While taking a walk near downtown Austin, TX, a police car stopped next to me and the officers started asking weird questions. Including if I know where I am at, where I go, or is there someone who could help me with these apparent struggles in my life.
It took me a couple awkward minutes to realize that I'm the only one standing on my feet and not sitting in a car wherever I was looking. I apologized (???) and told them I was heading to a museum, bc I'm a visitor here and that's what we do right? I added a colleague's address and assured them that I'm not "confused", and will take an Uber now.
This was simply unbelievable in my world; for the next week I observed my colleague, whenever they took me out, or went to somewhere: we never walked outside. From the building to the parking lot, from the destination parking lot to the resto and vice versa.
Today, of course, I know that there are walkable cities too, I enjoy walking from my Chicago hotel to the office building :-) every single time I enjoy my US visits, but after a couple weeks I can't wait to get back to my 98% car free European life.
Had a somewhat similar experience in Houston (minus police), which seems to be a city whose infrastructure is comprised of one 9000-lane monstrosity of a freeway. I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the office I was working in, maybe a 3 minute walk. A coworker offered to give me a ride each morning, and when I mentioned I could just walk they said 'the only pedestrians around here are homeless people'. So I guess that's their general attitude about walking, which might explain the attention from police.
When I lived in Houston I would bike to work occasionally but it’s not a pleasant thing to do 4-6 months out of the year. Even walking to the bus stop at 8am in the summer I would be sweating. People who harp on Houston for being designed around cars (notably the “Not Just Bikes” channel on YouTube) usually live somewhere like the Netherlands with moderate weather and never address just how uncomfortable it is to be outside in Houston half the year. It also rains heavily in Houston quite frequently (90 days of rain/year).
I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston.
A substantial contributor to that heat is asphalt and concrete though (absorbs heat and releases it at night). And to make it worse there's no tree cover. Winter is also more manageable if you don't have to wait 20 mins for a bus in an uncleared snowbank just because non-car mobility is second-class
True. Another issue with all the concrete is that it doesn't absorb rain and has made the constant flooding worse. Zero tree cover is also a shame, there are hundreds of miles of concrete bike and walking paths along the bayous that would be great for commuting but most of it has zero tree cover so you're just baking in the sun.
The older parts of Houston have massive oak trees that provide a lot of shade (and acorns the size of walnuts). But the older houses aren't large enough for modern Houstonians (roll your eyes here); when you tear it down to build a McMansion the trees also have to go.
The elementary school near my friend's house had a playground that was 100% shaded by just two massive trees. They tore the school down for a modern replacement. The new playground has no shade at all, not even those stretched fabric triangles you see all over the southern US.
Caring about nature that you can't shoot or eat is for pansy leftist tree-huggers. Especially if you work in a manly field full of manly men like construction. /s
This seems unnecessarily bait-y, but you can probably assume that the people who planted those trees in Houston weren't tree-huggers either, they were just practical. And lived in an era where "wasting money" wasn't as socially acceptable as it is now.
Before air conditioning shade from trees was one of the only ways to endure the heat. I bought a 70yo house with trees nearly on top of the house, and the old neighbors said it was intended to combat the heat.
As someone who grew up playing in the bayous out in the suburbs of Houston, even away from the concrete the humidity and heat are oppressive in the summertime.
I'm from Montevideo, I wouldn't call it "tropical" but yeah, compared to an US city it's absolutely a million times more walkable.
We do have humidity and heat and I don't enjoy it and I use A/C several months a year.
There's a big push for more cycling-centric and more cycling lanes, and the bus infrastructure is obviously a lot better than the US. I don't have a car by choice.
I haven't been to Houston but I have been to Dallas and it was an extremely frustrating experience and it feels like an awful soulless city to me.
I don't know the distinct history of those cities but Houston's population didn't hit 1 million until the 1960s, nearly all of its growth has taken place in a car-centric world. At least 3/4 four of those cities have been around for a long time pre-car and I suspect weren't designed with cars in mind.
How about Miami, e.g Miami Beach and downtown Miami, both extremely walkable? Like Houston, Miami did not reach 1 million pop until the 60s.
Or Panama City, did not reach 1 mil until the 90s
And "designed with cars in mind" is part of the problem, is it not? Using that as a filter is like saying "there are no parking garages with good canoeing routes"
More to the point, nearly all of that growth has taken place in an air-conditioned world. Urbanization of the U.S. South really only took off once the air-conditioner became mainstream.
Those other cities have a population that is adjusted to the heat - they grew up with it, their ancestors grew up with it, they're genetically and culturally adjusted to the climate. By contrast, the U.S. South includes a large number of immigrants who are only there because air conditioning exists. It's a mystery why anyone would want to walk around in 100 degree heat with 90% humidity, because they certainly wouldn't.
Singapore is no doubt developed in recent times and has one of the world’s best underground metro. It’s not for lack of cars in mind it looks the way it does. In fact the opposite, Singapore has a quota on total number of cars in the country, making other forms of transport a necessity to provide, including metro, buses, bike lanes, covered walkways.
2/4 had massive growth in the 50s/60s/70s (KL and Singapore). I'll give you Montevideo and San Juan, but let's not pretend it's just timing that made Houston the way it is. It's a matter of choices that were made, to prioritize car infrastructure over all else.
I’m from Malaysia and I can tell you barely anyone walks in the dense parts of cities. I do like walking but the smell of sewage and car exhaust is overwhelming. Much prefer the UK
Based on historical averages, none of these cities are hotter than Houston. They might have more humidity, but Houston averages are higher AND regularly experiences sustained daily highs during summer in excess of 100°F/38°C.
Agreed. No matter how good the biking infrastructure in major cities in Japan is (and apparently it was good enough for me to see someone biking at almost any given moment, so I assume it was pretty good), I cannot fathom how people did it. You open a door to the outside, and you feel like you got blasted with a human-sized heatgun. Just standing outside for more than a few minutes, and you pretty much gotta take a shower after. And no, I am not ultra-sensitive to it, as I managed to survive 90F summers in Seattle with no AC just fine before.
You are very correct about biking on the sidewalk, but I am not going to lie, I was madly impressed how it created pretty much zero disturbance for pedestrians ever. Totally despite the fact that it was happening all the time.
Meanwhile, had plenty of occasional bicycle/scooter riders in Seattle basically destroying the flow of pedestrians on sidewalks.
In Japan it wasn’t the case, it was straight up just people bicycling on the sidewalk in-between people walking. They just somehow figured out how to do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt the pedestrians, and I am still not sure how.
It does, people just don’t openly complain, much like any other problem - they either put up with it and say しょうがない or they complain in private or (often anonymously) online.
I am one of those annoyed people, I want bike lanes and I don’t understand why a place with so many riders is so anti-bike (aside from understanding the natural societal inclination to think that anything worth doing should be difficult, and made difficult if not).
I'm a biker and I want bike lanes too, so I don't need to dodge pedestrians. There is some bike infra here, but it's not nearly enough. And there's too many of those stupid painted "sharrows" that no biker with any sense uses because it's either next to too-fast traffic or blocked by parked vehicles.
I think the problem is just the politicians: they probably use cars and never bike or walk in these places.
I think the thing that makes it work the way it does is, as you say, people don't openly complain. They just get out of the way, or ignore the bikers (I prefer the latter as long as a bunch of them aren't blocking the whole sidewalk). In America, they'd be going full Karen and intentionally antagonizing the bikers, or trying to start fights with them, etc. Here, people seem to just recognize it's an imperfect situation, and put up with it instead of making a big deal out of it.
NotJustBikes went to Houston, tried to walk from the hotel to a suitcase shop 1-2km away, and found it too dangerous, not too hot. He doesn't say "everyone in Houston should walk everywhere all the time" he says "Houston is designed so you can't safely walk even if the distance is short and you want to".
> "I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston."
But the relevant part is people who do want to, but can't.
A few years ago I visited a company in New Jersey, in a business park just off the 1 - a bunch of office buildings and a business hotel in a little enclave.
I could see the office across the road from the hotel, but there was no easy way to get there on foot because there were no sidewalks, or indeed any other concessions to pedestrians. I had to walk through the car park, push through a hedge, climb down the grassy bank, and the do the same in reverse on the other side of the road. Reception had seriously recommended that I took a cab about 100 yards.
Even when the pedestrian infrastructure exists, it's not always good.
There's sidewalks and crosswalks between The Cupertino Hotel and One Infinite Loop, but they are terrifying to use because of how wide and busy that intervening junction is.
Walking to that hotel from San Jose was a mistake, incredibly hot even in winter and no shade, but it was possible — though I did have to switch which side of the road I was on several times because the sidewalk just stopped.
I don’t remember Not Just Bikes mentioning the sweltering heat and humidity in his video but it wouldn’t surprise me if he conveniently left it out or brushed over it.
But my point is that Houston is designed the way it is because very few people want to walk in 100 degree humid weather. It was mostly built after cars were invented so it reflects that.
>People who harp on Houston for being designed around cars (notably the “Not Just Bikes” channel on YouTube) usually live somewhere like the Netherlands with moderate weather and never address just how uncomfortable it is to be outside in Houston half the year. It also rains heavily in Houston quite frequently (90 days of rain/year).
>I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston.
Here in Tokyo, it's also quite hot, and extremely humid during the summer. Rain is very common during the summer as well, and we have typhoons too. Even so, everyone walks here, and lots of people (including moms with little kids) ride bicycles too, rain or shine.
I never understood why people compare places like Houston and Tokyo... Do these people lack any form of logical reasoning? It's the reason why the saying "apples to oranges" exists.
Do you know how dumb it sounds to compare two entirely different places as if they should relate?
I haven't been to Houston. But, people living in Singapore (near the equator) take public transportation and walk. So do people in Japan where it also ridiculously hot and humid. Japan also has just as many if not more rainy days than Houston and Singapore has double.
I'm not saying I get why people would not want to walk. Only that it's common to do so anyway.
Bikes are cooling as transportation, even in Houston. I think people who never bike as transportation, only exercise, don't understand that you can pedal around at like 20% exertion which gives you constant wind.
I had a similar experience in Mexico City, except it wasn't a cop who stopped me, it was a friendly civilian driving by, and they asked if I was confused because they had observed two men stalking me from 3 blocks back for a while who were likely to jump me.
I don't think anyone stopping to genuinely help is a "bad" thing, or robs one of their dignity. If you do, maybe that is a comment on your internal worldview instead of on that of the person stopping.
Dense cities where passersby ignore you wantonly are decried as impersonal, lacking community, etc and now we are saying we WANT MORE of that? That it brings DIGNITY?
I don't understand what you're arguing. It seems like you're saying you'd rather have a city where cops and concerned citizens stop to ask if you're confused than a dense, walkable city? I also don't understand how you got that dense, walkable cities would be someplace "where passersby ignore you wantonly".
Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared.
Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor.
Such is the paradox of modern urban life. Nowhere are you closer physically to your neighbor, but more distant socially. The 5 acre farms outside of town all know each other’s grandkids by name. Does a city dweller even know the name of the resident across the hall?
>Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared.
>Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high
crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor.
Here in Tokyo, it's still like this: kids play outside and roam around, taking the subway by themselves, etc. But people don't know their neighbors here either, since it's a city with tens of millions of people; it's just safe because it's built into the culture, just like petty theft almost never happens here and when you drop your wallet, it's almost certain to be turned into the nearest police box, with all the cash still inside.
> Cities used to be filled with tight knit communities in neighborhoods where everyone knew each other. Kids played outside and roamed around and no one cared
There are many neighborhoods in cities and towns in the US where this is still true. I know because I live in one, and I've visited others. There are also a ton of US suburbs and exurbs where people barely know their neighbours.
Having a friendly neighborhood has much to do with the strength of community institutions and the existence of "third places". Those can be present (or not) in a variety of community layouts and densities.
My take is that it requires a sweet spot of economic security where people aren't struggling so much that they can't/don't trust in community, but also aren't so wealthy that they don't need/rely on their community. Beyond that, it also helps to have physical layouts that enable friendly unintentional encounters between residents.
The problem is that none of these places will be cheap to live in, because all else equal, the existence of that lifestyle will drive up demand (and therefore housing prices).
Thats the narrative thats popular but I find it doesn’t pencil out. I know plenty of neighbors living in an urban area. More than when I lived in a suburban area that’s for sure. You have much higher chance of coming about someone on foot in earshot in the urban area. When your neighbor takes out the trash in the suburbs they are doing it 100 yards away from you.
Yeah it’s interesting. The kids in the upper peninsula know everyone else their age within a 150 mile radius by the time they graduate from high school (usually via sports). Many of them live on roads that share their last name. Very, extremely rural with small towns sprinkled around.
97% of Americans' daily trips are done via automobile. Walking, biking, and bus riding tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. There is heavy policing of low SES populations. In Kaplan, Louisiana it is explicitly illegal to walk at night. https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-pe...
Bus riding I can sort of understand, that tends to be the case everywhere outside of manor metros IME (and not without a certain amount of truth to it) - but to think of walking or cycling like that seems really sad, what a way to live, shielded from the natural environment, shuffling from one air conditioned box to the next.
> if you decide that's not a way you want to live then you also don't want to live somewhere where it's uncomfortable for you otherwise.
well, our living choices aren't necessarily choices these days. Nor comfortable. More like compromises for suvival. Already had more than a few friends priced out of California and needing to move out of the state in its entirety.
I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test. You can say you have to be in a car to be on a freeway for safety reasons, but you can't ban people from being in a place because they are not in a car because you don't like the people who aren't in cars. From reading the article the intent seems to be that you suspect people who aren't in cars.
> I am not a lawyer, but that does not seem like a law that could pass a constitutional test.
Nor am I, but a constitutional test used to cost about $250,000 or so over a decade ago (does inflation affect these things?). For someone who can't afford a car, that's a tough bill to eat.
As someone who has litigated a ton of constitutional challenges, you can definitely do it without representation if you want. I would think pretty much anyone on HN is educated enough to figure it out. (Attorney fees being your biggest cost; costs you'd have to swallow are deposition fees and filing fees if you're not indigent).
[Usually you can make two separate attacks on these kinds of constitutional cases since most states have their own constitutions that are practically identical to the federal one, so you can sue in both state and federal court separately if you want two tries at it -- this is good if you screw it up the first time and want to use the arguments the defendant fired at you in the first case to bolster your retry]
With representation though, I have a current case I finally settled today with the government and my legal counsel ran up a bill that was north of $500K for a very simple constitutional case. His firm swallowed it because it was part of their yearly pro bono requirements.
Walking / using public transportation is associated with low status when it is done for cost savings reasons. When it’s done for convenience it doesn’t convey much.
Using a bus in a ski resort is higher status than a car in a large city.
Yeah I live in the Boston area. All the neighborhoods that have easy access to public transit or are walkable neighborhoods are very desirable and expensive.
Strange. I have been to Austin a number of times for work and I find the city to be very walkable. I also enjoy the riverfront parks and pay a visit to SRV (may he rest in peace). I stay in downtown or at UT so I don't really know what it is like beyond there. I've also used their b-cycle system with great success. In addition, I remember their public transport system to be decent for an American city. That's how I get to the airport for something like $1 from downtown.
The hire bikes are great but if you don't have a North American phone number you can't sign up in their app! (I relied on a friendly stranger who offered her phone number for the confirmation code.)
Great city to ride around! Surprisingly good facilities.
There are places in Austin where you can go for pleasure/scenic walks. (eg think the green belts). But it's hard to use walking for utility in Austin. Not to mention socially you'll consistently be invited to places >5 miles away and the presumption is you have a car and you'll all drive separate.
I was in Austin for work in the 1990s and there was a mall, which I could see from my hotel so I figured I'll just walk to the mall. Nope.
I think either an older colleague (I was not old enough to rent a car, this is a long time ago) ferried me across or maybe the hotel took pity and sent me in their minibus ? There was no practical way to walk that short distance, the infrastructure is designed only for cars.
I mainly remember that mall because I found a (possibly mislabelled) copy of the version of Tori Amos' "Under The Pink" which is actually 2CDs, so "More Pink" is inside the case too but it was the same price as the regular album, and that was an amazing bargain for teenage me. But yeah, it was staggering to me that these Americans just expected to drive everywhere. I have grown up in an English village where I walked everywhere, to school, to the shops. to a friend's house, everywhere. I guess I was old enough to realise that most English villages aren't also served by the London Underground, but the choice to build only car infrastructure seemed very strange indeed.
FWIW, I live near downtown Austin, haven't owned a car in over a year, walk/bus everywhere, and have never been questioned by police. I typically see quite a few pedestrians out. As far as Texan cities go it's the most walkable, though it's still not very good.
Yes, I've lived here 17 years and see pedestrians most places I go - although to be fair there are many roads where pedestrians don't go (say, the service road alongside 71). Perhaps OP was in such a place.
I also did not own a car for years, commuting only by bicycle, and never had a problem.
Indeed, Austin's core is only about 5 square miles (the entirety of the East Side to the Greenbelt, Hyde Park down to far South Congress, say). Fairly compact.
It is no New York or London but it is walkable and bikeable.
Your European life might be car free but, I was surprised when a friend who lives in Brussels, where I've been 4 times now and walked all over, told me he loved his time in Japan because it was the first time he could live car free. I was like WAT? You live in Brussels! It seems to have reasonably good public transportation. He was like, I live in the suburbs and have to drive to/from work every day.
I certainly love living in a walkable city, but I also realize that can be somewhat rare, even in Europe. Friends live in Solingen (home to Henckels knives and Haribo Gummies). AFAICT it's not walkable. Düsseldorf is though.
I work for a Belgian company and have been to Brussels a few times for work... not only is the central city all very walkable, they have amazingly good public transport (if a bit confusing at times... Citymapper is brilliant for this).
But yes most people I work with seem to drive into work for their commute with only the occasional person getting the train. The office in central Brussels even has a load of free parking spaces they can book on their day in the office (company is hybrid one day/week in the office).
And the idea of commuting more than 30 minutes is utterly horrifying to them, which as a Londoner I found an interesting perspective - a 30 minute commute to the financial district in London would still put me in an inner London suburb with incredibly high housing costs so my commute is way longer than that.
Haribo is from Bonn, not Solingen! The name states as much, in its quintessentially german Consonant-and-vowel aliteration technique: (Ha)ns (Ri)egel (Bo)nn. Much like Rimowa (Ri)chard (Mo)rszeck (Wa)hrenzeichen, or Leica (Lei)tz (Ca)mera.
> Except for the very hottest of summer days, I see a lot of pedestrians in downtown Austin.
I don't know if this is true of Austin, but trying to convince people to get off the street in the afternoon can be part of the city's heat management plan in some parts of Texas.
if there was a dictionary of "american urbanism" they would define humans as having four wheels rather than two legs
they really do act like it whenever the USA plans a city or a neighborhood. why wouldn't everybody have a car? except we actually have plenty of reasons now that we didn't before
I own the domain AmericanUrbanism[.]org - I've been thinking of setting up some kind of advocacy group (501c4) or even political party there focused on changing this reality.
