I'm from Pontevedra. It has been the major's long-term project (~ 20 years) to make the city for the pedestrians: and he's done it. This works mainly because of two things: 1) the city is small and it takes aprox 30 min to walk it entirely from end to end, and 2) it is mostly flat. Only a smooth hill from "orillamar" to "alameda/peregrina". Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo). This means tha people from these villages commute by car to the city, which has really poor parking capacity. And the most important thing: there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality. My partner works in Santiago and I work in the UK. There is no future for us in our city unless we want to study and compete for a position with thousands of other Spaniards. I firmly believe the major should also prioritise quality jobs. It is pretty nice for tourists to experience a city with no cars, but the reality of most locals is that they either leave or settle to accept precarious jobs.
> Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo).
He can't! Mayors in Spain do not have the authority to establish public transportation outside their municipality, as is the case of the villages you mention. That would fall under the authority of the Xunta de Galicia, which as you surely know, has done a terrible job with that in all Galician cities, not just Pontevedra. (I'm from A Coruña).
Man, I was near A Coruña a few weeks back and was marvelling at how great it was that I could stick my friends on a bus in a small town and they’d get to Santiago. You have public transit.
Where I live in Portugal, there’s nothing - no buses at all, no taxis, zero public transit of any kind. You drive, you walk, or you ride your donkey.
There are bus stops, from when there used to be buses, but there have been none in 20 years.
I'm curious where you are in Portugal. I visited for a few months back in 2017, and I didn't get a sense of the transit, but there were lots of nice new roads to drive on (which I get is not the right answer here).
I'm looking for a place to move to in 5-10 years, and A Coruña is one of the places I've been researching! A friend from Spain says it's too cloudy/rainy. What do you think about the weather and any points in general about your city?
Maybe I shouldn't answer because housing is becoming prohibitively expensive so I shouldn't incentivize people to come here, but people have helped me in HN in the past :) So I'll do it.
In my view it's a city with awesome quality of life. Indeed it's cloudy, rainy and windy but it's better than most Galician cities (cough, Santiago, cough) and not that bad in the grand scheme of things, depends on what you compare to. 20 or 30 years ago I used to very strongly prefer the climate in southern Spain to that in Galicia, but with climate change things have changed a lot. We now have an actual summer that lasts for 3-4 months (it used to be one month, with luck :)), winters are mild, and we don't have the sweltering summer heat that is common in other parts of Spain. If you really need a lot of sun you won't like it, but if you're OK with weather being somewhat unpredictable as long as temperatures are mild (to give you an idea, we use heating for around 5 months but only turn it on like ~1 hour a day, and we don't feel there is need for AC), I'd say it's fine.
In general, pros:
- Great surroundings with coast, beaches, cliffs, the port, etc.; everything easily reachable by foot or bike from the city center (there are beaches in the city center).
- A 12 km long seafront walk (also friendly for cycling and running) with nice surroundings and sights.
- Nice size, in my opinion: big enough to have plenty of things to do, but small enough to be manageable (in Madrid in theory you have more stuff to do, but in practice my friends who live there end up going to things in their district because moving around is cumbersome. In A Coruña it's easy to get to an event anywhere in the city).
- The city is extremely safe. I have been here for 20 years and I think in all that time I only got asked for money by a junkie at 3 AM once. Nothing more serious than that ever happened to me (and I used to go clubbing night a lot, and still often take walks at night).
- Punches above its weight when it comes to events. From St John's night (23rd June) to early September there are events literally every day - concerts, book/art/medieval/comic/science fairs, exhibitions, workshops, and so on. The rest of the year not so much but still more than in other cities I know of comparable size.
- Also lots of things to do with children, if you have them. Many events specifically for them, apart from not one but three science museums plus an aquarium. And of course the above mentioned beaches.
- Like many Spanish cities, it has plenty of lively walkable streets to go shopping, for some wine/tapas, dining, etc. A lot of street life, unless in very rainy days.
- Galician food is top notch.
- While we are far from northern European levels of bicycle usage, lately there has been quite a lot of progress, with bike lanes and a bike-sharing service that works quite well.
- The city is booming right now, the economy is going well, people have work, so there is a lot of activity in general. (This may change, though. A political change in Spain is incoming and IMO it's not going to be for the better).
- You can reach other interesting cities, like Santiago or Pontevedra, by highway or even better, by train. Santiago is less than half an hour away by train and they are frequent.
So-so:
- Public transport has room for improvement, but it works. Maybe with some wait but it'll take you anywhere.
Cons:
- Still too many cars and pollution for my taste (although we're making progress). Although of course, much less than in any US city, and the city is perfectly walkable.
