
Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible - wallflower
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/02/cars-and-robust-cities-are-fundamentally-incompatible/4651/
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aharner
Brings to mind a quote from the mayor of Bogota, Colombia: "A developed
country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use
public transport."

~~~
jacques_chester
There are common use cases for which cars remain a superior alternative.

Shopping is the main one. Cars allow shops to be very large (providing more
variety and creating economies of scale), and the ability to site shops in
cheaper locations contributes to lower purchase prices.

The other classic problem with public transport is that it cannot replace the
point-to-point nature of cars. Sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn't.
But it matters for enough people that cars are the dominant mode of transport.

Self-driving cars will help some of this, particularly the car daycare
problem. Though they will have problems of their own. Ever tried to get a taxi
at rush hour? Ever been on a bus with suspiciously damp seats? People will
still want their own cars and will still want to travel at the same times.

As an aside, one thing I really like about my city (Perth) is that there are a
number of free bus routes in the CBD. You really do find CEOs riding the bus
to get around.

~~~
meric
You can have minibuses where you can get on/off anywhere along the designated
route. Farm these out to private operators (regulated, of course), and you
will have lots of cheap point to point public transport. It requires a city to
be dense, though.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus#Pros_and_cons_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus#Pros_and_cons_of_public_light_buses)

~~~
jacques_chester
We both know that this is not the same.

Let me put it in networking terms.

Cars provide a circuit model. You go from point to point over a single
dedicated "channel".

Any kind and combination of public transport does not do that. It is a packet
model and you, the human, are the packet. You must change modes of transport
and hope that they sync up, aren't running early or late, fit your schedule
and so on.

Except in the cases where point-to-point travel takes substantially _longer_
(very dense urban cores), I think most people will always prefer cars.

(Yes, I know the analogy is imperfect because the car can be seen as a packet
blah blah blah. But cars are not sentient. Humans are and it is _humans_ who
decide what mode of transport to use.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
But, as opposed to real computer networks, packet transportation is much more
energy efficient. Sending twenty people to the same destination in one
`packet' uses much less fuel than having those people travel in twenty
separated `circuits'.

As a society we seem to have mostly established the abstraction that _energy
is free and unlimited_. From the recent explosion of amount of things humanity
does we can see clearly how practically free energy is a desired state.
However, _we're not there yet_. Until we really get there, forgetting that
this is only a leaky abstraction is dangerous, as the leaks have deadly
consequences.

~~~
jacques_chester
I realise that on certain metrics public transport is better.

None of that matters. Who decides which transport to use? Humans. What
measurement do they use? It's clearly not litres of diesel per passenger-
kilometre.

"Humanity" is pretty good at economising scarce resources. But people are
pretty clearly prepared to pay enormous costs (fuel, parking space, commute
time) to have a private car. Arguing with revealed preferences doesn't change
them.

~~~
Tichy
Except that most of those costs (and lets include pollution) are externalities
borne by other people, not by the actual car drivers. If people would have to
pay the real cost for cars, things might look different.

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mikeash
Cars may cause trouble for cities, but the title is overstated to a degree
that makes it hard for me to take the article seriously at all. I've seen a
lot of cities I'd describe as "robust", and only _one_ of them, Venice, wasn't
swarming with cars. Although they may be at odds, it's clear from just looking
at nearly any modern city that cars and robust cities are _not_ incompatible.

The article tacitly admits this, with the lowest rate of automobile commuting
in their data set still over 40%. Which makes the terribly overstated title
even more puzzling.

~~~
hammock
Cars will fill the space given to them. Every growing city will have traffic
in its center. I.e., when you look at a given city block you will see all the
parking filled, and cars driving in the road. But what you may miss unless you
take a step back (abstractly), is that while every road in a denser city is
still filled with cars, there are less roads in aggregate, and therefore less
cars as well.

~~~
lutusp
> there are less roads in aggregate, and therefore less cars as well.

 _Fewer._ Fewer roads, fewer cars.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less>

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hammock
OP argues that more drivers cause cities to be less dense. That is a factor-
e.g. if you are a small business and you know all of your customers have cars
to visit you, you will lease the cheaper out-of-town real estate rather than
the expensive stuff next door to them.

But it really works strongly the other way around. The closer you are to
others, the less you have to drive to see them.

Things like zoning and parking minimums increase the space between buildings
(and therefore people), which necessitates more driving.

------
petercooper
As a countryside-dweller who visits cities now and then, I'd be more than
happy to use public transport in cities if they provided good ways to
transition between driving and public transport.

Very few cities have a good "park and ride" culture where you get safe, modern
parking structures on the main approaches to the city, and then frequent
express trains or buses into the center. Without this, it's more tempting to
just stay in the car and put up with a little extra traffic and expense in the
city center.

(In London, the closest thing you get to this is parking at Westfield in
Shepherd's Bush and tubing it in, but Shepherd's Bush is too central to London
to avoid adding to the worst of the traffic.)