Cars made more sense in the industrial age, when people needed to commute to a factory for work. But, in the age of knowledge work and especially remote work, we aren't commuting as much. So, walkable neighborhoods become far more important and impactful.
I think there should be just many types of neighborhoods. Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center, where there's enough space for parking slots, while the rest can enjoy pedestrian-first neighbourhoods closer to services. Public transport should of course reach all areas, so that the car owners have no real need to use their car much to reach the denser areas.
The least coercive way to do it is probably by making areas closer to the city center worse for driving — narrow roads, no parking, etc — and better for walking and biking. Then people will naturally sort themselves based on their preferences. The problem being that establishing the needed urban environment is itself a political struggle.
I never drive to London because a train will get me there faster, and I can rely public transport to get me to almost anywhere I want to get to. It can definitely be useful to have a car in the suburbs but not enough to be worth the trouble of driving one there.
The difficulty of parking and driving around the city centre is a deterrent, but to me it is secondary to the positive factors.
I do like pedestrianised areas, because they feel safe and clean. The main danger remaining is the cyclists of the "get out of my say" type, especially couriers and the like.
How so? We've built huge amounts of infrastructure (parking being the obvious one) to explicitly enable people to have cars in city centers- stop doing that and my gut (scientific, I know!) says that'll get you most of the way there.
Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. If you are having to wait ages for a light to change every time you go from one block to the next, you lose much of the efficiency of walking.
> Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments.
There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example. Tunnels can be an option as well. Grids can really help a city be more walkable since it becomes dead simple to navigate and you aren't wasting time on long winding roads or labyrinthine paths which increase the distance between two points and make it easier to get lost.
> There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example.
Infrastructure for pedestrians would be you cross as soon as you get there, cars wait. Bridges are not pedestrian infrastructure they’re “cars are the priority” infrastructure, “cars mustn’t be delayed or inconvenienced, pedestrians can be” infrastructure.
" without slowing anyone down. " - but the very first image you provided will slow down pedestrians, it's harder to cross compared to a simple direct crosswalk and it's less friendly to ppl with mobility problems. Such bridges are relatively ok to implement outside cities where you have highways/roads with cars driving high speeds but these are bad solutions inside cities where the priority belongs to pedestrians and cars must drive slower
It's inconvenient to climb a set of stairs every time cross a road. What about pushchairs, wheelchairs, the elderly, people with walking sticks, shopping trolleys, arthritis, gammy knees, people carrying heavy shopping or wheeled luggage? In general if you're going to slow down anyone then slow down drivers who have engines to accelerate them back up to speed with no effort. Making people climb stairs so drivers don't have to wait is not good pedestrian infrastructure, the view (of a road full of cars who have priority over you) is hardly a great trade off. Nor is paying the extra taxes for bridge maintenance so that car drivers can have a better life at your expense.
When you consider that drivers are generally wealthier (because they own cars) and the pedestrians are breathing car exhaust and tyre dust while working their lungs harder climbing to give cars the priority, listening to car noise while drivers pass in low effort comfort, the mild unfairness of it is more starkly contrasted.
Ideally good pedestrian design would tempt people out of their cars because walking is so quick, convenient, cheap, pleasant, interesting - with shade and shops and short distances and quiet clean surroundings. Big steel bridges don't contribute to that very much. [Have you seen how often Americans comment on the price of gas? Yet what people campaign for is the government to lower the price of gas, not for the government to make life without cars so pleasant that cars are not a necessity. What sense does that make? Most living Americans have never lived in a walkable place, and have no film, tv, or cultural reference for one to use for a basis for such a campaigh - maybe Disneyland (which visitors tend to love)? 120 years ago everywhere was walkable because there wasn't much other than walking. 70 years ago places were bulldozed for cars. Now multiple generations have grown up and lived their adult lives with car dependent urban design].
If you are in hurry, you will avoid those. They add more time to your trip then one would guess intuitively.
What do work for pedestrians is a network of smaller roads that you can "just" cross safely without waiting or taking detours. Basically, a few big roads you cross once in a while and the rest being smaller roads where cars are forced to go slowly.
Grids are better than culdesac but worse than randomness for a human brain so that it would be interesting to walk there. Wide roads aren't good for walkability in any sense: even if we ignore huge noise and pollution created by lots of cars, wide roads are more dangerous to cross and since it's wide you as a pedestrian need to walk more on non pedestrian infra to get to points of interest. Walkability isn't just about being able to walk
Outside my university there was a fairly fast "A" road (two lanes, high speed limit, actually much narrower than a typical American street). Rather than stop traffic, there was a bridge that crossed the road. To use the bridge you needed to climb a set of stairs. Of course, people didn't use the bridge because it was inconvenient and tiring to have to take a longer route (including stairs) rather than just walk 8-10 meters across the road.
There were severe injuries or deaths every single year when students would cross the road late at night and a car would be speeding at 60+ mph. They eventually installed a puffin-style crossing, which was much better.
The solution, especially in built up areas, is to keep cars from causing problems for pedestrians rather than trying to stop pedestrians from causing problems for cars. Perhaps the cars should be relegated to a tunnel so people don't have to be near them instead.
The fact safety is a limiting factor means those places don't have social control, meaning these are not places ppl tend to hang out in so probably not that walkable. P.s. walkable in this context doesn't mean it's just possible to walk, it means it's a nice experience to walk with nice environment/shops/othwr points of interest
This is definitely not my experience in Austin. I was only there for a week but I stayed downtown and walked just about everywhere and there were always lots of other people that I could see walking also. They have a lot of walking paths (eg near the river) so it never felt strange and I had no encounters with law enforcement. I would say the downtown area of Austin is more walkable than some other US cities in my experience.
But I note that you're saying "Near" downtown Austin so I guess it depends where you were maybe?
However, I do remember a night, when we went out with colleagues, and from one place we were to switch to another, it was less than a mile away. We stepped outside, and one of the colleagues were looking for a taxi / checking Lyft already; we, the visitors, didn't understand; are we really gonna wait and then squeeze in a car, instead of walking 10 minutes?!
We eventually walked, and it was perfectly safe (and lively) at that time of the night.
I had something similar happen to me in Miami about a decade ago. As a New Yorker I'm just used to walking and taking public transit everywhere. I was down there for some data center work I needed to do out of the NAP of the Americas, and one night I decided to go to see a friend of a friend DJ at some bar in downtown Miami. So I took the free Miami elevated train to a stop near the club (The Vagabond) and started walking over. I get a block into the walk and someone pulls up on a bike and is like "wtf are you doing? are you lost? you should not be walking right now, do you need help?". It was a totally fine walk, maybe 5 minutes at NYC walking speeds, if maybe a bit desolate. The guy proceeded to slowly ride next to me while I walked to make sure I was ok. Ended up buying him a beer in the club and chatting for a while, he just thought it was dangerous to be walking.
Maybe it was a dangerous (i.e. high-crime) area? A lot of areas can look OK but are not someplace you want to be at night especially alone. And if you're from out of town you might not know.
Similar happened to me. I was at The Oaks Card Club on the border of Emeryville and West Oakland. I needed to get to BART, and it was just a few blocks on one street, so I thought I'd just walk. About half way down, a taxi driver actually pulled up without me hailing him and said "Man, what the fuck are you doing walking here? Get in and I'll drive you wherever you need to go!" It was either a great sales pitch or I was actually in danger and didn't know it.
My SF story: Chinatown, near the convention center. My wife wanted me to pick some stuff up while I was there. I had been there by day, seemed perfectly reasonable. I get done with the trade show, head over there near closing time to get what she wanted (perishable, so I left it to the last minute) and coming back I realized the character had changed considerably and it was a place I didn't want to be. I hadn't gotten a car because the hassles of parking made it a negative to me.
I think this was a bit before 7pm. It surprised me because I didn't expect the character to change that much while the stores were still open. The undesirable elements usually only show up once the legitimate people leave.
Eh. I've been mugged once. When I started college in a big city, we were given a talking-to by our RA about never going off-campus alone, being careful walking at night, their own close-call story, etc. I, being a reckless dumbass, ignored their warnings. Walked all around, at all hours, basically never buddied-up. Of course, my luck couldn't last forever.
...It just waited to run out until after I got home to my "safe", car-centric suburb for the summer, and decided to walk to a nearby gym. "A lot of areas can look OK," for certain.
Yeah, that's what he was saying. I mean it didn't look the safest, but that's never something that has bothered me. A large part of my 20s were spent being places I probably shouldn't have been all around Brooklyn in the early 2000s. As soon as I got on the Miami metromover and noticed I was the only one not strung out I knew what I was getting myself into. The palm trees were maybe throwing me off -- as a New Yorker palm trees meant vacation.
I know the area well since we had a family business around there. It's a few blocks away from a sketchy neighborhood; rapidly gentrifying today, though.
At one point it was the intersection of 3 sketchy neighborhoods, but it's been a while.
I dunno about metromover but I took metrorail in miami every day during ultra music festival and the clientele seemed about on par with the clientele on the nyc subway
I'd say there's a selection bias during big international events. You feel it more than say, NYC or Chicago, because baseline ridership is low in Miami. So when Ultra comes to town there's a larger effect size, IMO.
It's pretty wild. I'm in a very car-centric city in Canada, and there have been days where I drive across the city and not seen a single pedestrian (across multiple types of areas). Usually in the winter, but still a very weird thing to not see people in a city.
I walked 35mins to work everyday of the 2 years I lived in Calgary, which got me excited to bike 20 mins to work everyday for 4 years in Whitehorse.
Biking in -40 is a lot of fun when you attack big snow drifts in the pitch black at 10am!
I heard the same from a Scot who visited Texas and decided to go for a 45 minute stroll to his destination. In summer. He regretted it 15mins in and luckily a local stopped and gave him a ride, saying that he could die in this heat (not sure if that was a joke)
Almost this exact situation happened to author Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles, where he lived without a car. He wrote several short stories memorializing the incident, including a scene in Fahrenheit 451.
I have known people in Washington, DC, who lived with a quarter mile of a hiker/biker path in Rock Creek Park, and would drive ~7 miles to Fletcher's Boathouse (or 10 to Carderock) to run on the C&O Canal towpath.
I confess that I have been one of those people (I didn't live quite there)--but when meeting with friends for a run. My preference was always to lace on the sneakers, walk to the end of the block, and run.
I guess my own biases excuse the idea of driving a good distance for a hike or trail run that are "one offs" (though in aggregate are regular), but the idea of going for a weekly (or multiple times a week) social run seems to be wasteful. In terms of the atmosphere they're equivalent.
I've been seeing this top comment for days now as this thread seems to never die and I can't help but finally say something because this and associated similar comments are utterly bizarre to me. I've lived in Texas about 15 years now, first at Fort Hood, spending quite a bit of time in Austin, and I've lived in Dallas for the past decade. I live very near downtown, so there's that, but I walk all over the place and always have. I didn't even have a car for about 6 years and only finally bought one because I was going through foster care licensing and you needed to have the ability to drive a kid somewhere without relying on external assistance.
Even at 3 AM, I'm not the only person out walking. I have never once been stopped by police. I go through "dangerous" neighborhood, through places near homeless encampments. I tweaked my groin while running a few weeks ago when I was 8 miles from my house and walked all the way back from Highland Park, though Uptown, Downtown, and the Cedars to get back to my house.
To be clear, walking in Dallas sucks. Sidewalks randomly end. There is construction everywhere. Oak Lawn this morning had both sidewalks closed, each with a sign saying to use the other sidewalk. Drivers pay absolutely no attention and never look for pedestrians. But it is nonetheless possible and feasible to walk around and no one has ever looked at me funny for doing it. Yes, it is also often triple digit fahrenheit heat in the afternoons, but that is well within the human survivable zone, and as long as you aren't going somewhere that you can't be covered in sweat, you'll be fine.
Also, I live about two miles from the main museum district in Dallas, and I walk whenever I go to a museum, and the streets there are completely filled with pedestrians. Even if you drive from out of the area, you're still not gonna park right next to the entrance. Some have their own parking lots. Some don't. The parks in the area do not. Plenty of drivers still park pretty far away. So it's particularly weird that someone would stop you on your way to a museum.
That is why cultures in such climates tend to have a mid-day siesta when no one goes out, and a lively late night when the temperatures become bearable, the sun no longer tries to murder you with its rays, and people go outside to eat, shop and meet friends.
Nah, as someone who lives somewhere with actual humidity “mid day” is basically “whenever the sun is up”.
85 and humid here is worse than -00 and dry in Phoenix. It’s so humid your sweat can’t evaporate because the air is already saturated. It’s beyond miserable, and actively unhealthy to many.
Yeah, hot and humid areas have never been particularly friendly to human civilization. Prior to the industrial era, they were mostly covered by rainforests.
The map of US rainforests shows an active rainforest along the western side of North Carolina. It is not all that hard to believe said forest could have been much larger before the human touch.
The easternly side of the forest to the easternmost points of NC is not further than LA from SF, though. Unless you live way out in the ocean, but still consider that to be North Carolina for some reason, you are closer than said distance to the forest.
I do I. Fact live almost at the Coast. Just to get to Asheville, which is hardly the westernmost point in the state, is over 6 hours.
Los Angeles to SF is 381 miles.
My town to the Cherokee, which is about where the rainforest zone starts, is 383. North Carolina is a much bigger state than most people realize.
Nobody has ever thought North Carolina was small, though. Where did that idea come from? In fact, it is not clear why the record needed a distance in the first place.
I assure you, as life long resident, I have blown the minds of many non-natives by stating I can drive for 8 hours west and still not quite be in Tennessee. In most places east of the Mississippi that gets you through 3-4 states.
It's all relative, I guess. I'm looking at 20 hours of driving to get the western extent of the province. And seven hours the other way to get to the easternmost side. 8 hours is but a leisurely afternoon cruise.
I don't know much about NC, but the only parrot native to the US used to live there [0], which indicates that it must have been pretty heavily forested prior to the Colombian exchange.
Portable wearable air conditioning and sun protection, that's what you'd need to make it comfortable. Maybe like a robotic exoskeleton, we can't be far from making that affordable.
Wheels might make it energy efficient but engines powered by oil from deep under the Gulf of Mexico shipped to refineries, then shipped hundreds of miles to gas stations, then people driving a ton or two of steel and plastic and rubber to the gas station so they can “efficiently” get one person 4 miles to a shop isn’t so efficient.
A bicycle on flat asphalt is more efficient than a person despite person+bike moving more total mass; but still the cost of mining iron ore, making steel, making a bike for every customer, compared to just building the store and the homes close enough to walk and not doing any of that…
Energy.gov says “In 2021, 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile”, it’s daft either way that people want to use a car for such short distances or that urban spaces are designed so that things are relatively very close but juuuust too far for convenience.
Living in Southern California, I like to go on walks with my family in the evenings or mornings, but I couldn't imagine having to take public transportation or having to walk everywhere. It seems picturesque, but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms.
I visited London a long time ago and the public transportation is amazing and it I did want to walk to see the city, which I did. But I imagine even living there, I would want my own car to be in control of my life.
So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.
The best public transport in us is usually worse that bad public transport in most of eu so no wonder you felt that way. Let me tell you a counter point: in Switzerland public transport and trains are so frequent and fast due to own lanes that you don't even need to check the schedule, you just go to the station which is usually nearby and wait at max 5 mins to get into something, usually a tram, for intercity between biggest cities trains are usually coming about each 15 mins. In this regard you are more independent than with a car- you don't care about fuel, about parking, about being focused all the time on the road, you just get in and get out. Even for buying tickets they have an app where you just check-uncheck it and it calculates the fare based on gps.
also in many dense eu cities you'd probably have enough shops in sub 5 mins nearby so you can either walk there or go with a bike or take a taxi that would cost pennies for such a small distance - again, no worrying about traffic, fuel, parking and so on
I haven't owned a car for more than 15 years now. I have city year bus pass but I also frequently just walk to wherever I'm going, there's lots of paths and shortcuts for pedestrians, but if the weather is a bit rubbish, there's bus stop outside my flat that runs every 5-10 mins.
I'm a member of the mobility car share for the rare times hen I do need a car, usually to pick up or move something heavy, or take a bunch of stuff to the decheterie.
Maybe sometimes after a night on the town, I might grab a taxi home, but I do not miss having a car.
In the US the issue is the car is just too damn convenient. There are parts of LA where the busses or trains are every 10 mins or so and they interline, so you get a train or a bus every 5 mins or less. People still prefer the car because it can go everywhere on your schedule faster than a bus making stops along the way. Plus cars are much cheaper for Americans than they are for europeans.
It's made to be convenient (as long as it gets, because you get traffic and you get low density areas which are bad for walkability/pedestrians which all ppl are the moment they leave the car) while pub transport is made to be bad.
Idk about the situation in LA but if you want good ridership, 5-10 min isn't an enough condition. You need these times at all the routes in the city and those should be extensive, you need reserved lanes, priority semaphores, single ticket policy, same lvl boarding, easy connections between multiple routes and at last- you also need a mid dense walkable city, because if it's not, the moment you'll get off the transport you'll have a sh** life needing to walk a lot in unpleasant environment to reach the destination.
The cheap thing usually isn't a factor, cars are mostly more expensive than pub transport using unless pub transport is nuked by authorities. Ppl don't use cars because these are cheap(these aren't even for many americans considering insurance, leasing, repairing and so on), they use cars because pub transport doesn't exist or because it's inconvenient to use it. Ppl always use the most convenient path. In lots of eu cities, unless you come from suburbs, pub transport will be more convenient- it'll have own lanes so no traffic, priority semaphores so almost always green, shorter paths towards destination compared to car lanes, again- saves time, easy transfers(multiple routes have stations close to each other), single ticket policy, in some cases like NL you also got bike parking nearby to cover las mile distance. This makes them easier and faster to use than cars especially considering parking space is limited and it'll take time to find a spot+traffic
If LA had Tokyo's train system (they used too), I could get from LAX to Glendale in ~45 minutes. Like an express train to DTLA and then another to Glendale. Instead, at 5pm, that same commute in a car can be 2.5hrs. Sure, it's nicer at 3am (30mins) but that's not the norm for most waking hours. Further, I could drink at my destination, like say
FWIW I found the critically acclaimed berlin ubahn to have significantly worse headways compared to most NYC subway lines, as well as not having air conditioning and becoming uncomfortably hot and humid
I used lime scooters considerably more than ubahn when I was in berlin
U-bahn is old, but new trains are slowly arriving on some lines. Anyway it is not the best part of its public transport system - I personally enjoy trams.
Well that's pretty easy, Dutch trains are unreliable.
In fact all public transport there is pretty bad. Here in Barcelona the metros come every 3 minutes during the day on each line. In Amsterdam it's more like 15.
I’m 40+ years old now and have never needed or wanted to have a driving license. I simply hated America when I had to visit and use taxi or someone else’s help to get anywhere.
In Berlin even with a child the need of a car is so rare — sometimes it’s even more pleasant to walk an hour to a museum or a club than use public transportation.
That’s strange coming from someone whose country has the famous autobahn. What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go? Don’t you need a license to rent a vehicle?
> What if you want to get out into the countryside, where busses and trains don’t go?
