People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.
I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean.
We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.
> Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean.
The "tourist" vs "working" views of a city to the side, I think the big solution isn't revamping existing cities at first, it'll be creating pockets of new development with different goals.
And there's lots of weird things that affect American suburbs - minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.
I've often wondered if a "carmpromise" city could be built - let's assume a ten minute walk is half a mile. Imagine a strip of city a mile wide where cars are effectively banned. Parking garages at the edges provide car access for those who have them, and the rest is entirely built around walking/biking. Perhaps a tram line runs through the middle. Then those who want cars (basically everyone) can move in without fear, and if some? most? eventually realize they're not using them they can save money by eliminating them.
> minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.
We have fire and garbage trucks in Europe too and we manage to build small scale streets in the suburbs and rural areas without compromising on emergency services. The key difference is we plan these streets for the expected amount of traffic which will be a couple cars per hour at the top and have regular intersections with other streets where, should there be the rare case that a vehicle comes up towards you, there is enough place to act as a bypass. Americans seem to plan all streets as if they would be used at capacity 24/7.
The main thing seems to be requirements to turn around - a normal street here is wide enough to park five fire trucks side by side. It’s way too wide for what we need.
To be fair the streets date from before the invention of the car, so maybe it’s something else.
I don't even think there's anything wrong with 2-3 car households being the norm in suburbs. I just want single occupancy vehicles banned from city centers, at least in places like Manhattan (where I live). They're dangerous, they're a waste of space, and due to traffic and parking requirements they're usually not even an efficient mode of travel for their owners.
If we reserved a few roads in Manhattan for busses, large commercial delivery vehicles, and people with disabilities, and left everything else for bikes, scooters, and pedestrians, transit would be faster and more pleasant for everyone.
And I’m sitting here in my European suburb and considering if we could get rid of our single car. When I still had to go to the office I always bicycled or took the bus. There’s a grocery store and pharmacy within 5 minutes walk, but we order most groceries online anyway. The kids daycare is 200 meters away, and when they begin school it will be a 10 minutes walk. The car is useful when we go on holidays the whole family or when I need to buy some lumber.
From where I live now it’s hard to fathom why any family would need two, or even three cars. Those suburbs that made that a necessity must be considering utter failures.
In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area. Any supplies or groceries must be transported a significant distance in a pedestrian hostile environment.
That would be hell for me. I have never lived more than 1km from a grocery store, even in our village 20 years ago. Most time, including now, about 100-200m.
> In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area.
Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?
I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?
In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.
They’re wrong on the scale but correct in the essence. 3 miles away, no bike access, that means you’re driving. No shops, restaurants, or anything lives in the suburban housing area.
> there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance
That’s very nice and quite rare, especially for newer suburbs. Some of the older ones had a little Main Street or some grandfathered in stores and shops. Prices are extremely high accordingly compared with other suburbs.
> They’re wrong on the scale but correct in the essence. 3 miles away, no bike access, that means you’re driving. No shops, restaurants, or anything lives in the suburban housing area.
I'm still curious where all these suburbs are that have nothing but houses for 3 miles or more?
Was trying to find some examples and looks like Mesa,AZ is the worst in this sense in the USA:
Looking at it in google maps it is indeed sprawling with houses. But I couldn't find a spot in the various neighborhoods where one would be more than 3 miles walk away from a supermarket. The worst I came up with was 2 miles to a supermarket. But then I zoomed in and saw a restaurant only 1 mile away.
Not a thorough research for sure, just spent a handful of minutes on it.
But assuming the article is correct and Mesa is the worst of the sprawl and given I didn't find it easy to find houses more than 3 miles away from (food) businesses, I'm thinking the OP statement that "In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area" is quite an exageration.
Am I wrong? Can anyone name a handful of these neighborhoods?
I looked at the mountainous (seems like it on maps) region between Escondido and Temecula.
That doesn't look like suburbs, although there are a handful of housing developments. But these are not in the outskirts of an urban area like a suburb, these are more rural and not attached to any city.
Yes, sure, once you go outside cities into semi-rural or rural regions, it's easy to be way more than 5 miles from shopping.
Most of my experience woth "europe" is Finland as I have lived there a couple years and married a Finn, so I don't dare say "european vs american suburbs" but I do dare say that what constitutes as a "suburb" in Finland is much different than what you can find in the US. Here, we have suburbs that just seemingly go forever, with nothing but houses. Usually when there is a suburb in the US, it is zoned such that it is only homes, and nothing else. It is the worst (imo)
I blame government zoning laws. These prevent entrepreneurs from opening restaurants and markets near to where people live.
In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.
Zoning laws came to be because of the classic "tragedy of the commons" - enough people were too greedy and built polluting, noisy or traffic-intensive businesses right adjacent to people's homes.
Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.
Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.
And in a car centric society, even a supermarket becomes noisy and polluting since all their customers use heavy machinery (cars) just to get there. I certainly don’t want to live next to a large parking lot.
Houston doesn’t call what they have “zoning”, they just have a bunch of other laws on the books that have basically the same effect. It’s certainly not an urbanist’s paradise.
> I just want single occupancy vehicles banned from city centers
Why be so authoritarian? It's one thing to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm not going to use them", but it's another to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm going to take away everyone else's choice to use them".
Cities are older than most of the people living there. People know what they get when they move to a city and pay higher prices for that. For quiet there are better cheaper options, ones where you don’t have the noise of sharing buildings and walls with others above, below, and beside you. Obviously if one person wants cars and another doesn’t it will come down to how many want that, but moving to a city for quiet is like wanting to go swimming without getting wet.
Cities are also much older than the car infrastructure in them.
Cities can be changed: in Utrecht, Netherlands they removed an entire motorway to restore the old moat and a more pedestrian / bicycle friendly environment ( https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov... ). Many cities ban cars from the city center, restrict them to 30 km/h or one way streets, or make parking prohibitively expensive.
People come to cities because of all the other people there, not because there are so many parking lots.
It's funny how banning single occupancy vehicles is out of the question for being overly authoritarian (you're downvoted on HN, but I bet you'll win most actual votes in actual American cities), but designing a city center with no roads so no vehicles can use them isn't usually considered authoritarian. People have weird intuitions about rights and commons.
Because a car is much more dangerous than a bike and regulated much looser than a bus or a truck. There's a high likelihood on an auto heavy street that as a cyclist I gravely hurt myself or lose my life while the driver only had to pay a fine and or higher insurance. I'd gladly support an alternative where any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure, but that's even more politically dead in the water than closing a street off from cars in the US. Cars in the US are very lightly regulated heavy machinery.
> I'd gladly support an alternative where any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure
If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me (because someone decided that narrow lanes are better) decides to step in front of me, not at a crosswalk, avoiding an accident would require me to have a negative reaction time. Are you saying I'd deserve to have my license seized in that case?
> If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me [...] decides to step in front of me
Which she presumably had to do to avoid the oncoming double stroller without diving into the pile of trash bags awaiting pickup.
I disagree with the GP, this isn't merely about penalties for drivers. We've allocated an inordinate portion of available space to large metal vehicles carrying just one or two humans each, and left the scraps to be shared between all pedestrians, skateboarders, outdoor restaurants, parking meters, trash bags, trees, and all manner of other things. Because of course, you can't put the trees in the middle of the street, what would all the cars do? And then the pedestrians also spend 20% of their time waiting at traffic lights that are only necessary because cars are death machines that can't stop quickly enough.
The fact that avoiding an accident "would require [you] to have a negative reaction time" is exactly why cars are inappropriate for busy city centers.
Yes and get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault. Right now damages are not proportionate between drivers and anyone else, so a rational actor will drive. If this is acceptable I'll take it and let cars gladly downtown. Elsewise, I'll take a ban on cars in downtown streets.
If I need to accept the risk of maiming to play, the other side does not, and both of us are innocent until proven guilty, then I'm not playing unless I really have no alternative. Unsurprisingly this is what actually happens in the US; only a few people proportionally actually use non car modes on streets. The majority are those that have no other option, either because they cannot own a car for cost reasons or other physical or legal reasons (physical disability, suspended licenses, etc).
> You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
Come on, stop putting words in my mouth. We're talking about city downtowns not the whole US. I'm for restricting car use there, which you claim is authoritarian. I proposed an alternative, one used in the Netherlands, to put the onus of harm on the less vulnerable party and balance unfair externalities. You complain that this is "guilty-until-proven-innocent". If you want to rules lawyer your way to a car hegemony be my guest, but I'll continue to advocate for decreasing the unbalanced harms to non-car drivers on American streets.
The thing I noticed is you seem to be associating the seizure of the license as some form of guilt, where as sat least to be it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning from the cops. You’re not guilty but you are under investigation to determine if you are guilty, so they politely ask you to not run away in case they have any more questions that could help prove you innocent (I’m obviously putting aside the fact that reality doesn’t work this way anymore for loads of reasons when it comes to the police). The same goes for your license, you are involved in an incident where you being an irresponsible driver is one possible result, preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation and has nothing to do with innocent or guilty.
> you seem to be associating the seizure of the license as some form of guilt
That's because not being allowed to drive is a really harsh punishment. Harshly punishing innocent people is even worse, which is why I assumed you meant guilty-until-proven-innocent.
> it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning
Not being allowed to drive doesn't keep you from leaving town, but it does severely reduce your ability to participate in society. Now you can't go to work, drop your kids off at day care, or bring home groceries.
> preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation
That's exactly what guilty-until-proven-innocent is!
If you’re going to associate removing the ability to drive with a punishment, then naturally your going to have the viewpoint that you’ve been judged as guilty. However driving is a privilege not a right, you’re not entitled to it, if having it temporarily withheld is earth shattering, then perhaps that’s indicative of issues beyond the importance of driving to the individual and represents how dangerously dependent on cars society has become.
We can’t expect the status quo to change without some way to force it off the car dependent pedestal it’s perched on. Lawfare might be the best way. If it inconveniences people they might drive different or stop driving so much and then eventually we get urban change.
You're also (in some cases) allowed to swim in the same rivers as alligators do. Yet that's not a good idea since the alligators make swimming there pretty dangerous. Same goes for riding a bicycle on roads full of reckless car drivers.
Speaking as someone who likes rock climbing and also road trips, I'm not sure what the alternative is. Even in Europe (especially in Europe), you need a 4-wheel drive to access most of the climbing areas.
I live in Canada and currently just have a hybrid, but it does limit me in what areas I can drive to for climbing
Simple, we don’t optimize for edge cases. I live in the suburbs. You know how many people around here have 4wd Jeeps for their commute to the office that they have never taken “off road” a single time?
The solution is someone like you who does outdoor stuff may shell out for a 4wd vehicle. That’s OK!! You just park it in your neighborhood or in your garage like everyone else. The majority of people who don’t do these activities just walk and bike around and probably take their hatchback to visit someone once in awhile or pick up a larger piece of furniture.
I don't agree with that statement. Here is a list of top sport-climbing and bouldering destinations that will not require a 4-wheel drive (source: me and my car).
- Frankenjura
- Elbsandstein
- Margalef
- Siurana
- Chulilla
- Albarracin
- Finale
- Osp
- Kalymnos
- Leonidio
- Ceuse
- St Leger
- Gorges du Tarn
- Les Calanques
- Buoux
- Fontainebleau
As for multi-pitch climbing: almost everything in the Alps is accessible with a normal car and the customary approach (or a cable car).
This isn’t the case here in the US. We have thousands of miles of off road areas that aren’t accessible to non off road vehicles. But I do agree that a large portion of people here in the US that have huge lifted vehicles never go off road.
I've climbed in Canada, Italy, Germany, and Greece (but not a ton in Italy), and it seems like Greece especially has many climbing areas that are hard to access without a 4wd. I traveled around in a rental and bottomed out so many times, but also had to just give up and turn around on several occasions.
It's been a while since I climbed in Italy, but I remember it being pretty similar.
Admittedly, the limited climbing in Germany I did had pretty good parking access.
I suspect there are many European countries whose climbing access is more like Greece though.
No need to suspect anything. My list included the major climbing areas of Europes major climbing countries and none of them require a four-wheel drive. Even some of the more secluded Swiss areas (Gimmelwald, Rawyl) are easily accessible in a camper van. And I know that for a fact, because I've been there myself.
If you don't go climbing daily, access to good car sharing will do just fine. It is probably cheaper, as you'll only need to shell out for a 4x4 when you actually need it.
In bc? the amount of climbing is insane, Most is non 4x4. But also depends what you mean by 4x4 accesses. Some better tires and then maybe a lift kit covers 99%.
As a kid in the US it seemed silly that so many people had SUVs in a city, and as adult I wouldn’t buy anything but an SUV. Once you grow up you realize how nice the ability to transport more people and more things is. Picking up groceries, moving, buying even a TV or any type of furniture. Having to move every other year because your apartments rent went up and once owning a home the number of home improvements that require going back and forth to Home Depot.. then there’s bad weather, snow if your up north. If anything I’d be more inclined to remove cars and keep SUVs now because the utility is more than double and the price is only slightly more. A car is like a knife in your pocket, handy to have for various things, but an SUV is like a Swiss Army knife. Cross-over SUVs are perfect because they are literally just cars with bigger bodies.
It’s a bit of a chicken vs the egg problem. Charge stations in parks and at access point would really change the range requirements. There’s some parts of van island that kinda have this covered already. It’s pretty neat.
Yeah, I'm in BC, and not having 4x4 limits you a lot. I got stuck trying to get up Mt. Maxwell (the climbing area on Salt spring) in a civic. Bottomed out a lot / damaged my car a lot on Vancouver island / Sunshine Coast, and just can't get somewhere remote like Eldred Valley in Powell River.
Of course, most of Squamish is accessible, and Skaha, so yes, there's tons of climbing, but the "well-traveled" areas are realistically <50% of all potential climbing, and not the same experience as climbing remote.