- The amount of dogs is absolutely insane. Honestly, I travel a lot and I haven't seen a city even close to the amount of dogs you see here. I guess it's maybe not a con if you have one :) But to me it's very annoying, because there's always people that lets them loose near children or that doesn't pick up their excrements, so finding dog poo is very common. And it's difficult not to hear some neighbor with a dog that barks.
- Construction quality tends to be bad. Most buildings are from the 60s-70s boom, ugly blocks with poor insulation. Much of the housing prior to that has little natural light and much of the housing after that has little space.
- Also related to this, the city center, tourist areas and parts of the city by the sea, etc. are beautiful; but many neighborhoods are ugly as hell, full of soulless blocks that have little to envy from Soviet architecture.
- Housing prices are skyrocketing both for buying and renting.
- Since we are in a corner of Spain, traveling tends to be inconvenient. We do have high-speed rail to Madrid which works very well, but if you want to go further, you typically need to take a flight to Madrid or Barcelona and there are not many, so layovers tend to get long.
I've lived all over the place. Currently New York, but not looking to replicate that. Goal is someplace walkable with nice weather and people, and adequate health care. We've spent time in Portugal, Uruguay, Argentina, Thailand, England, and several others for brief visits. Oh, and decent internet :-)
I've been to Pontevedra and actually I thought it was something of a public transport hub! I was there because I was changing buses.
Looking at Google Maps, there's a bus (XG628007) every 20 minutes from Marin to Pontevedra that takes 18 minutes for 7 km, along with at least two other bus routes which are less frequent and less direct.
How much more public transport could you ask for? There are subway stops in Manhattan with less frequent service. It's not practical to build rail to every village. An express bus might save some commuters 10 minutes, but it looks like the population is spread out along the coast so this would not be a huge benefit.
Maybe the buses are always late or cancelled, but that seems like a cultural problem rather than the mayor "forgetting" to provide them.
Public transport just serves as an excuse to argue against car-free policies. Public transport can never be good enough to cover any rural alley cost-effectively. It also does not need to, cities don't need to justify makong themselves more livable to their citizens, at the cost of commuters who only see the city as a parking lot and roads.
The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.
Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.
Anyone care to give a detailed argument for this position. Whenever I'm buying/renting a place in the city I always check its proximity to subway/train/bus stops and how frequently those vehicles stop by. That's even when I have a car. So the solution would seem to be build out inner suburb public transportation out at the same time or beforehand so there's less inner suburb real estate people fighting it? Yeah easier said than done, but it's still worth it to eliminate kneejerk opposition when you can.
It's true there is a bus to Marin every 20min but it uses a _single_ fixed route. People that live far away (>1km) from this path spend less time driving to Pontevedra than walking to the nearest bus stop.
It is not just increasing frequency, it is a matter of providing alternative routes to serve an important part of the population.
> [...] there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality.
Alas, this is basically how it works in most of southern Europe, including my home country Italy. I don't know how much a small-town mayor can do to reverse years of bad political choices at the national level.
I'm not saying the mayor should change what is not under his radar. I'm saying the mayor should attract private companies for locals that don't want to be public state workers.
Thanks for the perspective. I think it's difficult for small cities like Pontevedra to create high quality jobs. There are not enough people to support rich doctors, lawyers, accountants and such. Factories can be established, but most people employed in a factory won't have a "high-quality" job. What other type of high-quality job could the city create?
[1] population ~ 80k, but working population ~ 50k.
Your perspective is really skewed here. 80k is easily enough to support multiple hospitals, specialist doctors, many dentists, and several multi hundred employee specialized companies.
I live in a city like this. We have muni employees, a hospital, some startups, plenty of non-tech jobs. There are doctors, lawyers, accountants, tradespeople, restaurants.. 80k is a LOT of people.
Side note: an hospital in Spain can be a relatively building with a few specialists, perhaps 20 people working here counting the staff. On many other countries an hospital is a huge building with dozens of specialists. The small places are "medical/care center". For sure there’s specialized jobs here too.
Do you know the funny thing? There is a cycle path from Pontevedra that stops ~500 meters before Marin (although still Pontevedra jurisdiction). It has been like this for years. Those 500 meters are ocean. We can't cycle through...
How do the employment prospects compare to other Spanish cities? It's one thing to say prioritise quality jobs but it seems breaking the mold in one dimension is hard enough, but to do it for 2 dimensions at the same time is pretty tough.
The situation they describe is true in the overwhelming majority of Spanish cities of comparable size. It is an actively discussed topic in Spain that there is a serious problem with people having to move to Madrid or Barcelona for jobs and the rest of the country emptying out. Regions with no coast that aren't Madrid are now often called "la España vaciada" ("the emptied Spain"). Near the sea cities don't empty so much, but often most jobs are in tourism so there is still a lack of high-skilled jobs.