I don’t have any business in such countryside. What would I find there? A good beach on Baltic sea is 15 min walk door-to-water plus 2 hours on express train. The list of tourist attractions and vacation destinations accessible by train, plane and/or taxi within half a day or so is so big here that I cannot imagine going to such inaccessible place. Worst case I will pay a few hundred euro for taxi if such improbable situation occurs.
And what's going to happen long term with exploding Berlin rents? The only affordable rents will be out in the suburbs of Berlin, where you'll either have to drive in or spend 2-3x the time on a probably crowded train possibly standing room only. As in the example of Switzerland above, mass transit is a luxury for those able to pay high rents. Previously in Berlin this was subsidized by the rest of Germany and by price controls but the right-wing courts have pretty much gutted Berlin's price protections in favor of billion-euro property developers.
I lived in Germany for years without driving as well, because I could afford to live by the city center. But over half my colleagues drove because that's all they could afford to do, and you should try stepping out of your bubble and understand the pressures that force Germans to drive. They're not all just wanting to spend more time in their Audis.
First, I’m not representing all Germans here, just sharing my own experience which is a good counter-example to “life without a car is impossible”. I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.
Second, don’t tell me about my “bubble”: you have no idea who I am and what I have experienced in my life. I’m very well aware of many sides of it, maybe more than you are.
Third, do you seriously want to lecture a person who is both a landlord and a tenant in Berlin about local rent controls and price development? We do have some issues here, but it is nowhere close to neither London or NYC where prices are crazy nor Moscow where commuting can be truly exhausting.
>I’m of course not arguing that car is unnecessary for everyone.
Sadly, many are. This topic often does turn into one of lifestyle judgement and it isn't very productive when arguments go from practical to personal. As if any one car-goer or bus-goer determines the fate of a city's urban planning.
Agree. Especially when you add bike-goers to the conversation it can get ugly very quickly. A parent with a stroller is the most neglected person in such talks.
I myself believe that personal cars are mobility edge cases and the world will settle on vendor-managed rental fleets eventually, where most people will occasionally use rental cars with autopilot.
Nevertheless this is not going to happen for the next 50-80 years, so we just need at least to stop promoting car-centric lifestyle and find a real compromise between cars, bikers and pedestrians.
In Switzerland, people in villages use trains to get to and from work. Quite literally, they bike to train, park bike, use train to go to work. Some ride car to train, ride train and then go to work.
It is just not true that mass transit is only for those who pay high rents. It is other way round pretty much all round world and historically - rich people were buying cars more and poor used public transport.
> So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.
This is a common Internet meme -- the American tourist that goes to Europe and loves their experience of walking around nice, dense cities designed at a human scale and functioning public transit. Then they return to their life of highways and parking lots and strip malls, which, to me, is dystopia.
> but I couldn't imagine having to take public transportation or having to walk everywhere
Well yes, the US transportation system is utter trash, even in California
> but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms.
In Europe I have three supermarkets in a 800m radius around my place, the closest shopping center/mall/whatever you call it is a 30min walk away (10min by public transport, 8min by bicycle). I can walk to the closest supermarket without even leaving the private ground of my block of buildings and its park, no street to cross, no cars in sight
> I would want my own car to be in control of my life.
I'm European, spent the first 10 years of my independent adult life without a car, and have always lived in urban areas, within walking distance of supermarkets and other amenities, and with good public transport services. Yet I agree with him
When I finally did get a car, it was a massive QoL upgrade. I can go anywhere, at any time, usually considerably faster than PT, and carry an order of magnitude more than before. I didn't enjoy having to go to the supermarket multiple times a week, but I had to when I could only carry maybe 4 bags (fewer if heavy) in one trip. I still do use buses and trains where it makes sense, e.g. visiting other cities or the centre of mine
Cool, too bad it isn't sustainable. If life was about doing everything you want whenever you want and carry a lot of useless junk around without having to worry about side effects we'd have won the game by now
And the goalposts move again. We were talking about the convenience, not the sustainability. If you want to argue that the inconvenience is a necessary price for environmental sustainability, sure, that's a valid position, but don't pretend that there's no convenience cost
It's interesting that I've been downvoted to -3 for factually detailing how cars are in fact useful. Shooting the messenger won't change the facts
> I didn't enjoy having to go to the supermarket multiple times a week, but I had to when I could only carry maybe 4 bags (fewer if heavy) in one trip.
I mean, if we're talking about convenience, I started ordering my groceries online during the pandemic and I'd argue that's an even bigger QoL upgrade. You can still go for produce (or not) and the occasional thing you need immediately, but getting stuff delivered to you is generally cheaper and more convenient than owning a car. The gratification is a bit less instant, but I value my time more than that.
As for cars being faster than public transit, sure, but making cars fast often have the side effect of making other modes of transit slower, and vice versa. Buses need reserved lanes to be reliable, bikes need reserved lanes to be safe, which means less cars can go. As a pedestrian, I would get to places significantly faster if I could just jaywalk wherever I please, but naturally this would require very low speed limits. Cars also require parking lots, which make walking less efficient. Cars are only convenient for their own drivers, they are inconvenient for everybody else (including other drivers).
Agreed on supermarket delivery. I've started using it now, and probably should have done so sooner
I also actually agree on prioritizing bus and cycle lanes over car lanes. Instead of being angry at them, which unfortunately many drivers are, I choose to appreciate them as intended - i.e. if I'm going into the town centre I usually go by bus. I'd also like to see more properly-separated bike lanes. I don't blame cyclists at all who choose to ignore the painted ones and take the lane as if they're a car
However the main reason why public transport is slower isn't usually due to traffic or physical constraints, but the longer routes you have to take. Usually the planners have done their job well, and the route is near-optimal in aggregate (and therefore often useful for myself if I'm commuting or visiting the centre), but if I want to visit a friend in another part of town, I've very often got to go in to the centre and change out again. Even if there's a direct route, it can be slow due to how many stops occur (off-board ticketing/proper BRT could help with that in major areas). If I'm visiting a business in a business park/industrial estate further out, it's often a taxi or nothing
The following doesn't change much, but just to nitpick:
> As a pedestrian, I would get to places significantly faster if I could just jaywalk wherever I please, but naturally this would require very low speed limits
That's legal where I currently live (UK). Motorways are essentially the only place you're not allowed to just cross, though drivers aren't generally required to break the traffic to give you passage if you're not at a zebra crossing (or a junction, as of recent code changes). Speed limits definitely do vary based on the likelihood of pedestrians in the area, but I don't think changing the law would change much there. I mean, they'd have to fairly compensate by adding more crossings anyway, and IME those are more likely to slow down traffic due to their poorly-timed and long stops (even with sensor-assisted intelligence), whereas pedestrians making ad-hoc crossings are usually sensible enough to wait for a natural gap instead of forcing one (and those who don't would probably "jaywalk" anyway), essentially making their effect on flow near zero. Even if you do have to slow for a pedestrian, it usually is just a slight slow for under two seconds. Much quicker than a red light. Zebra crossings of course don't have lights, but you do have a hard requirement to stop as soon as a pedestrian presents themselves at the side, and remain stopped until they've completely left the road, resulting in similar interruptions rather than turn-taking in existing gaps
That's so funny, because in my mind it's the complete opposite: I feel free because I don't have the burden of keeping a vehicle-object. However, where I leave is car unfriendly. People who always late are the two friends of mine who try to use their car
(Actually I tried both lives. I used to have a car in the past. Still prefer being car free)
this is the real lie, that cars give you agency and freedom. except that you have to find a place to park, and keep the fueled, deal with minor breakdowns like punctured tires that leave you to deal with them for hours. and insurance. and a drivers license. and a place to keep them at night. the threat that they will be broken into. the constant switching back and forth between inattention and attention while driving. getting delayed by traffic. spending quite a bit of time complaining about traffic even though it is you. the inevitable collision. the abysmal process of purchasing. knowing you're are getting screwed at the repair place. having to deal with rentals when you travel. the complete loss of function when you become old or injured and cannot drive for yourself.
Yes! At least a third of the population can’t drive, because too young, too old, handicapped in some way, or too poor. And we have built an environment that requires driving. That’s pretty messed up.
Depends on where you live. In most of the US if you don't have a car you'll be spending hours a day on busses. You have no freedom - you are either sleeping or commuting or working. You can't sleep less, you can't work less. But you can commute fewer hours a day with a car.
Walkable/bikeable places exist in some cities, but are reserved for the rich.
As for the costs of owning a car - these are real, but the cost of not owning a car is much greater. As electric cars filter down to the used market cost of car ownership will also drop a fair amount.
As a gig delivery driver, I'm one of the few people who (on a social level, at least) can justify owning a car. It's immensely frustrating to get into accidents with people who don't need to be on the road, to have to wait for a spot to open up at the gas station, to have to navigate the endless parking lots... But, look, even for us, it's barely worth it. The pay is so low, and cost of ownership so high, that it's less like a job and more like a loan that you pay back in vehicle upkeep, maintenance, and depreciation (and stress, and injury, if you're unlucky). Once you're desperate enough to work one of these gigs (cough) it's almost not worth it to bother with any of that stuff. Just drive the car until it stops, sell it for parts, take the proceeds and start investing in the means to live-car free.
And mass transit you have to deal with line failures, the inability to transport more than you can reasonably carry, and the curfew created by the end-of-line time for the evening.
Which you can wait a lifetime to maybe be built in some diluted state given current pace of things, or resign and take the option the present environment favors. Hate the game, not the player.
not much different from a human in the grand sceme of things. Need to maintain energy, treat minor and major injuries, deal with insurance, keep an ID on me (which costs money to renew), and either avoid or accept the risk of night walks. Fights can break out, routes can get deterred, and Just keeping up with living expenses is hell.
Adding a 2nd mechanical maintenacnce isn't as bad as dealing with the flesh skin version.
If you consider night walks a risk you really don't live in a good area. I walk everywhere here in Barcelona day or night. Same in Amsterdam, Dublin etc.
As it is, people love to complain about buying gas. If someone were to add up the costs associated with driving, I’m sure it would be insane. And I mean all costs. Driving is subsidized to a level that is incomprehensible, and obfuscated away more than just about anything else.
People complain about gas and the weather and the baseball team and everything else and they still don't make any changes about that with their life, because its hardly significant. Gas could double people pay maybe $40 extra a week on their fillup as a result. Meanwhile rent and housing take so much more out of your pocket its hardly relevant what the price of gas is.
Having the option to walk doesn't mean that you can't drive. One can have both. Nice weather to walk in? Maybe I'll walk the 10 minutes to the shopping center. Raining a lot? Take the car.
No one is arguing that you would have to take public transportation or walk everywhere. They are just saying that it is good if where you live is walkable. I also live in Southern California and I would say that a lot of most expensive places to live are expensive because they are more walkable. You could live in downtown La Jolla or by the beach in Santa Monica and walk around. You could also own or rent a car and drive to Lake Tahoe. It's not either or.
East hollywood probably sees the some of the most foot traffic in southern california and rents are relatively affordable by LA county standards. Chances are the working class areas in sd are similar I imagine where you see a lot of people walking, biking, or taking the bus to get to work. Of course this isn’t “urbanism” in the way that upper class people consider it, but it exists.
You may not imagine how it works but plenty of people do ride transit in southern california. LA metro ridership is like 800k people a day. A lot of neighborhoods have a lot of foot traffic in LA county at least.
I think it was around Waterloo park and capitol; I was on my way to the Texas State History Museum.
I looked around now on Google Street View, but can't recognize the slight hill I was walking on (it happened around 10y ago). Funnily enough, also street view shows streets with no pedestrians anywhere :-)
An old roommate moved from the Bay Area to Dallas years ago and on a nice day in the park he decided to lay down on the grass, as he would normally do in the Bay Area. Pretty soon cops arrived.
>>That being said, you're in a city, what did you expect?
Literally every single city I can think of it's better to walk than drive, so I guess it's a uniquely American perspective? Or like the other commenter said - a joke?
I wouldn't generalize this as an American perspective; at least many of my US friends envy the walkability of the European cities they visited (while recognizing the disadvantages / inconveniences about it, too)
As an American (New Englander), I would say that if it's better to drive than walk or take transit, you are not actually in a city, you're in the suburbs. So this definitely isn't a universal American perspective.
I've lived in big cities most of my life and I take the car maybe 10 times per year, including cabs. And that's mostly to get away from the city, where I can't go by bus.
I lived in the suburbs of a very large European city. I still drove to work every day. Sure I could walk to the bus stop and wait or walk KMs to the train station and wait. But my car was the most direct and easy way to get to the office.
I never had a big city job. Mostly office buildings in office parks. So I guess me and my co-workers' lifestyles were very similar to Americans.
This is the thing about tourists who come back from Europe raving about "walkability" well of course, you were staying in the heart of a major city probably, of course there is a lot of stuff you can walk to, and there's good public transit. Get a few miles away and you'll find that many more people have cars and drive.
Living in The Netherlands, and unless you live very far out in the country, everything is easily walkable or bike-able. The closest supermarkets are generally a 5-10 minutes walk, a train or bus station is almost always close by, etc.
I myself do not own a car, and besides some very rare moments (like bringing large trash to the junkyard or something, in which case I can ask friends to quickly borrow their car), I do not have any hindrance from it.
> That being said, you're in a city, what did you expect?
:-) I giggled on this one 10y ago when I first saw this difference in mindsets, and also smile at it today. I sometimes wonder if I were growing up there, would I also feel weird when I see my alterego walking around on the _streets_ of Zürich, where I don't even have a vehicle to _drive_ to one of the national parks.
> you're in a city, what did you expect? If you want to spend time walking outside drive to one of the many National Parks
Is this a joke? I hope this is a joke and I’ve misunderstood it.
Cities are not synonymous with cars. There are lots of walkable cities in the world. Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm.
" Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm."
Can is a strong word here.
I am an avid walker with around 13 thousand steps daily on average (counted over last three years), but in my daily life, I generally take some form of transport if the expected walking time exceeds some 25 minutes. A tram or a bus, but I don't regularly walk 7 km to the centre of my city and back, even though I certainly can. It would simply take too long.
> Driving to a place where you can walk is a very strange inversion of the norm.
There's no way for that to be true; driving to a place where you can walk is a possibility. Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless, because you wouldn't have a car there.
> Walking to a place where you can drive would be useless
You could walk to a vehicle rental shop or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked. But not a normal situation, definitely.
> or (eg London with Zipcar) walk to where a vehicle you can rent is parked.
I never got Zipcar. They made themselves completely pointless by charging you for time when you didn't need the car, inflating what appeared to be reasonable fees into ludicrous overcharges.
If I want to visit my family 90 minutes away over the weekend, I might pay for three hours of car rental. I'm obviously not going to pay for 48 hours of car rental. Who exactly is using Zipcar? Where did the model "like long-term car rental, but we'll lie about it" come from?
Former Zipcar employee. Nothing here is confidential afaik.
In London, they did have the one way concept for some time - I don't know if it's still there. They experimented with dedicated spaces as well as charging by the minute with approved parking areas. I don't think any of the competitors in that space are still using that model because it didn't work out financially. (Parking was a giant issue - our competitors and us could only negotiate for parking in some places. If the user parked outside of that, we got fined, and GPS was terrible in trying to make sure they were in the right area - the buildings were too close together. And users were frustrated if the area they were allowed to park was full.)
The fundamental problem is that the cars end up getting bunched up away from where people want to take them. Let's say you're driving to your parents for 90 minutes. Who is going to rent your car 90 minutes away? Are they going to go to your parents' house to use it when you don't have it? What if there's no car when you get back, because they put it somewhere else? How many places allow you to park a car for days without prior agreement?
Zipcar is meant and priced for shopping trips or other short errands on the order of a few hours. If you want multiple days for a longer trip, that's what traditional car rental exists for. If you're "obviously" not paying that, that's your choice and nothing to do with Zipcar.
You don't get to break down Zipcar's hourly pricing into just the hours you need to drive each way. In the interim inbetween then the Zipcar isn't at its spot and therefore unavailable for other use. Zipcar's hourly pricing includes the fact that it will be returned and immediately available for other customers.
TLDR: You may only use the Zipcar for a few hours, but it's out of its spot and unavailable for the entire trip, so that's what you're paying for.
> You don't get to break down Zipcar's hourly pricing into just the hours you need to drive each way.
This is how all other vehicle rental works. It's the only advantage of rental over ownership.
> In the interim inbetween then the Zipcar isn't at its spot and therefore unavailable for other use.
That's just logistical incompetence on the part of Zipcar. Why would the Zipcar be unusable when not at "its spot"? My car doesn't become unusable when it leaves my driveway. The Zipcar is usable as soon as I return it to Zipcar. Their choice to refuse my return is just their commitment to an unworkable business model.
I think they would like to pick up the car, drive somewhere else, and then leave the car parked somewhere for a weekend without paying for it in that time. Which is difficult to make work as a business (is anyone else going to rent it in that time? Would they be happy if all the cars were to be driven away somewhere else?) Even more traditional rental companies will often charge you extra to drop off a car one of their locations which isn't the one you picked it up from.
Zipcar and co are generally aimed at daytrips, the kind of thing where you occasionally need a car or van for a day but no longer, not for longer distance trips where you are away for a few days.
I live in Zürich, in my experience the city with the best public transport system(Stockholm a close second, but Switzerland has much better public transportation overall).
In case I need a car in Switzerland I would simply rent one for the day using one of the many rental options.
Public transport for 95% of my trips, 3% cab, 2% rental.
It’s better for me, it’s better for the environment, the people around me. Reducing cars on the road also makes it so much more pleasant and nice just to be in the city.
I travel frequently to London and it’s unbelievable how big difference it makes to be in a city designed for pedestrians and not cars(and London is absolutely designed for cars first).
I travel world wide for work and my default option is always public transport, with the occasional cab ride for convenience. In some places it sadly doesn’t work out so then I end up renting a car.
I mean, walking from my home to the beach is almost as fast 70% of the time (the summer month make finding nearby parking spot really difficult and time consuming), and it's definitely better to come back walking too, as I don't like sand in my car. Going to the farmers' market by foot is faster (unless I go at 6am and find a free parking spot), and less alienating (I say 'hello' to a dozen persons on the way, another dozen on the way back, meet friends, flirt a little). The only exception is going to see my parents, It's definitely faster to drive around the small marsh than the 40 minutes it takes to cross it, but I usually cross it, and when I don't, I use my bike rather than my car.
And when I used to drink, I definitely walked to my bar rather than drove to it despite the free, often empty parking nearby and the 10 fewer minutes it took.
I honestly don't see situations where a walk is worse than a drive in my living area. At worse I take a bike? When I was alone, I managed with rentals only tbf (now it's a bit more difficult, also the windsurfs are easier to handle with a car, and are the primary reason we own one)
Yeah, but you have to find somewhere to park at both ends which is a hassle, you are limited in where you can go - couldn't stop and have a drink with friends either.
> You would prefer to walk around a city because it's that's dense as opposed to walking around nature that's specifically set aside for this type of enjoyment?
I've taken some very enjoyable walks in cities that I wouldn't rank either above or below some of my favorite hikes. It's just a completely different type of experience.