Again some better tires and a lift. The gambler 500 is a good indication of what a small shit box can do with better tires. I lifted my small old Subaru, and some at tires. was a nicer ride than most trucks, and snaked into more places they couldn’t
Or they realize that most public transit here is unreliable junk. It's almost never on time. This isn't a huge deal until you have to catch a connection/transfer and being late by 5 minutes mens you have to wait another 30-60 minutes for the next one. Or that they completely shut down after something like 1am. Oh, and I good luck to people not losing their job when the system goes on strike and you can get to work for a few days.
I would love to have great public transit. Much of these issues are policy or design issues. The policy issues need to be addressed. If only there was some accountability to the public...
Just for a fun story, my car broke down and I had to take public transit for a month. It was easier for me to walk 2 miles (no real sidewalk for most of it and busy roads) than to rely on the bus schedule. It took me 1.25 hours to get to work using two trains and a bus, when in the car it would take 20 minutes.
So as much as we want good public transit, we can't suddenly start using it if it doesn't exist. People have basically given up on it when schedules are a joke and the whole system can shut down for days or weeks.
It depends on the city, but in bigger cities it's frequently the traffic from cars that keeps busses from being on time.
Separately, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to run busses every five minutes—which is what you really want—you need enough bus riders to fill all those vehicles.
The easiest way to solve the problem, as I understand it, is to ignore the urge to cover the whole area in bus lines, because it's expensive and many of them won't have enough ridership to justify the cost. Instead, look where your density is highest, change zoning to let it get even higher, and build, like, 1 or 2 bus lines with very frequent service (less than about 12 minutes gap). That's the magic threshold where you don't need to look at a schedule -- if you miss one bus, a 10-12 minute wait won't make much difference. And that makes it an inflection point for ridership too -- you can get a lot more people with frequent service, meaning you get enough riders to make the whole thing worthwhile.
Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it. You want buses to be a pleasant alternative to driving -- since you already have a walk at the beginning and end of your journey which takes time, it's nice if your bus can get priority over car traffic.
And from there, build up the areas with good bus service more and more, add more buses as needed due to population growth, lengthen lines, add new lines gradually as people see the success of the first ones. Incremental implementation is the trick.
> Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it.
Counterintuitively this even is useful for people who have to go by car. A bus has a lot higher density in people transported. By making it attractive for people to use the bus they don't take away space on the road, which can increase the flow of the remaining cars, even if road space is reduced.
I really envision a hub/spoke wheel design. Run rail as the spokes. Once you get far enough out, the gap between the lines can be managed by a circular rail line and/or a couple bus lines. I guess I don't really like busses.
Buses are much easier to add in a city that's already built for cars. You just build some stations instead of having to dig up the whole road to add rails.
True, but that's only busses. Rail lines were (are?) commonly 5-15 minutes off schedule depending on the time of day.
For people to use the system, they have to trust the system. Depending on the city, rail infrastructure can get you close enough to walk to many places. The stuff that crushes trust even then is the rail lines being off schedule and strikes. Safety can be a major concern too, like the woman who was raped on a SEPTA train recently (WTF). These should be simple asks. Maybe we just need to charge/tax more so they have more money (or maybe we need better people making the decisions with that money).
If only there was a solution to this problem. If only we could make the public transit go from “sucking” to “not sucking”. Guess we can’t. Throw in the towel. I’m buying a truck and America better damn we’ll go bomb someone to make sure gas is cheaper than milk.
That's not a helpful comment, nor is that what I'm saying. People can continue to go to meetings and write their reps. But until the number of people doing that gets big enough, it's not going to change (ie a centralized system needs a significant number of supporters to overcome status quo).
In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments. Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.
Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us.
And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.
> In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments.
Yes but not in the way you’re describing. Apartments would be part of the single family home neighborhood. Which is good. People who are single for example can live in the community and meet people. Which brings me to the next point:
> Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.
Right. Because we choose to live in suburbs and make it so we are this way. We could just, ya know, not do this? It’s like saying well I’m not using Google because Ask Jeeves has conditioned me to use a crappy search engine. Well… just stop then?
I'd like to see some sources on the reason for having underdeveloped social skills. Sure, exposure to situations is necessary to an extent. You still have shy urbanites as well as kind/inviting rural people. I would venture a guess that much of it is culture based (eg southern hospitality, NYC has a reputation for being gruff/big personalities, etc)
I don’t even know that we do have “underdeveloped social skills” if I’m being truthful. But if we do I think “how we live” is probably a good starting point since so many people are just cooped up all day.
HOAs get a lot of hate, but they were the only recourse I had against neighbors who became hostile when I tried talking to them politely about their 24/7 barking dog in the adjacent lawn.
It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.
Why can't that problem be something that local governments fix with actual laws? Why do we need organizations that have most of the power of a government, but none of the accountability or checks and balances?
My friend said that when he lived in Brisbane, the police will actually come out with a volume meter and log the noise, talk to the dog owners, and ultimately take action if nothing is done.
Yea until spring time. Then it’s endless lawn mowers, leaf blowers, drag racing, dirt bikes, and all sorts of other loud noises. Can’t keep the windows open because it’s too loud.
There's a fairly simple solution to the issue of excessive noise from neighbours in apartments: have rules for when noise can be made and when noise cannot be made, and enforce them with fines/eviction.
Evicting people for not paying rent has become a political issue. There's no way you'd ever get away with evicting people for not keeping their dog from barking at the wrong times.
I attribute the desire to go out of their way to spend more money just to live in a cramped box among strangers to be overdeveloped social neurosis. Humans lived for millions of years in large open spaces, owned land de facto, and had ample space (think kilometers) for themselves or their children to run around outside.
If you want to live in a box and own nothing, go ahead. I can't imagine going back to living on less than 8k sq meters. The growing population is a virus encroaching on man's ability to own his kingdom, not something to be applauded and smiled about.
I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit and have been a transit-alternatives advocate for years in 3 major cities, I'm a member of the lefty SF bike coalition, and am also a fan of strongtowns that leans toward the right side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be a left or right issue. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this topic.
We a former football quarterback was killed today because of dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. We lose 100 people in America per day due to, trivial fixable, dangerous automobile infrastructure. It's a death toll we happily ignore, because it's better to just not think about it.
They apparently edited the article at some point to mention the truck in the lede:
> Dwayne Haskins, an NFL quarterback drafted by Washington and on the roster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Saturday morning after being struck by a truck in South Florida. He was 24.
> I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit
I was a Reddit mod for a while, but after I reflected on the fact that Reddit pulls in nearly $200MM in yearly revenue thanks part to my unpaid labor where I primarily deleted Youtube video spam posts and idiotic flame wars in comment threads, I decided to spend my time and energy elsewhere. The next logical step was to stop contributing anything at all of value to Reddit. So every once in a while I'll visit a few subreddits to see if anything new or interesting happens (i.e., sort by Top for the last month).
Unfortunately for r/bicycling I find the content to pretty much just be, "Hey everyone check out this picture of my bicycle!" If it's the goal of the sub to advocate for cycling infrastructure, I question how the top posts from just this past month accomplish that.
* Check out this picture of my bike in the Ukraine!
* Check out another picture of my bike in the Ukraine!
* Truck driver slows down and stays behind cyclist going through a rather long tunnel with no shoulder to keep said cyclist from what seems like certain death otherwise
* Cyclists near bike storage in the Netherlands lining up to leave the station
* Cyclist climbing a steep hill
* Cyclist forcing protesting trucks in DC to go slow
* Check out this picture of my bike! (And I'm depressed!)
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Silly stationary bike that actually moves
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Cyclist holding up a line of traffic on a remote mountain
road
* Cyclists riding gravel
* Check out this picture of my bike I got for cheap!
* Check out this picture of my bike!
* Calvin and Hobbes comic about bike/car drama
* Video of flying down a remote mountain road
* Picture of a mostly-empty bike storage room
* 50-ish mile bike ride map
* Video of a cyclist riding around for 60 miles
* Tesla crashed into a shop with a sign against bike lanes
* Check out this picture of my bike! And I rode 100 miles
Anyway, you get the idea. r/bicycling could be so much more, but for some reason few visitors there seems to care much about anything except people posting pictures of their bikes, and for a lot of what gets upvoted, I just don't see why it's really even all that novel or interesting.
I don't know how to fix that, or whether it's even really worth trying to fix. Like I said, I'm a jaded former mod on Reddit who just doesn't see much anything virtuous coming out of that platform.
It's not a bike problem or a reddit problem but a people problem. Forums were the same way if not worse because people had so much rep tied to their username. It's the same thing with all my different interests, it's like you can take out all the topic-specific language from the flamewars to the constant posts suggesting you buy x brand that the community has ordained as the best product there is for y use, and the forums would be perfectly interchangeable whether people are arguing/showing off about bicycles or skis or ham radios. The hobbiest internet self validates a lot of gear acquisition syndrome too. It's uncanny how similar they all feel no matter the topic at hand.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m generally fine with it. I don’t see Reddit as a vehicle to serve my interests, and I generally only passively moderate. Automod does most of the work.
People like sharing pics of their bikes and I think that’s fun, even if I mostly don’t care.
Detroit has the concept of twenty minute neighborhoods and they've created several. The idea is the basics of what you need are all within a twenty minute walk. The idea is unless you're doing something out of the ordinary you won't need to use your car. Or even own a car.
They have executed pretty well with one glaring exception. Nearly everyone needs a weekly supermarket visit. Until fairly recently the city had no supermarkets for a population of 650,000 people. Recently a Whole Foods opened downtown as well as a couple of supermarkets on eight mile on the edge of the city.
Those eight mile supermarkets were created to cash in on a multi-million dollar incentive offered by the state. However it was poorly worded, so while they're technically in the city the suburbs are right across the street.
Many affluent highly educated people live in downtown Detroit and are forced to own a car so they can travel to the edge of the city to buy groceries.
In Michigan we've got a Walmart style set of stores known as Meijer's. After Target built a small style grocery store in East Lansing Meijer's created one in downtown Lansing near the Capitol. Neither city had a grocery downtown in over fifty years. Locals just accepted you had to drive out to the suburbs to shop.
Both stores appear to have a very strong business. So why doesn't either company create one in downtown Detroit where the demand would be a multiple of that in Lansing and East Lansing?
Probably because there is an upper limit to how much grocery you can haul back to your house on foot/bus. It's a completely different lifestyle.
Living in downtown Vancouver, I would go to the grocery store every 1-2 days to get food, because it was close by so there was no reason to "stock up". However growing up in the suburbs, we would go to the grocery store once a week to get all the food for the entire week.
A large scale grocery store/costco style simply doesn't make much sense as the place you go shopping every 1-2 days. So its better to put it in the suburbs and have people from downtown go out of the city every few weeks to stock up on specific items.
I don't see the problem with that, if the wind is not too strong, and it doesn't rain or snow. I've been on my bicycle for hours during the few days I had it that cold. It was fun!
There is no bad weather. There is only bad clothing!
Post-car industry Detroit is such an interesting place. 20 minute neighborhoods exist naturally in some places around Denver where there are occasional 1 block sections of grandfathered in retail zoning.
There's no intrinsic need to use a car for your weekly groceries, if the infrastructure is built accordingly. A lot of European families in big cities manage that without having a car.
Even framing shopping as a weekly activity is inherently car-biased.
A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents.
Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.
I regularly do large grocery runs by bicycle. I have a cargo trailer I can hook on to my bike and it lets me carry easily 2 weeks worth of food for two adults, probably more.
I think bike lanes, pedestrian access, and other transportation options are great - I bike where I can these days for health - but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place. They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could. People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently. In this vein I think the improvements in ebikes will probably help drive more popular will for bike lanes. But I really don't see many people being convinced to give up cars.
> People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently
This is exactly why I want to live in a bikeable, walkable city! I really don’t consider babysitting a massive 2+ ton hunk of metal and plastic to be low effort or independent. On the contrary, it’s the most draining and stressful thing I do on a regular basis.
You mention “go far”, but I don’t think that’s actually the priority for people. What they really want is to get to their daily destinations – the store, the park, the office, the mall. The distance is a consequence of the car, not the other way around.
People will still want to go places that are beyond biking distance or need to do something that isn’t practical on foot/bike, and that’s fine. For most people, if they lived in a bikeable and walkable area, these would be a minority of trips. But for those minority of trips where a car makes sense, a car should be used. (Note: this doesn’t mean they need to own a car.) Cars don’t need to be eliminated from cities, just reduced and deprioritized enough to make biking and walking safe and appealing.
I wouldn't describe my relationship with my daily driver as babysitting. Once I get going it pretty much feels like an extension of myself.
In my case it's also very low maintenance, maybe equal effort to maintain as my bike - charging batteries, adjusting brakes, lubing the chain etc. compared to filling up gas and occasionally topping off the oil, which is all the maintenance my Jeep tends to need.
You're neglecting the decades of government policy that built out infrastructure for cars specifically, and neglected other modes of transportation. Of course people are going to drive if the government is pouring billions into making driving fast and convenient while transit, bike infrastructure, and dense housing are either neglected or actively undermined.
I don’t think GP neglected that. They gave the example of bikes vs. horses in the 19th century. People preferred horses because they wanted to go far with little effort.
There was recently a thread on HN about why Europe had become so wealthy. Many opined that exploitation of other led to Europe’s wealth, but others observed that such exploitation was only possible because Europe was already wealthy. The same applies here. Yes, the government had many car-promoting policies, but those policies were tolerated because cars were already desired and that desire made the car lobby popular, not the other way around.
I mean, the bicycles they had throughout most of the 1800s were not at all as practical as today’s. The safety bicycle that you’d recognize as a modern bicycle wasn’t a thing until around the 1880s. I think the calculation would be different had people in the 1800s had modern bicycles.
Absolutely, some people will do that. I personally know some that will drive 500 meters rather than walking (even in Europe) or that will drive instead of taking public transportation even when the public transportation is faster and cheaper.