There are a few cities of that size that are more dynamic, because they have managed to attract some IT/biomedical/etc. Santiago, which they mention, probably falls into that bucket, although it's still far from being a skilled jobs powerhouse. And anyway it's an exception rather than the rule, and I'd say it's mostly related to having a university with over five centuries of history and all the ecosystem that generates, not to anything a mayor could do.
There are a lot of places with crappy job markets and plenty of cars. I'm thinking of southern Italy for instance. At least they put the city on the map for something positive. Better than being just another anonymous place with poor job prospects and, who knows, maybe getting some attention helps with the economy.
Exactly the point, those that celebrate these victories from the outside, completely lack the perspective what it means for the people on the suburbs, let alone everyone else not fortunate to afford housing in the city center.
Cities don't need to cater to people moving out to the suburbs, who only view the city as a road and a parking lot. Citizens of the city have every right to make it attractive and livable for themselves.
Pity that whole thing with having a job, and wanting to get some better living standards.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
Having lost access to the city center during my teenage years certainly gave me a perspective on those that talk from above, without worries about everyone else.
Around here, people voluntarily move to the suburbs because they want a house and a garden or simply larger flats for a lower price. And then they demand that prople inside the city center cater to them and turn their city into a parking lot for those not living there. I'm glad this is now being slowly reversed, and that cities actually look after their citizens rather than commuters that moved away because they wanted large houses.
As if, living in the suburbs means having larger houses.
Feeling lucky living into one of those matchbox sized flat up on the 15th floor, while community 4h per day, distributed between several buses, train and subway lines.
it really doesnt work like that in Spain. The associations say the US has with what a suburd is, and of suburban life, does not translate to Spanish city planning. A better word for "suburb" in Spain would be "outskirts" of city—somewhere you might be pushed to for financial reasons. They are often urbanised areas of cheap apartment blocks, and if rural, not in a fancy way, e.g. large spacious houses. The discussion on this thread is coming from a cultural misunderstanding.
There are of course also very nice houses around cities, and rural ones out from that, but they rarely characterise suburbs in Spain (Barcelona is an exception I've noticed, and Madrid has some satellite towns and cities North of city that are very plush, though not the suburbs).
Thank you for the real "insider" information. As usual govt tries to get rid of something, but by their incompetence they create other problems.
Me myself living in a large city, try to avoid car as much as possible. But when the incompetence kicks in, the public transport fails at so many levels, I have to use my car, or I'd spend 2-3 times more on commuting (e.g. instead of 1hr - 3hrs daily)
This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first stops on our trip through Spain and as an American it was stunning.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
I was in Spain last month and what stood out is that walkability requires mom and pop stores as well as more integrated neighborhoods with small commercial shops mixed into residential. Small shops seemed to be the majority in the city centers. The only large store I saw was a Lidl. They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars. And these are located in a neighborhood center serving the surrounding community.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
I think big box stores are popular largely because it would be inconvenient to drive between many smaller shops just to find the same variety of goods. It’s the same dynamic we see with car-dependent shopping malls, where the main advantage is being able to park once and visit multiple stores. If instead you had to re-park at each individual store, the experience would be far less convenient.
But if a town is designed to be fully walkable so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), then I think the appeal of large one-stop-shop stores is greatly reduced.
"so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), "
That is funny to read that, because indoor malls were meant to replicate the experience of shopping in a commercial area in a city, not the opposite.
It actually failed though. I feel terrible, sleepy and only want to get out after more than half an hour in these indoor malls. Probably something that has to do with artificial light and aircons.
Interesting. I guess the loud music and high temperature in some clothing stores is meant to achieve the same. They look like methofs law inforcement would use in an hostage situation.
In my case it gives me the urge of leaving as soon as possible. I could see how it could create impulse buy but most of the time I go to a shopping mall, it is to be able to try out clothing before buying and I will just lose patience and go away if it doesn't fit well. I tend to avoid them as much as I can anyway.
You go to Midtown Manhattan and you continue to find plenty of chain stores like Target. Large scale stores are fine. Just don't dedicate space to parking. If you must, use underground parking garages not surface parking lots. You can cater to lots of shoppers if you assume shoppers will walk there or take public transportation.
It's easy to forget the large Department Store started in downtown areas with plentiful multi-story buildings. We tend to remember the few that remain now as the anchors at the ends of malls, but they started as more natural vertical extensions of urban development.
> They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars.
It's very common all over Europe, they are simply called "markets".
