End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs).
That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo
The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.
Couldn't agree more. Situation is very similar in Tokyo. Almost from anywhere in the city, one can walk to a train station within 15 min; and trains come every 5-10 min if not more often. I was very surprised when I had to wait for 1 hour for CalTrain to go from airport to Palo Alto.
The density is both the reason for the high cost of car ownership as well as the efficiency of its public transportation system.
(Just googled a random picture, but you get the idea; Hong Kong density is rather extreme).
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/wealthy-hong-kong-poor...
In other words, there's plenty of people living in what you and me would classify as normal apartments. Albeit perhaps not incredibly spacious.
You and your numerous fellow residents are fortunate enough to live in a city that has quite possibly the best designed and most ubiquitous public transit system I have ever encountered as well as a city geography where it is economically viable to service virtually everyone.
The vast majority of the world's cities are not quite so lucky. This is especially for cities in the American Midwest. I live in one - Detroit. It would be nigh on impossible to function without a car in this city.
It's the end of the age of car-centric design in large metropolitan areas, but not of the car or "car age" by any stretch of the imagination.
Pretty much everywhere else, cars are almost essential to modern life.
PS: It's not just about doing less shopping trips; if you only get 1 bag of stuff it's easy to carry around. If you’re getting a massive load of junk you really want to drop it off in your car.
It's getting to the point where, if you live in a dense city, owning a car isn't just a thing you can live without. It's becoming one of the more obnoxious possible ways to get things done.
It's true I gave up listening to the radio years ago. The ads drove me away.
We're sort of on the edge of the naturally car-free zone: end of the Victoria Line tube one way, boundless greenery and suburban shopping barns the other. So yeah, lotta people here do have cars.
I am excited about this future. Cars slowly being phased out for a more accessible city for the people. Taking back the roads from cars for bicycles and walking.
But that just might be me.
But since around the 1980s or so there's been a revitalization of cities, especially in America. Changes in crime, changes in the economy, and changes in culture have brought people back to the cities. The suburban nuclear family is no longer the ideal for ambitious 20 to 30 somethings. The best paying jobs are no longer factory or industrial jobs outside the city, frequently they are knowledge worker jobs in urban centers. And young professionals seem to prefer the city life in many cases. The crime waves of the late '80s and early '90s (due to innumerable factors, especially the onset of the "crack epidemic") abated by the late '90s, right as the tech boom started. The result of all of these changes has been an influx of population and business back to urban centers.
And that has led to the increasing importance of public transit as well as walkable/bikable cities. Cities are discovering that expecting everyone to drive their car to work every day leads to gridlock, and they are reaping the consequences of low urban populations, low city revenues, and low investment in transportation infrastructure during the mid-20th century. They're also discovering that there are strong benefits to walkable and bikable cities. It leads to generally more appealing downtowns and, at least the perception of, nicer cities to live in. The improvements in telecommunications as well as delivery and other services (smartphones, amazon, uber, etc.) has reduced a lot of the traditional downsides to not owning a car (it's easier to find your way around due to GPS and maps, it's easier to coordinate with friends, it's easier to get important household goods delivered, etc.)
Cars are still relevant, and important, but things are changing in terms of where people want to live and work, and the era of the city designed solely around car transit is finally coming to an end.
Still, even if this is selfish and hypocritical, it can be harnessed - transportation is all about "if you build it they will come". If people support the development of alternative transport, it will get used. The biggest obstacle is people demanding that all the transport funding goes to building roads and parking lots, if we can defeat that mentality by telling people it will make the roads better for them, thats good.
I'd be happy to bike to work. It is not a very long commute and the exercise would do wonders to my sedentary self. Though, I will not risk my life to the maniacs on the road.[1] A few people do, but many don't, so no cyclist lane is going to get build that I could use.
[1] Cyclist like to say it is more the perception than reality. Still, one pedestrian or cyclist per week get killed in this town, by public transportation alone.
Buy the car. Park the car. Maintain the car. Repair the car. Insure the car. Put gas in the car, inflated by infrastructure and environmental taxes. Pay tolls for the car. So why not: pay for fewer others to be in the way of the car.
By the way, don't forget to wash and wax the car, and vacuum the car. And you can't use the same product on chrome, glass, paint and tire: what are you thinking?
I wonder how much things like Google Shopping Express, Amazon Fresh and (possibly in future) drone deliveries would help to reduce the need for personally owned cars?
Not having a large family allows you to do that. Good luck carrying home enough groceries for 6 people.
Consequently I'm buying hundreds of dollars of stuff each time I go, and most times I have a kid pulling on my arm. How am I supposed to carry all this stuff?
Luckily I have instacart, Google express, and Amazon to fulfill all non-groand the deliveries are sent to my house.
