This is the problem with American cities in general.
A very beaten dead-horse, but look at Japan:
Elementary Schools and Middle Schools placed within a MAXIMUM 10min walking pace distance at that age group’s walking pace.
High Schoolers able to commute to their school of choice due to robust public transportation network.
We have designed cities that create as byproducts incredible amount of self-inflicted wounds on our culture. We don’t have to live this way. This is a choice.
Parents go to work or send their kids off. A parent personally accompanying a student to school is an indicator of something having gone wrong.
Major US population centers who are not New York should have, at the start of their explosive population growth, experienced a massive construction boom. There should be so many people employed making a city right now that the other problem we have with people not making a living wage because they are working jobs that weren’t designed to be life-sustaining careers might not be a problem!
Tear down all the “historical homes” and build mid-sizes apartment buildings. Build more schools. Hire more teachers.
The “character” and “flavor” of a city will come naturally and organically as an emergent property of trying to build a massive city to house millions.
Cities if done right turn into quasi-perpetual motion machines that feed itself the economic activity to sustain itself. And because they are denser and more compact, resource consumption can be scaled to be more efficient. Oh and all the people who used to be sprawled out now concentrated? That frees up land to build industrial centers on the outskirts that feed more economic activity.
This is an oversimplification that ignores a LOT of externalities to economic activity and histories of urban decay, but essentially: yes cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles essentially need to be rebuilt from the ground up and hopefully it will be as a result of conscious decisions and not a Great Fire of London/Earthquake of 1906 type disaster.
The other problem is bureaucracy and that is actually a consequence of the way US regulations approach regulation. It will make everyone’s life easier if we had very perspective building regulations that can be just checklisted through instead of ambiguous, litigious wording.
Scratch the minimum parking requirements and allow people to fill up those spaces with new buildings. Maybe require basement parking or multistory parking at least.
Over time the city will grow denser and all other stuff like bike lanes and public transport will simply make sense.
> But how can we fix it? Tear down all the cities and start over?
No, that's not needed. There is one first start that is relatively easy to do, and many cities are experimenting with it all over the world: ban individual-transportation cars, only allow taxis, ambulances, delivery services, tradespeople's / construction vehicles and transportation for the disabled. Then, use the space on the suddenly free roads to introduce a solid 24/7 bus network and return the space that's not needed any more to the public by building green stripes, bicycle lanes and pedestrian stripes.
It's all fun and games until you have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare. And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Not advocating for car culture, but failing to account for citizens' actual needs makes your city unliveable.
- Your lifestyle can adjust so that you don’t pick up two weeks of groceries at once and buy in bulk at Costco. You could walk to a fresh market instead. You can get a few days groceries at a time. Getting groceries doesn’t have to be the massive effort it is here in North America. Or there are small electric mobility options.
- Customers and parking. This doesn’t necessarily follow. If a street is very walkable and people use it frequently, people can easily notice a shop and walk in. That doesn’t really happen if you’re driving, as you don’t really interact with or see the outside world. So in theory, a vibrant walkable street can support a lot more local economic activity. Beyond that, the amount of land used for parking in North American suburbs is so vast that there is actually less economic activity because so much land is effectively sitting there empty. If a parking lot is as big as the store… well, that’s one more store that could exist!
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Existing dense and ultra-dense cities do not face these problems or have adequately addressed them. Or these aren’t actually problems.
Increased density in a neighborhood means increased foot traffic which means increased business.
Delivery of large items become an essential business activity. The Japanese versions of many multinationals offer free, same-day delivery of any items bought in-store if you live within a 30 miles of the store. You actually can have it scheduled to have the delivery truck coincide with when you come home.
Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
Businesses respond to the limited range of their customers by increasing their presence. Look at New York — a bodega at every corner. Small businesses can thrive by filling a niche inside a walkable radius and have decreased marketing costs and higher customer discovery because tens of thousands will walk by every day. So large corporations create more jobs and independent mom-and-pops can reliably compete.
Denser cities don’t have your above problems because the nature of dense cities make all of those things moot. Ive seen many of these same counter arguments before, and my only thought is that Americans have lived in our current state for so long we fail to imagine a better life.
Culture is harder to shift, and I was mostly talking about France, but your points on increased density neighborhoods are valid nonetheless.
French cities are currently not getting denser because of perceived social problems such as poorer working population leading to low economic activity, poor academic performance and eventually and a rise of crime.
Paris in particular concentrates a really-non-negligible fraction of the metropolitan area's economic activity but cannot become denser that it is right now because current regulation restricts high-rise buildings in the city proper [1]. That leads to inflated price which drive people away.
Same-day delivery? Good luck with that. 24h is the best they can do, and that's 79 euros -- by the way -- for your sofa that's being delivered to your home, when you'll be there (or not, lol). That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost.
> Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
These exist, and there are even moving companies that use that as a selling point. Don't see how practical it is though, especially when driving uphill, as Paris is not exactly as flat as Amsterdam, Chicago or Miami, for example. Mopeds or cars still won't deliver more than 5 km away from their base, but customers can easily drive for 45 min to a good restaurant 20 km away.
They want to turn a city into a car-free one but regulation ties their hands. As long as the city transitions, its citizens have two problems that lead to them being driven further and further away from the city proper.
You raise some good points, but I wanted to touch upon this one:
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
The needs of a neighborhood's residents are distinct from and sometimes opposed to the needs of non-resident stakeholders such as suburban commuters, absentee landlords, and tourists. Ultimately I think every neighborhood needs to strike some balance between these stakeholders.
But the extent that most American cities prioritize the needs of commuters and visitors over their own residents has always seemed odd to me. For example, many cities spend huge sums of money destroying local neighborhoods to widen freeways so commuters can move further from the city. This results in a destroyed local tax base and increases in suburban property values.
All else being equal I would have expected most cities to operate like Paris and prioritize the needs of local residents above the needs of visitors.
> It's all fun and games until you have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
The former case can be solved by either going shopping more regularly - or by making that possible in the first place by making sure there are grocery stores at regular walkable distances. If you have to use a car to transport your groceries or other regular (!) shopping, your community is underserved.
The latter case can be solved by regulating delivery services to have enough staff and technology (i.e. pallet trucks) to be able to haul all the furniture from the nearest delivery drop-off point.
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop
Objective data from Berlin's experiment shows that this concern is relatively unfounded - they looked at anonymized cellphone tower data to determine a sizable increase in pedestrian traffic for the shops [1]. For stores selling stuff that is not easily transportable without a car (e.g. kitchens), there should be incentives to move these to a new location that is accessible with cars or by delivery services.
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
Well, they are learning. The important thing was to get started in the first place. Now with real-world experiences they can adapt and improve.
> And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Again, the answer of this is government regulation. In Germany, taxis are mandated by law to serve you.
A very beaten dead-horse, but look at Japan:
Elementary Schools and Middle Schools placed within a MAXIMUM 10min walking pace distance at that age group’s walking pace.
High Schoolers able to commute to their school of choice due to robust public transportation network.
We have designed cities that create as byproducts incredible amount of self-inflicted wounds on our culture. We don’t have to live this way. This is a choice.
Parents go to work or send their kids off. A parent personally accompanying a student to school is an indicator of something having gone wrong.