I hear this discussion also on this side of the pond and I just don't get it: why not reviving public transport? I can't see how even more car-friendly policies - self-driven cars or not - can make the roads more available... I'm in Switzerland and short or long distance, public transport gets you in comparable times with driving. Maybe not for some godforsaken places where you need to switch three buses, but 90% of the trips you're within 20% of the direct drive time (and parking time is never counted).
It's more painful in the US because so much of our built environment is not at a human scale conducive to public transit. Transit uses an implied hub and spoke network system where the base level of spoke is walking, then some combination of buses/trains/subways integrating those walk-sheds.
For huge areas of the country (and yes, this includes those classified as "urban"), the distances are too long, and the scenery too hostile or unexciting, to encourage walking. The more this happens, the more people want cars, and everything about accommodating cars (vs accommodating those on foot) worsens the area for human use: heat islands from parking and roads, danger from the same, dead landscapes, etc. Part of the problem is that cars are great for GDP (road building/maintenence, New rings of suburbs every generation as people flee the old ones, the whole car ecosystem) and horrible for building wealth, and ultimately national policy is all about GDP.
The inertia of this ugly system keeps cars nearly necessary to live and work in most places. And you can live in ways that avoid car use, but all entertainment and recreation and your friends are inaccessible without cars because most people pick the car option when faced with the question.
All of this means that there's no critical mass of people using transit to push for high level of service, and buses (and in some regions trains too) become filthy places to avoid.
I think there are a ton of opportunities to use unused or infrequently used existing rail infrastructure. Passenger rail travel was more common when the population density of the country was lower [0], so there's no reason we couldn't restore it.
For example, a local city wants to expand a road leading to the downtown area, to improve traffic flow from the highway to the downtown core area.
I'd much rather they build a parking garage where we have a park and ride lot, and run the modern equivalent of a Budd Car on existing track a couple miles into the city and back. The tracks parallel the road they want to build, and anybody who wants to drive into the city is going to park and walk around anyway, so why not reduce traffic and make it less frustrating to go downtown?
> Transit uses an implied hub and spoke network system where the base level of spoke is walking, then some combination of buses/trains/subways integrating those walk-sheds.
Not necessarily. Minibuses, bikes, e-scooters, even cars (park and ride, a big parking next to a train station; you get off the train and on your car for the last/first part of your trip) are perfectly viable "last mile" options.
I prefer not to get killed in a traffic crash. Even personal mobility requires infrastructure like fully separated bike lanes and multi-use trails. A white paint line or sharrows is a joke.
We have level of service standards for roads and highways. But for pedestrians and bicyclists there's no standards for sidewalks on every street, bus stop quality, tree canopy, protection from speeding SUV drivers, crosswalks, bike racks, etc.
Here in Portugal the louder voices speak for public transit - greener, fairer, etc etc. You know the usual arguments.
Unfortunately massive public works are by far our biggest source of grifting. It takes an average of 20 years and $120M/mile (60M €/km) to open a new metro station.
Maybe Switzerland doesn't have this problem, but I'm all for solutions that take funds away from our politician's hands. And the car is great in that respect, as long as you don't advocate to increase road capacity at a massive cost.
> It takes an average of 20 years and $120M/mile (60M €/km) to open a new metro station.
Light rail transit or streetcars can be a lot cheaper than that, while still avoiding quite a bit of car traffic. The best system for any given atea is going to depend on density and local demand.
It can, but it won't be in Lisbon, unless we completely reform the public sector first. If that's our hope we might as well get used to the current situation.
There aren't such big cities in Switzerland to actually need a metro. Surface transport does just fine, plus some transit trains going under where it can't be avoided. So yes lately many investments go in new train tunnels, you can load your car and go that way for really long distances or across mountains, you have the sleeping wagons back in fashion, you can send your heavy luggage ahead via same train for a minor charge, you have night transport for when you come back drunk from clubbing... so you can keep your car for the casual shopping trip and for taxiing kid's football team to the weekend match. Not much need otherwise, and yes, it works already.