Mixed use zoning and some rules on what businesses can open would go a long way. Where I live I can walk to a small downtown that spans a few blocks with a train station. Unfortunately there is no where to buy groceries. There's like 3 ice cream shops, 3 pizza joints, and 9 salons though.
Grocery stores are pretty low-margin, and need a certain amount of demand (for the size Americans are used to).
Some convenience stores get moderately close to being a grocery store.
It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry (and of course, only one of each type) and have people still willing to shop there.
American-sized grocery stores are relatively new though. When I lived in Germany downtowns had plenty of smaller, specialized stores. There'd be several small butchers, small bakeries and sometimes even a fish monger. Stores that carried produce would usually beer less specialized but there still would be plenty of small ones like Spa and Edeka used to have small locations in walkable areas. And of course proper markets at various frequencies.
We have a very large number of grocery stores. They just aren't in walking distance of the downtown area. So there's demand, but apparently not enough for a bodega with produce.
I don't know about that. There have been large grocery stores and retailers in Washington DC for years, and walkability is fine. It's most comfortable when it's just one or two in a neighborhood, of course, but a block's a block.
Major retailers for sure but DC stores are typically more compact than their suburban counterparts. IMO it’s great. I far prefer the small WF in Logan Circle to a giant one in NOVA - it’s much faster to get in and out and still has everything I need.
I would say that the causality goes in the other direction. We have big stores Carrefour and even some Coscos, but not in the middle of walkable cities.
>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc. It was great. You'd get the occasional guy that jumps on, makes a speech about how he's raising money for something or other, and walks around trying to sell chocolate bars. And there was the occasional dangerous person, insisting on getting up in your face.
So long as this sort of behavior remains at a very low level, something like maybe once every couple of weeks, that's probably okay. But public transit loses all appeal if it happens often. If it rises to the level of violence, everybody starts thinking about the suburbs.
Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced. If it is not, and other options present themselves, people will choose the other options.
This happened en masse many decades ago in America. Those that could decamped for other places where their social expectations were met.
I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
All this applies to cars as well. Drivers are wild and driving is absurdly dangerous. I hate driving because other drives act like they are the car in the world - particularly post covid. Here in Toronto turn signals feel like they have been uninstalled. We have a ton of street racers tearing up the roads. I see motorcyclists pop wheelies and rip down major streets weekly.
All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I sit on the bus watching 10~25% of drivers on their phones watching videos at 60mph on my way to work. All ages too, including surprising old people. I live on a street that's posted 25 MPH and watch people impatient with the light down the block try to cut around traffic at ~40 down a narrow 1.5 lane street. Several times this year I've watched people cross a double yellows to drive into oncoming traffic to make a turn or skip past traffic. On Monday I was late to work because a driver ran into a pedestrian, stopped, then drove off, leaving him bleeding from the head on the side of the road.
Yeah, let's talk about antisocial behaviors. I'm getting to the point where I think roads should be designed specifically to inconvenience drivers. And I am one, I like being able to drive across the state, or across town to places that can take a long time by transit. Cars can be great.
> All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I would argue that drivers are worse. I've had motorists stop me while crossing a multilane street asking for directions. I'm thinking, "WTF, this isn't a safe place to stop and talk." I've also have had drivers pass by me while I was laying on the road. (One time after flipping on my bike because of street car tracks. The other time after being struck by another vehicle.) And these are normal people I'm talking about here, not some "big scary" stereotype.
"you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate."
This is the sort of vacuous moral posturing that loses elections and if it wins them, it makes cities unlivable.
Why should I be fine sitting next to someone who shit his pants several times and likely has lice and scabies? And yes, it occassionally happens even in Czech public transport.
If you not just tolerate this, but scold people for being disgusted, the public transport system will lose the middle class and with it, any benevolence of the tax payer.
Civilizations always have some minimum for public behavior. Not stinking to high heaven in closed spaces is one of them. If you fight against such bare minimums and tell people that they are bad people for requiring them, you are promoting pure, unadulterated barbarism.
I don't know how it is in Czechia, but here in the US, we have a long and storied history of suburbanization, white flight, redlining, exclusionary covenents and discriminatory mortgaging.
The result is entire generations of people who grew up in suburban sprawl, isolated away from anyone who didn't look like them. I don't expect to be able to convince those people to suddenly turn over a new leaf - if anything, the argument was lost long before I was born.
You cannot make public transportation both useful and sufficiently sanitized to where these sorts of people won't be bothered. It's an impossible standard - at least for a country as diverse as ours.
At this point, what is there to lose by speaking the truth?
My experience is that panhandlers on the road like to post up at long red lights, at which point you’re effectively forced to share space with them for N minutes unless you intend to run a red light. In the subway, you just change cars.