Rather than discovering interesting birds and plants, I can notice architecture, discover new restaurants and cafes and maybe check out their menu, window shop etc.
> I don't understand the complaint, here, other than "America is unlike Europe."
Even though America and Europe have developed differently, what's wrong with reevaluating some of the results of these developments in American cities, in particular with regards to whether they're meeting the needs of the people living there?
> Were they designed intentionally as such or this that an outcome of history?
Oh, it's definitely intentional. Sure, pre-industrial cities had narrow streets that were poorly suited for car traffic, so you could say that walkable cities were technically the default.
But a lot of those European cities were intentionally changed towards car transportation in the middle of the 20th century, when cars became widespread and a symbol of post-WW2 wealth, widening street and turning historical squares into parking lots.
And most of those cities were turned back into walkable (or bikable) cities since the '80s onwards, by banning cars and reusing the parking lots for other purposes.
Here's [0] an article about the Netherlands's intentional policy in that regards, and here's [1] a more recent effort in Spain. A lot of Reddit's popular "then and now" posts show this off [2].
> Were they designed intentionally as such or this that an outcome of history?
Both. And with different constraints at different time periods.
Aside, people in the past weren't stupid and they built cities purposefully. Just like cavemen weren't stupid, they just had less _stuff_, knowledge, tools, etc.
> In any case what value does this "norm" have?
Using less fuel. Enjoying a more healthy body and mind, enjoying life. Leaving a better world for its future inhabitants.
> You would prefer to walk around a city because it's that's dense as opposed to walking around nature that's specifically set aside for this type of enjoyment?
Strawman ("because it's that dense"). I like walking in cities AND nature. Both can be true.
Also, why should nature be "set aside"? What a weird notion. Why shouldn't we have more "nature" in our cities, in fact we know it's probably better to do exactly that, for a myriad of reasons that have been scientifically researched. Why should WE "set aside" nature, as if it was somehow external to us.
because, absent being set aside and reserved for nature, the land in the city is Very valuable and would be sold off to developers to be razed for buildings and parking lots.
> Were they designed intentionally as such or this that an outcome of history?
Amsterdam was re-designed for cars in the mid-20th century, it was not designed for cars and had been historically for walking. Then they realised the mistake in the 70s and started to re-design the city again prioritising walking, and biking, now we have Amsterdam as the poster child of a city designed for that.
You seem to forget that in the mid-20th century everywhere was being designed for cars, we are seeing a response to that after the failed experiment.
> you're in a city, what did you expect? If you want to spend time walking outside drive to one of the many National Parks
Many Europeans are used to "cities as Open Air Museums". (If you are not under the time constraints of appointments, and instead you have the time and want to enjoy the place and what is contained with some natural attention, you need to walk.)
That's a weird assumption, given that it's the exact opposite. In most European cities it's better to walk especially if you're under time constraints or have an appointment, it's going to be usually quicker and more predictable in terms of time needed than driving.
Just to be sure there were no misunderstandings: I wrote that "If the agenda allows, you will need to enjoy the open-museum city by walking - faster methods will decrease the ability to pay attention": that is not inconsistent with "If the agenda does not allow enjoying the open-museum city, you may want to consider walking as a more reliable way to respect the scheduling".
The fact that you get downvoted is mind blowing. European cities have a clear policy to make it harder for cars and easier for other transportation.
The previous poster is basically saying "Most Europeans use the cities they live in as open air museums, and not to live in. They don't have time constraints, they don't have appointments, they don't work there". Living the life in Europe, as a full-time open air museum visitor, it's great!
The parent poster (parent to my original post) wrote that there is little to «expect» from a city, and recommended at least the in turn parent poster - who wrote about having been an exception as a city walker - to go to a park for walking.
So I informed the parent poster that to walk in many European cities is, opposite to that idea, an experience of architecture, monuments and art. I.e.: walking many European cities is far from unusual and with reason.
The idea of the poster above about time constraints and appointments is delirious and completely disconnected from what I wrote, literally, briefly, clearly, and exactly with the purpose of avoiding misunderstandings.
I hope the above post is at least only the consequence of rushed reading.
I counted the subset of them living in nice cities full of remarkable architecture, art and monuments as people who could call walking the city a privilege, as opposed to the post against which I commented, that went "what do you expect if not bewilderment if you are seen walking through a city".
I think one of the key points that is often not understood widely is that car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) than necessary. If every building is surrounded by a border of 15 meters of roads, that significantly expands the distances that a person needs to travel to get anywhere. This further prioritises cars and drives demand and cultural norms.
I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. There's still a need for emergency vehicles and goods to be transported within the city, so we would still need some roads, but we could eliminate a considerable number of lanes.
I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful:
If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.
Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.
The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.
Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.
It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.
"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."
Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.
The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption!
In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.
For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.
Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.
In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.
That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.
However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.
You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.
If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?
I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?
> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.
The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.
> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
This is such a weird line of inquiry.
Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.
Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.
If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.
I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.
First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.
Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.
Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.
It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.
Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.
It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.
They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.
Your car improves your quality of life. Every other car reduces your quality of life by a small delta: they reduce walkability and bikability, they are deadly, they cause traffic and slow down public transit, they reduce visibility, they are noisy, smelly and hot, they occupy space that is ugly, radiates heat and could be used for other purposes, and so on.
Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.
And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?
I don't really agree with your premise because you are not incorporating the positive contributions of additional users.
Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.
Those are the negatives.
But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.
The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.
There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).
No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.
Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.
Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.
You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.
If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.
The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.
A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.
A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.
The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.
Other common modes of transport that lack fixed schedule, route, or stops:
- biking
- micromobility (scooter-share, etc.)
- walking
- dial-a-ride transit options
But they have other cons as well. You need to have good bike lane infrastructure or to be confident taking the entire lane, whereas most everything is already created around the car or increasingly being created around the car (in the case of the developing world beginning its nascent highway networks). You have to have fair weather or be able to pack around gear like rainpants wherever you are going. You probably make use of the cargo capacity of your car once a week when you buy groceries and goods from stores that tend to size their products around that sort of interval of a trip. I ride my bike plenty but honestly when I go to the grocery store three blocks a way I am usually taking the car, because its easier when I realize oh crap I need milk, I need a gallon of vinegar, I need paper towels, I need toilet paper, I need olive oil, and that alone will overload the panniers and be nigh impossible to get on the bike, especially the paper products and their awkward bulk. I haven't used my panniers for groceries personally since I broke three eggs in a carton with them once. I either walk and grab a small handful of things or just take the car most times.
On first read, I was wondering why on earth did they not use a train? I looked it up and found this from a primary source:
> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first
World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e;
and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the
problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming
that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged
or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.
Another reason, not stated: The rail system melted down with the traffic load of World War 1. (Or with the government taking control, when they didn't know how to run a rail system.)
> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.
They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)
Many early cars were large terrifying beasts. Huge wheels, engines and very noisy. Extremely expensive too. I totally understand with mud roads and low power densities of the time that is a logical design.
It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more.
I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions.
The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.
This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities.
I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.
The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.
There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .
Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars.
Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.
I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.
And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.
Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.
Carriages were extremely rare and cities were not built to accommodate them until the rise of the coach in the 16th century.
Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.
If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.
Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips.
The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.
How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).
It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips.
If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.
My point is about the average space taken up on a trip.
In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.
I am sorry, you are still making little sense. The space taken by a car is the same no matter how many people walk, crawl or stay at home and don't go anywhere. It's more than a man but less than a horse carriage. And since you still refuse to compare the space taken by the horse carriage to the space take by a car, I figure you understand now that your logic is not sound, which is good enough result of this thread.
A horse carriage takes up similar space to a car, yes.
But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.
I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.
But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.
> that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.
In the low traffic volume world of carriages, one lane in each direction is ample or even excessive for most roads. Many pre-car roads aren't wide enough to even accommodate one carriage in each direction at the same time.
The pre-car Europe and the US were not low traffic. E.g. the main street (Nevsky Avenue) in St. Petersburg, Russia is 200 feet wide since 1760s (and it was expanded from the original 65 feet because that was not enough for traffic).
If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.
Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.
As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.
I don't know where you live but in every city in the US I had been there are minimum lot sizes and setbacks to prevent fires and flooding and those leave plenty of room for parking so I don't see how walking could change that (it's not like fire propagation and water absorption cares about your mode of transportation).
Not really, they existed before cars. As I said they are dictated by the fire safety, flooding danger and nuisance concerns. All the stuff you read on Reddit ("people want to live in tiny apartments but those are illegal to build", "it's illegal to have mixed commercial and residential use", "lot sizes are blown up by parking requirements") could be proven to be completely insane with few minutes of research.
Yeah people I know in the parking industry have a saying that if you want to print money build a parking lot or garage. They're stupidly easy and result in tons of recurring revenue if they're in a good location. Even the little lots can produce thousands per month of revenue.
They've already done so. They're just waiting for the economics to make sense before they convert the land. The parking lot is just how they're paying taxes and the mortgage on the land.
Say you've got a lot with like 420 spaces a few blocks away from Minute Maid Field in Houston. You charge $25 for parking during the event and you're guaranteed to fill it up every game. 81 home baseball games a season. That's $850k in revenue a year, practically guaranteed, and just for the baseball games. How many other events will they host there?
Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.
Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.
In arglinton, Texas, often called one of the least walkable cities on Earth, there's a requirement that each building has a parking lot proportional to it's occupancy. So if you build a 200 person building, you need a parking lot to handle 200 people. I can't remember the exact ratio, I doubt it was 1:1 like that.
So the parking lots are there by force, not convenience or cost.
But there are still lots of incentives to have a surface level parking lot. $$ per spot, it is stupid cheap for a surface lot in construction costs. Why pay $25 to park in a garage for the day when the surface lot around the corner costs $5?
Developers effectively can't 'outsource' parking. If you want to build anything, you get to build parking. For a long time, building a parking garage cost more than just buying a bigger plot to develop. Now that's not the case, but the rules haven't changed, so it would take a developer with deep pockets to build a parking garage, and it would have to be associated with a massive development project.
Another way to think about it is cars allow people who live further from the campus along routes not served by transit (either at all or in a timely and convenient manner) to still work for the company. A multi-story parking structure would also have reduced the amount of surface area dedicated to vehicles.
Given that Apple is the most successful company in the world perhaps it's not a waste and there's something in your model that doesn't capture reality.
Along a similar vein, I'd be interested in the correlation between car use and economic growth is between similarly developed territories is. I know that the US and EU were roughly equal in economic size when I was in school and now it's more like a 3:2 ratio. China has also aggressively adopted cars over the past 3 decades while passing many other countries in per capita GDP.
Another thing I've noticed is that people drive even when there are nearby options. I live in a suburb of DC, right where a residential area meets a commercial area. There is a large Korean grocery store less than a block away, fully accessible by shaded sidewalks. My neighbors always drive 10-20 minutes to different stores. I go to the nearby one because it has cheaper and fresher produce, although I still make bulk purchases by car.
There is also a lot of times when you could walk to a place but you may be motivated to drive because other drivers are more accommodating to a car. It may sound crazy, but in Los Angeles (my home) drives are often more patient and behave in a safer manner toward cars then they do bicyclists or pedestrians.
A nice thing about electric bikes is that it seems to be making bikes more common. It really needs to be normalized that a person doesn't have to be in a car to use or cross the road.
I mean, I sort of get it. There was a time when I stopped driving to the grocery store all together but it was only because there was a great independent grocer right on my walk home from public transit. The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what we needed, and I wasn’t even going out of my way to do so. It was fantastic, I loved it. Maybe once a month we drove somewhere to get anything we needed that they didn’t carry, or for a big pantry restock.
If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would.
And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.
Carrying capacity is a challenge, but I'm still surprised a 5 minute walk always loses to a 40 minute round trip by car. I struggle to get enough exercise as it is.
Because for a lot of people it isn't a 40-minute round trip by car. It is a five minute each way trip by car for multiple grocery stores for me personally.
> The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what
Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.
Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.
x7 days a week. But it's not just the time in the store, it's also whatever detour there is to get to it. At walking speed. Whatever the wait time is at checkout.
> less if you know exactly what you want.
So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.
And if there is another pandemic like event, I'm also constrained to the one day's supply of food that I have in my house at any given moment (maybe less than that, realistically). And it's still a fucking pain if I'm anything other than single. There was a point in my life not so many years ago, when we were going through about 4 gallons of milk per week. Hell, some of the things that we like to eat, that we should be eating for health reasons... you can't even buy those in single meal sizes. We'll probably have 3 (plastic) bags of vegetables home for salad.
> So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.
Oh, the horror. Usually I would just go in an see what looks good and decide then what I wanted for dinner.
> I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so?
Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.
> Pandemic
You can easily build up some reserves.
> Milk
You clearly have a large family, so you might consider that your situation is not universal. I think many Danes with a large family would mix the two options — shopping by car (or online for delivery) every week or two, and supplementing it with additional trips for fresh food.
Two adults is also two people to share the shopping.
For you. That one time. Honestly, I always seem to be on the wrong end of the curve when it comes to salaries... betcha I end up in the ghetto apartment in the food desert.
> Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.
Nah. You just get the things you usually get, and you make whatever of that you feel like that evening. No need to plan, you figure it out when you open the fridge.
> You clearly have a large family, s
Just the two children. Even with just two children, this quickly becomes absurdly impossible. For any more than that, the walkable city people just sound like stooges. Well, they sound like that long before we start talking about large families.
There is a fixed time in every supermarket trip no matter how big or small it is. Multiple trips accrue these costs. For example, I live next to a supermarket, a big one. It's a 3 minute walk door to door, 6 min round trip. Inside it takes about 5 min to find what I am looking for and another 2-10 minutes to checkout depending on the size of the line. So, at the very best I am spending 13 minutes per trip. If I shopped for groceries there every day I would be spending at least 1.5 hours per week shopping. Instead, I drive my car to Costco every two weeks and spend less than 1.5 hours on that (20 min drive x2, 30 min picking groceries and checking out, 5 min parking, 5 min loading and unloading), saving more than 1.5 hours of my life every other week.
I also use Costco for bulk purchases too, but buying in advance requires careful planning. Unless you have a repetitive diet, supplement with a quick grocery run mid-week, only purchase frozen/shelf stable food, or throw out a bunch of expired food each week it's hard to predict what you need two weeks in advance.
I usually eat out so my diet is quite varied, which is another problem for walking advocates because they are limited only to the restaurants in their walking distance, or cold soggy deliveries, or, ultimately, have to spend a lot of time cooking themselves (or making large batches and eating the same leftovers for days in a row). This is besides the point, which was the time spent with daily shopping by foot. It's incredible waste of time and I know that because I used to do just that.
if you want densification and you're willing to using zoning changes to achieve it, adopt the solution favored by truly dense cities: force more skyscrapers
it's a mixed bag. Some argue that sporadic skyscrapers might be a good thing since those would act as a point of easier orientation in space + providing housing/work area for ppl that want to live/work high. The problem appears when there are too many of them or public transport infra is not adapted to handle such an inflow of people towards a single point
It depends on what you consider "low-rise". Different parts of the city have different densities and building heights. Some parts near the center have real skyscrapers (and new ones are under construction now), and other more-central areas are full of buildings that are 5-10 stories or so. Many places are full of apartment blocks, and the newer ones are usually 10-15 stories. Some places are full single-family homes or buildings that have just a handful of apartment units in them. Of course, the taller buildings tend to cluster near train stations more, and the single-family homes tend to be farther from stations since the land is less valuable the farther from a station it is.
But yeah, "tiny roads and tightly packed buildings" summarizes Tokyo's layout to a good degree. If you look at Tokyo from a satellite view and compare with typical American cities, the biggest thing you'll probably notice is just how little space is wasted on things like wide multi-lane roads (or stroads), parking lots, and lawns. That's what makes it so walkable, and why public transit works so well here. A 5-minute walk can take you to a very large number of buildings, which equates to a huge number of apartments or businesses. A 5-minute walk in a typical American city like Houston will probably only get you across the street.
Even in suburbs, it does seem that the potential of in-fill development and mixed-use repurposing is undervalued. For example, I've lived in many low-rise apartment complexes; they always had one or two ground-floor units that were unpopular and frequently vacant because of their proximity to a road or something, and it never made any sense to me that they couldn't be converted into a small commercial space for the neighborhood. Something like a small cafe or corner store. With a higher commercial rent, residential rents in the area could be lower, and car trips to similar spaces would be reduced.
These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride.
The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.
I live in Dallas city center and I can only think of two roads that have more than a single lane in each direction. Banning passenger vehicles may still make plenty of sense for other reasons, to reduce pollution, noise, congestion, make it safer for pedestrians. And a few streets have actually shut down to vehicle traffic in the past decade. But I don't know what you're imagining about space. The roads we have aren't going anywhere. Aside from emergency vehicles, trucks still need to get in to make deliveries, and they require more space than passenger vehicles. The intercity bus station and both metro transit transfer centers are also in the city center, so seemingly you need room for buses, which also require more space than passenger vehicles. The water and sewer mains also run under the roads and need to have some minimum circumference to allow the throughput to supply a city center.
Even if we somehow managed to eliminate roads, I'm still not sure I get what you're imagining. Are we going to tear down all of the existing buildings and replace them with buildings that have 7 meter wider bases? That would take decades and render the city mostly unusable while it was happening. There would also need to be room for trucks to bring in construction material and remove waste.
I always think when walking around the USA that one could literally insert a narrow block into the middle of even a 2-lane-each-way road and end up with similar spacing as a typical Tokyo neighborhood. Imagine how much density that would create.
This is the only way it can work. Walking makes natural sense in dense city centers, and the paths don't even have to be pretty. By all means, have ample roads and parking around the center so people can drive to it, but there's no reason people need to drive through it. Close 4 blocks, let businesses develop, then close more.
Just making the paths nice and other stuff mentioned in this article isn't enough if there's nowhere to go. A lot of the time, this effort only worsens traffic.
Are you sure that's a good example of car centricity? The streets in my town are wide enough for a six lane highway, yet the streets were built before the car was even a glimmer in someone's imagination.
Nah. If it were car-centric it would be much more friendly to cars. It has come to try to be everything-centric, which results in it being awful for everyone.
exactly, especially in the suburbs. My closest places to talk to
- ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable".
- now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need.
- And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk)
Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown.
>I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres.
If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.
Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything.
Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses.
About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.
I sure hope y'all don't have to climb 200 ft hills in those areas. If it wasn't for that I'd say it's a walkable enough area for my needs.
I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.
It’s worth remembering that a lot of car centric design has political roots. For example many of Berlin’s wide roads were built so that Nazi tanks could traverse them. Likewise Paris’s wide streets were built so that cavalry army’s could pass. And a big part of America’s single family home suburb design (which necessitates cars) is born out of a desire keeping white and black people separate (as well as regulatory capture by the auto industry).
My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.
Very subjective question I know, but how significant do you think racist intentions are compared to the many other factors? I wasn't under the impression it was one of the top two factors that pushed us towards a car centered built environment.
I think it was an enormous factor. Just google for "white flight". While the rise of the automobile was a big enabler, there were other factors like the real estate industry practicing "redlining" which prevented Black people from moving into the suburbs to follow the white people who were abandoning the inner cities.