It's not really the death of cars, that's just a good headline, it's a shift in priority in new design, and a transition in that direction over time. But obviously there will be huge variance in transport models in different cities and countries, and from the centre to the suburbs.
I live within a 5-8 minute walk of half a dozen different grocery stores. It's great. I've lived in places where you need to drive, and I never want to go back to that.
Though of course, you can always get a cart or something.
When I lived in Denver many years ago, King Sooper's sent around a flat truck a couple of times a day, picking up grocery carts that had been left on lawns and curbs by pedestrian shoppers. I doubt that something so great could still be happening, but I'd be happy to hear that it is.
Perhaps a stepping stone to a general self-driving car would be a car that could just drive itself back to the store, to have the trunk filled with more bulky purchases.
If you are only concerned with what groceries you will require in the next 24 hours then carrying the required groceries for a large family isn't such a big deal.
And if grocery shopping every day sounds like an ordeal remember that everyone else is doing it too so generally everyone is only buying a handful of items. No trolleys piled high with stuff.
>do you have kids while living in a walkable city?
I do although my collection is limited to a single 1 year old at this time.
>Other days its simply that we haven't gone for a bit, and so it takes 3-4 arms to heft it back. Serious pain if you're out with the tykes and don't have your spouse/SO along.
Shopping as a lone adult with children when you have extended your usual shopping schedule is always going to be painful no matter what.
Going shopping with your car having not done it for a while is very definitely no picnic. Managing a child who isn't happy about how long this whole thing takes while you select, pack and eventually unpack your own body weight worth of groceries is not fun. Even if you aren't buying that much, as a lone adult juggling a baby and your groceries and getting all of them into the car while standing in a busy car park is an inherently unfun and often dangerous activity.
Frankly the only non-unpleasant way to do a larger than usual shop alone but with children is to get it home delivered.
I think our baselines have shifted: We've become so accustomed to living in places that are designed around the assumption that everyone owns at least one car that it's becoming hard to even imagine things that were just everyday life less than a century ago.
Conversely, I suspect the density of Snap Fitness locations was much lower. But you have to take the bad with the good.
Incidentally, in my (currently) single-income family I'm expected to pick up groceries on the way home from work. When we were two income, we'd share that responsibility. Historical chore assignments were a product of more than one factor, and I don't think anyone would suggest that all of them were desirable.
(But you can use pretty big panniers on a standard bike too)
Works for 2 people, should work for 6. It's even cheaper than driving there because you don't pay for fuel.
Or buy smaller amounts each day when walking back home. A little more expansive than in mall, but fresh.
Now it's coming back, now that the ordering end can be automated.
Densely built cities will be a lot easier to build encasings around, that filter the air on the outside before it circulates around inside the encasing, when they'll need it in 20 or 30 years time, than low density single-house cities fed by cars on freeways. East Asian and some European cities seem better suited for this than most in the U.S.
* you've never heard of air pollution and global warming,
* you don't experience air pollution every day for it to register in your thinking, or
* you disagree that polluted air will within decades encompass the globe.
Far more people live in places like Beijing China and Delhi India than Adelaide Australia or Anchorage Alaska, and the only trend they see wrt air pollution is an ongoing increase. A decrease is only talk by people whose other hand is milking the machine.
(The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)
Are you planning on moving the factories outside the encasement?
It seems more likely that various cities and countries around the world will act in self-interest by gradually enclosing more and more of their own living spaces inside air-filtered zones (including areas currently outdoors) than that governments around the world will mutually agree on and execute solutions to growing air pollution.
In fact, reality bears this out. Pollution in the U.S. is down over the past several decades, compared to its previously increasing. Pollution controls work and are economically viable.
Yes, developing (and far more corrupt) nations like China are increasingly choking themselves with air pollution. That's because of their social problems (i.e. not putting enough value on human life and quality of life). Their governments are willing to let their citizens suffer, and their citizens are powerless to effect change within their social and governmental structures.
Eventually the costs will become too great and even the corrupt governments will have to do something. (Or the rich/powerful will live in expensive, isolated structures while everyone else suffers.)
But one thing that certainly won't happen is to encase everything in airtight seals. Not unless Free Energy happens, in which case pollution would no longer be an issue anyway.
But it could be cheaper for the inhabitants of a few living spaces to build airtight seals around their own living spaces only than to contribute to the cost of decreasing air pollution worldwide, something you suggest might happen when you say...
> Or the rich/powerful will live in expensive, isolated structures while everyone else suffers
A city's residents and a country's citizens tend to act in short-term self-interest, and taking part in worldwide pollution control is a long-term solution that gives up a lot to developing countries like China and India who expect the developed world to bear the greatest costs because they've already reaped the greatest benefits from polluting and causing climate change.