(I’m riding the subway right now, and two people just changed cars because of weak A/C.)
Well, as one data point, I've been driving in the Northeast US since 1996, mostly around Philadelphia and Boston, and that has never once happened to me.
Saw a juggler in Barcelona do this. Was juggling at the lights, then ran around asking for tips. Ran up to me too, as a pedestrian, but I was crossing the lights then so he decided to focus on the cars instead.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.
You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.
>>> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
>People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes on public transit. If I have an uber or a private taxi or even a private collectivo which is a private system that works like public transit in much the 3rd world, if I get sick of someone panhandling for the Nth time I can kick them the fuck out.
If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.
Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.
I don't think that's true at all. Police in NYC are able to remove passengers who are being a nuisance, there just aren't enough of them to police every car of every subway train.
In my experience (as an NYC resident) the people causing problems on the subway aren't just being assholes for the sake of it. They're homeless, have mental issues or frequently both. I suspect when you visit Germany or Japan you're seeing the effects of much more comprehensive social nets that actually care for these people rather than let them fall through the cracks and live on subway trains.
You don't need police to trespass someone in private transit though. You can just tell them to leave, and if they don't they can be made to leave (depending on the state). If you're familiar with bouncers you understand this function.
Expecting a police to be available to every transit disturbance, I agree, is not going to end with a functional outcome.
I'm not sure why there would be a distinction, really. The NYC subway has a specific transit police force who would act as the "bouncers" in this scenario. Either way it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Disruptive passengers can be ejected on public transit.
You don't see the difference between every driver being able to be a bouncer, and only sworn police being able to be a bouncer?
Private citizens generally can't trespass people on public property. You have to get a policeman and the policeman has to cite a specific policy or law they have violated.
The private system in this case is way more pragmatic since every driver that is already on the bus has bouncing rights.
Well you just admitted it applies more to public transit because they need a police to kick them out. If I can be an asshole and no one is able to show up and stop me, I have effectively the freedom 'de facto' to be an asshole even if I do not have 'de jure' freedom to be an asshole.
Personally I'm not so sure police in NYC can kick people out for 1st amendment protected activity, which was what I specifically referenced the asshole activity being under the umbrella of. That was your assertion, that while I contested how pragmatic it might be, I never stated whether I believed it was true or not.
Drivers are given the latitude to kick passengers off public transportation for a range of reasons including violating the rules of conduct.
If I'm reading this correctly, you're talking about panhandling as an example of asshole activity that you believe is protected by the 1st amendment. Specifically, in NYC, it was ruled that panhandling is not protected speech on public transportation, see Young v New York City Transit Authority.
Of course, if the passenger refuses to leave or stop, the driver can't physically force them to and must escalate to a police force. Although, I imagine that's similar in many other countries as well.
I don't think it has anything to do with free speech laws, it's simply civics and the lack of it in American society due to a multitude of factors.
American society doesn't understand collectivism in any level, your country has been built upon individualism without much care for collective living, you just reap what you've sown.
Have you considered that America is a wealthy country, where anyone with a job even flipping burgers can buy a 150cc motorcycle and then take his girl on a date without a process that involves getting accosted by a paranoid schizophrenic?
You can basically buy a small motorcycle or scooter or fast e-bike on credit for the cost of maintaining a bus pass. It's only a rational choice for elderly or people with such mental or physical disabilities they can't maintain or operate similarly cheap alternatives. The end result is public transit gets dominated by hood rats, mentally ill, homeless, and a few elderly and people with disabilities, and due to the first amendment you can't stop the first couple classes from harassing the rest so as soon as a normal person gets their 50cc scooter or whatever similarly cheap other option fixed they go right back on that.
Sweden is also a wealthy country, even more here in Stockholm, people can lease cars for cheap, can buy scooters, etc., and public transport is still great: clean, reliable, covers a huge area since it's very sprawlwd, with almost no disturbances (in more than 10 years I can count on my digits the amount of times I've seen someone being mildly disturbing to others passengers). I only cycle and ride public transport here since I never cared (nor had to care) about getting a Swedish driver's licence.
The issue is not free speech, it's how your society educates people to be citizens.
If the US builds high density corridors supported by high frequency, reliable public transit connecting desirable destinations (housing with shopping, CBDs, etc), I'm willing to bet a lot that every social class will be represented on those public transit lines.
Yeah, great.. I was recently hit by a paranoid schizophrenic on a E scooter.. More logically he could have been denied access since he had plenty of public transportation options where he wouldn't have gone on to eventually maime people.
I don't have any reason to believe a paranoid schizophrenic capable of buying and maintaining a scooter is going to be any more persuaded to use public transit than anyone else. They are going to use alternatives for the same reason the rest of us do.