But, many do due to the lack of alternatives. Especially in the US/Canada, but also in Europe (especially anything built recently). People will drive because they don’t feel safe cycling/walking, or because their destination is too far. Or they will own several cars while they could just go on with one.
I don’t think anyone is really advocating for completely removing cars from the street or cities. I personally don’t own one (and this is a priority for me - I don’t want one), but I do take rides with friends or a cab from time to time.
What most advocates want (including me) is to stop prioritising cars in every single decision. Mixed zoning laws will remove lots of car trips if you can just walk to the shop when you need a couple of items or a coffee. Making streets car free (bar few exception) will make people come out and enjoy the street. Making people pay a fair price for parking will avoid subsidising a huge amount of land for private use. Removing parking will add lots of space on the streets for things that people enjoy. Better public transportation will favour everyone, especially poorer communities. And proper ciclying and walking infrastructure will allow more and more people to do so safely.
If after that someone still want to use private cars, then be my guest.
This, again, comes to the cars popularity: laws and regulations "prioritize" cars because people who make them drive cars. The anti-car crowd to me looks as same as the anti-shoes types (there are people who insist on walking barefoot, I know a few) if[1] they started to insist that there is a vast conspiracy to prioritize footwear and only that holds off construction of heated sidewalks and prohibition of the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signage.
1. To clarify: none of the barefoot walkers I know does that, they seem to be pretty content with the status quo and are not militant about propagating their lifestyle to everyone hence "if".
500m is around 6 minutes walk for a normal person (5km/hour or 3 mph). Perhaps 10 if you are a slow walker due to age etc. Any delay with parking or traffic means that driving won't save you much.
I just walked about 1km and back to a suburban market to get my lunch.
I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places).
> but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place.
I don’t buy it. People want cars since our infrastructure is optimized for it. But I seriously doubt that most people want cars specifically as the optimized transit solution for urban environments.
I'm one of those people. I LOVE being able to go anywhere I want, when I want. I'm willing to pay for the privilege. Do you know what happens when you take away parking and make it difficult for me to bring myself (and lets be honest what really matters--my money) to a place? I stop going. If you make it difficult for me to get to where I want to go I read that as a rejection of ME, and I don't go places where I'm not wanted. My money and my car will go somewhere else. I'm not going to fight with people online about it, I'll just abandon those spaces.
Please don't take it personally. YOU are still welcome. YOU are not a fast-moving, noisy, smelly, ugly, large, heavy metal box.
Other people who also self-identity as ME matter too. THEY will still welcome YOU. absent the brum-brum which, in aggregate with other brum-brums, is a massive annoyance to THEM.
The businesses will still be better off though, because for everyone like you who avoids them due to the lack of parking, there will be multiple people who visit them more on foot or by bike. Your money won’t be missed.
If there is enough population living within walking distance of the shops to sustain those shops then the businesses will be fine. And the area will be more pleasant for those who do live within that area, so that's nice. It does become exclusionary for those who live outside the area as parent poster said but perhaps that's ok, as long as the population density there is high enough to keep it going.
But many downtown shop areas don't have enough population within walking distance to keep the businesses viable. Those areas depend on people from farther out driving in to spend their money. For those, making parking difficult (too far, too expensive) can quickly go into a downward spiral of shops closing, area decaying, becoming less attractive to visit, leading to even more shops closing, until the old downtown core is a ghost town.
So population density is key. If density isn't there one can't just slap a prohibition on cars/parking and expect it to work well.
If people had been buying cars out of necessity then why would be there so many expensive cars on the roads? My commute's traffic is more than 50% SUVs and trucks, which cost way more than small hatchbacks and sedans.
Mostly marketing, but also the bigger vehicle safety dilemma: if you drive a bigger vehicle and crash with a smaller vehicle, you will be fine but the smaller vehicle will not. Hence, to remain safe in a world where some drivers get SUVs/trucks, you more or less are forced to get one yourself.
An easy solution would be to tax vehicles in relation to how much road damage they cause. If drivers had to pay the weight of their vehicle to the fourth power, then they would all think twice before adding any more unnecessary (and lethal) kilos to their vehicles.
One could buy a 30K minivan for that, not a 100K truck. And that marketing seems to be very powerful if it can easily make people pay 10s of thousand dollars more for the things they don't want, I'd like to employ this marketing for my business if it had been real.
Probably missing. I respond to the post that explains that people drive expensive cars they don't want because they are big and well marketed with an example of cheap big cars and a request for a referral to a marketer able to oversell tens of thousand dollars of useless goods.
SUVs and trucks are a lot better for dealing with furniture and kids.
As a compact car owner I wind up renting a pickup pretty frequently, and it's already pretty cramped for my son in his carseat. Just owning one is ... alluring.
They are, also they are much more comfortable to drive. And they are not the only expensive cars on the road, just the most obvious.
If the theory that people don't like cars en masse had been true then I'd expect car market to look more like, say, insurance market, which people are actually forced to buy and as the result most of the insurance advertisement is about the lowest price.
To summarize my post, _urban_ residents would likely prefer not to have cars. Someone in an earlier thread also made a good point that I should have written “high density urban”.
Some people want cars. Some people like cars. But everyone is forced to have them in most places in the US due to the feedback loop caused by investing in car infrastructure and sprawl.
Beyond that, though, even if something is a necessity, it’s rarely a race to the bottom. Your insurance example is actually an excellent instance of how markets tend to divide up: there’s the economical market (eg save 15% or more!) and the premium market (eg you’re in good hands). Same with cars.
Well, I understood your post, but I have not seen any evidence for that. Is "high density urban" something that does not exist in the US? I've lived in several big metros and everywhere people seemed to love their cars. In case it's not clear, I am doubting your "most" qualifier, I am well aware some people don't like and don't want cars, I just think they are a tiny minority.
Also I don't understand how the car market is as same as the mandatory insurance market. There is a race to the bottom on the, say, auto-insurance market while the vast majority of car promotions do not mention price at all, at most advertising preferable financial terms.
There are several studies that show that a significant portion of Americans hold a more conflicted view of driving than you believe here. A quick search gives me [0] which is cited by a ton of follow-up research. While I think this is a sociological issue and therefore difficult to pin down, I have a hard time seeing this research and thinking that “a tiny minority” of people want to do away with cars.
Re: cars vs insurance, used cars are the economical choice, so new car commercials are targeting the premium demographics.
Cannot read the article but the abstract does not make any of your claims. From personal experience I've only seen people on the internet saying they don't want cars, if they had been any significant majority I am sure I've met one or two in real life over the years.
Why car manufacturers don't advertise to the "necessary" buyers at all? A new Kia Rio is still cheaper than a used MB GLS.
It is not even go far with little effort. It is go far or close without having to mind weather unless it is really windy when trees fall on the roads.
When it is -15 degrees celcious or is pouring rain you don't care, have fun riding bicycle in such rain.
So not caring about weather/elements is not natural.
Most of the time I have to carry ~20kg of stuff with me, laptop, coat, umbrella, some food, some water. Getting groceries on my way back home.
Carrying ~20kg or even ~30kg of stuff around all the time is totally unnatural. Well going 50km away from your home on a daily basis is not natural at all. But a lot of people to make ends meet need to go even 100km away on daily basis.
Yes, going to your local shopping center with a car where you can walk in 10 mins and carry 5-10kg of goods is supper shitty and for 5-10 kg one could cycle with it. Going "all car culture" is bad is not the way to go, because for many people alternative is to "sit in one place and die" as they don't have shopping center available in walking distance.
As someone who has bicycled most of my life in Scandinavia, neither pouring rain or -15 degrees are much of a problem. You are dressed for the weather and you soon don’t even think about it. The only reason that I stopped bicycling in the winters for a while was because the car drivers tend to become “bicycle blind” when it’s snow on the ground. I’ve had drivers stare right at me and then almost hitting me because they obviously didn’t understand what they saw (a bicycle in the middle of the winter).
I don’t understand why you think you need to bring 20 kg of stuff every day. That is what I carry for a several day camping trip.
Right, what's more independant than a bike? Cars, machines with thousands of moving parts that must be maintained with gas, oil, tires, insurance, registration, and other maintenance aren't in my view.
If you have the physical layout of suburban sprawl then obviously you will drive everywhere you can; it’s designed not to be usable any other way.
What we’re asking for here are things like street and block systems, mixed use zones, bike lanes, buildings pulled up to the sidewalk instead of set back by giant surface parking lots, etc. When you have those things, the preferability of different transport modes change.
> They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could.
They had something bicCle-like, which was less comfortable with way less bicycle compatible roads.
Cobblestone and hills on a heavy bike without transmission? - Not good. Same with a paved bike path and either a lighter modern bike or even E-Bike? - Smooth riding.
That said: Their are cases where a car is needed, given the right infrastructure that need however can be reduced, so that people can make the choice. Which in turn can create new possibilities for the young, disabled or old, which won't be there in a car centric place.
Your comparison in the 1800s about horses vs bikes omits consideration of the condition of roads - it wasn't until very late that cyclists started succeeding in getting roads more paved. This development was also of course welcomed by motorists who also demanded more paving. Now both are competing for space on those paved roads.
People only "want" to drive the ten minutes to the grocery store because that drive would be a half hour bike ride or a 90 minute walk. But they'd much rather the grocery store be a ten minute walk away.
I really don't think most people would choose to carey groceries for 10 minutes. I'd drive a half hour as opposed to carrying groceries for 10 minutes.
There's a feedback cycle here. If it's long and difficult to get to the store, you need to buy a lot to make it worth the time. If it's easy and quick to get to the store, you don't need to buy nearly as much. Carrying a single small bag of groceries for 10 minutes shouldn't be a big deal.
Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.
I lived car free for couple years, until had a first kid. Carrying child car seat with you gets old very quickly. And, in winter time, biking is not only unpleasant but dangerous (or rather more dangerous than in summer). Even if it's only for 3000km a year, our lives, kids lives (and their activities) and business we bring would be negatively affected if we had no car.
It's fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Not just bikes has a good video on finnish biking https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU, and the difference is bike paths in the us/Canada usually get treated as a leisure, rather than an essential service.
Man, the way bike paths, and even sidewalks, get treated in Canada is so frustrating. The city's instructions on shoveling your stretch sidewalk tell you that you must not shovel it I to the road... and then the city snowploughs come by and push a load of snow onto the sidewalk that you've already shovelled.
There were places this winter where the sidewalk was impassable due to several feet deep on compacted "snow boulders" from ploughs. I get that you need to allow car access, but not at the expense of pedestrians being able to walk anywhere.
I have lived in a US city with pretty decent public transportation without a car for several years until recently. The problem is just complete lack of flexibility.
Want to do anything an hour out of the city - you're either begging for a ride or trying to fight the absurdities of renting a car.
I now live in a cheaper area, more outside the city where it makes even more sense to own a vehicle, and its definitely worth it. All that being said, all of the shops I most frequently patron are walkable from my home or work.
> People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
I don't think r/place has caused this. There has been a massive increase in an anti-car sentiment in the last few years.
Maybe the cause is people staying home more often now, so they care about whether their neighbourhoods are nice?
That's because there's been a huge, sustained rise in pedestrian and cyclist injury and general reckless driving through the pandemic. Many cities relaxed traffic enforcement during the pandemic because cars are such an important part of the American transportation framework. This lead to predictably horrific consequences for non drivers and drivers alike.
I heard of “r/fuckcars” for the first time a few days ago, and I’ve seen it mentioned ~4 times since then, and I’ve never visited r/place. From my perspective it seems like r/place has boosted this topic’s prevalence. Kinda cool.
I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site
I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination)
edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.
My favorite is Detroit and their absolutely ridiculous approach to planning the city, which was along the lines of “hue hue hue hue let’s make it look like a wheel and spokes!!” then only a decade later “hmm wait never-mind”, leading to an awful mishmash of design ideas resulting in a downtown that is basically impossible to drive. Luckily, no one really goes downtown in Detroit since the riots in the 60s, otherwise the traffic would be terrible.
Add in the collapse of the American auto industry that was keeping Detroit relevant and these days it all adds up to be a place I never see myself going back to in this lifetime, and an example of how bad in so many different ways a city can be.
I think you're vastly overestimating the cultural impact of reddit on the general public. This is a huge talking point in New Zealand right now and I promise you it has nothing to do with /r/fuckcars which even I, a Reddit user, had never heard of.
And then go to cities that implemented lightrail and bike lanes and got rid of some car parking to do it. Talk to the business owners there. None of them have recovered to anything like the preconstruction levels of business... And those are the ones who survived the long closure of the road to put it in.
At least, that's the takeaway from the metro nearest me. At least they got a couple of shiny new luxury apartment buildings out of it. Maybe the hope is to gentrify all of the poorer businesses out to be replaced with hipster shops that won't complain.
I drove through the area I'm thinking of a few weeks back. Maybe 40% of the businesses that were there before are gone, but much has happened in the past few years.
I know of 5 that definitely closed because of it, at least 8 more that were torn down (including a grocery store and a Walmart) to put up a field for a soccer team right on the line (which may or may not have been built without the light rail going in). 3 more that I can think of didn't make it to COVID, but they were probably struggling beforehand and might not have survived anyway.
>so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me
Excuse me? If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
hellscapes? lol. I've been to Europe several times, the cities there have their own problems. I never have problems getting around a city in either place.
“If you don’t agree with my position, spend some time listening to my side’s propaganda.” Not Just Bikes and StrongTowns is not where one should go to educate themselves, because those sources are highly, highly biased.
