ride or a few line changes of subway, but rather within an acceptable driving radius. And for many people, myself included, acceptable commuting time in my own car, with my own radio and peace/quiet is far longer than what I'd accept on the green line subway in Boston, or waiting in the rain/snow/slush for a bus.

This freedom radius is particularly important when you consider that most (American anyway) families have at least two incomes, so I must choose to live where I can get to my employment and my wife to hers. With cars, at least in America, that opens up a much wider range of options than if we could only look at jobs on the subway. As it stands, we chose to live in Cambridge (a "city suburb" of Boston); I drive; she takes the T. Either one of us could easily change jobs to literally dozens of different employers without having to move houses or change fields. There's significant value there.

Naturally, had American cities evolved differently, that might also be true just by us living on a better-than-current-reality subway system, as most desirable employers would also have located near subway stops, because that would be a competitive advantage. As it stands now, companies needing white collar talent intentionally locate where there is parking and good access to ring highways, for that is a competitive advantage.

The network effects to overcome to make car-free living are daunting, and just because you can find a few thousand people with lifestyles perhaps overly suited to car-free living in planned communities does not mean that those communities are scalable.

I'm 37 and I never learned to drive a car. I do own a car I inherited, which my wife drives about once a week. We use bicycles, not because we're nuts but because we live 5 minutes from work or work at home, and everything's close by in the city we live in - restaurants, entertainment, shops, parks, etc. I've always lived close to where I work, in cities where it's nice to live.

Cars are unbelievably important unless you're either very wealthy or willing to accept squalid conditions. Is there an invention more egalitarian than the automobile?

Huh? Cars cost thousands of dollars and require upkeep, etc, etc. People use cars to flaunt their social status all the time. They're also an incredibly dehumanizing way to interact with people (see road rage, etc).

Cities which weren't built for the automobile are very different that those built in the last 50 years (sadly, in the US you can't really see this, but in much of Europe and Asia you can -- even South America has some pockets here and there).

A car allows me to travel anywhere I please, not where the Transit Authority deems worthy. Cars are very cheap when you consider the tremendous benefits of such independent mobility.

A car allows you to travel anywhere with roads (which were constructed with public money). Road construction (like transit construction) was decided by the gov't.

An effective train/bus must stop at every stop to pick people up. This is why public transit access is limited and could never remotely rival that of roads. On a road, every inch is a stop of its own, and the only people who have to stop for it are those who intend to go there.

Don't buses use roads? You're getting hard to follow.

Yes. And buses only stop at their designated stops; you can't hail a bus like a cab. And you're being dense, which is worse.

And you're just pushing your tiresome agenda and boring everyone else on the site. Yes, cars are great in America because it's spread out and public transportation sucks. The point of the article was to illustrate an experiment with something new (a suburb designed for bikes and peds), which was interesting. Nothing you've said has been new or interesting.

Is that long-hand for "you were right, I was wrong, but nobody cares"? If people were bored by this topic, it would not have generated so many replies while being voted to -2 in the root comment.

Also, it's intellectually dishonest for you to claim that these discussions have offered nothing of interest, especially given your propensity to engage in them.

"Nothing you've said has been new or interesting."

A fixation on novelty in discourse is not a good thing. Defending a conservative belief is no less valid than championing a new, liberal one (I use these terms apolitically).

Yes. You win.

There are network effects at play. With good transit, the "worthy" places gravitate towards the transit nodes, for the same reason cities tended to form in river valleys.

Cars really only allow you to travel where the Department of Transportation deems worthy. Also, the road network gets congested and is literally unusable in many large metropolitan areas for many purposes for about a two-hour span, twice a day. (Houston!) Rail has a much better record in my experience. (Commuting to work on the 7 train from Queens to Manhattan in the early 90's)

Not only that, but the Department of Transportation gets its money from taxes, yet I have only indirect input to where the roads go. If you are touting "free-market" philosophy, you're only going halfway.

That said, I love toll roads! I think the Westpark and Hardy tollways in Houston are awesome!

I believe the "human-sized city" proposition is meant to remove the requirement for wealth or squalid conditions from a car-free lifestyle. Let's not forget that the car itself still requires more wealth than most people in the world have access to. My pick for egalitarian invention would lean more toward municipal public utility systems. If restricted to transportation-based inventions only, the bicycle.