If you don't realize just how horribly racist most Americans throughout most of the 20th century, you must not be very old. I still remember how commonplace it was in the 1980s even.
Detached houses and tenament houses also space things out compared to commie blocks which is why I have unpopular opionion that low-height (+- 4-story) commieblock neighbourhoods designed before cars were widespread are the best form of walkable cities.
When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns.
There are parts of SF that have another "dignity" problem unfortunately. I know too many who refuse to walk in many areas there due to feeling unsafe and the smell issues. I know another one who refuses public transit now due to similar issues. They tend to be small women and it's super sad and it really limits a lot of their transport options in life.
I agree this is the current situation, but I think the concentration of homelessness in urban areas is largely a consequence of policies that favor suburbia:
- Requiring a car for daily life drives up cost of living, pricing the bottom tier of earners into the streets
- Restricting housing unit supply by mandating single family zoning makes whole regions unaffordable
- Blocking effective public transit into the suburbs effectively geofences homelessness into urban centers
- Concentrating the overwhelming majority of homeless services downtown is a policy choice, not a natural outcome
I think a lot of people look at urban areas in the US and think "that looks awful, my area should make the opposite of those policy choices", and it leads us to subconsciously hold some weird beliefs. Tall buildings and public transit don't make people homeless. They do the opposite. But something about the American lifestyle (my own upbringing included) plants these negative associations with urban centers, and it wasn't until I saw other cities around the world that I realized it didn't make any sense at all.
If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.
Not sure what this has to to with the article. Kind of wondering why there are so many off-topic comments attached to mine. Maybe the word suburbia sets people off?
You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond:
Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials:
This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way).
People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.
The usual counter argument is that you can take the money raised by making cars expensive and give it to the poor. That’s fairer than subsidizing cars, since rich people tend to have more cars and use them more than poor people.
A lot of times it isn't by choice, but as a consequence of zoning and parking minimums that are affecting housing stock and it's prices (both in the city and in suburbs). You may not have problems walking in sf(debatable but doesn't matter), but could you say the same about detroit/huston?
When I am driving through suburbs in central Texas I think it is interesting to note that there are rarely people outside the houses. Mostly the the people I see are mowing.
GCN, a cycling channel, just released a video on the car-centric thinking that we all have been forced into over the past century https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c
It took me years go get into a thinking that mobility should be the priority, not cars. Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc) and how streets and cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars to make them safer for what many call an indicator for a good cycling infrastructure: women (with kids) on bicycles.
It's a great video and better than the article imo.
Any talk about walking or cycling that doesn't talk about cars is completely missing the main reason people don't want to do those things. The video talks about "motonormativity", a phenomenon where even people who don't drive will defend and justify car usage.
Cars need to get out of town centres. Roads need to be redesigned to put pedestrians first and motorists last. Unfortunately you can't just make big changes these days so any attempts use the boiling the frog approach. Tiny changes that will take decades to get anywhere. For example, in the UK now pedestrians have priority at T junctions. This is the law. Good luck exercising that priority, though. It would be much easier without the type of junction shown in that video.
It is a long process, it was in the Netherlands (where it started with campaigns about the number of children killed by drivers (others might say cars, but there's a person driving the car) but will be faster for every other city. I envy Paris for the massive change in a quick time, here in Austria is a fight street after street with cars still cutting through the old town.
I don't think it's fair to compare the article to the GCN video. Strongtowns has been advocating against all the issues mentioned in the GCN video for years.
This article is just making one argument that aligns with the broader idea of urbanism. It's not meant as a general introduction to the movement like the video.
> Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc)
Then you need to take the mental step of thinking about all the people who require a car for mobility. People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped.
> cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars
A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
You probably wouldn't believe it: But we managed to raise our daughter without having a car. She's now a happy cyclist herself. And in regards to handicaps, a few years ago I broke my hip, nothing a few plates and screws couldn't fix but I wasn't allow to step on the right leg for months. But I was allowed to borrow a recumbent trike, moving the bad leg was fine. and I was able to ride it with just the good leg. Needless to say I didn't loose much musclemass in the bad leg as it was constantly in motion.
It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. Did you actually watch the GCN video? Have a look again at the bit about the corners that allow cars to go faster but take away space from pedestrians.
We also raised a child without a car -- in North America. It is much more possible than most people claim.
I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical.
The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future.
> who could live closer to work with a smaller living space
If that’s the necessary tradeoff, of course you’re seeing failure of adoption.
Also, would they need to move every time they change jobs (or husband & wife can no longer work on opposite sides of town to continue their careers from before marriage)? Logistics need thought through to be feasible policy.
Yes, you are articulating perfectly why the pampered, irrational and entitled Western middle-class are and will fail to meet any of the real world challenges we now face.
Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.
Awesome. On the bikes. There's plenty of variants, not just the regular city bikes or cargo bikes, but also push bikes for adults, here's one German pensioner who actually made a startup out of this and his bikes are also useful to people with certain disabilities https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/
>It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up.
I'm in California. We have a massive amount of space. If civilization collapsed, we could make a walkable state that can probably suit billions if need be. Being more compact isn't a huge priority here. On the contrary, we're trying to develop other suburbs out in the desertous regions.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Cars and their supporting infrastructure often take up a vast amount of space, which makes walking less attractive as all distances are greater as a result.
Another way of saying this is that because physical space in the city is a scarce resource, the allocation of infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for people is a zero sum game.
yeah, the US solved this by expanding out to suburbia. Because we just have so much damn space and cars let us utilize more of that space.
Of course, the other thing people in this community may look over is that suburbs are often a fallback when you can't afford a dense urban area. I'm in an LA suburb and renting in LA would be over twice as expensive if I moved down there. Even if downtown LA became walkable, most of the LA county wouldn't be able to afford that living.
A city designed for other modes of transport is also better for drivers because only those who need (or really want) to drive need to do so. Result, less congestion and more relaxed driving.
" People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped."- yes, usually all of them will have a more comfortable life in a city that gives priority to pedestrian and bike infra. We are all pedestrians, but not all of us have cars. Disabled ppl in us are living worse than disabled ppl in nl again due to car oriented infra. Having a baby doesn't necessarily means you need to have a car, in a dense area like in NL ppl get by with a backfiets or cargo bike or just are using public transport or taking a taxi/day rental when really needed.
Related to car speed- at some point you have intersections of pedestrian and car infra and if the priority is to have a safer area, cars must drive slower, that's why lots of cities are implementing 30km areas+traffic calming like curbs, bollards and bumps and it works and heavily reduces the accidenta while avg speed remains paradoxically almost unchanged because less accidens/dangerous driving means less road blocks. Also, not all areas are wide enough to have everything separated, that's why the shared road concept exists- cars drive super slow and pedestrians and bikes have priority there, ppl can walk in the middle just like cars and cars will need to wait
It's much much more than that. For example in nl ppl in electric wheelchairs/microcars can use bike paths to drive slowly and safely to their destination. Also due to higher density they aren't far from either shops, cafes, other stuff they may need, everything is close-basically they can live relatively normal lives without relying too heavily on others
Cars are not alive, let alone sentient, so it is no more possible to punish them than it is a rock or a pane of glass.
Perhaps you do believe cars are sentient and capable of receiving punishment. But if not, you might have been using “cars” as a de-personifying shorthand for “drivers”. In which case, yes, drivers should be punished — not for merely existing, no, but for the harm they have caused to non-drivers. From traffic fatalities to car-only infrastructure, drivers and their insistence on cars have been to the detriment of the rest of us.
you want to punish all drivers because some were dumb and reckless? Seems excessive.
I'd start with making sure tests are actually tests and not formalities. Then I'd also expand that to needing to re-test every X years, so old people who can barely see or have poor motor control aren't still driving.
That's the thing — a driver doesn't have to be dumb or reckless to harm those around them. Merely insisting that society provide space for you to drive and park your car, not to mention all the harms that driving itself causes (CO2, particulate matter, other pollution, noise, ...), is a serious harm inflicted by all drivers on those around them.
Electric cars are still cars that need a lot of space in our cities and run over pedestrians. It's rather sad that the move to electric cars wasn't taken as an opportunity towards smaller cars.
in general, you can't convince someone to do the more pro-social action by making their lives worse, you have to meet them where they're at and provide either an upgrade or a side-grade.
Did you know that of the car drivers & passengers killed each year, about 25% (and the difference between the US, UK or EU is pretty small here) didn't put on a seat-belt before their last drive? Of course this number will eventually go down, but it seems there's a lot of dumb drivers out there.
> People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped
99% of cars I see are occupied by a single person. If you get them out of the road (or car sharing at least) you can easily accommodate for the rest with a much smaller footprint
People who require a car for mobility should be in favor of less traffic on the roads. If more people use other forms of transport, that makes it easier for the pregnant soccer mom on crutches to drop off her 9 kids at practice before driving all of the elderly dementia patients in the neighborhood to the hospital.
One thing I like to tell car fans: Unless you LOVE traffic jams and searching for parking spaces (because they refuse to got straight for a parking garage of which we have plenty in my city) you should convince other motorists to give up their car and use a bicycle or public transport. The logic is sound yet a bit too much for most people ;-)
"Anyone with urgent medical needs and the handicapped" probably already have access to paratransit, since municipal mass transit systems are required by ADA to provide it.
> A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities?
No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed.
There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals.
Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...
The post you're responding to talks about having "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", and your response is saying "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets" and "infrastructure separating transport modals". Both of those are making the same case.
> Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city?
To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.
To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport not cars. With cars you'll get more traffic and the fast road will become slow. Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing that will act promptly to the button press to switch to green for pedestrians.
> Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing
The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals".
You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.)
> To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport
That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".)
It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians, that's why many cities in eu are either closing them or doubling them with classic crosswalk and finding out that raised/under paths aren't used anymore since it's much more convenient to just directly cross the road
Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it
You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.
> Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians
I agree, which is why I personally prefer the solution of burying the roads and keeping the pedestrian walkways at what is currently "street" level. That's a major challenge for existing infrastructure, but I've seen more than a few public transportation proposals that have similar "much easier when one from scratch" problems, and I think it's worth designing the ideal before settling for something worse.
> Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting.
No, I'm thinking about ideal public transport versus ideal car transportation. It's not reasonable to compare the best case of public transport to deliberately worsened car transportation and declare public transport the victor. I would love to have public transport that's actually better than the common case of car transportation, but proposals like what you're describing don't go far enough to get there.
I would love to have a world where we have 300km/s trains between every city (major or minor), and automated point-to-pointno-transfer underground transportation within cities. And I'd love to see incremental steps in a direction like that.
What I don't want to see is "if we make cars much worse, we can have public transit that sucks less but is still worse than cars used to be".
Best case of car transport would be if few ppl use it which is achieved by giving priority to public transport and bike paths. If this (car) mode is prioritized, car transport by definition will be a worse experience than an ideal bus because you don't get traffic with the bus.
Burying cars under is a good idea in theory but not that great in practice. It's extremely expensive to do it(and also build all the underground destination infra) and in the end you still will end up with traffic, the difference being that all the drivers will be trapped with their fumes/microplastic tire wear underground.
You don't need to make cars much worse, just make pub transport and bike/pedestrian infra as good as possible and give what's left to cars
I moved to Barcelona and living in a walkable city is such a life upgrade. My whole life is within the distance of a walk. The grocery store, gym, doctor, friends, restaurants, beach, movie theatre, shopping, everything. I can walk across the entire city in about an hour.
Barcelona takes it a step further than just being high density with wide pedestrian streets lined with trees and outdoor seating at the expense of roads used for cars/trucks. At the end of every block on a rambla is a roundabout where people sit and hang out, with more trees. It really feels like cars are 2nd class citizens here.
The mental tax of having to get into a car, navigate bad traffic and other drivers, finding parking, etc is hugely underrated. When I describe the above to people, it's easy to brush off as "not that big of a deal", but it is a big deal on general mood and wellbeing compared to what it could be if you remove those 'micro' stresses from your life.
And finally, if you need to get somewhere quick, there are taxis everywhere, and the underground metro is pretty decent.
I randomly moved from Houston to Guadalajara in my 20s and until then I didn't realize that all of my disillusion with life was because I had to drive everywhere and could walk nowhere.
It changed my life to realize how much better life is when you can accomplish everything within walking distance. It impacts absolutely everything.
You even lose weight when you can walk to the store to buy a can of beans and one avocado for lunch instead of having to drive to the grocer once a week and store tens of thousands of calories in your house at all times for you to graze on.
It also impacted my social life because I would run into friends while walking around. Or I'd see friends in a bar while walking home and go join them.
I refuse to settle down somewhere where I can't walk to live. Unfortunately this rules out almost all of the US.
These posts always feel like people are fetishizing some "utopia" where everyone should want to live in an imaginary fully walkable, meticulously maintained, pristine city. The comparisons of like a 2 square mile section of the nicest parts of a European city to areas of the rural US that have land areas larger than many European countries feels... at best, idealism run afoul.
Should we look at rural areas in Europe? I spent 3 weeks this summer in a small town in Spain. I could smell manure if the wind came from the right direction. And yet, I didn't need to get into a car, because the town center of this rural town, population 5 thousand, lives next to each other. The farmers go to the fields further away by car if they need to, but the kids walk 5 minutes to the high school.
The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle
Example of small town from "flyover state" in Denmark: i.e. area with very few jobs, very low house prices, everybody moving away, houses on the market forever. We call this for "the rotten banana" as the area is shaped as a banana and the economy is rotten.
Still very walkable and nice for kids.
Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less).
Barcelona is also a very walkable city (across the entire area of 2 million people, not just the very center) and is definitely the upper end of Spanish income.
A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles.
The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).
my rural area had twice the population but probably 10x the size. There was nowhere to "walk" to. We are talking about a 2-3 mile drive to the only "supermarket" in the town center, which was probably smaller than many modern corner stores. everything of interest was 2-3 miles away: the schools, the church, the liquor store, and that's really all there is (they did build a 99 cent store there, so that's neat).
It's not like the land was wasted with parking lots. It's just as generic a desert setting as you can expect. Hot, tumbleweeds everywhere, Sand as far as the eye can see in any direction, etc. It's all single home housing so it could be denser, but that's pretty much the only benefit of living there; I grew up with a half acre yard (full of sand and an awkward tree in the middle, but actual land) and it gave my grandparents some piece of mind when we went out to play.
The US is not large and not sparse compared to the rest of the world in general or compared to Europe in particular. This argument pops up every time but it just has no basis in reality. There are sparse (rural) and dense (city) areas everywhere. The ratio between this type of area is different in Finland compared to the UK, just as it differs between Alaska and New Jersey. The density of the US is roughly the same as Europe. (Around 100/sq km)
But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too.
Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.
Oh sorry Google fooled me, when asking for US pop density it answered per sq. mi (96) and for EU it answered per sq km (106). The numbers are less similar with the same units then….
Some sparse countries like Ukraine aren’t counted in EU however.
But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built.
In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty.
“Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.
Curious, have you ever lived for an extensive amount of time in a walkable European city? As a person who was born and raised in suburban East Coast car-hell and then moved to Europe, I would never want to go back. I still want a luxury car for rare drives to the countryside, but I hate it every time I have to go back to North American car-dependent cities, except for the nicer walkable downtowns.
I've given up on "arguing" with people on this thread, but FWIW, I have lived in Berlin and Frankfurt both for extended periods of time (2.5years total). I'll leave it up to you to decide if those are walkable cities or not. I also currently live in NYC, which is, if not walkable, anti-car.
My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.
It's not about everyone. It's just about building enough nice walkable cities for people who want to live in them.
It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through.
And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.
*For people who can afford to live in them. I imagine most people (like me) aren't out in the boonies due to claustrophobia. We could use more walk able cities, but those we do have in the US tend to be the most expensive neighborhoods.
Don't overdo with by adding "meticulously maintained, pristine city", I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window.
European cities were in most of their cores built before the car or didn't allow highways to cut them up, followed by more demolishment for parking space. Add zoning laws that only allow single homes with no business in their center and you get suburbian where you can only escape with a car.
> I mean okay this might be a side-effect once people start walking more and have the time to look at their environment close up and maybe even thrown their single-use coffee cup into a bin instead of out the car window.
Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment
I hear these complaints all the time about any conversation that involves making a change for the better.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves.
Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing.
Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.
That's a fairly bold claim to say that I oppose making any change for the better lol... anyway..
Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not.
> Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get?
As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question?
> Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change?
Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive.
Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against...
The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few.
Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places.
I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise?
To be clear I'm not saying you personally are necessarily opposed to all changes. But, when I see people very obviously over-exaggerate, like "looking for a Utopia", that's the impression you give off. That you're ideologically opposed to this particular change, and not reasonably opposed to it. Like, the fact any amount of this change is happening at all is too much for you.
> people who actually live there
See, again, nobody is saying this should be a thing for everyone. Nobody is really going to target rural areas with any infrastructure changes because, well, nobody cares. And that's the draw of rural areas - you don't have that infrastructure. People don't live in towns of 2,000 people they want rich public accommodations, lol.
> don't have to deal with the consequences
Au contraire, you have it backwards. The Suburbs are the ones who do not have to deal with the consequences of urban sprawl. They're subsidized, on welfare, by the dense, walkable parts of the city. Because dense areas are simply more efficient and produce MUCH more taxes. That money is then taken and given to the suburbs, who cannot exist on their own.
> are tradeoffs
Sure there are. But this position of "we've tried nothing ever and we're all out of ideas" is lame. Sorry. There are trade-offs in our current status quo but because it's status-quo you refuse to acknowledge them as tradeoffs.
Again, nobody is claiming magic wand or Utopia. You have the expectation that we can make things better for pedestrians with absolutely no friction. And when the solutions don't meet the absurd expectations, YOU set for yourself, you deem the whoooole idea bad.
That, to me, is a mindset problem. In order to justify your need to maintain the status-quo you have to construct a logical framework where change can never be good, ever.
> push changes
Simple, we're not. These things are decided democratically and you're seeing more and more people talk about it because, well, they want it. Sorry if that makes you feel as though you're becoming a minority. I don't know what the future holds and maybe in 10 years everyone will be drooling over motor vehicles and concrete again. In which case, good for you.
The reality is these ARE being talked about by the people they affect. These aren't random outside forces. These are me, and others, living in our communities who want change in our communities. We don't want change in your community. Nobody cares about the boonies and that's the entire draw of the boonies. If you want people to start caring about you move out of the boonies. Then, I'm sure, you'd be very upset.
As an outsider (as in: not American) I notice that a lot of the details, especially downsides, are left out.
I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper).
I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like:
-Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on).
-Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts.
-General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there.
-Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles.
-Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities.
-Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area.
I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
I agree with most of the points, but I'm surprised about the "lack of green spaces" you mentioned. From my experience, Europe has far more and better urban parks than what I have seen in the US. The general atmosphere of European parks is something that I will forever miss while living in the US.
... but what are "these posts"? Because this post compares good and bad examples within the Minneapolis-St Paul metro area. This isn't a comparison of some cherry-picked European city with the rural US. It's a comparison of good and bad points within a mid-sized US city.
Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".