I generally that those "against car ownership" are just PR and PR-convinced guys, really, that's not intended as an insult but as an (hopefully) open minded consideration:
- those who work and live in a "small" area, witch means in bike/foot range for anything do consume far less, yes, but to sustain those sober lifestyle many others run on km and km on gasoline trucks & other transports means;
- European style cities (where from I came from, switched to a mountain area few years ago) are a nightmare in the modern world because being dense means being unable to evolve. There is no room to change because there is no space to move and when something exceptional but not so exceptional happen is a disaster;
- most tend to think living in apartments, very concentrate is efficient, like a big factory tend to be more efficient than various little and spread, that's false actually. Environmental costs of tall buildings is FAR superior to many equivalent (even bigger) single-family homes, those buildings demand structure and infrastructure that single home do not need at all and not only: as dense cities they can't evolve. So we can build a "A-class state-of-art" building today, in 100+ years it will be the same building, probably in a dangerous shape, very inefficient and can't be rebuilt.
We need a certain density because transportation costs and social life, idea sharing etc demand a bit of aggregation but we all know pushing aggregation is a vary bad move. Actually the dominant idea is "small and smart cities" but even these can't really scale because today we can build them (well, at a hyper-big cost) for today needs, tomorrow we will be still unable to evolve them because of density. IMVHO the sole scalable model is the Riviera one, where living and working buildings are spread together but residential parts are single-family home with enough room to be rebuilt on generational change, and factories except for those who demand a certain size, can be single-purpose areas so something that can be rebuilt at a certain point in time with enough ground around to do so. That's also have another positive aspect: it stop the possibility to concentrate to many people in small places making them nightmare like many modern city-states.
In the Riviera model we have schools like campus where students can aggregate to develop ideas and social life, but again they are single-purpose complexes so easy to rebuilt/change as needed, there is a bit of travel but not too much, a bit of aggregation perhaps less effective than a dense city one, but without risk to became too dense etc.
I feel bad for people who lives in cities without a car. It's sad life. You're stuck in a tiny bubble defined by a handful of transit stops. This is true in New York, London, and Paris all the same.
Public transit is slow and shitty in every city in the world. If you compare travel time by foot to subway the subway merely cut it by 50%. Subways are about as fast as a moving sidewalk. The "better" a city's public transportation the longer the average commute time of workers. Spending two hours a day on the train isn't living. (Nor is spending two hours a day in a car.)
I also refuse to accept that dense cities are cheaper than the alternative. Everything in a city costs 10x and takes longer. London's water pipes leak about 25% of their water. Replacing these pipes is effectively impossible.
I'm hoping remote works kills the dense mega-city and lets people spread out a bit more.
What are you talking about? I live in Stockholm, it's Saturday, 23:00, and I can be in the next city over, Uppsala, 70km away, at 0:04, using public transport.
I takes 28 minutes to a random spot I just picked on the other end of the city, 10km away.
Stockholm has 100 subway stations alone, and probably over 1000 bus stops. I have no idea why you should say that is "a handful".
I can also bike everywhere, of course. Usually way faster than the car over medium distances.
When I was living in Tokyo, it was theoretically possible to get from where I lived to the center of the most popular downtown hangout spot in 20 minutes by train. In reality, though, you had to tack on between 5 and 30 minutes of random delays depending on the train schedules and what time it was.
If you're sitting in your living room, and decide "I want to go to $place, it's a 45 minute trip if I leave now and a 20 minute trip if I leave in an hour" I think you could make an argument either way.
Within downtown Tokyo, you can often beat the train by just walking briskly from point to point, and almost always beat it by riding a bike.
Maybe the guy above you is focusing entirely on those worst case walking/schedule-based delays and you're focusing entirely on the best case.
You must live in the suburbs. Even in slow transit San Francisco, taking the bus is always faster, never mind Paris.that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.
“RMI analysis indicates that the United States must reduce VMT by 20 percent before the end of the decade to limit warming to 1.5°C—and this remains true even under ambitious EV adoption scenarios.”
The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years.
Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.
Have you ever driven in London? Have you used public transport in London? Moving around is much more efficient using public transport. The underground + a couple of buses take you around everywhere faster than a car.
Renting a car (in the US) can cost $40/day.[a] That’s how much gas costs me in a week or so. It’s not cheaper to rent.
[a]: Don’t forget the $150-300 deposit (that takes a week to disappear). And also being pressured to pay for their $15/day insurance. Rental companies are expensive
The cost of a car isn't just gas, you have to amortize the cost of the car depreciating, the maintenance, registration, etc. For a quick example, https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co... has a monthly cost of 690 using average (used) values and 0 dollars for gas. So you can drive 17 days a month and still come out ahead renting. There are services like zipcar, or [hourcar](https://hourcar.org/individual/) that make renting significantly more convenient, though the costs are marginally higher if all of your trips are full day.
I've done this calculation multiple times in my life, and because I mostly get around via bike (perks of living in college towns which have to invest in non-car infrastructure), its never been worth buying a car.
I spent $4205 on car expenses last year, not including fuel (since I'd pay fuel separately on a rental car as well). That's for two cars (spouse & I), so I'll say $2100 per car.
The cheapest rental car I could find (searched kayak.com) is $72/day.
So, renting could only be cheaper if I used a car less than 2100/72 = 29 days per year.
But that's not counting cost or inconvenience/time of getting and returning that rental car. The few times I'd had to rent a car I've had to get an Uber ride to get to the rental place and then back home, so that adds another $20 or so to the rental.
It’s much, much more convenient to be able to go where I want when I want.
Hiking, skiing, my friend’s cabin, the lake house, my friends in the suburbs, Costco, that speciality root beer store I like. I don’t even need to plan my trip. I can go whenever I want.
Yes you can rent a car to do those things. But it is indisputably friction. My experience is that my friends who don’t have cars are subsidized by those who do. Either that or you don’t see that friend because public transit makes it too inconvenient.
I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab.
I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!
Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.
Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).
Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!
> there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff
That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
It's like, you hollow out your town making it as efficient as possible to leave rather than spend any amount of time. So then you have to build this artificial downtown where you actually can have that interaction space, because you destroyed your original interaction spaces. Only the more insidious problem with this is how malls suddenly control the entrants. Notice how most malls are filled with major chains who can actually afford the rent on these sprawling retail spaces rather than small owner-operated businesses like what used to make up these interaction spaces around the main street or square in these small towns. Plus you can't exactly add a shop to this mall. It's one giant hulking thing. Whereas back in the day, if you lived near the town and wanted to open a shop, you might have built one yourself in the setback in front of your house.
"This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab."
"Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time."
At the end of a rather long reply to throw0101a's comment on my original post, in passing I mentioned that things were somewhat different in Europe. (My reply to throw0101a was principally in reference to his link to the book High Cost of Free Parking by UCLA professor Donald Shoup who has an underlying Georgist philosophy in connection with these matters.)
My original post wasn't well accepted by about half the voters (upvotes and downvotes in about equal numbers) and I expected that when I posted it. I mention this specifically as my original comment was made from my perspective here in Australia; here the 'average' shopping conditions are very different to both the US and to much of Europe (I've lived in Europe and I'm also very familiar with US roads, shops and shopping conditions).
In essence, I've little doubt that the original story is correct when it comes to US conditions, and I've no doubt that your experience (and the article) are correct when it comes to your experience in Barcelona. Here where I am it's a mixed bag but the vehicle/parking/shopping problem is nothing like as bad as it is in the US (in that shops are far more accessible from roadside parking (despite my earlier cynical assertions seemingly to the contrary).
I'll avoid a lengthy discussion involving examples so I'll just say this. The issue that cars detract from spending in the US and the Barcelona setting is, I reckon, pretty clear-cut. It's not so clear-cut here and in some other European cities. For example, in a German-speaking city (which I won't name out of deference) where I was living for quite some while has shops with easy walking access à la Barcelona and people actually shop by walking around—and public transport is as good as it gets (I've seen no better anywhere). That said, the number of cars parked in the side streets (and anywhere else their owners can find to park them) is quite unbelievable—it's nothing to see cars parked at 45 degrees across the 90 degree junction of two sidewalks if that's the only space available—moreover, it happens all the time. Most people who live there DO NOT need a vehicle and yet they have an obsession to own one (seems as if their psyche remains unfulfilled unless they own a car even if they rarely use it). So much for eliminating cars by providing easy walking access to shops! Despite this and excellent public transport—which they all use with gusto—it still hasn't eliminated the vehicle problem.
It seems to me that we need to be very careful how we measure the benefits of planning our cities to be more human-friendly. There seems to be no one-plan-fits-all, generalizing seems a risky business. If there's an underlying car culture as there is there (and here where I am now) then the benefits of good planning and having ready access to shops by foot may be much harder to realize than it first seems.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the same problem arises when it comes to invoking Donald Shoup's underlying Georgist philosophy which underpins many of these new ideas about planning our cities. (I know, this is somewhat esoteric matter but unless we can genuinely equate it out of the discussion then it might come back to bite us).
This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes.
But even so, the business owners losing business shouldn't matter at all for such decisions. Business only exist to serve their customers. If customers don't want or need them, then they should disappear. The real concern is whether customers do still want shops there but are unable to access them because of lack of parking.
Yes. That's why it depends on the location. Cities with mostly high-rise apartment buildings will be different to single family home suburbs. You can't just take some research and assume it applies to any specific other case.
Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing?
"Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction."
It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
> I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to
Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way…
I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
Best thing about living in older European cities is they don't have this stupid zoning, they mixed commercial and housing because that's how people chose to live before planners got invented after ww2. Now planners are patting themselves on the back for recently inventing the 20 minute community, Which is exactly the same thing. My one major thing I want in life is to never ever live in a suburban development with zero to do except drive to places.
Urban planning is probably as old as cities. Based on my limited experience, European planners just focus more on actual planning than mere zoning.
When an area is being (re)developed, the planners try to figure out many of the details. How should be public transport and parking organized? Where are the walking and biking routes? Where should the parks and commercial spaces be? And so on. Older European cities are not as much organically grown as planned and replanned over centuries.
You might be right, but there was an interesting thing on BBC radio 4 s few years ago, an British architect who grew up in Lebanon explained that he thought the UK should bin it's planners completely as all that had been built post ww2 when that arm of government was created, was monstrosities or at best only allow the equivalent of music's James blunt records. Not great but at least boring and acceptible.
Lack of zoning is one element of the equation but having developed before the car is pretty crucial too. Houston, TX has no zoning laws to speak of but because most of its growth happened in the last century, it grew outwards instead of upwards.
>Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way…
I feel like you're almost making a moral statement there, it doesn't have the nuance I think exists.
1) You have people like my parents, siblings, and friends in the Midwest. The idea of living somewhere where they don't have the practical privacy of living on a farm literally horrifies them. I can't convince them otherwise, I've tried. They view me as simply "weird". Literally no hope, but maybe you can convince their kids.
2) You have people like me who love the energy, convenience, and stimulation of high density living but still end up driving and having a car because the cost differential is just way too extreme to logically justify living where I want to.
There's a mystery to me in it. I spent time in Bangkok and Shanghai and why does it seem really easy to rent a centrally located place in a quality tall building, as if it's just normal, and without a prices that seems insanely disproportionate to other life expenses? Yet in the US, it's very rare. There's not enough demand? Labor costs are too high? Laws like building hight limits in the US prevent it? I've heard there are taboos in Europe for high buildings as well.
I think there is also an element of culturally dictated space demands that comes into play. You can have these nice dense places in Bangkok because people will see 300 SQ ft and still rent it. In the US people told me I was brave for trying to survive by myself in "only" 500 SQ ft. They could never "stand not even being able to breathe". You won't have an easy time changing people's minds about this. Personally I'm willing to live in 150sq ft if I'm at the heart of the fun.
I live in the midwest too. The vast majority of people live in the suburbs or an urban area. I don’t know why those who live on farms who already have the roads they need should be the primary voice we listen to, especially when nothing changes for them. That’s the thing. Nobody is changing their way of life.
> 2) You have people like me who love the energy, convenience, and stimulation of high density living but still end up driving and having a car because the cost differential is just way too extreme to logically justify living where I want to.
Right but those places are so expensive because they are so rare. Why are they so rare? Because we don’t build them.
> I think there is also an element of space demands. You can have these nice dense places in Bangkok because people will see 300 SQ ft and still rent it. In the US people told me I was brave for trying to survive by myself in "only" 500 SQ ft. They could never "stand not even being able to breathe".
This is another end of a spectrum, one which I don’t like either. We don’t need skyscrapers. We can build with a great level of density and have the best of all worlds.
This is in Columbus. You can have a car, you can even have two, you can have a garage, or park on the street. But you can also ride your bike to work or walk. These aren’t 500 square foot homes.
“Yea but all of that is so expensive” yes because we don’t build them. There is no reason this isn’t affordable except that we simply choose to not build like this. That’s it. We just choose to amputate our mobility and pay outrageous amounts of money to have the privilege of driving. The high prices of these homes demonstrate that they are desired.
I don’t advocate for skyscrapers. They are an anti-pattern enabled by cheap energy and oil. The other end, the car-driven suburb is bad too. Ideally we’d have towns like they do in Europe with rural communities surrounding them. So your family can have their space and farm. And everyone who wants a town can have that too.
“Choose” is a critical word, too. We’ve chosen it partially because some laws setup over half a century ago have a lot of inertia, and have literally made it illegal to build many of the places you’re describing.
Even when it’s not explicitly illegal, it can be stymied by people who were appointed who simply can’t imagine people wanting to live near public transit and not own a car. Just recently in Boston, a building that was 5 stories high, and a 5 minute walk to an excellent subway station, was rejected by the Zoning Board of Appeals. [1]
The arguments made included that the building was too high, and that it lacked parking. At 5 stories high, it was 1 story higher than a very nearby building, and 2 stories higher than many residences near it, which are 3 stories.
And it’s a 5 minute walk to a subway. That’s exactly the kind of place to live and not own a car. But the city zoning board didn’t think that was an acceptable way to live, and they chose not to… partially because the law gave them the ability to choose that, because not having minimum amounts of parking is illegal when building a new place to live. It’s illegal even if you live a 5 minute walk from a subway stop.
Well then don’t live on a farm? I mean I’m not sure what they’re expecting. If anything there would be fewer cars on the road and less traffic.