I'll go with point 3. In some places it will continue to get worse, until either governments change and people can enact change, or the workers suffer so much that the economics make it cheaper to reduce pollution than to let it increase.
But no, it will not "encompass the globe." That's an extreme exaggeration, and your mentioning Australia and Alaska as counter-examples proves it. Are you letting your agenda trample upon your truthfulness? :)
If you look at developed nations with well developed public transportation (which means less need for private cars), you generally see lower birth rate. Really low. Look at Japan. S Korea. Europe.
However developed nations with less developed public transportation (meaning more ownership of private cars), you generally see higher birth rate. Examples are most of US (excluding NYC), Canada, Aus.
I personally think young moms just decide to have less kids if their option of traveling within the city is limited to public transportation. And with young kids, you do have to travel more than usual to get to doctors office, school, activities etc.
When you have a sedan/suv/minivan, traveling with kids is much more tolerable. You don't have to carry everything on your back or in your hands. You can strap them into car seats once and that's just about the only time you have to worry about it.
The three areas you list as "developed nations with well developed public transportation" are all compact and densely populated. The three you listed as "less developed public transit" are much larger, with a significantly higher rural population.
I would bet that if you normalized for education, you would see any disparities between your cohorts disappear.
You chose as your example the colonized English-speaking world, a.k.a. the U.S. (including its 51st and 52nd states)?
From 1st hand experience the main problem is finding a cheap parking spot near your destination. Then you still need the pram or the stroller to get from that spot to where you are going. That pram (or more specifically the carry tray underneath) is like a pack mule for all the junk that your kids need.
Can Google make an auto driving pram please? Something that can handle getting on/off public transport.
Fresh correlations daily!
It's also the case that young urban populations don't get the discount rate on children right. A lot of young urban people see children as a very high cost, and see no benefit. The benefit of children is all in the long tail. Many people who say 'kids are expensive and too much effort' have failed to factor in what happens when they get old and lonely. Anyone pondering this question should consider how much your parents like getting a phone call, then project forwards in their life where this possibility of joy is eliminated, forever. You don't even have to see adult children to get joy from them.
Many young people don't seem to think that far ahead. No, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone. I was once young too.
I'd love to see what would happen if cars were prohibited in bigger cities and what big money would do to public transport and bikes.
But since Germany is a car country, this will probably never happen.
How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your shopping home from your local store.
That requires a handicap-accessible city. There absolutely cannot be stairs between your front door and the aisles of the store (including bus rides). I'm sure some newer cities are like this, but older cities tend to grandfather in older buildings and public transit systems. I don't see this happening anytime soon.
Would love to be wrong, though.
Truth is, more cars are being sold than ever before, but even this is levelling out.
Global bicycle production per capita, on the other hand, has halved since the 1970's
Urban designers for densely-populated countries should plan instead for people and industry to spread out as much as possible to eliminate the effective damage of WMDs. I think there was a sci-fi novel (by Asimov?) where people no longer lived or even met with each other, fearing death through either disease or malfeasance.
And the way drones are progressing, we'll soon have some like those in Dune - "bugs" that fly to their target, identify him/her and kill only that individual. I haven't heard of anyone working on a bug spray yet.
One solace: all the above was brought to us, one way or another, by democratically-elected large powerful national governments. Guess we wanted these things, eh?
That was a hell of an effort to achieve a result that a) could easily have been exceeded by a small, simple low-explosive IED; b) Ended up having the opposite effect of the goal of terroism - it highlighted how difficult and relatively ineffective WMDs are.
But in these novels, the Earth was living in huge underground cities; big, noisy and somewhat dirty. The funny thing is that in Asimov's future Earth, population density was very extreme, people did have very little privacy (their apartments didn't even have own bathrooms, regular citizens used only public bathrooms and toilets). This was for 8 billion people, which in early 1950's looked like a huge population. This was supposedly achieved by megacities covering entire continents.
But today, the world has 7 billion people, and will have 8 billion people in a couple of decades - and life will not be that much different from what it is right now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
"Thus certain bombs were designed to destroy an entire large city even if dropped five to ten kilometers from its center. This objective meant that yield and effectiveness were positively correlated, at least up to a point. However, the advent of ICBMs accurate to 500 meters or better made such yields unnecessary. Subsequent nuclear weapon design in the 1960s and 1970s focused primarily on increased accuracy, miniaturization, and safety. The standard practice for many years has been to employ multiple smaller warheads (MIRVs) to «carpet» an area, resulting in greater ground damage."
So sprawling won't save you neither from the initial "nuclear carpet" (that can be quite wide), nor from the radioactive fallout that have always spread over a much larger area than the radius of initial explosion(s).