I want to live in an imaginary fully walkable city. Now I live in Montreal, for the context see video https://youtu.be/_yDtLv-7xZ4
It's very good overview of what is wrong with the best* city in North America.
Not covered in this video: high rent/cost of owning compared to the local relatively low salaries (most of Montrealers agree) and in general low quality of hosing (many Montrealers got very irritated if I bring that).
And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.
I'm quite familiar with Minneapolis, and you're right it is fairly suburban - but suburbs are a phenomenon of the world after the invention of the car. Car ownership rates in suburbs are incredibly high, like 90%+ in most suburban areas (https://newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png). Minneapolis has a ~98% rate of car ownership, and places like Hopkins and Northfield were designed knowing that most of their citizens live far enough away from places like schools/grocery stores/movie theaters/offices/etc that they will need a car anyway.
And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
What does car ownership rate have to do with anything? Even in a suburb with 100% car ownership, I want to walk - not drive - to buy milk, when possible. Walking the dog should ideally be possible from every single home without even having to walk or cross a road.
Walkability is as important in a suburb where everyone can drive as it is anywhere else.
There are many parts of the world where suburbs are shapes very differently, and while they support cars, they don't need them. The 0.3 acre plot, the street with no commercial activity... those aren't requirements for suburbs. Madrid has many a suburb that is far denser, grows upwards, and is centered around a train station.
And that's great for those places. But why do people feel compelled to make relatively new US suburbs more similar to old suburbs in Madrid? No one is trying to make suburbs in Madrid more like suburbs in Iowa - I'm voicing frustration that the reciprocal is not true.
This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
Forcing places to be a certain way by law is like writing an essay without the letters 'D' and 'O'. Possible, but it's really tying your hands behind your back.
"Their own of being" = putting a fist in everyone's mouth by <<forcing>> housing to be exactly the same type (single family detached house) and <<banning>> any other type of activity, even compatible ones like light commercial.
A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
And the examples given here can make the walking experience better, for a similar amount of total expenditure, without meaningfully changing the situation for drivers. Some things the author never suggests in this post:
- removing lanes of traffic to make more space for pedestrians
- reducing speed limits
- increasing gas taxes
You're reacting like advocating for a better pedestrian experience is somehow an attack on drivers, but that's totally not what this post is. Instead, the author points out places where they're already creating affordances for pedestrians (sidewalks, crossings with refuge medians, new curb ramps) but are doing it in a way that is not impactful.
You can make it a more comfortable for people to walk on the sidewalks that they're actually paying for, so the option of walking 20 min to the grocery store is more feasible, normal, appealing, without expecting that people in car-dependent neighborhoods are going to give up on car ownership.
> so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around
This is a misleading framing for two reasons:
- high car ownership does not imply that people don't want to also feel comfortable walking in their own neighborhoods. You can own a car, but walking your dog or walking with your family to a park or walking to the nearest store can still be a welcome option. People can get around in multiple ways, choosing different options at different times for different purposes.
- to the extent that a high proportion of trips are in a car, part of that is because the other options are crappy because of the argument you're making
We can have pleasant walkable neighborhoods and cars, and your kids can walk home from school and you can drive them to costco on the weekends. End this nonsensical pretend conflict between the two.
Suburbs (especially newer ones) were indeed designed for cars, but it is also illegal to change them, because of road requirements, parking minimums, zoning restrictions, separation of uses, etc. The qualities of a good suburb are desirable, but let's not pretend like they're a natural outcome of choices.
I'm a car person but 20/30 mins of walk to get some coffee with my dogs sounds very pleasant (iff the pedestrian crossings are safer as the article proposed)
Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
Sure, and you can do that 20/30 minute walk if you want, there are many parts of minnesotan suburbs that are, in fact, very walkable already. On a weekend, that is a nice thing to do - but the day-to-day life that the majority of people live shouldn't be optimized for that.
I'm not sure why you're shoe horning body weight into this - that's a whole separate can of worms that tenuously related, but not relevant to the fact that these places are so spread out in such a way that walking isn't feasible for a myriad of other very practical and immediately relevant reasons (weather, ability to organize child care/education, ability to run errands before/after work, time spent "commuting", etc.)
In a lot of places it's close to impossible to do what you're saying. There are no side walks. Many suburban streets and especially those bigger roads (stroads) are horrible. No shade because no trees because HUGE ADS SHALL BE VISIBLE FROM CARS, lots of dangerous driveway exists every 5 minutes that you can't even walk in peace lest you are run over by a huge truck, etc.
Streets are dangerous for cyclists (and I mean the regular cyclists, commuter/grocery shopping style, not the lycra-clad racers).
There are modern ways to design infrastructure, it isn't even a lot more expensive than the old fashioned way, and it makes for a lot more pleasant environment for everyone. Even drivers get to enjoy it because... people start walking (under 1km) and cycling (under about 5-7km), so a lot of car traffic just vanishes. So the remaining car drivers get to vroom-vroom a lot more :-)
The headline is a bit misleading compared to the article. Everybody already cares about dignity but only at the expense of everyone else. We need to prioritize dignity for pedestrians at the expense of drivers.
Everyone in Yukons and F150s are already using, at least in their minds, what they think is a dignified mode of transportation. Excluding cities for the wealthy (there's no dignity for the poor anyway), most cities in the US are not livable without a car. Affording a car, particularly a new one, earns one some degree of dignity. Furthermore, drivers living in poorly planned-cities spend lots of time in their cars and have chosen larger cars where they feel comfortable and safe.
> chosen larger cars where they feel comfortable and safe.
Larger cars do have a higher chance of roll-over and are much more dangerous to pedestrians (especially children due to a enormous blind spot near the front of the car) and drivers in smaller cars.
Driving what is essentially a consumer tank and calling it comfortable and safe is a dangerous line of thinking, and the casualty numbers show it.
> Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!”
Honestly, no.
I live in a medium sized city in southern Ontario, about a 3 1/2 - 4 hour drive from Toronto. I just came back from spending a week in Toronto and although everything was walking distance, and we did walk everywhere, the week-long stay was not at all enjoyable.
There are people who love big cities. They love being able to walk everywhere, they love the "excitement" and the ability to experience a wide and diverse range of activities and food etc.
And then there are us introverts who find it extremely uncomfortable to be in places that are so crowded.
I enjoy walking as a solitary activity. I'm not lazy, I'm not averse to doing physical activity. But I really really really dislike walking anywhere that has a sizeable population density. I've heard that in the USA / Canada, the average "personal space bubble" that people find comfortable is around 1.5 feet. For me it's closer to 6 feet. I find that trying to navigate busy sidewalks is overwhelming and anxiety-inducing.
I've heard a lot of city-loving younger people talk about the pains of owning a vehicle. I didn't get my driver's license until my early to mid 20s. At the time I had a young family of 4 (my wife and I plus two small children) and, although I might be biased because I live in a built-for-cars North American city, getting our first vehicle gave us so much freedom and independence that it was life-changing in a positive way. I realize that if all amenities had been within walking distance then maybe not having a car wouldn't have been such a hindrance, but when I think back to being in downtown Toronto recently, I couldn't imagine navigating that population density nightmare while also pushing a double-stroller.
To me, and maybe this is more psychological / emotional than logical ... but a car is my personal isolation bubble that gives me much needed personal space while travelling. Though I also must admit that leaving the house is a special occasion for me. So yeah, I'm not typical and city-life is just not for me.
There are plenty of small walkable cities in Europe, I just came back from a trip to a 300 inhabitants town, everything was walkable, albeit you had to walk 20min to the next city to get to the bigger things like banks and big stores but that was easily doable as you could use a clean hiking path through the woods or a very nicely maintained sidewalk. Get yourself a bicycle and the 20min walk becomes a 5min ride
And rest assured, you won't see much action or social interactions on the way
That's really cool. Usually when discussions come up about "walkable cities" the discussion is around major urban areas and city planning.
Though you mentioned banks as something that is still pretty far away. A few years ago I was self-employed, collecting old-fashioned checks (it was slow moving to digital) and I had to frequent a bank once every week, two weeks at most since I had to deposit checks that were in USD and my bank in here Canada couldn't yet do that via an ATM. My nearest branch was walking distance but I still chose to drive because it was a 20m walk, 5 - 10m bike ride or 1 - 2m drive. Since it was such a big chore to have to go there in person, I opted for a car more often than walking or biking.
I think that at least some of what drives these discussions is congestion and parking in major cities. I can't stand driving in downtown Toronto. But in my mid-sized city I really don't mind driving 5 - 10 minutes vs having to double or triple that to walk or bike there. Add the benefit of personal space and a trunk to carry groceries in and I can't see any benefit (beyond maybe environmental impact) to a "15 minute" city in a medium-sized city where traffic congestion is not really a thing and a short car ride will halve your 20 - 30m round trip.
City advocates claim that North American suburb existence requires you to plan your grocery trips and buy lots at a time, vs the "benefit" of city life where you can run to the store to grab milk if you're out of it. The idea of going to a crowded grocery store is such a chore that I welcome any strategy that gets me going there once a month or even less if at all possible. The idea of running to a grocery store, even if it were a block away, for a single item or two is nightmare fuel given that the trip could be avoided all together with the smallest bit of planning, whether walking or driving. So how do I accomplish buying a month's worth of groceries if I have to walk there? Whereas, if I have the choice to drive or walk, I can decide how much to buy at a time and how often I want to go. Big win for cars.
Another drawback to the "15 minute city", from an extreme introvert's perspective, is that the closer things are to your home, the closer PEOPLE are to your home. It actually bothers me if I'm sitting on my couch reading a book and I can hear people walking by on the sidewalk. When everything is close by, so are people. I really like living as far away from people as I reasonably can. A vehicle becomes a necessity with remote living.
Walkability isn't just important in big cities; you can have it in smaller towns, too. I live in the suburbs of a large city, but my town has a small "main street" area with shops and restaurants that I love to walk to. I also have the anxiety around crowds (especially post-pandemic), and my town is the perfect balance of freedom to walk places and space to breathe.
When I think about walkable vacation spots, I don't only think of cities either. I think of small beach towns where even though it isn't populous, things are close enough together to explore on foot.
So I guess one question I'd pose is: if you could have that personal space without the car, would you still prefer the car and why? And given the negative externalities of the car, are there other ways those needs could be solved?
> So I guess one question I'd pose is: if you could have that personal space without the car, would you still prefer the car and why?
That depends on context. I would say that I would prefer to always have the ability to drive a car even if I were to choose to walk more often than not. Reasons for this: bad weather, needing to get somewhere while ill, feeling anti-social and not wanting to risk running into anyone, needing to get around with a minor injury, needing to transport a large or heavy items.
I know that we're talking about walking vs driving, but public transportation will inevitably enter the picture when it comes to physical or mobility issues. I would like to travel to Europe one day because what I hear from Europeans is that their cities are night and day compared to North American cities when it comes to not only walkability but public transport. Here in North America, I would rather walk on a crowded sidewalk than use public transportation for no other reason than being in what feels like a "tin can" full of strangers is nightmare fuel for me. At least on a crowded sidewalk I am outdoors.
> And given the negative externalities of the car, are there other ways those needs could be solved?
Sure. To the extent that "negative externalities" are something that we need to care about, let's use technology to reduce those negative externalities without having to give up the things that make our lives better.
>I've heard that in the USA / Canada, the average "personal space bubble" that people find comfortable is around 1.5 feet
"comfortable" is a stretch. But yes, I won't think much of an unassuming person 2 feet away from me. School desks are about that much spaced out when reaching behind or in front of you (close enough to tap the back of the person in front of you), so I suppose that's how we form our bubbles.
> "comfortable" is a stretch. But yes, I won't think much of an unassuming person 2 feet away from me
I envy you. Unless there is an obvious reason that more space is impractical / impossible, my thought in such a situation is "Why do you need to stand so close? Please get away from me."
Places are crowded because only small parts of the city are walkable and most ppl go there. When it's dense evenly, youll get hot spots in the center but the other parts would still be nice and walkable just not crowded
Logically, the more dispersed people are the less concentrated they are in any one area. Obviously. That said, Toronto is extremely walkable. Maybe not as much as certain European cities (I honestly wouldn't know), but everyone walks everywhere in Toronto. My wife and I had a dinner reservation with friends one night and we chose to Uber instead of walk because my wife wanted to dress up and wear high-heels. Big mistake. The walk would have been 25m, the Uber trip took over an hour. Toronto even has the largest indoor walking path network anywhere in North America, it's something that Toronto prides itself on and was motivated by our cold winters. The point being, you don't need to walk on sidewalks on roads. You certainly don't have to drive (and most people don't). And there are paths all over the place that short-cut through buildings, parks and court-yards etc and avoid busy roads.
And still, you can't find yourself anywhere in downtown Toronto where you're not trying to dodge people or get one second to yourself without having people constantly around you anywhere that you look. Though my definition of "crowded" likely differs from people who don't mind being around people as much I as do. Our friends told us that we would despise New York given how bothered we were by the amount of people in Toronto.
So I'm skeptical that there is some high-population-density major urban centre where crowds would not exist on a level that makes me feel uncomfortable. At the same time, I'm happy to say that cities, in general, just aren't for me. Fine to visit from time to time when there's some special occasion (comic-con, concert, trip to Vegas or what-have-you). But not a place that I would want to live no matter how "walkable" they are. For my preferred, secluded & remote lifestyle, a vehicle is a necessity.
Tangentially related but I saw some similar comments in the original thread [0] so hopefully this is alright.
How does one move to Europe? Or how does one begin the process? I’m an average engineer and only speak English. Clearly I’m not the type of immigrant counties would love to welcome in. Where does one start?
For clarity, countries like Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Estonia highly appeal to me.
The easiest way to move anywhere is to apply for a job there, and if successful, let them guide you through the visa process.
That gives you a visa linked to your job. But keep unbroken employment in that country for 4-5 years and you will get permanent residence (pre citizenship), which frees you up immensely but requires you to not spent more than 1-2 years at a time outside that country.
If you get that far, you’ve done the hard work and citizenship is yours if you want it just by settling there longer.
This is true. The further away you go from the bigger cities that aren't touristy, the more friction there is if you only speak English. A1 level of Dutch is plenty to navigate and do personal errands, and even then others still might swap to English to communicate with you if they hear an accent.
You will be very welcome as an engineer. We do have english speaking countries in the EU: Ireland and Malta have it as their official language but others like The Netherlands will give you not much problem and then there's plenty of cities to look at like Berlin, Vienna, ... Even in the rather small Austrian city of 200k pop where I live I know a South African woman who gets along just fine as English teacher. European cities are becoming the melting pots again they had been before the world wars. Just learn the local language and don't fall into English too often, the natives will do switch to English but I finally got into the habit of having bi-lingual conversations which is great fun.
The easiest way is finding a job, moving here wasn't hard at all with a job, the bureaucracy was taken care by the company, when I moved you'd get a 2 years work visa attached to the job you got, the visa renewal after 2 years frees you to move jobs without the new company having to sponsor you. After 4 years I got a permanent residency and after 5 I got my citizenship.
I'm an American living in Amsterdam. I moved here last year on a highly skilled migrant visa as a software engineer. [1] Unlike the USA, immigrating to many countries is easier. The company's onboarding team handled all the immigration paperwork. Feel free to contact me if you have some questions.
I would add that the paperwork is easier in countries other than the US, but the cultural aspects of immigration are hard everywhere. Small things like the food, the sense of humor, the cultural expectations, having friends and family far away, all weigh down on one regardless of where you are. The first half a year you're in a honeymoon period where it won't be a problem, the second half is where nostalgia hits hard. After that you either have adapted to the situation/feeling, or you're gone back. I highly recommend people live in different countries, it's enriching and eye opening. But it's not what I'd call easy.
Fair enough. I was focusing more on the procedural aspects of immigrating as come with a special skill. I haven’t really had a truly Dutch living experience yet. All of my coworkers are expats and the center of Amsterdam is largely English speaking. I’ve not yet been exposed to living in a Dutch community.
Please read up on the tax implications if you are a US citizen. Unless you move to some place in Europe with low taxes (e.g. certain cantons in Switzerland, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more difficult country to get a work visa for outside of getting EU citizenship by ancestry), you likely won't end up owing the tax difference as income, but it can be difficult to navigate retirement savings, especially for mandatory systems that don't have a bilateral treaty with the US, wherein the US IRS recognizes the special tax-deferred status of a pension or IRA equivalent.
You will likely be limited to working only with the largest banks, as they're the only ones that are usually willing to file the FinCEN reports back to the US.
I still recommend doing it. Yes, you'll likely take a hit financially (lower salaries, certain consumer items being a lot pricier, a big PITA tax situation), but I think it's worth it to see how it is to live in a place that is much better designed. It's also great to be able to experience how it is to trade off the "grindset mentality" in the US for much better WLB. I literally had colleagues whose OOF messages that said "I'm bikepacking through Norway and will be offline for all of August" meanwhile back in the US, I've had colleagues join conference calls on their phone while recovering from surgery (not because of a lack of PTO, but because unfortunately industry research labs are highly competitive).
Also, it's a good idea to make great efforts to learn the local language or you'll end up in an Anglo bubble and you'll end up feeling like an alien on a foreign planet.
As an alternative, I'd recommend trying to live in places in Asia like Hong Kong or Japan. Walkable cities, relatively low tax rate (but not sure how it works with US citizens tax system), higher salaries than Europe (in the case of Hong Kong, Japan really depends although CS salaries have increased quite a bit lately).
You can also be a digital nomad while living in those places. Japan has a special visa IIRC, with HK you can just use the 3 months tourist visa and do hops to other countries (I know quite a few people who have done that for years)
I'm surprised nobody mentioned intra company transfer.
You start on the foreign country's website and supplement with community groups eg on Facebook. Average engineer might be fine but you need above average drive to navigate the process.
Germany offers an "Opportunity Card" which gives successful applicants a year to live here while looking for a job. This is a new program that just launched in June, 2024 and I have no personal experience with it but, for a country that needs qualified workers, I thought it was a good idea.
A few countries now have remote work visas (Spain definitely, Portugal too I think). As long as you make good money (any software engineer salary is fine) and it comes from abroad, that'll work to get you in the door. Alternatively you can find an big international company (who will often work in English) with a local office.
In Western Europe at least, English-only in day to day life will be a moderate challenge but not a critical one (many people speak at least basic English, you get good at pointing effectively, you learn essentials much faster than you think), you'll find people & services targeted at expats to solve exactly this problem, you meet many many other foreigners in the same situation, and with a little time you really can learn a language even if you've never done it before (and doing so is genuinely an interesting and meaningful project that many people enjoy).
I moved to Spain with no Spanish. First year or so is tricky but manageable and definitely not boring, and then from there on it's relatively smooth sailing. Quite a few years later now, worked out great, best decision I ever made.
> How does one move to Europe? Or how does one begin the process? I’m an average engineer and only speak English.
In Sweden at least practically everyone speaks English and it should be common among engineers to mainly speak English (at least that's the case for software engineers).
Only English is not a problem in Sweden (especially Stockholm), and we hire foreign engineers all the time. Some companies have a majority of foreign born engineers, with a wide range of backgrounds (Brazilian, Russian, Spanish, American, etc.)