That's fair enough, I'm pinning my hopes on the electric car/bike coming down in price enough to make them viable for our commuters in the next 5 years. Still, if we don't have massive public works, it's a lot harder to fill politician's pockets on the side.
I have a dream in which cities will offer free parking on the outskirts in garages, and free light rail/subway transit into the city, with zoning laws that emphasize a walkable city. I can dream, but I think it will require separating people from their cars and getting them comfortable with that.
I'm jealous of parking abundant American cities. In this part of the pond, your choices are between walking, taking a face-planted-against-the-window bus or train, or take your car and spin around for 30 minutes at your destination trying to find somewhere to leave your car.
Neither of these are very good. I'd rather one problem be solved than have a choice between 3 awful compromises.
I use bike to go everywhere. It is a prefect solution:
1. Cheap
2. Takes very little space
3. Good for health
4. In a dense city almost as fast as a car; sometimes faster
For people who doubt biking is possible. In Finland there is a city near arctic circle called Oulu with population of around 100 000 people. They have 2h of day light in winter. Temperatures often go to -10 degrees centigrade. And 22% of all trips are done by bikes. Including children going to primary schools.
The answer to that is not more parking; it's cheap rideshare / carpooling / taxi when weather is bad, and incentivising usage of space-efficient bikes and motorbikes when weather is good.
In fact, London's taxi culture already has (or had) that sort of approach.
The answer also involves congestion pricing for parking spots, so you don't have to spin around so much in your car looking for a free spot. Of course, the higher prices involved would themselves create a higher incentive for these alternate solutions.
More parking can definitely be part of the solution. Above or underground automated parking cylinders can fit many cars, especially in the periphery of the city center where people can then use a short taxi ride/walk to their final destination.
Commuting to work, five days a week opens up a lot of possibilities. But it also becomes a source of many problems.
Your commute to and from work are now influenced by traffic. Some days are worse than others, but your boss doesn’t care as long as you are on time.
Fuel/electricity, maintenance, tires, and all the other costs for owning a vehicle add up to be a significant cost. And if you are already paying a premium to drive, might as well capitalise on that.
Eventually you move a little farther from work to buy a bigger house for less, and free up some of your income for other things. That 30 minute commute is now an hour and maybe less on a good day.
Well, if your going to spend two hours a day in a vehicle, might as well buy something more comfortable.
That is the mentality of a slave. Rise up, and employ a chaffeur to drive you where you need to be, and be back in an instant when you need the car again.
More parking just makes the sprawl worse and the traffic awful. Many Americans have commutes well over an hour each way because traffic is so bad. Doing so has a serious negative impact on quality of life and overall health since you’re sitting in a car so much.
You're correct in that once you start building for cars your city sprawls out and other modes of transport become impractical.
I don't think the 27% number is particularly useful because it offers no context into the type of trip. No one is suggesting you use bicycles for intercity trips, but for city transport they're perfect. This is reflected in the mode share numbers for cities compared to the national average: Wikipedia has Amsterdam at 40% bike share with 29% public transport and 27% driving. In the context of a city, biking and public transport are the obvious choices to get more people into the same area.
I think you have a chicken and the egg problem in many cities where driving is hugely subsidised and no investment takes place in other transportation methods. For example, in the UK the majority of trips seem to be around 5 miles or less. By bike this is only a 30 minute commute at the extreme end. Once you account for traffic it ends up being only 10-20 minutes slower than driving the same distance.
Compared to the Netherlands cycling only makes up 2% of the national mode share. The difference between the UK and the Netherlands is that we have almost no investment in cycling infrastructure, and what we do get is typically poorly executed.
> Bicycles replace walking, not driving.
Personally I don't believe driving belongs in any city where you also want people to have an enjoyable time walking the streets and socialising. It's a perfectly acceptable way of getting between cities or from remote locations, but within a city there are almost always better options.
> Wikipedia has Amsterdam at 40% bike share with 29% public transport and 27% driving.
That's the thing: in Amsterdam. Who are those people that are responsible for half of all trips and where are they headed with their cars?