Maybe we should buy the land surrounding their farm and just place apartments and Wal-Marts and tear down the trees? They can live next to the city they wanted. Oh and that way I can go visit a farm whenever I want, easily and conveniently and feel like I’m on the countryside. Similar to a farmer getting to feel like they are part of the city or town. This cuts both ways.
“But Eric this is already happening”
Yea because we build suburbs, and have to spread everything out.
Of course they are. I love farmers. I wish I could buy their fresh produce directly similar to how it occurs in small European towns and city markets. I want local farmers feeding me and my family. But… those farmers apparently prefer that I live in a suburb and go to the grocery store and buy produce from somewhere else instead so they can have a highway and easy parking to the city center they don’t go to.
> I spent time in Bangkok and Shanghai and why does it seem really easy to rent a centrally located place in a quality tall building, as if it's just normal, and without a prices that seems insanely disproportionate to other life expenses? Yet in the US, it's very rare. There's not enough demand? Labor costs are too high? Laws like building hight limits in the US prevent it?
There aren’t enough of them because in huge swaths of the country it’s illegal to build anything denser than a single-family home. There’s plenty of demand for it, there’s just not enough supply.
Doesn’t even have to be high-rises, in most places it’s illegal to build the sort of mid-rises that are everywhere in European cities.
EDIT: Oh, and it’s also usually illegal to put a business in a residential area, which forces things further apart and forces people to drive to get to anything.
I would happily live in a 150 sq ft shed if it kept me out of the city and the "fun". It's not that I'm not willing to make do with a small space, it's that I don't want to be tripping over my neighborsband dealing with their noise and idiosyncrasies.
The biggest problem with increasing density is noise. Some of it can be solved with better building standards, but that increases cost again.
And in western countries there seems to have been a general erosion of the kind of local level government authority you need to deal with the one household that is a chronic noise problem for the hundreds of people they disturb around them.
These discussions tend to gloss over the fact that more density is going to require tackling antisocial behaviour head on, and local government are neither willing or able to do so.
> The biggest problem with increasing density is noise.
Noise can be managed with sound insulation, but the biggest problem with density is the crowds. Big lines and waits for everything because there are so many people. I'm very happy to live in a borderline-rural suburb. No lines anywhere, no traffic, no waiting anywhere. It's so nice.
The stomping noises upstairs in my old apartment were from cars? And cars pumped Tejano music through my vents? (Didn't actually mind that one. They were very loud, but during reasonable-ish hours) I guess what I thought was a screaming child in the hallway was also cars. Crazy.
Most of the noise might be from cars, but the noise that makes me want to hurt people is from stereos and parties and dickheads with power tools at fuck off O'clock in the morning.
Edit: and motorbikes, fuck motorbikes. I'll give you that one.
> Personally I'm willing to live in 150sq ft if I'm at the heart of the fun.
How could that work? Do you own anything? Do you have any hobbies? I'm having trouble imagining how that could possibly work.
That's smaller than my office and my office only contains two desks, a few ikea shelves and a handful of computers and books. No beds, no kitchen, no bathroom (there's a bathroom in the office building elsewhere), no personal posessions, nothing.
> I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
I'm european and I've lived in several european countries. It's definitely how a huge percentage of the european population lives day to day.
Not even 40% of the european population lives in cities. 30% is towns + suburb and 30% is countryside/seaside/mountain/rural.
That's 60% right there where car is the de facto daily way of moving.
And even in cities like Brussels or Paris you have those who do use their car on a daily basis, for short trips (like going to drop/pick the kids at school a few kilometers away). Insane statistics (x% of all car trips in Brussels are for less than y kilometers with both x and y being very low: although I forgot the numbers).
I guess it depends on who your friends are but around me, in the various place I've lived in Europe, the car is totally king.
Ah ok. I didn’t realize Europe was built like places like Houston, LA, and Atlanta and everybody took cars everywhere, they did the whole 2hr car commute to the office, and they didn’t walk to the grocery store in their neighborhood and instead they all got in their big SUVs (which they own at least 2 of of course) to the local grocery store about a mile away with the huge parking lot. It’s a small wonder that Europeans can even afford to do this, given how expensive gas is compared to America.
"Europe" is much less homogeneous, from an urban-planning perspective, than the US. We have medieval cities with narrow streets, like Barcelona or Firenze, mixed with '70s developments, suburban dormitories, megalopolis like London and Paris, and so on. So depending on who you ask, you will get a very different picture of their habits around transportation. Undoubtedly, you Americans drive more and longer than we do; but we still drive some, and have a similar issue with choosing our development models post-1980. But undoubtedly, ditching cars would be significantly easier for us than it would be for you.
> invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store
But that’s not how cities in Europe are laid out. The closest grocery store to me is 3 minutes by bike (1.19 km) and I live at the edge of my particular neighborhood (shops are usually concentrated near the center of neighborhoods). Even the city center (where the more specialized shops are) is only about 8 minutes by bike (or about 15 by car due to traffic).
Especially within the city a bike is always faster.
I live in a suburb in northern Europe. Mix of modest and not-so-modest townhouses. I sometimes choose to go to the second-nearest grocery store 900m away because I want to walk more than the 300m to the nearest one.
I guess you just have to make multiple trips if you need to buy a significant amount of groceries? My grocery trips always involve more than I could carry by bike.
Is there any business you would frequent - a pub, restaurant, grocer, etc. - that’s within, say, a 10 minute walk of where you live? I grew up in a city, yet everything was more than a 10 minute walk from my home.
Have you visited a place where there were multiple stores within a 10 minute walk? Once I started living in places like that, my way of life changed in ways I never would have predicted.
Walking home from work meant I walked right by a grocery store, and I could grab something quick. Would I always? Nope. Did I sometimes still do big grocery store trips? Sure. And would I sometimes even bring my car if I had a bunch of stuff? Yes, because I lived up a tall hill.
The reason I mention this is that your well-established may simply change in unexpected ways that you never would have imagined.
The traditional model of grocery shopping in Europe is daily. That's what our grandparents did - as it has been since the Romans invented the urbe and exported the concept around the continent. The famous stereotype of French people biking with their baguette under an arm, is because people did buy bread every day.
Then women started working more and more, and they had less time to shop for food, so the supermarkets happened here too - much later than in the US though, because of space and legal constraints. But there is still an attraction for the traditional way of life that keeps a significant amount of smaller and more central stores in business, keeping shopping more distributed: one day you buy fish, the next you buy meat, and everything fits in your bag.
Generally I just shop more often, my nearest grocery store is 3 doors down. There are two bigger ones 3 mins walk away, and a big one 10 mins walk away. When you're talking distances like that, buying more than you could carry doesn't make much sense. And if I did, I'd use Ocado or something.
I never need a significant amount of groceries because the supermarket is only 3 minutes away. This means you only get what you need at the moment, you don’t buy things in advance. This is much more convenient, as I don’t need to plan anything in advance. I decide what I’d like to have for dinner tonight and then go out to get whatever ingredients I need. I’d hate for shopping trips to be this whole weekly expedition where you have to plan and haul all the stuff for an entire week just because you can’t quickly hop over to the store.
It also means you get fresh products. I’d hate to have to eat week old bread.
> I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store
All of your friends have to take highways to reach a grocery store? That's nuts! Is this some kind of international agrarian hermit club?
Or are you saying you don't have many friends? There are more possible friends to be made in more populous areas. Come, join us!
Not seeing it mentioned in the other replies, so I'll mention that (at least the way I read it) "our massive car addiction" should be taken as a societal addiction to cars rather than addiction of any individual. If someone lives in a place where a car is the only feasible way to meet their day-to-day needs, it's not fair to say they're addicted to their cars; however we might question why they find themselves in that situation in the first place. Often this comes down to societal pressures (zoning, lack of funding for other modes of transportation, etc.) which are largely outside the control of individuals. The challenge is to change the cultural mindset from "I need a car today, so cars are a necessity for life" to acknowledge that other options can be viable if we, as a society, are willing to recognize and seriously consider them.
> ... the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
Places like this already exist (ie. basically any major urban center), but I don't think the intent is that every place needs to be like that. Small steps toward better options (eg. allowing limited commercial redevelopment in residential-only areas, improving the safety/speed/accessibility of alternate transit options) should be the short-term goal, and we can work slowly towards them. But societal pressure (eg. from NIMBYs and zero-sum car-first people) often makes even small improvements glacially slow or impossible.
> invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean here, but my nearest grocery store in London is 3 doors away. My second nearest in 3 mins walk away. My 3rd nearest, 3 mins 30 secs away. My nearest big supermarket is 10 mins walk away. That's the alternative here.
Funny you ask: I'm moving in a few days to a remote place in France. Closest village, by walk, is 50 minutes away according to google maps. It's also all steep uphills and downhills, so bicycling there is hard (I do have a MTB for fun and, darn, it's hard to cycle there... Although the local policemen from the village do use bikes on non-rainy days).
By car it's a 5 minutes drive. So 50 minutes vs 5 minutes. Bicycling would be 15 minutes then 15 minutes back but I'd be toast due to the hills.
Closest highway: 45 minutes drive.
Closest city: 1h15 minutes.
Driving my kid to school in the morning: second closest village, 12 km / 7 miles. By bicycle? More than 40 minutes just to get there. Car: 12 minutes.
Of course I don't get the "vibrant" city life.
But I do get shitloads of nature and a sky so clean at night I can not just see stars but the Milky Way too.
As to where it is: I won't give the exact location but let's say "somewhere on the french riviera" (think Sonoma County vineyards meet the mediterannean sea: a little piece of paradise on earth with ultra-low density of population).
That's certainly interesting, and the place sounds nice. I think most people (certainly me) will admit that cars are almost necessary in your situation. Just curious though, would it not be better to live near a larger place assuming larger towns/cities may have better schools (on average)?
It's not unheard of. I live in a Dutch city. There are five supermarkets within 1km from my home, a tiny one, two medium ones and two larger ones. Now that I’m working from home, I usually walk to one twice a week. When I worked at an office, I biked to the office and took a small detour once a week to stop by a supermarket. Also, they have flash delivery here where you can order groceries and somebody will bring them to your door in literally 10 minutes. Those use e-bikes. There's also regular grocery delivery, one company uses these tiny electric vans, another uses normal vans.
Flash delivery is only available in the big cities but the rest is pretty standard.
IMO you have to actually look at the current makeup of zoning. Plenty of places have great, amazing bones, because they were actually laid out in an age where people did walk to the grocery store, or maybe they took a streetcar, and there might have been a rail station in the middle of town that is currently only used for freight today. It's not a form of development that is specific to only new, dense areas, it was a form of development that was the standard everywhere in this country 100 years ago, and still remains. Look at some mid or small sized places like Pensacola FL, Sandusky OH, Corpus Christi tx, and hundreds more. They are gridded like the SF peninsula because 100 years ago they very much looked like the SF peninsula did 100 years ago, with dozens of street cars or cable cars and people walking with groceries. There are good bones everywhere, now lets shake off the dust and start improving things like bus service, affording a lane for a bike along these easy to navigate grids with commercial zoned relatively evenly throughout.
They seem to believe that by working to actively make roads and parking worse, then some sort of car-free utopia will emerge. Of course, the actual effect is that things are just worse.
I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
> “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.”
So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M.
Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.
Making it harder to access by car is a feature. You're not boycotting the city centre because you find it hard to park, it was actually them throwing you out. The people living there decided it's not worth it to cater to the few individuals demanding to drive everywhere to the detriment of others.
Rather safe, living and cozy streets for the inhabitants, than easy access for the suburbians.
Indeed, the city near me, that I used to live in, has a CBD that is dying a slow long death. The council keeps doing initiatives to try to prop it up, but at the same time keeps making it less and less car friendly, while the public transport continues to suck.
Meanwhile the large outdoor mall on the city outskirts is thriving, because of the easy parking.
It doesn't need to be much, decent size parking building with an arterial access actually in the CBD would work. Let people drive to the CBD and wonder around when they get there.
It’s not even logically consistent with itself. The article starts by saying that we have a “massive car addiction”, then talks about a village where only 4% of business customers arrive by car. If true, this leaves totally unaddressed the question of where all the car addicts are actually driving to, and what to do about it.
I spent two years commuting by bike and bus and by doing so I was much more aware of the stores within a 5 mile radius of me. I wanted to stop and spend my money and time BUT it wasn’t worth missing my bus or risking my bike getting stolen so I never stopped. This was in Los Angeles. If buses were more reliable & enjoyable I would have stopped or gone back on weekends, and if I could trust my bike to still be there those businesses would have benefitted.
I do a lot of commuting via bus and bike in LA. You can always bring your bike into the doorway of the business and throw your ulock around the frame and rear wheel to prevent it from being ridden. I find if there are at least other bikes in the rack I feel better about leaving my bike out, and if its something like the front entrance or a parking lot where there is foot traffic I don't mind leaving the bike out on a rack while I'm inside and its during business hours, but I would never leave it out on a rack overnight.
The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.
I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places.
My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.
> Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.
Presumably those are areas that don't have the bikes and buses the article talks about. You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.
> You obviously can't make driving impossible without providing any alternatives.
This sums up my complaint about Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, etc. They want to do things that will make driving impossible (or at least miserably difficult) now, and only maybe later do things that will provide alternatives for everyone.
You can make this argument for any change that would improve cycling and transit though. Take street A, a street that right now is hostile to both; it only has car lanes, traffic is fast enough that it's intimidating to bike on, and buses get stuck in traffic. You'd like to get to street B: a street that people feel safe to bike on (protected bike lanes) and that enables transit to be fast and reliable (dedicated bus lanes or streetcar right-of-way).
Now how do you get from A to B? At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars. This might mean removing travel lanes, and it might mean removing on-street parking, but regardless, that is a necessary step to get to street B.
That point is where people complain, "you're making driving impossible!" But you can never get to street B if you never make that step. And at the point you do, there generally also won't be that many people biking or taking transit, because you haven't changed the street yet.