Ofc, salary comparisons are hard to make vs. the US, but you can live comfortably on an engineer's salary in Sweden.
Some of the biggest "modern" companies include DICE, Klarna and Spotify. More traditional ones are Ericsson, Scania and Volvo.
Hiring is a bit slow right now though, so that has to be kept in mind.
I recommend visiting said countries first, as you are very likely to have a warped understanding of the country, its' people and culture before visiting it. Also, aside from very specific cities, learning the local language is a must in almost everywhere in Europe if you want to live there, so you should keep that in mind.
While still abroad, interview and get a job in a big company in a developed country. Afterwards the company will help with relocation, visa, and other paperwork.
I don't disagree but interestingly Europe may have one city that is less walkable that anywhere in the USA because I saw one list of the world's least walkable cities that started like this: Johannesburg, Patra (Greece), Dallas, Houston, ... and I think the next European city in the list was also in Greece. On the other hand I've heard it claimed that Britain has the least walkable cities in Europe so I don't know.
One thing I really don’t get, is what do people under the age of 16 (can’t drive yet) and over the age of 75 (get a bit too old to drive) do when they wanna just hang out? Ok, well, I know what they do, but how are people ok with being trapped within a small local zone and be depended on others? I grew up in a walkable city, would take the walk, bus, or subway home since I was 10, met up with my friends at a mall or downtown to just hang out.
Now I live in a very walkable neighbourhood in Vancouver, and constantly see older people going throughout their days. And I would want the same for myself when I reach their age, rather than live in a suburban zone with no ability to see life outside of my 500m radius.
As an SF Bay Area resident who walks/BARTs as much as possible, IME bicyclists are at least as big a threat to my safety as motorists, who at least have a license and insurance on the line if they screw up. I can't tell you how many times I've been hit or very nearly hit by entitled cyclists who don't think that traffic laws or common courtesy apply to them. Even worse since motorized bikes/scooters hit the streets...er, sidewalks in recent years.
City centres should be built so that people naturally prefer walking/cycling/public transport over driving there. That's how many European cities are, and it works just fine. It doesn't mean anyone has to give up their car, instead people can learn to use it only where it makes sense.
I would never give up my car, but I use it only for stuff where walking is not practical (visiting countryside, buying lots of groceries from a big market located in less dense area). Suburbs that have apartments with enough parking slots AND adequate public transport / cycling roads to city centre work perfectly for me.
Portland is designed in this way. Unforunately, busses, cycling, walking, and trains are also at competition with each other in such a way that they can encourage car travel. Safety of all of those is also another relevant subject.
Instead of trying to jam squishy humans along side aluminum vehicles, why not build elevated walkways above traffic?
In a city, the space between buildings can be auctioned, and the owner of that space is responsible for cleaning and policing a section of elevated plaza. The second story of each building can then be used as a storefront and events can be held in between buildings.
If even a few blocks in the center of a city can be walkable above the traffic, I think it could create a popular tourist hub where people can explore the city, see events and spend money.
Who foots the bill for construction, maintenance, and inspections which ought to be thorough and frequent, that’s another question I hope somebody who knows politics can answer.
> Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited?
In my adult life I have always lived in dense urban centers (precisely because I like to walk for coffee, quart of milk, etc., and have a choice of restaurants)
When I return from travel after renting a car, I gush about how cool it was that I got to shop at a mall and stop at two other strip malls on my way home and load the car up with bags of supplies I never could have carried :)
if people on holiday bought mayo and all they need to go with it at Costco, they might have a different memory of their walking tour. grass. greener.
I think it's not happening because it's a chicken and egg problem. To have where to realistically walk, to have some stuff you want reachable on foot, you need to have a high population density. When everyone drives, people want, and get, lower population density because it gives them more personal space, lowers crime, makes kids safer, and cost of living lower. Sure it destroys the sense of community and makes everyone obese, but that comes slowly and so it's not what people consciously prioritise. Thus building good pedestrian infra in a low-density community built for driving won't give much benefit: most places people need to go to will be too far for walking anyway. And pushing people to higher density will mean pushing them to ghettos because everyone who can afford, lives in those car-centric, low-density, safer places.
First steps would be ditching zoning, parking minimums and maybe favourable tax for businesses set at first floors of multistory buildings. This way you give space for development and gradually density will improve
You got it wrong. In us, because of zoning and parking mins density got wrecked and housing supply small and prices increased a lot and many ppl moved to suburbs. In us ppl had no choice because the law was designed in this way. Make no mistake, a lot of ppl want to live closer to the city if the housing supply/zoning would allow it and if prices will drop due to higher supply, basic market rules
In (most of) EU on the other hand zoning is much more relaxed and you can live either in a big dense city or a village, it's up to you
Also, safety is usually conditioned by public/social monitoring which happens in well developed areas (neighbors watching, ppl hanging out and as result ppl tend to commit less crimes since they are watched). If it doesn't exist, that area is designed poorly.
People are willing to live like that everywhere. Even in tiny towns with one main street, that main street will have mixed-use commercial under residential.
Suburbs with large plots are the most profitable possible mode for a land developer -- construction costs are cheap, all they have to worry about is drainage. Suburbs will never go away; they happen by default. That's why the parent comment mentioned tax benefits for mixed-use development.
You got it wrong, suburbs are the most unprofitable for both the city and land developer. I mean no, for land developer it's still profitable but the profit from building a high mixed use building would be much greater. Tax benefits would apply to businesses that are subletting the areas from already built houses to just jumpstart it
Suburbs are expensive as hell for cities to govern. Population density is low, there's no commercial taxation opportunities, utilities and services have to cover more ground, and so forth. Developers love suburbs because they have a low startup cost: you buy a few acres of land, throw a few thousand bucks to a civil engineering PE to plat it, and start selling to builders. Mixed-use development requires ages of collaboration with city planners, permit denial rates are much higher, and then once you can break ground you have to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and hope you make it back with rent.
Mixed-use development requires ages of collaboration with city planners, permit denial rates are much higher, and then once you can break ground you have to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and hope you make it back with rent.- didn't know it's this way in us. Here in EU developers are happy to build as high as possible with first floor reserved for businesses to a point where cities are thinking auch a high density may affect negatively the life of the other ppl since the infra/schools nr etc aren't designed for it. And ppl are buying this stuff like hot pancakes
That's not zoning. It's bureaucracy and corruption. Basically politicians are bribed to give authorisations to specific companies. On the other hand, in Germany for example they just give fewer authorisations to protect the revenues from their investments in pension system.
The other reason is just lost knowledge and huge effort needed to design new areas. New housing needs proper infra like schools, public transport and ao on, all of which should be planned, takes time and costs money. Some cities learned to deal with it, others didn't
Disney World is the example that comes to mind as an environment where pedestrian movement is maximized. When it works it's still better than driving, but it's extremely tiring to walk _all day_ (at least if you're not used to it, like I'm not).
Lets handwave that concern away though; if everyone walked around that much normally it wouldn't be an issue right?
There are still roads, but they're mostly divided from pedestrian movement ways. Mass transit systems connect between the pedestrian optimized blocks. In at least that respect I think Disney World DID become the 'city of the future' example. That's the logical direction to move things.
Oh can we also ban all the noisy cars to underground passages except between 10am and 10pm and emergency use?
Agreed. But this is an easy fix. Except it isn't because it's a matter of character and manpower and only then is it about money. Cities would gladly implement ideas, just create websites with & for proposals, let the neighborhoods know, get volunteers, demand social and corporate social responsibility, plan and organize potential development projects, in some cases we'd have to wait a year or or two or three for some official approval and a construction company to find a free spot but this really isn't a problem to which the solution requires more than a naive beginners mind set and consistency.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen this before. Maybe not the same exact post, but one similar enough to be a match.
It's spot-on.
However, I submit that, as software/hardware/tech engineers, it behooves us to add User Dignity as a fairly important axis; just as important as Security and Usability. Lot more difficult to define, though.
For me, and the software that I write, it's absolutely crucial, and I will spend many hours, refining what appears to be perfectly functional UI, to enhance the Dignity of those using it; especially technophobes.
In my case, I write software for my Community, and I deal with the users of my software on a daily basis. Very few of them have the slightest inkling of what I do. It's "Some stuff with iPhones. I dunno."
To be fair, they often don't offer me, or my work, too much Dignity, but that's not their job. It is mine.
A perfect example is error handling.
Microsoft Windows is notorious for its obscure, jargonistic error messages. Many users quake in fear at triggering one of them.
I have found that the best way to give the users some Dignity, when an error occurs, is to make sure that the error doesn't occur, in the first place.
That can be a tough ask, but good affordance design, doing things like disabling UI paths that won't result in success, smoothly failing (as opposed to crashing, or triggering an error alert that isn't actually necessary to anyone but the IT HelpDesk person), and avoiding the use of jargon, in our displays, are a good way to get this.
I just went through a year and a half of wrestling with a designer, on an app that has been shipping since January. A lot of the stuff that I wanted, wrt to usability, affordances, etc., didn't make the cut.
Some of my concerns were probably overblown, but a number were not. The users are having difficulty in exactly the places I thought they would. They are also surprising me.
Help screens and whatnot, are pretty much worthless. I have a feature in the app, where, if you long-press on any element, a popover appears, with the accessibility label as the title, and the accessibility hint, as the text. You basically get focused, directly-relevant help, for any element of the screen, and it also helps us to make sure that vision-impaired accessibility is handled.
No one uses it.
Ah, well...
I actually have a great deal of love and Respect for the users of my software. I do my best to make sure that the software I write helps them to solve their problems, achieve their goals, and not impact their self-respect and Dignity.
Fire and EMS demands have more impact on our built environment than I see in these comments.
Some of this is direct from land use regulations. Some of this is from political influence of Fire depts.
It's only recently that people are waking up to how the regulatory requirements of staircase design in multi-family buildings for the ostensible purpose of evacuation impact the look and feel of US cities.
Same for street widths. You will rarely find support from fire depts. for compact and connected streets.
AFAIK for US cities, street and intersection size are restricted by the turning circle of American fire trucks, and large cities can't buy European/Asian firetrucks due to buy america
I will always take any opportunity to shit on buy america and how it hamstrings infrastructure projects for the sake of running a jobs program for flyover towns
I once flew to LAX and just wanted to walk down to Santa Monica from the airport, or walk downtown. If it took 8 hours I didn’t care I just like walking and exploring.
What surprised me is that you literally cannot walk away from the airport without (probably) breaking some law by the highway.
I guess this night sound strange to some but it felt a bit oppressive.
When the environment a walker needs to travel is hostile, unsafe, or uncomfortable for them it lacks dignity. A more respectfully planned urban environment gives walkers safety, comfort, and enjoyment.
In high status areas the local government and landlords are much more likely to plant street trees to ensure dismounted people can comfortably walk. In neglected areas there are less trees and the sidewalk is crumbling or abruptly ends.
If SUVs are speeding along at 54 MPH right next to the sidewalk, their wind hits you, their noise hits you, and some asshole drivers intentionally drive over puddles in an attempt to splash pedestrians.
I'm in Vegas. I see bike lanes. I see transit lanes. I see sidewalks.
I also see six lane roads through residential neighbourhoods.
As much as transportation experts talk about dignity, EDI, engineering safe environments, if we build it they will come. I think what's missing is land use planning.
We can provide the safest space, build the best sidewalks, bike lanes, or whatever, but if it faster to drive, and it's more comfortable. That's exactly what people are going to do.
I use to be naive, judging people, for not cycling or walking more. Heck I use to bike through industrial parks against transport trucks, rain, wind, and snow thinking I was doing the world good. And I'm doing my part to show people this way of moving around is possible. You know what I missed, I was time rich during that period in my life. Those others weren't and they want to be comfortable.
If you want people to walk, bike, or not take a car, make the travel time on parity with taking the car, and you'll probably get a better result. Dignity - EDI, ugh.
This is kind of on the right track, but not really. The right part is that people really do respond to incentives. In fact, this is what they are doing with cars too. Cars often seem like an obvious choice, but that's because the environment is set up in a way that cars make the most sense. In South-East Asia, for example, the incentives are such that small motorbikes make a lot of sense. They are a cheap and versatile option, and navigate the chaotic traffic well.
So yes, if we want a shift, we need to reorganize the environment. And the traffic options will follow. Returning to the article, this would mean to bring back walking, biking and mass transit as priority options. Because it's clear from the infrastructure design that everything else besides cars are an afterthought.
The environment is set up the way it is because not only of the culture, not because of the politics but also mega corporations.
People will agree to reorganizing the environment only if they are not the ones you have to do anything or are negatively impacted in any way.
Also, massive reorganization of the living environment is really only an option for a totalitarian communist government, which decides where people going to live and everything else and they just have to take it.
Ghost communities in China showed that even that doesn't always work.
Yes, I see how this all reinforces itself. Maybe this is why initiatives like Strong Towns begin the change with people's hearts. "If there's a will, there's a way", so they say, so if they manage to create enough "will", there ought to be ways as well.
The issue is simple, we don’t need to belabor it. Dense city centers are more walkable, but most people can’t afford to live there, while at the same time being forced to work there. Don’t worry, Europe, you’ll get to the same point eventually with rising time prices.
I just went back for a week to the city in which I was born (in the EU) and I was shocked to see that, in many neighborhoods, there was nobody walking on the streets anymore. The reason is not that they're taking the car more: the reason is safety.
But not safety as in "I fear for my life due to the risk of a car hitting me" (btw speed has been lowered to 30 km/h aka 18 mph in the city). No. Safety as in: "My city has become a hellhole and I feel I risk getting robbed or raped if I get out at night".
Does self driving cars affect how we might think of arteries and driving? I haven't seen a downtown area that only allows self drive yet. Could be narrower etc.
The issue is not about walking vs using some transport tool, but what's needed to support people only walking.
There are many who state dense 15'-cities are eco-friendly because people move without polluting, but no considerations seems to exists about how many others pollute much to supply anything needed by the eco-friendly pedestrians and IMVHO and experience (as a former big city resident now living on mountains) the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.
Strong Towns should start to consider that their model is not those of the modern cities but the one of the older villages, witch due to tech changes is now the model of spread areas. There is no strong-walkable-town possible in the modern world, only polluting monsters, modern Fordlandias doomed to fails like the original, take Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, Prospera, Telosa, ... as good examples.
Than start to ask who profit from them, and you'll see the big financial capitalism behind the (dollar/stereotypical toxic waste leaking from rusty barrels) green fog.
> the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.
This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.
Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.
Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.
Citation very much needed. For each person living rurally or suburbanly, the per-capita footprint is bigger in terms of land, roads, building materials, facilities, shipping, HVAC, and transportation. The supply problem you mention gets worse in rural environments, not better, because you need to distribute goods across large areas. Here's some data too: https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...
Most of the things the article mentions would be lovely, but I'm more concerned with much more basic aspects of walking.
For example, a neighborhood in which most sidewalks are simply impassable for a wheelchair, even though it gets a high "walkability" score for Realtors to claim.
(And that tree cover "dignity" the article mentions? Someone tries to do that by taking a sidewalk just wide enough for two wheelchairs to pass each other, and puts in a tree well that won't even let one wheelchair scrape by. And often the roots eventually tip up the sidewalk into a tripping hazard. And extremely frequent parking-related sign posts along that stretch as additional obstacles. With overgrown landscaping on the other side, jutting into the sidewalk already too narrow. Occasionally with surprise poison ivy/oak, scraping across your hand, arm, leg, or face. And on the bigger streets, some street work gets done, and there's briefly enough space, then, bam, bike-sharing station, with garish advertising. Then winter comes, and if you walk heavily, even with traction aids and diligence, eventually you're going to get injured by a hazard that someone else managed to create beyond normal snow and ice.)
Suggestions:
1. Make the sidewalks passable. Including by wheelchairs.
2. Make traffic signals greatly increase the priority given to pedestrians. (Even consider a near-immediate Walk signal from button/sensor, with half-minute cooldown so cars can't be entirely DoS'd. If that will make traffic worse, then let traffic be worse.)
3. Eliminate dangerous noise pollution. (Like the "loud pipes save lives" modified motorcycles, one of which surprise blasted my eardrum a couple hours ago. Or a subset of the ambulance sirens, some of which I'm pretty sure are well into hearing damage decibel territory for people on the sidewalk, when the siren tries a little too hard to be heard by people sealed into cars and blasting music from their infotainment systems half a block away.)
4. Improve snow/ice management. (Don't plow streets up onto the sidewalk. If punting to property owners, actually enforce that. Also educate and enforce about not actively making surprise ice slicks on the sidewalk. Maybe, a bit like the city plows streets, also have city units go clear the numerous sidewalk stretches that property owners neglected, protecting pedestrians from crippling injury, and then later figure out the delicate politics of whether to fine/bill property owners.)
5. And only then -- after those basics of being able to move around, and not be maimed casually -- think about dignity like pleasing views, and sidewalk feng shui.
Everything about our world is designed for us to spend money. Walkers don't buy cars. People on bikes don't buy gas. Why would the overlords ever promote such anti-capitalism? That's not in their interest. More to that point, dignity is for the rich. Comfort is for the already comfortable. So, shut up, buy the landcruiser on credit and don't you dare consider otherwise.
Maybe this sounds idiotic, but I've started playing chicken with drivers. If it's a crosswalk with no pedestrian signals, as long as they've made eye contact with me, I just go.
Note that this works everywhere but Boston. I visit every once in a while for family or work and every time it takes me a day and a couple close calls to adjust.
When I told my wife-to-be this, she told me I'm insane! And she grew up in one of the biggest cities in the US. There's a couple other commenters expressing the same sentiment.
Most big cities these days have cops who basically quiet quit, and often the shit drivers don't even have plates. Many won't care about "accidentally" hitting and running you, and some might even enjoy it.
You might think this is a joke, but simply giving some idiots a middle finger is enough to lead to them shooting you (or your kid - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-man-killed-6...). Trying to be mr.tough guy with idiot drivers is a quick way to make yourself road kill.
As a city dweller for my entire adult life... huh? What you're describing sounds more like a GTA game than any of my lived experiences in the city. If what you've described is an accurate depiction of your living conditions, I urge you to leave.
One freak incident that made the news isn't going to convince me. And, I'm sorry, but following basic traffic laws isn't being "Mr Tough Guy."
I've lived in mostly safe cities where this doesn't happen, but all you need to do is spend a week in a place like Baltimore to see that what I am writing is absolutely real, and many places really are like an "IRL GTA".
As long as there aren't drivers on alcohol or coke in your city, they will not try to pass faster than you by that place. If somebody does and kills you, they will be fined, so is a... "you win". Maybe. Sort of.
I think this works better if you keep your head aimed at the goal position and only observe the vehicle by turning your eyes, it makes drivers think you're unaware and therefore they behave more cautiously
That is idiotic because you're vastly increasing your risk of injury. And for what? To make some point? I don't see how you benefit from that increased risk you are taking on.