The ones using public transit are generally the ones with functional issues to the point they can't even get to that point of having a functional e scooter to crash.
Court systems persuade people based on weighing rights, necessities and probable harm. Reduce public transit and their decisions change, increase it and they may make incompetent pilot free zones.
I'm not sure that's quite the case, because as a country we do tend to be rather compassionate when motivated to do so. You frequently hear from travelers "Americans are the nicest folks you'll meet" and I generally believe that's true. It's not about individualism vs collectivism, but lack of empathy enforced through transportation methods that by design create a lack of social cohesion.
Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
> You frequently hear from travelers "Americans are the nicest folks you'll meet"
It's fake niceness, it's the American way of being "polite", most times I interact with Americans it's pretty clear it's surface-level niceness, more like a theater than genuinely being it. To me it's quite grating and makes Americans feel untrustworthy.
> Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
I live in Sweden and usually tell people that it's the most individualistic collectivisc place I've been to, people are individualistic in the sense of self-sufficiency but care about the collective if you are acting against it. In that sense we are much more collectivisc than the USA, whenever I've been in the US it's very clear that most aren't caring for the collective aspect at all.
I know you are being facetious, but its hard to get past the uncomfortable theatre of 'this is all just fake nice for tips' if you are visiting from a non-tipping country.
Being nice and being empathetic are very different things. Niceties are protocol; you can be empathetic and considerate while displaying very different types of mannerisms.
I’ve found a good chunk of Americans to be vacuous, self centered and obsessed with performative individualism. Other people don’t need to make a show about their kindness.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
OP is right. The demand is huge and supply is tiny. Even with those scary panhandlers people are jamming onto public transport (when it actually exists) and going far far out of their way to experience walkable areas.
> zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional
Crime in NYC is exceedingly low and the schools are great. Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
Wait. Are the pedestrian friendly cities battlegrounds with panhandlers with horrible schools, or are they wildly expensive luxury destinations that are in such high demand that only the 0.1% can live there?
So, OP is right. Despite the Nextdoor-tier rant about panhandlers the demand for walkable cities is huge. So huge that the super rich will pay handsomely and put up with panhandlers on top of it to live outside of car hell.
At least one wealthy family in NYC I met doesn't use surface transport for much... they use helicopters or have things/people/shopping/restaurants brought to them.
Had an experience where a store sent tailors, stylists, a manager, and a ton of inventory so that they could clothes shop while still in their home. Apparently, this was "normal". My shock was a source of great amusement to them.
They did the same thing with restaurants, movies, concerts, even a play... the staff, etc. came to them.
I have no idea just how wealthy they were (Brazilian who owned many businesses in oil and gas production) but I had never seen (or even heard of) such service.
I don’t think your wealthy acquaintances are representative.
I’ve lived in NYC my entire life, and I know plenty of wealthy people. Most take the subway; a small but not insignificant minority drive or are driven everywhere.
That's an amazingly reductive take on a complex issue, and it infers something which was not implied.
At no point did I suggest that walkable cities were not in demand, only that the current state is less than ideal for a large number of people, to which your solution was "be rich".
Renting has to support the mortgage on that. The only difference between being able to afford a house and affording rent is having the capital for a down payment
That’s not really true. Renting is significantly more affordable than buying in NYC right now. I don’t know the exact reasons, but presumably most landlords bought a long time ago and refinanced when rates were low.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
These are not issues with public transit. These are issues with municipalities that don't invest in their citizens.
For one example, public transit connects people to jobs. Some people in nicer areas with good jobs fight against public transit because they don't want the working class to have easy access to their neighborhood. So, again, the issue isn't public transit, it's people who don't want to share their municipality's resources. New York today has free kindergarten, universal school lunches and the excelsior scholarship program. Thanks to investments like this, we see crime in NY today is lower than even Giuliani's tenure as mayor...
> Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner."
That literally all of society.
The American idea that you live in suburban home that is a quasi gated community, drive into a parking garage, then go up to an office, only interact with workmates and then driving back out with no social interaction other then work is just not how most society worked for all of history. And its not how the US worked until the 1960.
The reality is, violence and death on the roads, is far more common then on public transport. There are tons road rage incidents, an absurdly high number. Those lead to all kinds of problems and quite often shootings. You are in more danger then on public transport generally. And yet I almost never hear about that when Americans talk about transport policy.
But yes, there does need to be rules enforcement. But on the other hand its also true that the US often has very user-hostile design principles in pretty much every aspect of their city design and policing policy. And that often invites or re-enforces bad behavior.
And social policy. You have too many people wandering around in a psychological state one negative interaction away from an incident that could easily escalate to murder.