> At some point during that process, you'll have to take away space from cars.
Why couldn't you just build transit that's above or below the existing space for cars instead? Sure it might be more expensive or difficult to do, but at least it wouldn't be making people's lives worse the whole time.
It's free in terms of direct monetary cost to do, sure. But there's a very high cost of banning cars from a lane, borne by everyone who used to use that lane but can't anymore.
Alternately: there's a high cost to not creating a dedicated bus lane paid by everybody who rides the bus or chooses not to ride the bus because it's too slow.
As in, would hurt the poor the most?
If so: just split the payments (after accounting for the cost to run the system) equally between the city's residents. The poor people will be the first to share cars, so getting an equal share of the profits, while splitting the per-vehicle tolls across the occupants, should be able to counter the regressive effect of a per-vehicle toll. And making it adapt to congestion would prevent the "I got no one to share the ride with this late at night, and I couldn't afford to not split the toll" issue, at least with something like Uber or Waymo to fix the "you didn't drive to work at noon in your own car for late shift" aspect.
And I believe that if ride sharing is effectively forced through capping the traffic to non-congested levels, there would be a practical solution to the issue of organizing ride-sharing for the trip back home late at night.
Like, some sort of dynamic bus network using normal cars (Uber Pool w/ having to switch cars at suitable "hub"s either end of the freeway portion of your trip, or even along the way if any of the resulting legs of your journey would be too-low-throughput to meet realistic latency expectations of yours), at least for the time it takes to manufacture better-suited public transit vehicles.
Software for this can happen in at most a couple months to get something that works, so just make the tolls under this system take half a year to activate after getting enacted for the region.
>Replacing kerb-side parking with bus or bike lanes does not hurt local businesses, and in some cases, it can increase patronage. Bikes and buses don’t kill businesses - parking does.
Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any.
What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?
I've lived extensively in most population densities available in the US. When you are in a very dense environment like Manhattan, people simply don't buy quantities that large from local stores, and the vast majority of apartments don't have the storage space to accommodate for the giant sized quantities that suburbanites buy at Costco every day. The end result is that living in Manhattan, Brooklyn, western Queens etc., you're basically walking every day down to local stores and lugging relatively small bags back. People in the city tend to be pretty trim and fit as a result.
I currently live in a rural-density zoned part of the US, and the car is basically the only access one has to virtually anything. Businesses here can pretty confidently state that close to 100% of their customer base arrives by car.
I bought four gallons of milk at my last shopping trip, this will last my family a week or so. I also bought five dozen eggs which might last two weeks. Perhaps the reason people in high-density areas shop in smaller quantities is partly that high-density areas price out families like mine who would be shopping every day without the ability to efficiently buy in larger quantities.
In the city you could just buy food as you needed it. Your kids could get a gallon of milk at the store in the morning and chug it on the way to school. Same for the eggs. You would just pop over to the egg man who would quickly prepare you a 8 egg omelette and side order of quiche.
When you have more than a couple people in a house, this would mean shopping continuously. And the quantities you'd need for a single day would be more than you could carry effectively without a trunk. (I moved to where I am from a dense city with transit too, it makes more sense for me to be in a smaller city where my kids have a yard to play in and space to plant a garden than to live in a dense urban environment)
this is incorrect. A significant proportion of high density environments include people living well below the poverty line. In New York City, they shop at places called "bodegas". They often have access to public assistance like food stamps, but they are otherwise consuming those products at "high density" prices. They dont buy in large quantities for financial reasons but also for the "high density makes quantity buying largely impractical" reasons I mentioned above.
> You are paying mortgage + property tax on the pantry space used to store it.
If you have the space anyway, you're not paying any extra to store stuff in it. And it's expensive enough to move that it's not economical to do so just to have the lower payments from 1 fewer square foot.
> Not to mention gas to drive and get it. And vehicle insurance. And car maintenance.
If you stop at the store on the way home from somewhere else that you were going anyway, the additional cost of those things is basically zero.
I've been fighting this with the insurance company ever since the pandemic started. We no longer drive anywhere daily, working from home. But the insurance company wants to maximize profit so they won't approve less than 6000 miles per year, a number they made up, and keep raising prices.
Only if you don't value your time. Either you're paying even more for taxis and rideshares than you would to own your car, or you're spending an hour on trips that would take 10 minutes by car.
I think it's actually faster to get to central London from me on the tube than by car, not even counting looking for parking. And hell, on the tube I can read, listen to a podcast, code, or even call family. Can't do most of that in a car.
Yeah, but you can't easily store it in high density areas where square footage is expensive. Personally, I think this is a significant negative for city living, and a reason why I prefer the suburbs.
Living in European town -- no one wants to buy huge quantities in the first place -- gotta store them somewhere and make sure they're not spoiled yet, why bother if there's always a shop downstairs that does pretty much that. Just buy what you need for tonight (or for a week if you're a hoarder).
Exactly - the odds that a black swan event causes massive supply chain disruptions so you can't buy groceries is slim, so there's no need to worry about having emergency supplies. It's foolproof.
Indeed, GP's comment made me chuckle, it hasn't been long enough since the start of the pandemic to take "a week if you are a hoarder" comments seriously.
It looked to me that some of the COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions actually resulted from hoarder-type public that went to replenish their own emergency supplies all at the same time.
The article is probably sponsored by some real eastate developer group who wants all those pesky parking requirements gone, so they can build 1k unit buildings with very few parking spaces allocated.
A developer would only build a parking-free building if there are people in the area who want to live without cars. Otherwise it would be a financial disaster for them.
Not true. Kyiv, Ukraine keeps building skyscrapers with almost 0 parking in it (althoug there are dedicated parking buildings within about 10-15 minute walk, not as convenient). And everyone hates it that way. People keep complaining. Developers keep building.
As one developer told me -- that simply financially makes more sense for them to build an apartment instead of parking. Why should they solve other people's business?
At first I was outraged, but now I kinda see a long term benefits of that, even thought it's harder for me to own a car. Hopefully that'd lead to improvement of public transportation or invention of new ways to move.
Not sure about Kyiv, but here in Vilnius the elephant in the room is parking enforcement. Illegal parking under no-parking signs, blocking sidestreets by leaving minimal space to pass, on the grass, in basketball courts, playgrounds... Municipality doesn't give a fuck. People don't buy parking spots since hey, free parking out in the street! And developers build little parking since nobody buys. But everybody still drives and surroundings are a mess.
Sounds like there's no other choice in Kyiv. In any US city there are hundreds of buildings with parking that people could choose to live in if that's what they want.
> A study in Berlin found that shop owners believed only about 12 percent of customers lived within 1km of a shopping street when more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.
This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street.
This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.
It really depends on the context of the building imo. If you have a grocery store with like a few spaces that are always full, vs one with a bunch of spaces, someone who is planning a big grocery load will probably opt to drive their car for two minutes to the big lot one vs walk 10 mins to the one without parking and walk back with a gallon of milk and all their groceries for their family of 4 for a week.
What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.
1km is a good distance for walking, but you can expand it quite a bit if you have good bike infrastructure and transit. You can bike 5km in 20 minutes at a pretty leisurely pace, which I would gladly do for a good restaurant or specialty store.
Since this discussion is mainly US-centric, and not NZ centric, I feel at liberty to ask this question even if it's not strictly about the article:
I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated.
But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country?
Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value.
Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve.
I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.
It's a process that will take 50-100 years+. Like it or not there is no real incentive for people to stop living like they currently do. All you can do is tax fuel/carbon and stop adding car lanes to make people converge closer to the city.
In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
I'm from NZ, but live in the USA. The same car-centric issue talked about in the article is common both many USA cities as well as Auckland.
The most pragmatic proposals I've seen revolve around optimizing for the most common trips, rather than trying to completely eliminate cars. Optimizing for the easiest 80%, if you will.
For most households, the easiest 80% to mode-change would look something like:
- schools within walking distance
- shops/cafes/restaurants within walking distance (either by removing euclidean zoning, or creating new, small retail zones)
- better public transport specifically targeting the most common destinations (e.g. a central business district)
- improving walking/cycling infrastructure so people aren't risking their lives when doing shorter trips
People are still going to want/need cars to go to the beach, home improvement store, etc, but that's fine, because these make up a minority of total trips taken.
Auckland is very suburban outside the center, but the older and newer suburbs have mixed use zoning which manages to support a few cafes, restaurants, shops per suburb. The middle-age suburbs are the worst for walkability. The population of NZ is increasing, and most of the cities are expected to increase in density, rather than size, which should mean more retail can be supported within a shorter distance to everyone. It remains to be seen enough mixed-use/retail zoning gets allocated in existing suburbs though.
I'm not sure how this would play out if the population was stable though. Possibly then like belval says, it would take 50-100+ years as housing stock gets rebuilt in different configurations.
I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment.
It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen.
In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses).
Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway.
In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option.
The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost.
I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.
Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns.
Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.
Mountain View has a lot of residential housing near Castro street so I can see how it might be different than Palo Alto. But let's be honest. if you live within a half-mile of Downtown Mountain View , you are probably earning in the top 0.1 percentile of income in the world.
The houses that are close enough to town centers to live that way are highly prized and unaffordable to almost everyone. By removing the possibility of driving to a town center like Mountain View or Palo Alto, you are actually disadvantaging people who can't afford to live close enough to casually bike to Whole Foods on a Sunday morning.
Look, this is a complicated issue. It's hard to get there from here because a lot of things have to change at once; there's a chicken and egg effect here. I can imagine a different Palo Alto or Mountain View, but I can't imagine how neighborhoods could change without drastic social upheaval. And if I have to handicap the NIMBY power of well-to-do homeowners to keep your plans from taking effect, I'm going to bet on them. Not because they're better, but because they're likely to win.
We're about a mile from downtown, and while rents and house prices have gone up substantially like they have everywhere in the bay area, it is still one of the more affordable areas in Mountain View.
But location aside, there is very little of the city that is more than 20 minutes by bike away. I used to commute to Palo Alto, and then later Sunnyvale, both were less than 30 minutes. If I made the mistake of trying to drive to work during rush hour, it took about as long.
Just for the record, I did the bicycle/Caltrain commute for years -- with my bike for one job, using city bikes in SF at another. It's doable, even preferable in some scenarios. I'm all for making cities as bikeable as possible.
Now I'm older, with kids, and have a health scenario that precludes biking (Getting a trike soon to be able to cycle at all). This area is probably one of the most bike-friendly in the US. But still, are you going to bike a week's shopping for a family of five? Costco? Ikea? Dressed up for dinner? Visiting grandparents 10 miles away?
I tried to buck the trend. A full year here with just 1 family car. On good days, it sort of worked, but eventually we had to break down and get a 2nd car. Between rushing to get kids to school, working long hours at a startup, even walking the dog in a nice field so she could run -- we just had too many hiccups with a single car. That is just how CA was conceived and built.
I think it would be more productive to accept that there is a demand for the suburban lifestyle, and come up with creative solutions that fit that demand, but also address issues of housing and climate.
You could make the analogy to architecture. It doesn't work to look at a city and say "This is all wrong", then build whatever suits your aesthetic. You try to modernize but also blend in. Work with the structure you are given. It never works to say "This sucks, burn it down and start from scratch".
While thks article is quite interesting, I think it's worth pointing out the vast differences in non-car accessibility between countries, probably due to zoning laws. Large and low-density population places would require reliable modes of long distance transport (be it cars or buses or metro etc). From what I've heard North America practically requires car ownership outside medium sized cities. Here in the Netherlands you can mostly get anywhere in the country with a bike and a train (OV) card. Back home in India not too many people have cars so buses, trains and taxis and autorickshaws (aka TukTuks) substitute them. Not criticizing the point of the article, but I think a bit more nuance is needed when comparing Germany with Canada with New Zealand.
Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.
Here in Switzerland it often takes 2x as much time to get anywhere if you take public transportation outside of big cities, compared to the car. Is it the same in the Netherlands? Also public transportation here is quite expensive.
> it often takes 2x as much time to get anywhere if you take public transportation outside of big cities
This is almost always going to be true, regardless of the country. Living in the countryside is always going to mean inefficiencies in terms of transportation. I couldn't say how you'd solve this, just increasing buses and trains is just too cost ineffective given how sparsely populated most of these areas are.
I do align with the whole anti-car crowd when it comes to cities though. We should encourage and enable people to use literally anything other than a car for city movement. Anecdotal but I know plenty of people that'll take their car for all kinds of stupid small trips that could've been at most a 10 minute bicycle ride.
Getting to sit in your car and pressing a little pedal sure is comfortable, and I feel like it's impossible to get people out of the mindset that using another mode of transportation is better for them, as well as everyone around them. All these little trips such as getting groceries once a week, driving across town to go see a friend, etc., really do accumulate to be a problem and you end up with cars littering streets left and right. And then we're not even talking about health yet.
In a city at least, the benefits of car ownership for the individual, take far too big a toll on a the livability of a city as a whole.
My dream would be that I could take my car to an edge location of a big city with a modern parking structure, where I can of course charge my electric car, and then switch without hassle over to some fast Metro that is going every few minutes.
I have never understood the idea of people who live in the city taking the car within the same big city to do stuff. That just makes no sense in most cases.
I can't comment on small towns, but I live in a medium-ish size place of around 100k people though it really depends how far you're going. If you're going just a few (<10) km then cars would be a bit faster.
On Google maps I see that it takes 9 minutes to a store 6km away by car. It takes 36 minutes by public transport, however it takes only 20 minutes by bike (almost everyone has a bike here). However a lot of roads are bike-only or similar (esp in parts of the city centre), which (imo) makes it super frustrating to drive.
On longer distances yes cars do get much faster. Amsterdam to Rotterdam by car is 52 mins (74km), vs 1hr18min by train, however this was station to station. Once you add the time to go from the station to your destination it's often longer.