Looking at the map I wouldn't drive in this city as well - the distance from the city limits to the centre is less than 5km, so as much as I have from my apartment to the centre of the city I live in, and I generally don't drive into this 5km radius circle around here.
The problem is that the majority of people do end up driving within that ~5km limit in cities that don't invest in public transport and cycling infrastructure. In the UK most cities are around this size, but our modal share for cycling is much lower, despite similar climate conditions. The main difference I see is that we invest heavily in infrastructure suited for cars, but very little in public transport or cycling.
I guess what I'm trying to say is cities typically end up the way they do due to how their residents approach transport planning. You can either continue with a car centric approach that leads to more sprawl and a city center that's less welcoming/interesting to visit, or you can try to make the city friendly towards more efficient modes of transport that encourage people to onto the streets.
To get back to the article for moment which is really about how parking and cars destroy cities, the discussion about whether bikes/walking replace driving is missing the point somewhat.
The point is if you build city centres around the idea of biking/walking then you can have much smaller and compact cities centres which are more pleasant and suitable for biking/walking at the same time. Biking/walking doesn't replace driving so much as eliminate it.
For people coming from further away, you drive to the edge of the city centre, park (often in a multilevel car park), and then walk the last part to your destination. This is how most Dutch cities are set up. Bigger cities of course have more short distance public transport too.
What types of trips? Distance traveled isn't really a relevant metric if you consider that cars may be used between cities (where distances are longer) and bikes inside of cities.
I'm from the Netherlands, 30 years old and have never owned a car. I do most everything by bike and public transport, occasionally if the situation calls for it I rent or borrow a car (I know people with cars that, unsurprisingly, aren't being used all the time). It certainly depends on your exact living situation, but my impression is that infrastructure plays a big role. I lived in Amsterdam for 12 years, and almost everything in that city encourages you to use a bike, and almost everyone does. Recently I've moved to Germany, and even though it's generally considered a bike friendly country with lots of people owning bicycles, the infrastructure doesn't compare. Dedicated bike lanes are way less common, and whatever is there is often bad quality (avoiding bumps all the time is really energy consuming). Again, unsurprisingly, people use cars here over distances where it wouldn't even cross my mind.
Of course distance matters, and cars will be preferable for long distances with bad public transport connections. I've never found driving a car inside a city to make a lot of sense though, it's often not even faster taking congestion etc into account. Put the bike infrastructure in place, and people will use it. Lots of Dutch train stations now have what's referred to as a "public transport bike", a few euros lets you borrow a sturdy bike for a 24-hour period. Take a train into town, do the rest with the bike, it's all really simple and fast. I see this being added to large parking spaces outside of cities in the future (maybe they already have - I don't own a car so I wouldn't know ;]).
Bicycles replace both walking and driving trips. In Dutch cities, most people walk or cycle to the grocery store, which is a great example of cycling replacing walking trips.
In smaller villages however, that are more spread out and usually only have one or two grocery stores, people usually take the car or their bike to the grocery store, because walking is too far. In this case, bikes do replace trips by car.
Also note that in general, Dutch cities are quite walkable and cycleable. If I visit a friend on the other side of the city I live in, I go by bike. Which is about as fast as going by car. Going by public transport also takes about the same time. This is a result of the Downs-Thomson paradox [1].
Here in the UK, approx 10 million (about 16% of the population) people live outside of towns and cities. My nearest supermarket is seven miles away. Public transport is almost non-existent. Cars are a necessity not a luxury.
In cities (and I lived in London until six years ago) you needed a car for transporting shopping. Its either that or pay inflated prices at local convenience stores. Where I lived (Leyton) there were 1 or 2 supermarkets within a mile or two but other parts of London you had to travel further. Even with the much better public transport, you would not be able to carry more than a couple of bags of shopping. And much of London was just too dangerous to cycle on.
So I can understand why people like their cars even in cities.
Free parking is also quite expensive, although it's hard to see.