For me, it's more about the cumulative mental energy required to get somewhere. If I walked maximally defensively, that would put me in a certain state of mind. It would expend some of the limited focus that I have in a day. Much in the same way that I don't always read all of the EULA before clicking "I Agree". It's easy to blame someone for skipping through after it goes bad. But the amount of energy and discipline it takes to maintain that when the environment is stacked against you is impractical.
So whatever. Just hit me if you have to. I have no illusion that I'm making a noble point. I just don't have the energy.
Another commenter replied that this is standard practice. Funny.
Because I actually make it to where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time.
Because it's the law. I have the right of way in the crosswalk [1].
Because I'm in the middle of a pleasant morning stroll and I'd rather not have it interrupted by some jackass whose day will somehow be ruined if they arrive at work 4 seconds later than they expected.
We can talk about this forever, but it's a waste of time. Nobody is listening and nobody is making any real effort to combat car culture. And the right wing, always eager to lap up whatever slop corporate american serves them, has chosen this as a culture war issue. "15 minute cities... but where will I park muh truck??"
The dumb-fucks with their emotional support trucks have won. We've paved over the whole fucking country and all of the road construction and automobile businesses are laughing their way to the bank.
Every time we try to fix something, the chuds start crying about "but muh traffic" and it gets canned. They don't want to actually pay their own fucking way, through tolls or gas taxes or taxes on their asinine vehicles. They want to take our money and use it on roads.
It's dead. The middle class is dead. The country is dead. Progress is dead. Try to enjoy yourself for the next 30 years before the Great American Desert reaches Chicago.
People need to spend less time crying about it, and more time making what they want to happen, happen. I've said for a long time that Millenials and genz should give the middle finger to previous generations and refuse to buy their realestate for the going rate. Instead we need to build communities and cities in the middle of nowhere that embody our values (and economics). Or we can wait another 30 or so years for them to die and leave it to the next generation(s)
> I've said for a long time that Millenials and genz should give the middle finger to previous generations and refuse to buy their realestate
Unfortunately there aren’t generational meetings where your plan can be voted on. Also, plenty of millennials and Gen z own property and would gladly buy more once prices drop from you refusing to buy.
Why would I want a shift to walking? Cars give me fast transportation on my own schedule and let me have far more access to things than just walking or walking plus public transit.
I'm visiting Berlin at the moment, and one thing that's really nice is never having to figure out how to get home after a few drinks (or planning who will drive or how to pick up the car in the morning etc).
Interestingly enough that km traveled by car per person in Germany isn't that different from Canada. Of course Berlin is nice, doesn't show the whole picture though.
Because walking is good for you and good for the environment. Additionally, if everyone walked/biked when possible the roads would be more pleasant for you to drive on.
Something I've realized after moving to a walkable neighborhood is that you interact with your neighbors more because you run into them as you go about. Cars are isolating. Walking about builds community.
No car maintenance. No insurance. No gas.
You don't have to deal with traffic or parking
I still keep a car because it's the status quo but if I had to replace it I wouldn't
Cars offer maximum versatility at the cost of low accessibility, high inconvenience, and high unit cost.
Plenty of people can't drive for medical reasons. My wife, for example. If she needs to be driven somewhere, I have to do it. That's a pain in the ass for both of us.
It might take longer to get somewhere by bus/train/etc in the absolute sense, but you know what I'm not doing while riding the bus? Driving! I can read a book, take a nap, daydream, catch up on work or social matters, watch a movie, or countless other things that you simply can't do while driving.
As a result, I actually have more time in the day to go about my life because I opt out of driving when possible. And I live in a mid-sized midwestern city with the middling public transit options you'd expect of such a place.
Then there's money. Insurance, gas, tires, brakes, oil, and routine maintenance add up to several thousands of dollars in yearly expenses if you drive regularly. Public transit is flat-out cheaper, even if you don't have a monthly car payment.
The point of all of this is that car ownership should be thought of as optional. The versatility is nice, and that's why I own a car. But, I don't use it much, because it's cheaper and more pleasant to walk or use public transit.
Because with proper city design you'd get even faster where you want, also on your own schedule and in very rare occasions this doesn't work out you'd get a taxi or rent a car several hours. Or maybe an ebike
Exactly. And cars are essential for many journeys, and for normal family life in many out-of-town regions.
Yet so many people on forums like this live in metropolitan bubbles and have no idea why cars might be necessary. There’s a lot of ideological opposition to motorists at the moment and it needs to stop, because the proposed “solutions” to motoring are zero-sum and in some cases downright hostile
Cities have a limited amount of space, and a disproportionate amount of it is allocated to drivers. It's fine to choose to live in a car dependent suburbs; but don't be surprised when urbanites want to prevent fast through traffic just like suburbanites do. They're not obligated to design their neighborhood for your convenience.
This is my biggest gripe in the US. it's not the cars per se. it's that sub/ex-urbanites want to change the city to conform to their values. keep your car, i don't care, drive everywhere, but don't trash up the city just for your convenience. Let a thousand flowers bloom. cars for the fur trappers, but beautiful, calm pedestrian environments for the urbanites.
> it's that sub/ex-urbanites want to change the city to conform to their values. keep your car, i don't care, drive everywhere, but don't trash up the city just for your convenience.
Agree with the sentiment but IMO suburbs and car-centric cities are basically mutually defining. Suburbanites didn't change the city to suit their preferences, the city changing is what enables the existance of the suburbs.
Suburbs can't sustain themselves alone, they lack the density and zoning to allow their citizens to productively work. The whole design concept is to give you place to live outside the city (away from the poor or minorities) while simultaneously making it as convenient as possible for you to commute into it with your personal vehicle. The end result is a system which generates wealth in a diverse urban area, and then exports much of it to the wealthy and exclusive suburbs. To make a city difficult to commute into by car breaks the whole system, since it deprives the outer suburbs of their revenue source; the people who live there (which typically includes the elite political class in charge of planning) will fight tooth and nail to prevent that.
thx, good way of summarizing it, and I think I understand this state of affairs the same way you do.
> To make a city difficult to commute into by car breaks ...
I think 90% of this is a mental fear. What we are really talking about in most US cities is just measures to overall calm car traffic; bike lanes, bump outs, some bollards, ... Small fiddly things which make city life meaningfully more agreeable for pedestrians, but the effect on drivers is all in all pretty marginal. Some slower top-speeds in the core, maybe parking a little further, ... It's incredibly frustrating to me that these small changes cannot even happen because suburbanites - at least, where I am - will not tolerate even the smallest material intervention. It's all gut feel. If miraculously one of these traffic calming measures does go through, it barely registers as a nuisance.
Why does it need to stop exactly? To me America skews to heavily to being car centric, and simply needs to be more pedestrian friendly, especially in cities. But it doesn’t have to ban cars everywhere. More balance is needed.
As someone who has biked in Minnesota winters as part of a commute, it sucks.
I don't want cars taken away.
I run to get my exercise.
My commute to work is short.
I don't sit in traffic most days.
It sounds like you admit cars are awful, so awful you have to take measures to combat their awfulness. Like choosing a close place to live, running to combat the health effects, and even then you still get some awfulness, like traffic.
I hear these types of arguments all the time for all different things.
Isn't that a strawman? Nobody wants to take cars away, not even in the most extreme countries. What they generally do is they want people to have comparable options until some folks just give up their cars and pocket the savings, accepting the discomfort caused by the constant lack of a car.
In a lot of these discussions, people do often comment denigrating people who drive and acting as if they must walk/bike/etc and there's something wrong with them if they don't want to, without considering whether the tradeoffs make sense for them or not. Those kinds of comments alienate people.
Giving people options would be great. Making a balance would be great. Separating car and pedestrian infrastructure would be great. Massively reducing pedestrian fatalities is incredibly important. All of those things would be much easier to advocate for and enact without those kinds of comments.
> In a lot of these discussions, people do often comment denigrating people who drive and acting as if they must walk/bike/etc and there's something wrong with them if they don't want to, without considering whether the tradeoffs make sense for them or not. Those kinds of comments alienate people.
The amount of in-real life hostility from the car driver community is 1000x but car drivers don't realize it. Hostility on the roads themselves, hostility to ANY proposal that would reduce the number of lanes (to dedicate to buses, cycling, sidewalks, etc).
So it's kind of understandable why there's so much pent-up anger.
At the risk of stirring a pot... Where's the boundary between "nicer for walking" versus "can't pay for it unless population/income gentrifies"?
There are certainly low-cost ways of changing things and not-doing-dumb-stuff, but the list does contain some things like extra-streetlamps and maintained sidewalk trees and buildings with natural stone exteriors etc., which adds up.
Sure, but your argument is "building those things will add up in cost" ignores the already huge cost of maintaining all the asphalt and car infrastructure. Planting trees is relatively cheap.
Pedestrians are after thoughts and hsve to constsntly pull on resources to get ahead. Could have cameras or learning systens that adapt to the flow of crowds. But the world is mot designed for pedestrian peasants.
I wish I could pass a law that forbids politicians from driving or riding in personal automobiles as long as they're in office: they can walk, take public transit, ride a bicycle, or take an airplane (in coach class).
> But the world is mot designed for pedestrian peasants.
Fortunately, small parts of the world, mostly centralised around anglophone North America and a few other "developing/developed rapidly in an age where cars seemed like the best thing since sliced bread, so everyone else was left behind" countries. And for the latter category, countries like Sri Lanka or Taiwan, it's still usually not as egregious as in anglophone North America because sometimes there are leftovers from before when everyone used to have to walk; not everything was bulldozed like it was in US and Canada. (Probably just because they had less time at destroying everything to remake it for cars).
But in a lot of the world, pedestrians are taken into account, and often even prioritised for.
I believe that early on there was heavy influence to build highways and suburbs to support the burgeoning US auto industry. It really makes no sense otherwise, from a planning perspective.
The infrastructure alone to support sewer, gas and electric makes absolutely no sense with such low density residential.
I'm not sure it's actually the rich and powerful necessarily drive much.
Of course, there are car obsessed rich people who enjoy driving. I know some Swedish entrepreneurs who are like that, but I also know similarly successful people who never decided to get a driver's license and who lived in Gothenburg and take the tram everywhere.
I think the car is a middle class thing, but then peasants were upper middle class, but I assume that's not what you meant.
Maybe in a modern context. In the terminology of the time peasants were lower class. The middle class was merchants, and "middle" referred to their social status, not their economic status - it would be unsurprising for members of the middle class to be much richer than members of the upper class.
Farmers were respectable landowners who had employees themselves. They were seen as the foundation society stood on and contrasted with the landless and the rich.
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants.
~ wikipedia
a poor smallholder or agricultural labourer of low social status (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries).
~ Oxford Dictionary
So .. limited land ownership (if any) and almost always a rent paying tenant.
The word you're looking for is "yeoman", btw. Peasantry is a larger concept which also includes serfs, but the yeoman farmer was exactly what you're describing. "Rich" might be pushing it in an Anglo context, but land owning and powerful, though not in comparison to the aristocracy.
That’s because the other poster is using the word “peasant” wrong. Sweden was indeed organised differently than most countries in those days, with the king having his power base from the farmers(and not aristocrats as in most other European countries).
"Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!”"
What is amazing about walking I have no idea. That sounds utterly horrible - to be in a place where everything is so close together that you can walk to everything?
Space, humans need space.
Ugh, I'm getting nauseated just thinking about it. And yes, I've been in places like that, I've tried them out, and they were as unpleasant as I expected.
I tested it, I went to NY using only public transportation, and it was the most horrible time I've ever had being away from home. Never again! Never!
My feet hurt, my back hurt, without a car I had nowhere to leave my stuff, so I had to carry everything with me, or make the long trek to my hotel (NY banned AirBNB, so hotels are far away from where I wanted to be).
It was truly an absolutely miserable experience, and sitting in traffic, or hunting for a parking space is a billion times better.
I've tried NY with a car before then, but I was told you don't need a car in NY - so I tried it! And they are wrong. Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower, it's less convenient because they only run during popular hours, it's more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber.
I don't know why I keep trying this no-car stuff, but I did, I tried Washington DC with and without a car. (I went for 2 days, one without a car, the second day with.) A car is better. MUCH MUCH better, and cheaper too, even paying for parking.
> I was told you don't need a car in NY - so I tried it! And they are wrong. Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower, it's less convenient because they only run during popular hours, it's more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber.
Some town in NY state designed for cars? of course?
In NYC everything about this sentence is provably false.
Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower
Well here's something odd. Just yesterday I was in a city crossing it from one side to the other, and it was so much faster by underground train than it would have been in a car. Yet your statement suggests that that real experience couldn't be true.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that public transport is SOMETIMES worse than a car. What do you think? Might that be more accurate?
Interesting! I have the exact opposite view, hunting for a parking space or sitting in traffic is billion times worse than walking or sitting in public transport. When you are driving, you must be alert, you can't just phase out to some youtube video the same way you can do while riding public transport.
Also walking is the most natural thing to us humans, it shouldn't hurt and it won't if you do it regularly. I don't mean no offense, but have you considered that you drive too much or don't get exercise otherwise if walking hurts so bad?
I used to work in Manhattan, you 100% don't need a car there. A backpack for your stuff.
Subways are a bit faster than walking for short/medium distances, faster if you're going interborough. But cars are so so much slower. Trying to drive in Manhattan traffic is torture.
Maybe you need better walking shoes? Manhattan isn't flat but I wouldn't call it super hilly either. It's mostly level grade, and the sidewalks are for the most part well maintained.
Pub transport is slower if you design it this way. In NL bus and trams have own lanes, priority on semaphores and the paths to dest are usually shorter compared to car paths. Combine with needing to find the parking and in 90%+ you'll get faster with pub transport there than with a car. And pub transport can transport much more ppl than a bunch of cars since cars aren't shared and aren't space efficient even if you drive them full. A single tram with 7 sections in Basel can transport up to 1k ppl. Do you imagine the traffic you'd get with 800-1k cars instead of that tram?
Public transport convenience is made by design, just like bike infra, just like pedestrian infra. The difference is what you prioritize
Your feet and back hurt because you don't walk anywhere and are over-reliant on cars. They shouldn't hurt for small distances, our bodies are quite literally built for walking literally all day if need be.
Also, walking doesn't need to be the only alternative. For medium distances, a bike is better in every single way, both health-wise and otherwise. It's fast, cheap, good exercise, you can store it literally anywhere and even bring it onto the trains for the long-distance travels.
Lol I always say I'm fine with people advocating for zoning restrictions, as long as they also acknowledge that land use planning is the most communist and regulated industry in America, in a way that would make the healthcare industry blush.
Land use planning is the most communist? Doesn't really seem to be run under priciples of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. How would one even have common ownership of land use planning?
As for making the healthcare industry blush; the healthcare industry in the US is brutally uncommunist.
Did you really mean communist? If so, in what way is land planning in the US operated under principles of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
So if it's not actually communist, but just authoritarian, what's the problem? And where's the authoritarianism with healthcare? In healthcare in the US, you can just go out and buy pretty much any legal healthcare you like - surely that's not at all authoritarian.
> I don't know why I keep trying this no-car stuff, but I did
It might just not be for you, and that's okay. Your actual experience is more useful to you than anything I say below.
My personal point-of-view is that I live in lower Manhattan, commute by electric bike, and regularly take the subway, buses, ferries, and commuter rail. I very rarely rent a car for trips outside the city.
> I had nowhere to leave my stuff, so I had to carry everything with me
There's definitely a learning curve there. It's usually possible too get by with less then you think if you plan in advance, but I don't know your situation. I have a little mini backpack where I carry my water bottle, charger bank, sunglasses, hat, and a reusable grocery bag.
> or make the long trek to my hotel
If you don't mind me asking, which neighborhood did you stay in? Was this in Manhattan? I would expect an average of a 5 minute walk to the subway, plus a 5 minute wait time for the train to arrive, and you shouldn't need to return to the hotel during the day.
> I've tried NY with a car before then
I think a lot of people don't realize how well a car works in NYC, even in Manhattan. In the outer boroughs it's probably the most convenient option. The main issues are 1) parking, which you don't seem to mind, and 2) rush hour traffic. Cars work very well here late at night and early in the morning, and pretty well during the day. Robert Moses built quite a lot of highways here.
> Public transport is ... slower
This is often true even in NYC, unless there is traffic. My rule of thumb is that the subway has a higher average time but a much lower variance. An electric bike is faster than both options, which is why delivery drivers here use electric bikes.
In the tourist areas, there's usually traffic, so the subway is usually the better choice for visitors.
The subway is also usually the better choice for commuters, because they commute during rush hour.
> Public transport is ... less convenient because they only run during popular hours
The NYC subway and buses are 24 hours and work well even in the middle of the night, although I would not recommend taking them to the outer boroughs in the middle of the night for safety reasons.
> Public transport is ... more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber
This may be true depending on your personal tolerance for walking and the kinds of trips that you make. You really have to be okay walking up to 10 minutes on each end for public transit to make sense. This is also why New Yorkers walk so quickly!
The Elephant in the Room that author ignores:
Streets smell, and smelling them by walking
a few km, cars and various chemicals are far more
annoying than in a closed window car.
If they were serious about walkable cities,
the streets should be pleasant to walk.
Evidently this isn't the case even in Europe
and even less likely elsewhere, where
smelly diesel engines, motorcycles and garbage
have a significant odor problem.
It's not streets that smell, it's the cars. And you're right - nobody enjoys having a walk near a street with heavy car traffic. That's why in Europe a lot of streets in the city centers are designed in a way to discourage driving, providing ring roads and public transport options instead.
> Evidently this isn't the case even in Europe and even less likely elsewhere, where smelly diesel engines, motorcycles and garbage have a significant odor problem.
I haven't experienced almost any problem with smelly streets while walking or biking in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Munich, Cologne, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, and the list goes on. The worst I can think of is some smelly alley or higher traffic road in Berlin, or when I was in Milan when garbage collectors were on strike.
The worst cities I've ever smelled were São Paulo, Los Angeles, NYC, and San Francisco. Guess what these cities have lots and lots of? Cars.
Your streets may smell, but not most of the streets I've been around in most of the countries I've visited... if your streets smell, that's a solvable problem.
> "smelling them by walking a few km, cars and various chemicals are far more annoying than in a closed window car"
You want to be in a car to avoid smelling cars? That problem would go away if there weren't cars in the places people walk, see also the article and prioritising dignity rather than (say) breathing car exhaust.
Only times I really remember smells is driving in countryside when farmers have used more natural fertilizers... Rest of the time have not really noticed issues.
But then again I suppose being pedestrian or cyclist in those areas would not help that one...
It took me a couple awkward minutes to realize that I'm the only one standing on my feet and not sitting in a car wherever I was looking. I apologized (???) and told them I was heading to a museum, bc I'm a visitor here and that's what we do right? I added a colleague's address and assured them that I'm not "confused", and will take an Uber now.
This was simply unbelievable in my world; for the next week I observed my colleague, whenever they took me out, or went to somewhere: we never walked outside. From the building to the parking lot, from the destination parking lot to the resto and vice versa.
Today, of course, I know that there are walkable cities too, I enjoy walking from my Chicago hotel to the office building :-) every single time I enjoy my US visits, but after a couple weeks I can't wait to get back to my 98% car free European life.