Edit - re:costs, it feels moderately expensive to me as an Indian. It's €5.4 from Rotterdam to Den Haag (Hague) station, which is 21km by road (20 min by road, 30 min by train). You get 20-30% off passes for monthly use I believe, though that's only useful if you use it a lot.
Though, if you go by train, you can use the time more productively than by going by car (at least until autonomous cars).
I have come to know a professor working using her notebook in the train while biking to the train station with the bike, and to the university, too.
It's more useful to think of it as a sliding scale vs all or nothing. You are right that there just isn't the infrastructure in a lot of places. But we could start small, we could add a bus route, or a bike lane. Maybe that leads to people taking the bike for that errand instead of solely the car, and that's a good thing even if its not 100% car free.
I have a theory: small shop owners are disproportionately likely to be car drivers, and when they say parking is essential for their customers, what they are really worried about is measures that will make it less convenient to drive them selves.
I was trying to figure out how I'd get to, around, and back from Hungerford, UK without renting a car, and concluded I'd be doing a fair amount of walking and a lot of waiting for the train. And a not insignificant amount of buying expensive rideshare transportation.
I think if I lived there I'd definitely own a car.
Your huge time investments and careful planning (which I guess you mean planning more than: I have to go to my yard take my car and drive from X to Y and that objectively is harder than walking or taking public transportations) can be beneficial for the environment and local businesses.
As a midwestern suburbanite, these threads remind me that urban dwellers spend a lot of time thinking about me and the way I live, while I never think about them at all.
To be fair, a good portion of these urban dwellers are in one of like three cities in the US, and are vastly outnumbered by suburbanites. Or they're in Europe, which makes them pretty much irrelevant to US politics.
I guess I don't blame them for thinking about it a lot, since in a particular niche circumstance it is probably disruptive and worth worrying about. But for those of us living in suburban cities, it's really not something on the radar.
The only urban dwellers who are spending time thinking about the midwestern suburbs are the ones who grew up in the midwestern suburbs and transplanted themselves to somewhere urban and saw a different way of life.
People who are perplexed about why a business would not want a bike lane need to take a look at the history books. It was business owners who were pushing for streetcar lines to be paved over into stroads like Geary blvd in San Fransisco. They see their clientele as one traveling by private car over one reliant on public transportation, and probably feel they don't even want to be associated with public transportation and the image of who typically rides it.
You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.
Anyone who has visited major Asian cities already knows that grocery businesses and customers both prefer dense cities - because everything happens on an app and a delivery system.
You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology.
Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.
This is pretty obvious at least for some cases. Of course it depends a lot on the structure of the street / city. I haven't been much in the US, but I can imagine it's not affected by some issues as much as other places. It comes down to space, and how you use it. I spent a couple months living in a busy street of a European city. The amount of parking space took easily 2-3x that of the sidewalk which was only maybe 2 meters wide. It was a busy street for pedestrians also and it was pure hell even walking there, but especially just stopping to see a shop window. You would automatically become an obstacle for all the other pedestrians, so almost nobody would ever do it. You can imagine that this is terrible for business - cutting down on the parking space would give space to pedestrians and they would have an easier time checking out shops and spending money there.
A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don't they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores?
I don't know what bizzaro world those people live in where they will actually find a parking spot in the front of their destination. A given block has what like 10 spaces for cars? In a city with thousands of road users your odds of finding a parking spot that's truly convenient to the destination are going to be so low. I bet most everyone currently parking on the street is parking in some compromised somewhat inconvenient spot. That's why I find the strongest voices of people keeping the street parking are usually the abusers: that neighbor who has some hardly functional car they roll out three feet to take up two spots while they are away with the other car, and roll back when they get home, or that mechanics shop that parks customer vehicles out there at 4am when the spots are actually available and holds them in perpetuity or to use them for their own employees convenience.
Where I live, small shops often have 5 or 15 minute parking time limits directly outside so there's usually a space available when I want one, despite the rest of the street being full.
Sounds like your city needs to write and enforce its parking rules better.
There are loading zones and such but still, how many spaces are going to be like this? What are the odds you roll up and there is a car there already taking advantage of that spot? Now what, you sit on your hands for 14 and a half minutes? Street parking is never a guarantee, and banking on it usually ends in frustration. Getting that convenient spot in the right place right at the right time when you happen to be there circling to park is always a stroke of luck if your area is somewhat busy.
We managed to save our local mall before it completely died, and now it thrives. They turned it mostly inside out, there's still halls inside but all of the popular stores now face outward so you can park right in front of them.
In denser areas they do, but honestly most new development malls are looking like that now a days with huge garages and an effort to maximize the developable land. I think Easton in Columbus, OH is a fair example of one of these newer malls with garages, and outside of a big city too way out in the exurbs not too far from cornfields. There are some lots but as the area has been infilling they've been adding garages.
Probably because customers aren’t going to malls for a short trip and taking 5-10 mins extra to park isn’t a big deal compared to them going to a small shop for 5 mins and getting out of there.
I don't know why you've come to that conclusion? I do the exact opposite. I got to malls to buy something specific, but there's no reason to spend anymore time there than necessary. City centres are the opposite.
I just got an ebike with the intention of riding to and from work. So far I have chosen not to do it for the 5 work days I’ve had the bike:
Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold?
First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon.
I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else.
Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid.
The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.
Raining and cold on a bike are just issues of wardrobe. Typically, a cycling cap, windbreaker, and gloves are perfectly adequate for most dry days above freezing.
The most bike commuting city in the world is Copenhagen, Denmark. They manage the winters just fine. That said, getting from here-to-there is challenging for most novice bike commuters, and having experience friends in the transit alternatives community is the only way for this knowledge to be passed from one person to another.
In effect, the fact that the dressing for weather has been nullified by cars for three generations has effectively hamstrung us all because of the loss of cultural knowledge.
Not all your trips can be replaced with a bike, but if some do that's still a win. IMO there is a ton of low hanging fruit. For example, in rush hour traffic when I drive to work its 35-45 mins, because you are crawling at 16mph. On a bike it actually takes the same amount of time or less sometimes, because I can split lanes and come up to the front of lights vs having to wait through multiple cycles sometimes. Sure you are working but IMO the cardio is probably better for me than sitting for 45 mins straight. Ebikes are great too if you have some hills but imo even with just a road bike you can go for pretty far on flats without getting sweaty without having to be in great shape thanks to the gearing and how light the bike is. A ride able old schwinn road bike might only be $50 on craigslist too, so pretty disposeable if they get stolen often. You can throw your bike on renters insurance too if you werent aware for your ebike, maybe homeowners too.
My commute is only about 10 minutes and I’m driving 35 for most of it except for about a minute at 60 on a highway. So I’m going to be going slower on my bike and slightly farther.
I have found that riding my old bike always gets me sweaty outside of narrow temperature and humidity bands in the spring and fall, but perhaps I’m not using the gears correctly. It is a hybrid not a road bike though.
I’ll be parking it inside at work so I’m not worried about it being stolen there. If I try to replace some grocery runs I will want to lock it up outside there and will definitely want the electric assist.
Gotcha… don’t ride anywhere I can’t change clothes when it is raining. And I need a rain proof backpack. And I need to add even more time to my transit when it is cold.
People in Denmark don't generally carry a change of clothes if it's raining. And I thought most backpacks were waterproof anyway.
We use rain jackets, ponchos and/or waterproof overtrousers, depending how heavy the rain is. It's generally fairly light here, so my overtrousers don't get much use.
Temperature is not a problem, just add or remove clothing according to the temperature. (Is this not obvious? I sound like my mum when I was 8 years old "it's cold outside, wear a coat!").
I’m just going to have to figure out the wardrobe change. Since I usually drive to work I’m used to wearing work temperature clothing covered by a jacket or a coat depending on temp to get to the car and in to work and if I misjudge the amount of cold it is a problem for those two minutes, maybe 5 more while the car heats up.
Now I need to figure out how to handle a much longer time in the temperature and rain, plus windchill (the other day when I tried out my ebike it took 3 minutes for my eyes to stop watering, I’m hoping that is just an acclimatization thing).
I did realize I can probably get some plastic bags to keep a change of clothes in inside my backpack.
I’m sure I just have a bad attitude but I’m working on it over here.
And with a car you might need to scrape off the snow from the windshields, and make sure your tires are in good shape so you don't hydroplane in rain. Everyone deals with weather in some way. Donning rain pants, some rubber covers over your shoes, and a rain jacket isn't so bad. All that rain gear is still going to be cheaper than even one new tire for a car.
22% of all trips is considered to be a lot of trips? What is the break down of the other 78%?
I can probably get close to 22% as long as Covid keeps my long distance trips suppressed. I thought when people were saying “I bike everywhere” they meant like 80% bike 20% walk or something.
Based on your posts so far I don't think you're genuinely interested, I think you're trolling. But even if we assume you are, you need to hear it - you have an attitude problem.
> In a study of Parkdale Village in Toronto, a quarter of business owners estimated that over half their customers drove to their business – in reality, just 4 percent drive.
Come on, Parkdale is just behind Little Portugal and near Dufferin Mall, all very walkable areas, how is this a surprise? Repeat the study w/ Yorkdale Mall near highway 401 and those car numbers will shoot through the roof.
The reality is that areas closer to downtown that are a hassle to park at will attract downtown folks and more suburban areas with big parking lots will attract suburban folks with cars.
What's the point of cherrypicking one area and try to draw general conclusions about parking from that?
Because even in city centres where most people walk, there’s a perception among business owners that they would lose a big part of their customers if parking were replaced with for example bicycle lanes, while the truth is the opposite.
The point is to drive their preferences and thoughts on how things should be home and reshape urban landscapes to fit a vocal minorities views on how things should be with the hopes that if they impose their will on the landscape it will reshape people into sharing their viewpoint.
> Both the Toronto and Berlin studies found that people on foot, on bikes or taking public transport spend more money when they go to local shops and visit much more often than those who travel by car. In the case of Berlin, people who did not drive were responsible for more than 90 percent of weekly spending.
That makes perfect sense. People who drive far are looking for better prices. They will buy one or two things they know are usually cheap or often on sale and then get other things in some other store that's along their route to wherever they are going.
The walkin' locals are going to be the more captive customers.
Meanwhile in America, Old Town revivals in like every small city in the United States has used abundant free parking as a key driver to get customers into businesses.
Because sometimes there aren't even sidewalks from the suburban tract to the Old Town they are reviving, much less a safe way to bike let alone a bus route with any reasonable level of frequency. So they have to do it because There Is No Alternative. That's why actually having alternatives on offer are important.
I think the bias come from a pretty obvious fact: people who drive do 100% of the whining about parking and traffic. People who walk to the shop just come in looking happy and well-adjusted and ready to spend money. So the only thing the shopkeeper ever hears about transportation is how bad traffic and parking are.
Its also from who the business owners perceive as their customers. They probably associate car ownership with higher income levels and would prefer to make their business as accommodating for that customer as possible vs someone who takes the bus and is perhaps perceived as having less disposable income to spend at the business. Sometimes businesses reserve their parking for the most high income customers e.g. when they make it valet with a high price vs first come first serve.
Is this research comparing spending at the same store, or just car owners vs non-car owners buying every day things? If the latter, I would think it's more that if you don't drive, you likely live in a more expensive area and things cost more.
If the advocates are so positive about it, then they shouldn't mind putting money in escrow to be paid out to any business that are negatively impacted by this.
Do any of these advocates have an ownership stake in any properties or businesses in the affected area?
Making it easier for cyclists and transit users has often been found to increase business:
> Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study. Researchers studied 14 corridors in 6 cities -- Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis -- and found such improvements had either positive or non-significant impacts on sales and employment. Essentially, adding improvements like bike lanes largely boosted business and employment in the retail and food service sectors.
I live in Indianapolis and we added bike lanes and more parking at the same time. The real driver in retail sales has been the increase in residential units downtown. Mass transit in Indy was and still is terrible ... It takes 1.5 hours to go 6 miles.
Yeah, a work/shop/live area near me instituted paid parking 5 years ago, after 25 years of being free. It had some serious negative effects on business and they rolled back the paid hours to just weekdays and just 9-5 for the garages, but it still has not recovered. Many of the businesses have moved out, although others have moved in. Some customers just park in the nearest free spots, clogging up other commercial or residential parking, and walk.
It's been 5 years and places are still closing as their leases expire. The place never really recovered and people are still complaining about it.
"Studies from across the globe have found that shop owners consistently overestimate the number of shoppers that arrive by car and vastly underestimate the number of people who arrive by other modes."
Perhaps the stats support this, we'll see (but I'm suspicious). What I am certain about is that I'll shop where there's parking for my vehicle—and that's how I go shopping. It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I've bypassed certain shops/businesses because there's either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.
What if street parking was more reflective of the actual costs and drastically limited the amount of time you could park? This could mean the likelihood of a spot being available in front a story very high.
I forgot what city implemented this (may have been San Francisco) but they made street parking triple the price and only for 15-30 minutes. As a result businesses in front of street parking got more customers.
I'm trying to search this on google, it may have been a paper put out by strong towns. I remember an episode of econ talk discussing it here:
That's all very well but until there's decent public transport most people will do what I do (and those who I know do exactly what I do now).
"What if street parking was more reflective of the actual costs and drastically limited the amount of time you could park?"
Where I live now I'd suggest it's the opposite, as the cost of parking is outrageously high. What I didn't mention was that I'll also bypass the shops unless the available parking is close—almost outside the shop I'm going to—because walking time from where I park to the shop adds significantly to the expense (every moment counts)!
Some years ago I was in New York and was staggered that the price of parking there was about one third of where I live. I was so impressed (and outraged) that I took a series of photos (around 34th & 8th) then did the same here at home for comparison to ensure people would actually believe me. To ensure my locals couldn't accuse me of fudging the photos I made sure the Empire State was visible in a number of the photos (the difference in price was so great they otherwise would have through disbelief). Shame I can't post them here.
