
End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile - mjohn
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile
======
pcr0
I live in Hong Kong, where 95% of the population uses public transport daily,
and has a very low car ownership rate. Reasons include $7.4 petrol (gal),
vehicle registration tax that can exceed 100%, and expensive parking ($400 a
month for a single car, and that's just at home)

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.

~~~
L_Rahman
I was in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago.

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.

~~~
tsmarsh
Its not luck

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api
"End of" or "death of" == click bait hyperbole, almost always.

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.

~~~
ams6110
The article is about a very specific scenario: dense metropolitan city
centers. It has always been the case in those areas that many people do not
own cars, and yes you can get by very well by using public transport, taxis,
walking/cycling, and the occasional rental when you do need to drive
somewhere.

Pretty much everywhere else, cars are almost essential to modern life.

~~~
Retric
It's a little more than that. The internet reduces peoples need to go
somewhere, buy stuff, and take it home even outside of cities. This is killing
the suburban shopping mall, but it also significantly reduces peoples need to
move around with a pile of stuff. Because public transport is mostly focused
on moving people and not their stuff this makes public transport more useful
to more people. Even if they don’t give up both their cars living in a one car
household is far easier nowadays.

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.

~~~
mistermann
The internet has largely removed my desire for physical goods. It's probably
partially my age, but I suspect it's somewhat true for younger people as well.
I'd just as soon read an in-depth review on a new piece of tech rather than
buy it and get it configured before putting it on the shelf not to be used.

~~~
drcross
Desktops with their huge CRT's have consolidated into laptops. Your phone
consolidates an alarm clock, a landline, a camera, a torch and a calculator.
You don't really need a TV or radio. Modern tech is slowly reducing the amount
of clutter needed for daily life.

~~~
WalterBright
I still love my huge desktop monitor and full size keyboard, laptops are too
squinty and I make too many typos on the cramped keyboard.

It's true I gave up listening to the radio years ago. The ads drove me away.

------
Zigurd
Cars kill over a million people annually and injure millions more. Let that
sink in. Getting rid of cars as we know them will be like curing a dread
disease.

------
InclinedPlane
It's the dawn of the second age of modern cities. There was a period of time
in the mid 20th century when cities were being drained of people. Some of that
was motivated by a desire to have a nuclear family living in a house in the
suburbs with a lawn and a garage. Some of that was motivated by the perception
of the cities as an unsafe or unsavory place to live. Some of that was
motivated by blatant racism (so-called "white flight"). The population of
Manhattan peaked around 1910, as did the population of Paris, the population
of Detroit around 1950, the population of San Francisco originally peaked
around 1950 as well.

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.

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kazinator
It's funny when _drivers_ echo the sentiment that their city would be better
off with fewer cars. Of course, they mean "my driving experience would be
better off with fewer _other cars_ on the road".

~~~
MBlume
Or "my life would be better if owning a car and driving it everywhere weren't
the least-bad option available to me"

~~~
michaelchisari
Or "My life would be better if driving a car was for road trips, family
visits, adventures and special occasions, not everyday life."

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r00fus
"We will still have cars – people need them for carrying goods – but their
speeds will be very low and there won’t be so many of them."

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?

~~~
nazgob
It might help in US (I guess?) but in most of Europe this is not the issue.
I've lived in several EU countries, never had a car. I always walk to the
nearest grocery shop or bike to a bigger one. City design allows me to do
that.

~~~
ars
> City design allows me to do that.

Not having a large family allows you to do that. Good luck carrying home
enough groceries for 6 people.

~~~
btbuildem
If there are six people in this family, surely some of them can help carry the
groceries.. but I digress. I think you miss r00fus's point - in a walkable
city, you're not forced to haul hundreds of pounds of groceries from one
centralized megalocation once a week. The design of a livable city means there
are plenty of small shops interspersed in and near residential areas, making
it easy to frequently visit them to pick up whatever you may need.

~~~
ams6110
I think there are some rose colored glasses in play here. Cities used to be
just as you describe. We liked supermarkets better. What's different?

~~~
TillE
By "we", you really mean American suburbanites. Supermarkets are almost
nonexistent in Germany, for example, and there aren't very many in Manhattan
either.

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.

~~~
mollmerx
Germany has many supermarkets. Where in Germany would you say they are "almost
nonexistent"?

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vorg
> This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted
> wisdom across the developed world. “The height [of buildings] is going up;
> density is going up; borough policies and London plan policies are all about
> intensification and densification of land uses,” [...] People live very
> close and they don’t travel at all because everything is on their doorstep;
> the population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you
> could ever want.

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.

~~~
alphapapa
Why will we need to encase our cities and filter the air that comes in from
outside the city?

~~~
vorg
If you're asking, then either:

* 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.

~~~
ptaipale
Most of the pollution comes from inside the city, so encasing the city would
be rather disastrous. And you can't really protect against the global warming,
aka greenhouse effect, by building a _greenhouse_ \- because that's
effecticely what encasing a city is. A very large greenhouse which gets very
hot inside.

(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.)

~~~
vorg
Perhaps "connected enclosures" would be a better term. The enclosures would be
built gradually, incorporating present air-conditioned buildings but with air
filtration systems added, and slowly extended to more and more areas. Many
subway stations in Asia have a transparent seal between the tracks and waiting
area which would be part of the enclosed zone boundary. You probably imagined
a dome over a city when you read "encasing".

~~~
ptaipale
I still don't quite get why cities should be any kind of enclosures. The world
as we know it has these huge air filtration and CO₂-to-O₂ conversion systems
called "forests", and I do not understand why cities should be disconnected
from them (apart from perhaps protecting the forests).

------
dba7dba
I have a small theory about cars and low birth rate.

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.

~~~
exelius
I think you're drawing conclusions from coincidence. If I had to pick a reason
for the disparity, it's that public transit and dense city centers make less
sense in countries with large, rural areas. Rural areas tend to have lower
levels of education, and level of education has been linked with birth rate
(specifically, higher female educational achievement leads to lower birth
rates).

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.

~~~
whatusername
Australia has quite a high urbanization rate (89.2%):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country)

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tehchromic
can't happen soon enough.

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k__
In Germany they just seem to replace "owned" cars by "rented" cars in the
bigger cities.

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.

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ianstallings
It's not that surprising given that most of them were originally built for
horse and cart traffic.

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SixSigma
No mention of electric bicycles or more powerful two wheeled vehicles such as
the 70 million petrol scooters in Vietnam.

How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your
shopping home from your local store.

~~~
humanrebar
> 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.

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docs101
Coincidentally a new documentary is out in the UK this coming week on the
exact same topic: Bikes vs Cars.

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Eye_of_Mordor
tl;dr increasing urban density => decreasing car use

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

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jivardo_nucci
I hate to be a downer but this "idea" will vanish like morning mist with the
first terrorist nuke.

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?

~~~
Zigurd
The reality of terrorist WMDs is one incident, _ever_. That was the Aum cult's
sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. That's it.

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.

~~~
alphapapa
By "reality" do you mean "history"? Or are you predicting the future?