~~~
bunderbunder
I think that folks driving into the city from the countryside is really a very
minimal part of the issue. No offense, but on any given day y'all are a drop
in the bucket. It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside
the city. The amount of space that needs to be devoted to accommodating them
can really be quite impressive.

Here in Milwaukee, for example, the downtown area has essentially been choked
off - there are office buildings, there are some hotels, there are a few
eateries and pubs which specifically cater to the office workers and business
travelers (many of them aren't even open on the weekends). And there is. . .
parking. Lots and lots and lots and lots of parking. If you ever go down there
at night, the parking is really the most noticeable thing because of the sense
of void it creates. All these great huge swaths of the very core of a major
urban center that are just completely empty. The feeling is downright
oppressive; it's like being in a shopping mall where 30% of the storefronts
are vacant.

~~~
petercooper
_It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city._

See, I was lumping myself in with that group. Park and ride schemes should,
ideally, be attractive to commuters in the outer suburbs (many of the smaller
British cities do a good job with this - Oxford, especially - just not any of
the big ones I can think of).

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kps
Once cars self-drive, most commuters' cars can be a quarter the size they are
now. When traffic lights, stop signs, _lanes_ , and such are gone, and cars
instead talk to each other to make efficient use of the available space, one-
person microcars will have an advantage, and the current disadvantage of being
flattened by a soccer mom's Canyonero will be absent.

~~~
saosebastiao
This is imaginative but flawed technophilia at best. People with grand
visionary ideas always seem to get two things wrong:

1) They underestimate problems with their ideas, and then brush them off with
solutions which, when summed together, make the visionary idea much less
palatable. For example, the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop
signs is complicated by the fact that not everybody can, will, or even should
use a car to get around. But in the world without traffic lights and stop
signs, pedestrians and cyclists are trapped by fear. Sure, they might
technically be able to walk out into traffic and the wondercars will stop for
them, but in reality, nobody will do that, because the cost of being wrong is
death. In every conversation I have had with these technophiles, the solution
always ends up being some massively costly network of pedestrian bridges at
every intersection of the city. Yeah, not so palatable anymore.

2) They fail to understand that, like evolution, intermediate states have to
be viable improvements on their own merits. Wheeled animals do not exist, not
because wheeled animals wouldn't have superior mobility, but because no
possible intermediate evolutionary state has incremental benefit over the
previous legged state. How do you transition a 2 lane road into three lanes
when only 50% of the cars are self-driving? What about when 99.9% are self-
driving? There are thousands of imaginary future states that do not have
credible intermediate states, and will likely never see the future state as a
result.

~~~
mike_esspe
Regarding the first point - have you seen crossing the traffic in Saigon? They
mostly don't have traffic lights, but pedestrians nevertheless cross the
streets.

With computer in charge it will be even more safer.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CU1PR4d1wM>

~~~
quanticle
Really? Your shining example for crossing traffic is third world traffic? I'm
sorry, I fail to see how that's safe at all. And even if it were theoretically
safe (it isn't by the way), I fail to see how that _maw_ of scooters,
motorcycles and cars would inspire confidence in any pedestrian that they
could cross the street and emerge on the other side with their limbs intact.

~~~
dalke
Better examples are Woonerf or Drachten, Holland and Bohmte, Germany. These
are first world cities where traffic signs were removed and streets designed
along the shared space philosophy. The now dated analysis (I don't know of
recent numbers) says that they are safer now than before this change.

There are a few reasons for why it can work. One is the idea that drivers on a
well delimited road become complacent. If it's a road designed for cars, then
drivers go faster, believe they have priority, and pay less attention to non-
drivers.

You can't just get rid of signs and expect things to work, because signs are
the only signifier. For example, the curb is a physical indicator of the
boundary between the place for cars and the place for non-cars. Also, if there
are more non-drivers often near the streets (cyclists, walkers, people sitting
at a cafe table) then drivers will be more attuned to events which are
currently rather low.

It also depends on a relatively slow speed. That video for Saigon shows that
the traffic is about that of a jog. At that speed, it's easy for drivers to
slow down, and easily within the normal reaction time for humans.

If you go this route then you can't have broad, open, clear avenues since that
encourages drivers to go a lot faster, which makes things more dangerous.