Such people exist in every country, yes, but fewer in most places.
I lived in Manhattan (Chelsea) and took the subway to work and most other outings (when I could not walk) in the few years before Covid.
It was fine. You would get some people trying to sell stuff or in some kind of distress, but it was not all the time and it was easy to manage.
Americans who don't live in dense cities (and use transit) seem to be obsessed with the idea that these are some intolerable dystopias that must be dismantled.
It was the best place I have ever lived, except for the weather...
I found the density of Manhattan oppressive and stifling. Coming from Wrigleyville, in Chicago, it felt very impersonal and alienating.
I ended up buying a house in an internal suburb (a former suburb from the 1930s that had been swallowed by the city) that is also a historic neighborhood (so it's character cannot be destroyed by developers).
It’s fine that not everyone likes the same things.
What bother me is a loud minority of anti-urbanists complaining about cities they don’t live in and pushing for policies that hurt them. All while economic data clearly shows cities are more productive and subsidize they rest of society.
I was right by Halsted and Addison. By oppressive I mean brutal in a sense. The drunks falling into the street. People shitting in my alley. Trying to get on and off the red line during a game. The huge crowds. Fights on the El platform. Cat calling. Harassment. People sleeping in my stairwell.
It was rather eventful let's say. I just didn't really know what I was getting into being new to the city. It's pretty amazing what you grow accustom to.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
As a european I read this comment, its sort of implications, and reckon US must be hell in some areas. TBH London has seen a big drop in health, pan handlers have "lightly" started appearing on public transport, I think I only began noticing it since 2020.
My point is even with the occasionaly pan handler in London, that statement wouldn't make sense, as it is not "obviosuly bad" in that regard.
Well, panhandling was just one thing mentioned, and to focus on that to the exclusion of the others seems disingenuous.
But it does depend on the nature of the panhandling, doesn't it? Passive panhandling is one thing, and aggressive panhandling is something else, right?
The point is that people will accept some level of anti-social behavior, however they define that, and above that level they do not. No amount of bluster or "why I just never" or incredulity doesn't change that. If you want walkable cities with good public transit you make it attractive and hospitable to a wide majority of people.
Or don't, no skin off my nose, but acting shocked that there are people who think and react differently than you do is silly IMO.
Im confused, you seem to be offended for some reason
EDIT> I reread your comment what on earth are you talking about? Im not acting shocked, and nothing about my reply is anything to do with other people having differing opinions.
As a North American who has contended with public transit in many different cities on this continent, I can tell you, you should infer that a person making comments like this has been primed by conservative media to: fear everyone who isn't exactly like them, overestimate the crime in cities, demand a fascist police state, blame the victims of circumstance (and be blind to the systemic issues that put them in said circumstances), blindly dismiss any honest attempts to fix the underlying issues as "communism".
>The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!"
A cousin was visiting us in our nice suburb. We had a slow, not-busy road we walked on when we lived there, and we'd wave to anyone; neighbors, vehicles, etc. Our cousin was sort of uncomfortable, and asked "do you know all these people?" I explained that we knew some of them but were just being polite and friendly. She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't think this occurred to her at the time, but that means she lives in a pretty awful place. Why exactly would it be _dangerous_ to wave at someone in a friendly way? There's only one answer to that question; because you live around violent or unstable people.
Before anyone says I'm just privileged, I've lived in rough areas before, and I can't fathom why anyone would put up with that sort of daily violence, noise and general degradation of quality of life if they otherwise didn't have to. We ultimately ended up moving out of the city just like you said because the crime was getting worse year by year. Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less) And if you go and try to get him to turn it down there's a significant chance you'll be met with violence? Or people harassing your wife if she's ever "foolish" enough to walk down the street without you? Or to need to explain to your wife "hey, we can't walk through that group of kids, I can't really defend you against more than two attackers." All of these were regular issues for us. Home invasions on our block started ramping up, we knew people who were attacked, shot, killed, just while walking home.
To your point, this wasn't academic. It can be quite the 3rd rail to try to explain _why_ the violence in the city is bad, what is the cause and what is the solution. But when we're talking about my family's safety, I just don't care. I'm not going to live like that, and would have done almost anything to get my family out of that sort of situation. I really can't even fathom people who would write these things off. "Sure, my wife might be murdered and abused in a home invasion, but there are really cool walk-able restaurants!" It's pathological.
Sure, when you compare a "nice suburb" to a "rough area" of the city you'll come to such conclusions. But if the city you lived in is anything like mine, that disorder you experienced is likely highly localized to those "rough areas". Given this, it might be more helpful to compare a "nice suburb" to a "nice area" in a city.