Yes, you could go wherever you pleased in such a place, within the city. A car allows its operator to travel great distances cheaply and quickly, seeking only the road's permission.

I can't see how needing to hop on a bus, train, airplane, or rented car to leave one's city requires extreme wealth or constitutes squalid conditions. Anectdotally, I lived in Korea for a year without a car, and had no problem getting around, both within and between cities as large as Seoul or as small as Kanseung.

Korea is a relatively small country.

The Korean peninsula is about the size of California. (Which is about the size of France and Alabama together.)

Yes. It's a small country. France is a small country too.

Hmm, out of all the countries in the world, how many are "non-small?"

    - US
    - Brazil
    - China
    - Canada
    - Australia
    - India
    - Russia

But that's a pretty dumb way to look at things. Population density and frequency of travel to population centers is a much better way.

If California is like a "Small Country" then by your logic, European style rail should work just fine there. The same goes even more for many eastern states. They have higher population densities and much smaller land areas.

No, land mass means a lot. A dense population is well-suited for mass transpo as the primary option. A relatively sparse country cannot pull this off. Pull out your globe...here are other actual, large countries:

  * Ukraine
  * Congo (DRC)
  * Argentina
  * Mexico
  * Chile
  * Turkey
  * Iran
  * Colombia

As you can see, in addition to those you listed, there many. Korea's freaking tiny. It's not an insult, it's a geographical fact. Also, by their very nature, there can only be so many large countries, so I don't know what you were getting at in the first place.

Poor reading comprehension. The significant part is at the end. As for my straw man, thanks for completing the list. Seems the majority of countries out there are "tiny."

Well, yes. there's only so much land to go around, and the majority is taken up by these countries (left out desert countries like Sudan, Algeria, etc. because they have little risk of over-expansion). North America is only three countries but is the third-largest and the fourth most populous continent. Three countries alone make up nearly all of Asia, the largest and by far the most populous.

So? This is the second notice: that the most salient part of my post, is that it's more relevant to consider relative distances and population densities. The US taken as a whole seems forbidding to rail. Specific regions of the US can appear quite hospitable. Gerrymandering left as an exercise and opportunity to display academic integrity.

Bread

That's the opposite of egalitarian, isn't it?

In one way, they are egalitarian, since their ownership is widespread. However, the cost of a car is a much larger proportion of the budget of those with lower incomes. Given a choice, many wouldn't own a car if there was some other, equally convenient way to get around. (My sister is one example. When I'm in Minneapolis, I'm another.)

Many city dwellers and those who live in regions with well developed rail and light-rail systems do not have to accept "squalid conditions." You're mistaking cultural expectations for economic realities.

But that's the point: There cannot, logically, be a more efficient way to reach certain destinations than with a car. Because transit systems serve the needs of many, nodes must be set up for each destination, which is terribly limiting.

Within a city, of course transit is usually the best option. I'm not arguing against that. However, it's important that we not exclude cars from cities, because of their importance for the vast majority of the population.

  > There cannot, logically, be a more efficient
  > way to reach certain destinations than with a car.

Efficient in what way? Least energy use per person? Surely not. Least time to destination per person perhaps? If you define it as "Persons per hour that one meter-width-equivalent right-of-way can carry"[1], you discover that rail is among the best with 4000 persons/hr/m. Cars are not even in the same ballpark at 170 persons/hr/m. Even bikes do better than cars at 1500 persons/hr/m.

1. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4057

"Efficient in what way?"

Time!

Again, you are mistaking the way people have set-up the system locally for some universal principle.

The combination of light rail and downtown bus zone are the most time-efficient way for me to get where I need to go when I am in Minneapolis, by far.

The time-efficiency of car travel is directly related to the city's layout. Cities designed for pedestrians and bikes tend to be more convenient for those modes of transport.

I am also reminded of the time I lived in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati. Those few blocks were like living in a European city. Once I parked my car after work, I did all of my errands on foot. And let me tell you, it was far more time efficient than the same errands done here in the car-friendly (to a fault) city of Houston. There was no getting in and out of the car, no circling for parking spaces, no waiting at lights, no waiting on people who aren't really qualified to drive their behemoth SUV.

That, and there was the significant chance I'd run into a friend walking down the sidewalk, and maybe we'd go up to her apartment for a drink, spot more friends from the balcony, and we'd have ourselves a little spontaneous party.