I'm the first to agree that what I do is far from ideal—clearly, using a 100kW-plus engine to propel me to my destination is inefficient but the naysayers only ever put one side of the story. Hiking parking prices to fit the need/demand is only one lopsided part of a much-needed better solution.
I'm really confused on what you are trying to say. Are you stating that you think parking should be cheaper and allotted for longer periods of time? For example say $5 gets you one hour?
I honestly don't know what you're trying to insinuate outside that you own a car...
You're saying you wish you could park in front of the stores with street parking to do shopping, but lament that there's never spots available so you don't. I don't understand what you're trying to propose here.
New York has reasonably high (and realistic) parking pricing. Where I live it's outrageously high (deliberately so on political grounds—not because of restricted space (there's much more space available where I live).
Introducing political idealism to deliberately hurt people just because one can is counterproductive and in the long term will do more damage than good (for starters, it's extremely alienating and likely to turn people off even a quite noble cause).
> It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I've bypassed certain shops/businesses because there's either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.
If there's no parking available it means that it has not been priced properly. For optimal use of parking space, at any given point it should priced such that only 85% of it is being used (thus always allowing for new arrivals), but not cheap enough so that people spend an "inordinate" amount of time taking up a spot.
See the book The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup for details and references:
"It incorporates elements of Shoup's Georgist philosophy."
Funny that, some years back I was a member of the local Georgist group (I've even some old newsletters to prove the point—again, it's a same I can't post some front cover images here for you to see). Yes, I understand the argument well.
Again, these matters are never as simple as they first appear. For starters, these plans rarely take into account the different abilities of different citizens to physically access shops and or their actual needs when they do (how often are the forced to go shopping, etc. — say versus window shopping just for an outing).
For example, would the elderly or infirm have privilege or advantage? Would you penalize or add an extra 'flag-fall' to the parking charges of someone who usually does online shopping and has all the facilities to do so—because they could have saved the shopping trip by shopping online? Now take the case of someone who cannot do online shopping (there are many people who cannot for many reasons)—should they be subject to the same parking penalty by default? And if a differential rate were applied to advantage them then how would you police it to stop abuse?
Where I live none of these issues has been thought about let alone implemented.
Afterthought: I should mention the reason I'm not now a member of the local Georgist society is that it was eventually abandoned out of the lack of interest (insufficient membership). The local organizer was upset to the extent that he financed the newsletter at his own expense for some years after the group folded—that's to say he sent non-financial members copies of the newsletter in the hope that he could revive the group but that wasn't to be.
The obvious question that arises is why was Henry George so popular in the 19th Century and these days so very few have even heard of him—except oddballs like me (and obviously Shoup). (Yes, I even a copy of Progress and Poverty and I've actually read it although I've not done so for at least a decade.)
If you read between the lines of my original post then you'll see my comment was pretty cynical (as well as being self-centered). Well, I thought about this at the time the Georgist Society was folding and I came to the conclusion that it's just not possible to implement Georgist ideas in a modern society without a great deal of restructuring—everything from the bottom line of banks (mortgage changes etc.) to the way our governance is done would have to change and that's a too bigger ask. Simply, the economic order would have to change and at present there's far from sufficient disruption to the present order of things for that to happen (and a lot of powerful fat cats would miss out).
Whilst many would agree in principle with Henry George's ideas there's always been something that's been holding people back from actually implementing them. I'd argue that this was true in the latter half of the 19th Century when Progress and Poverty was first published for that's when his ideas were at their most popular. I'd further argue that in the modern economic world people's beliefs about Georgist philosophy are even more antithetical in the sense that in their minds they've further separated the ideal world from the day-to-day pragmatic one. That's to say when it comes to the rights and wrongs of parking, cognitive dissonance is alive and well across large swathes of the population.
Thus, to put parking into perspective, whilst many will support Shoup's notions in theory it will be damn hard to implement them in practice. (Though I'd add a mild caveat here, I'm primarily talking about the Anglophone world here, having lived in Europe I can attest that views are somewhat different there.)
It would be interesting to psychoanalyze Shoup. I'll bet he's an idealist.
Nobody is saying that car use isn't common, just that it commonly overestimated.
I've predominately used means of transit other than cars over the last decade. That means that stores that are located more remotely with less dense parking are less likely to get my business.
In addition, "high parking" stores are very frequently built in areas where pedestrian access simply doesn't exist because of a lack of sidewalks, cross walks, etc.
I think it makes sense to accommodate both use cases by promoting centralized, density preserving parking structures even if it requires car users to walk a little further their final destination.
Their livelihoods don't depend on being right. If it turns out parking doesn't matter for their business, and they're wrong to believe it does, their livelihoods will be fine. They have an existential risk from only one of the options, so their opinion will be grossly biased.
Most HN users, especially American users, don't know that EU has 292 million cars. 780 cars/1000 capita. USA is not much different: 816 cars/1000 capita.
I live in Bay Area and people here think that EU is a utopia where cars do not exist and everyone just walks. They have a cartoonish caricature of EU in their minds.
Then you shouldn't be drawing conclusions from average miles driven. That doesn't further your point, I don't know if we have data for median miles driven per capita.
Most Americans have a bike in the garage, but that certainly doesn’t make us the Netherlands.
I would be curious to see what the usage patterns are. A quick google shows that the average mileage for Europeans is around 7k, while the average American drives 12k. So it would seem that Europeans drive about 60% less despite the same access to vehicles…
780 cars/capita is pretty high lol... Is it supposed to be per 1000?
Btw it does depend where you live but in the Netherlands you can get by without a car mostly fine if you live in a city. The biggest issue is transporting larger goods (basically any IKEA trip), but it's certainly possible (eg by renting).
The main difference I’ve noticed is that I have met people from various walks of life in Europe who literally couldn’t drive (no license) and got around fine.
Only in New York have I met someone like that here; even those who majority took public transit had cars or at least a license.
I'm in my late 20s, live in London, and that describes most people I know. It's not worth owning a car here, so people just don't end up taking their test. Even if I wanted to take it, I wouldn't get a car so would get rusty real quick.
Lol corrected. Yes, 1000 people. I just googled for it, but having travelled extensively in Europe, I wanted to comment on what people of Bay Area really think about Europe. It is very...VERY distorted.
Yes, but Bay Area and Europe are different scale :)
While I was still living in the Bay Area, once I thought I could walk from the car dealership to the rental car company, because on google maps it looked quite close... big mistake.
I live in Oakland. You'll find Oakland to be more walkable than the rest of the bay area (although you'll get robbed by the end of your walk, but that's not the point here). A rather strange concoction of terrible local politics, great food, crime through the roof, homelessness everywhere, distorted views of the rest of the world and even the rest of the bay area, very smart people working on great ideas, very smart people on ideological crusade, deep history of multiculturalism and great beer.
Oh, and potholes. I feel like it is a secret plot by the city to punish car owners.
> Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
Obviously before cars were invented it was impossible for people in rural areas to bring food to people in urban areas, so all the people in urban areas starved to death. /s
Humans managed to feed urban areas for millennia before the internal combustion engine was invented. I'm sure if city design was changed such that people could walk, cycle, and take public transit to work and to shops, various ways of getting goods (including food) into urban areas will be thought of.
And putting emphasis on urban layouts where people can get (say) 90% of their day-to-day needs satisfied without relying on automobiles does not preclude cars being available for the remaining 10%. Such layouts simply turn cars from being a need-to-have to a nice-to-have item in one's life.
We're talking about changing the emphasis of urban design. Most "bans" on automobiles focus on person transportation vehicles, and not eliminated commercial delivery. It may in fact be easier for deliveries since all the single-passenger cars will be reduced, thus potentially lowering general traffic volumes.
See the Not Just Bikes channel for various videos by a Canadian who grew up in a car-centric suburb to people-centric Amsterdam:
Obviously, the whole anti-car movement, sentiment, whatever we call it, is mostly centered around urban societies. You don't see many stroads, parking lots the size of an European town and multi-hour traffic jams full of single-occupant SUVs among the wheat fields in the middle of nowhere.
It would be great if even rural communities didn't need expensive, polluting cars to be able to live their lives, but AFAIK they're not a priority now. Cities are where it's all falling apart.
If there's a stroad, it's a suburban society, not an urban society.
Urban societies have existed for millennia, and before cars, people weren't all riding around on horses to accomplish their daily life. Personal transport was the exception, not the rule.
People in the US think that stroads and roads and cars are the only way to live, because we have outlawed other forms of living. Our lack of low-car city designs isn't because people don't want them, or because they aren't conducive to modern life, they simply don't exist because they have been banned from the marketplace.
Yeah we used to live that way. Most people didn't like it and bought a car when their personal economic circumstances allowed for it.
If people really wanted to live packed together like a hive of insects, we would not have suburbs and small towns. People live in high density situations because they have (or perceive that they have) no other choice.
Must be why those cramped penthouses in manhattan are so cheap, right? Who would want to live like an insect after all? Can't be any benefits to that, nope.
It can be both. We can have scarcity of access to a resource (entertainment, dining, culture, etc) which makes another resource (housing) much more expensive. There can be a relation to what people want access to and where people need to live.
Places like NY have extremely high densities of cultural resources and extremely low densities of housing. This doesn't mean people like the housing, it just means people like the cultural aspects.
This begs a big question: why do we pack all of our cultural institutions into a small area? Is it more cost effective? I would have a hard time buying that due to how many restaurants, businesses, etc close in Manhattan for not being able to catch up with rent. I think it's a cyclical issue we see in other areas. Why is Shenzhen the "only" place that manufactures electronics? It is likely a network effect causing this. Factory A can sell to B, C, and D which can all sell a similar fan out. The same likely happens with cultural institutions. Starting a restaurant supply company? Well, you'll look for the place with the most restaurants. Starting a restaurant? Look for the place with the most supply companies. Want to find a place to live? Look for the place that has the best optimization of {Rent, Entertainment, Food, Employment}. For me and many others: this is NYC (actually NJ with a commute to the city).
A bigger follow up question: Does it need to be this way? I don't think it does. Living in Manhattan/Brooklyn/etc is way more expensive than living in the suburbs of NJ even factoring in double taxes and commute. I currently pay $1,500/month in rent for a 1br 1bath. A friend who lives in Brooklyn (with a 15-20 min shorter commute) pays about $3,500/month and needs to pay $300/month in an MTA card while also spending way more on groceries and cost of living stuff than I do.
If you owned your residence in a suburb even with taxes my guess is it becomes much more financially beneficial even if you need a car. If we got a little smarter and built trains, street cars, buses, subways, etc in suburban areas with sprawl we may not even need cars for most Americans.
If we have separate single-family dwellings than the damage fires and poor maintenance can cause are limited (blast radius). We can, as a society, gradually "roll-forward" new standards in electrical codes / eco friendly by renovating homes as people move.
The only reason we don't have a single family home to give to everyone who wants one is because we haven't built them. Once everything is said and done though the cost of building an apartment complex in NYC is not much cheaper once you factor in the huge fees for doing any sort of construction in NYC.
I personally think that if we, as a country, decided to build walkable small towns that were interconnected by fast moving and reliable public transit and forced businesses who could work remotely to do so many people would much rather live there than in the city.
An inner city road doesn't need to be 4 lanes wide if it's primarily carrying small box trucks to local stores.
And I think it's pretty apparent that quite a lot of restaurant employees rely on public transit, or feed a substantial portion of their income to one car, whose breakdown causes loss of employment. Forcing people to need cars from arbitrary point to point is a regressive tax.
> Where do your groceries come from and how should these people taking care of ensuring you get to eat get around?
What are you trying to say? You obviously don't need freeways and 6 lane roads running through city centers to deliver supplies to stores and restaurants.
I don't exactly get your point. Stroads are generally more common in residential areas to the best of my limited knowledge. The bulk of commerical transport likely occurs on much larger roads and highways where trucks mainly ply. Short of last mile transport there isn't much overlap.
"Stroads" are in commercial areas by definition. A typical neighborhood designed after the car became popular does not have any multi lane roads inside of it. It will have them around it, but people who live in the neighborhood will not be directly on the arterial roads. The larger road used for commercial transport in low density areas is either a "stroad" or highway.
Please take five minutes to look on Google Maps before commenting about neighborhood design in a country 5000 miles away.
urban societies built within the 20th century are very different than urban societies built before then
they both have roads, the only difference is that the 20th century ones were built around car culture. car culture is not talking about people delivering food for the residents.
New Zealand English tends to be closer to UK English, with it’s own quirks. However, it is trending towards US English due to media influence.
Asking low quality questions is poor form. Generalisation about questions: You usually improve the conversation if you do some work: for example google your questions, and post your answer if you think it is interesting to others. https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=kerb+or+curb
What are the chances that millions of business operators across the world and over the course of decades are completely wrong about how traffic, including parking, affect their businesses? We could choose to believe that business interests are not public interests so to hell with what businesses want, but lets not harbor the lie that the businesses are mistaken in their experience.
A whole article about this without a mention of self-driving cars is silly. Even if you think they're still a decade away, they are coming and they are going to change everything about parking in cities.
I've seen a city center with hundreds of shops die out because businesses shut or moved to the newly built mall outside the city that has a huuge parking area.
There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.
Yes, if what you already have is a car-dependent society and a generally unwelcoming city center, people will do exactly that.
And there will be even more accidents, pollution, traffic jams, stress, further loss of green space and social contact. And together this will cost the society more than making the original city center walkable and convenient to do business in.
> There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.
Consider this: There is no reason to build a mall anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands in the CITY.
It's funny how the alternative for having an actual, functional city center is letting it die (or not building it in the first place) and then building an alternative city center called "the mall" where people can socialize, walk around without the fear of being crushed by a 2-ton SUV, window-shop, have a lunch or watch a movie.
It seems like the future, at least in America where land is plentiful, is multi-core metropolitan cities. With smaller cores, not so many silly skyscrapers.
People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.