It increases the costs of private properties when it's part of the property, and public parking increases government expenditures. It also consumes lots of otherwise very valuable space.
That's without factoring in the increased costs on social structures from the extra drivers on the road when there is more parking space.
If you are going to work as a freelancer and bill commute as working time (as you should, to disincentivize useless meetings), you might even make money while being driven.
This is madness. Despite the pandemic we all went through and the need to avoid unnecessary human contact and proximity, despite the fact that the highest risk of infection has been demonstrably in walkable cities like New York, the old policy of pushing for measures that would force people to travel together, regardless of their preference or safety, hasn't changed. I like to walk, and pre-pandemic I took public transport a lot, despite having access to a car, which I used to drive only rarely. That all changed with the pandemic. Thankfully, I haven't got infected, and I'm convinced that the shelter provided by car's cabin was an important factor. Do not force people into having only exposure laden movement options.
Urban planning is much longer scale than this pandemic.
In my opinion there should be no free parking in inner cities, and no requirements for parking spaces for property developers. Parking should be possible only in market priced parking garages. Parking options could still be built into apartment buildings, again at prices reflecting the cost of land/building costs. It should be markedly cheaper to buy an apartment without parking option.
Suburban areas are different of course, but cities seem to only turn really alive when cars are reduced and population density exceeds 10,000 per square kilometer.
San Francisco has had less COVID-19 fatalities than drug overdoses. New York got heavily infected because up until Mid February the governor considered it just the flu. On top of the feds failing to respond (botched test creation, minimal contact tracing, resistance to travel restrictions). The MTA forbid workers from wearing masks to avoid causing a panic.
No, this is my exact sentiment in Lisbon, Portugal - Europe. A city going on 1000 years. Our parking requirements for new construction and our addiction to free curb parking everywhere have destroyed mobility. There are unnecessary jams at all times of the day thanks to idiotic parking.
I drive daily and have nothing against cars. I hope that small semi-self-driving electric cars will eventually replace our dying public transit. There are many great things about the car. But I hate parking with a passion. In Lisbon we could easily double or triple the speed and amount of traffic flow without any investment by getting rid of a few thousand spots of street parking. Road space should be for people to go about their business, not for storing inert objects.
My hope against hope is that will one day we abolish street parking and invest in world-class automated below-ground parking. Let 1000 underground auto lifts bloom. Done properly it might even jump-start a new globally competitive manufacturing industry, something we haven't had since the 80s.
> In Lisbon we could easily double or triple the speed and amount of traffic flow without any investment by getting rid of a few thousand spots of street parking.
Agreed, but surely the best arrangement in a dense, traditional city centre is not to have high speed traffic at all except on a few large thoroughfares, and to reserve most other streets and alleys to pedestrian use.
I agree with you but high speed is very relative. I'd be happy to have a 30-50 km/hr limit across the city and no city streets/avenue with more than two lanes of traffic, certainly not advocating for more than that. What I'd love to have is a continuous flow of traffic at low speeds instead of stop-and-go for an hour to get 10 kms across town.
> I hope that small semi-self-driving electric cars will eventually replace our dying public transit
Why?? That can't work with the terrain and current buildings in Lisbon, there simply isn't enough space for a car per person. And I can't imagine a livable city with so much space and money wasted for parking and roads. ( Due to induced demand )
Improving public transit is a much better option, especially considering Lisbon has some decent infrastructure already ( the tram and metro networks seemed pretty decent from my trip there just at the start of the pandemic).
Sorry if I sound blunt but you're clearly not a resident of the Lisbon metro if you think public transit is serviceable. Maybe some 20% of commuters would have to trade 45 minutes in a car for 2 hours minimum in public transit. Lisbon =! the city centre. And our public transit is impossible to improve as seen in the last 50 years - we just can't make public works work.
Maybe it's a sign of old age but I've grown tired of idealistic solutions to persistent problems. Would I prefer a phenomenal public transit system over cars? Absolutely, I hate driving. But it is what it is and pining for Nirvana will not help us whatsoever. Better work with the momentum we have.