Serendipitous human contact. I really miss it!

no circling for parking spaces

Well, there's your problem! You're trying to live in an area with too many people. If traffic is bad, or you can't find a parking space, you should go where there are fewer people (like a suburb or something). Such a place is likely to be newer and nicer anyway, and since no one would want to shop or live in something more than 10-15 years old if they could afford something newer, everything's better that way.

Also, this will allow you to avoid people more effectively, which is an important goal as well. All those mobile obstacles are a real pain when I'm trying to get something done or go somewhere.

/curmudgeon

Given a good transit system in-city, I don't understand why you have to have cars. I only see your point as an argument for good parking at outlying transit nodes.

I don't understand the connection you posit between wealth and not using automobiles. I would expect that there is if anything a positive correlation between wealth and automobile use (though perhaps not between wealth and driving).

At the very high end you may be right that helicopter, yacht and private jet transport could somewhat offset automobile use. But I would expect that that chauffeured cars still play a huge role in the transportation for the very wealthy. I wouldn't expect many of them to be using buses, trains and subways, for instance.

As you leave the city, transit options become increasingly sparse. The US lower-middle class cannot afford to live in the close suburbs, or even in the suburbs. I see it where I live: People commuting from Luray or Richmond to DC (about 2.5hr each way), or even farther, because their hometowns have no jobs. Without cars, this would not be possible, unless they were to uproot their families and move into a very poor part of the city, hence my reference to "squalid conditions."

This has changed a great deal recently with low budget airlines. It's been consistently cheaper for me to fly from SFO to LAX or SEA than it would be to drive. Even Boston to NYC it's often cheaper to fly.

Ok well the article is about eliminating cars within cities, so why the non-sequitur?

edit: Regarding your point about commuting from extremely outlying "suburbs"--Richmond is over 100 mi from DC!--I agree that such insanity is only "sustainable" with the automobile[1]. This is why as our cities start to invert (again!) with the more desirable areas tending towards the center and the outlying suburbs becoming less and less desirable, it is important that we develop good regional rail links.

1. I note, however, that Fredericksburg, which is a "mere" 50 miles from DC has VRE service. It may even be possible to commute from Richmond to DC via Amtrak, but I'm not sure of their schedules or if a reasonable person would want to attempt that.

There's no non-sequiter. Cities are not exclusively for city-dwellers, they support a sprawling metropolitan area that relies on cars.

I note, however, that Fredericksburg, which is a "mere" 50 miles from DC has VRE service.

I live in the DC metro area, and I don't currently have a car, and I'm keenly aware of how it limits my options. I use the bus and metro to get to work in downtown DC from Gaithersburg, MD, and it's just at the edge of bearable for a limited time. I spend about 3 hours a day on public transit, and from Fredericksburg, VA, it would be even worse, unless I lived across the street from the VRE station.

With a car, you get ready to go, and then you go. Without a car, you get ready to go, and then you either go wait by the bus stop, or you try to time yourself to get to the bus stop just a few minutes before it arrives. This mostly works, but it's certainly more trouble (and I say this as someone who has a bus stop directly in front of my apartment building; it isn't as if I even have to walk a few blocks to the bus, and it's still a pain).

Going to the store is a project involving planning and giving up the evening to it, rather than something you can do just before your evening activities.

Going anywhere else is something I nearly always have to put off until the weekend, since I leave for work before 7:30 AM and get home about 7:30 PM. If I used a car, I could do those things on the way home (though since I live so far out, I still wouldn't get home much earlier).

I commuted from Fredericksburg to Reston for a little while last year. VRE->Alexandria(Blue)->Rosslyn(Transfer)->West Falls Church(Orange)->my bus. Minimum 2.5 hours each way. I had to do it for a week until I could afford new tires for my car, and driving cut my commute in half. I couldn't have kept up that commute, and I only had to do it for a month before I could afford to move back to DC.

The worst part about mass transit are the time restrictions. If you miss the narrow time slot for your route (assuming it isn't used heavily enough to warrant 24-hour service), you're screwed and have to take a cab, which I'd say runs about $40 per $5 of mass transit.

In Germany, many people take the train to another city. I had a coworker who did this, specifically because it was an economical way to take the whole family on a trip.

I suggest you read a bit of Ivan Illich on cars and transportation in general (http://ranprieur.com/readings/illichcars.html). The money quote, as it were:

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

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