~~~
saosebastiao
Those ARE better examples, but unfortunately, they aren't examples that
driverless car visionaries are envisioning, as it doesn't represent an
advantage to them. They think that their technology will make their commutes
faster!

~~~
dalke
This branch was talking about "crossing traffic" and "the idea that we can
abandon traffic lights and stop signs."

It broke off from driverless cars a while back, I think. I personally can't
wrap my head around the idea that a personal chauffeur would get rid of city
congestion. Who wants to wait more than 5 minutes for their car to come? That
sets a maximum distance to wherever the car depot might be.

------
joseph_cooney
Driverless cars are a big game-changer here, because they don't need to stay
'down town' during the day. Hypothetically they don't even need to stay with
you at night either. Maybe they just live in a parking garage somewhere near
where you live.

------
Retric
Flawed analysis, smaller city's have less congestion and less demand for
public transit. The real issue with cars is they don't scale as you increase
population density.

~~~
dalke
How is the analysis flawed? It specifically looks at density. Quoting from the
paper:

> We analyzed a dozen historically dense, small cities from around the country
> in which the shares of residents getting to work by automobile range from 43
> to 91 percent. We compared the rates of automobile use to the number
> residents and employees per square mile.

The underlying abstract says:

> Theory suggests that as automobile mode share increases in a city, the
> amount of land used for transportation also increases, whereas the land
> available for other uses decreases. This can result in a loss of activities
> from the city. This study compiles data from 12 cities in the United States
> to test these theoretical relationships. The findings suggest that on
> average each increase of 10 percentage points in the portion of commuters
> traveling by automobile is associated with an increase of more than 2500 m2
> of parking per 1000 people and a decrease of 1700 people/km2.

It's saying that the more the city promotes car commuting, the fewer
activities are in the city ("decreased robustness").

Small cities can also be dense cities. The paper included Cambridge, MA and
Berkeley, CA in the study. Both have populations around 110,000 with a
relatively dense population.

~~~
Retric
Congestion is fairly independent of the amount of parking in a city. It also
pushes people to use public transit where available. Public transit requires
public buy in or it's not viable. Increased public transit allows for
increased density, but in no way increases the carrying capacity of the local
road system pushing up demand for public transportation further.

In other words think of congestion as the engine of public transportation
systems. Now, looking a small city's inside major metro areas vs outside major
metro areas congestion is vary different.

PS: Not to mention the relative student populations have direct effects on car
ownership. Now, if they had looked at more city's this would have been less of
an issue, but look at the 12 chosen.

~~~
dalke
Thanks. I didn't realize this was a paper on congestion. I couldn't find
mention of that in the linked-to page, nor is it mentioned in the abstracts of
the relevant paper. So I'm confused about how that's related to the analysis.

------
jstalin
Ah yes, more "cars are evil" claptrap. Some people like dense urban living,
some don't. Cars offer that option. The author is one of those who wants to
remove that option.

~~~
dalke
Where do you get that the author wants to completely remove the option of
driving? For example, from the author's web site I read that he has a car.

Based on the linked summary, "If the function of parking in these places was
to enable growth and development, the data suggests they were abysmal
failures." What this paper says is that increasing parking does not help the
city, economically speaking.

If the thesis is correct - which the data seems to support - then having cars
diminishes the options for those who want a "vibrant city." If you're in favor
of options, then surely you should be in favor of no-car parts of town, no?

If you're in favor of more options, then (as the author comments on a link
from his home page), do you think that "factors like suburban infrastructure
and the distance to most business centers and even the distance between many
stores have made people reliant on motor vehicles" and reduced the
transportation options?

You write that you don't want to remove options. The issue seems to be that
some options have already been removed, and should be restored.

At the very least, it would get the cycle-only weirdos and walking fetishists
out of the parts of town that you want to drive to.

~~~
jacques_chester
> * which the data seems to support*

Which the _hand picked examples_ seem to support.

Any time I see "country/state/city did X and got result Y" I am immediately
suspicious of the lack of broadly sampled statistics. It's very easy to
cherrypick examples for and against any policy setting you care about.

~~~
dalke
Sure. Now what's the evidence - hand-picked or otherwise - that suggests that
increased support for cars enables growth and development? It seems like it
would be an easy study to carry out, if it were the common case.

In any case, my question was 'Where do you get that the author wants to
completely remove the option of driving?'

