http://ecooptimism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bike-bus-c...
Throw in the safety wins and you have a recipe for massively improved urban spaces.
Consider groceries. I can't get two weeks of groceries for two people without a car. Wine bottles get heavy, and stacking bags on my arms risks crushing my eggs. I imagine it's even more complicated for those with larger families.
It's also generally cheaper to pick up furniture with Zipcar than it is to have furniture delivered by retailers.
I know there are some grocery delivery services cropping up, like Instacart, but they're concentrated in very urban areas. I remember using a grocery delivery service in the early 2000s, and it was a disaster: eggs were broken, liquids were spilled, boxes were crushed, etc. We need to see a lot of improvement in this space.
It's hard to describe how inconvenient driving life is after living in a walkable city (and in New York, we lived in Westchester, in the burbs 20 miles from Manhattan!). Weekends are filled with strapping the baby into a car seat and driving to the mall to get basic essentials. Forget an ingredient you need for dinner? No running down to the grocery store a block over--30 minutes in the car for you!
I think one of the problems with cycling is that people don't have good bikes, and don't know how to maintain them, and are worried about longer (more than 10 miles) distances.
In this context when I say "good bike" I just mean "in good working order" and "sensibly adjusted to size of rider", and "has baskets or panniers". Something like that is cheap and really easy to keep going. And once someone has actually got that bike and they start using it regularly for shorter distances they build up the distances they're comfortable with.
Having said all that, it's pretty hair-raising cycling on roads where traffic travels fast if that traffic isn't used to cycles and if there's not much room for passing.
Palo Alto taught me that cycling was a viable mode of transportation five years ago, and that knowledge has added lots of happiness to my life since.
The corollary, is, however, that this means that people need to live IN the city, and the city needs to NOT be sprawling, and have good transit networks (paths, bike lanes, p. transit)
Banning cars from the city means anyone not living in the city simply won't visit, which for most cities will result in too few people spending money inside the city to sustain the businesses that make living in the city attractive.
This is the pattern used by traditional streetcar suburbs. See e.g. Tokyo and environs for a modern example.
Transit is generally practical because of density, but density can take many more forms than just a single dense city core.
The more general point is that development patterns and transit networks are intimately intertwined. Modern American development is often predicated on personal automobile usage, and so it's not surprising it works pretty badly when you take than away. But there are other combinations of transit and development patterns which may be much better overall.
As long as there are other ways to get around, a city does not need cars, in fact cars are a negative for most denizens.
The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?
Oh sure, the city will prosper as a result, but when you start making rules solely for the sake of the majority, throwing basic principles into the garbage bin, you set a precedent.
A precedent where anything that's for the greater good passes muster, regardless of anything else.
Which seems fine at first. The majority, is the majority of people right? Why not act solely in their interest?
But the truth is that we're all part of some minority or other. In some way, everyone's interests contradict the majority in some way.
If my grandma lives in the suburbs and it takes 4 hours to see her using public transportation and 30 minutes using a car ... well, you just fucked me over, didn't you? And that's just a mild example.
You keep cars on the periphery of the city, and have good public transit to and from them. So your 30 minute trip turns into a 20 minute public transit ride to your car (or a 10 minute taxi ride), and then say a 25 minute drive - longer than before, but not 4 hours. So no, you are not "fucked over".
And presumably, this comes with an increase in public transit quality. Most cities now are built around cars, but they don't have to be. Also, something like this would have to happen gradually - make dedicated non-private vehicle lanes (buses, taxis, etc), build up public transit, disincentivize cars via taxes and zoning, etc.
A place that's perhaps in range of this is Manhattan - most people I know, quite successful, don't own cars - and the ones that do use them to get out of the city on weekends, not for daily transit. It's a place where owning a car is pretty much worse than not - expensive and rare parking, high insurance, congested roads, etc. No joke, I know at least one senior executive here who doesn't have a driver's license because he let it expire.
And why do this? Because we should be building safe, healthy, happy, sustainable and affordable cities - something which cars are not contributing too. So ban them outright? Of course not - but maybe phasing out private vehicles in cities over the next 20 years is something worth seriously considering.
Shorter, more frequent routes are possible, but making the economics work does require a ban on cars to convert drivers to paying transit riders. But most of the drivers still need cars to get to outlying areas, so they have to pay bus operations and car capital outlay. People woth modest incomes cannot afford both, so they would have to give up the car and be trapped in the denser part of the city, indeed having their personal liberties stomped on.
Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules. Since they won't crash, the massive crumple zones and crush cage can be eliminated, dramatically reducing capital and operating costs. An autonomous taxi ride will likely cost less than driving your own beater.
> Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules.
You're absolutely right.
However, that technology isn't here yet and there is no guarantee that it will arrive. Mind you, most of the barriers to adoption aren't even technical, although those exist too. I prefer not to count my chickens until they hatch.
Right now, public transportation means one thing: unions. And unions, in turn, mean: strikes, price hikes, inconsistent schedules and performance, etc.
On top of that, subway and other rail systems reach relatively few places. That means buses. And buses exacerbate the above issues to an even greater extent.
I don't think it's only that American cities aren't actively discouraging driving (e.g. by banning cars from city centers), but that they are spending huge piles of money actively encouraging it, by building 10-lane freeways and the like. If you build rail and not freeways to all the suburbs, most people take rail for routine trips.
Yeah, software never has bugs.
/s
Nobody is restricting your right to use your property as you wish. You may drive your car on private property all you want: your own property, or that of anyone else who gives you permission. That's what private property rights guarantee.
What you seem to want is to drive your car on property you don't own, which is not some kind of human right. Nobody is required to facilitate your desire to drive around by building you roads and granting you access to them.