I'm glad you chose the experience of taking a walk as your original example because it was instrumental in helping me to decide that I wanted to raise my family in the city.
COVID offered an opportunity for my young family to spend a month in the suburbs and the thing that sticks with me now after all these years later is how much I hated taking our then 1 year-old for a walk as compared to the city. In the suburbs we walked past the same houses on the same sidewalk-lacking streets barely seeing anyone else. If we wanted anything beyond that it required loading our toddler into the car.
Compare this to a nice area of the city where the density allows for a vast array of possible destinations and plenty of folks to smile or wave at on the way. Walks these days could be to the local park on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, or to the local Italian Ice spot because the weather hasn't gotten too cold yet. While it's still possible to have those experiences in the suburbs, it's hard to be as spontaneous when you've got to consider things like car seats and parking.
> She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I was born and raised in urban environments.
Let me translate this for rural (or fake rural aka suburbia) minded folks:
In cities people don't wave except to people they actually know/have seen several times because...
It's gauche, awkward, weird.
There are just too many people in cities and nobody can pretend their city is just one big village. People just go on with their lives and don't wave 1 million times per day. Waving is reserved to actual acquaintances.
In this specific case, it was most likely a bad neighborhood or someone with a heightened sense of fear due to reasons that cannot be clarified without knowing the person directly.
> (Boston) .... Why exactly would it be _dangerous_ to wave at someone in a friendly way?
It's not dangerous at all to do this. It's just considered odd & borderline impolite to do that. It's hard to explain to an outsider, but you see it brought up a ton on places like r/boston. The stereotype is that people in the northeast are "kind but not nice". By and large we don't engage in frivolity like greeting random people when walking around.
This is also true of the tube in London - if you talk to a stranger on the morning commute you may as well have peed in their backpack - the response is about the same.
And it can make sense. A lot of people are packed in small space and commuting. Not exactly an uplifting part of the day. I can understand it's considered polite to try to keep quiet.
What's funny is where I live now in Italy (outside of the big tourists areas) is the exact opposite. Any line or idle time you have with random people will become a conversation. It's almost weird to not have a conversation.
>She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
This is the most hilarious thing I've read on this site. Your cousin might get some weird looks waving to random people, but why would they feel unsafe? I have never known more of my neighbors than in Boston, and I've lived all over the U.S.
People in New England are generally not at all polite but very kind.
Like if you waved at someone they'd give you the bird but if you dropped your groceries someone would help you pick them up.
I live in a rough area. The kind of problems it brings are far, far, far more manageable than the kind of problems that trying to exist in a "nice" area where some large fraction of people will hate me for how I live and have no real problems so they'll focus on me. Nobody gives a shit what you do in the hood. If you don't make part of your living doing some sort of business outside the law the violence will probably never visit you. That said, despite violence being not great, property crime generally is quite low here compared to even much nicer areas in other corners of the country so that takes a lot of the inconvenience off IMO.
I think the mistake you're making is assuming the entirety of all cities are rough areas. There are plenty of rough suburbs you don't want to live in either.
> She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't really understand this. It's well known people in the NE don't simply wave at everyone. I grew up in the south so it's odd to me to not ask any person I interact with how their day is going, but I've never seen it as some safety issue. Just different culturally.
> Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less)
I'm not sure if this is alluding to race, so I'll ignore that part, but kids are going to be kids. Suburbs, city, doesn't matter - if you have teenagers around you'll have things like this. When we lived in a suburb my wife always complained about the kids doing this and I would always chuckle because at one point I was one of those kids ;)
I live in Seattle and we wave to our neighbors every day. We also have block parties with big cookouts, kids running up and down the streets and sidewalks playing with each other after school, and I get to enjoy a highly walkable lifestyle. My son's normal is multiple parks within a few blocks, walking to a small grocery store to pickup ingredients to make dinner, and having multiple friends he can walk to and visit throughout the day.
are you my neighbor? Sounds like where I am, but with only one small corner market in walking distance. There used to be a bigger grocery/deli until about 5 years ago. Now it feels like we're in a bit of a donut hole within Seattle.
The semi rural and rural US south is, in many places, much more dangerous based on crime statistics. Stranger danger is also much less of a factor than is perceived.
Maybe. But I know that many blue cities also play games with crime metrics and what gets classified as what. Not to mention the utter lack of prosecution and consequences trains citizens to stop reporting, leading to the data changing in misleading ways.
You've fallen for right wing propaganda. Crime has continuously fallen since the 70's. Individual areas of cities might get worse (there's a cyclical nature to newly built up, desirable areas aging and becoming low-income as other areas get rebuilt), but it is an indisputable fact that you are less likely to be violently attacked today than just about any other point in living history.
And the difference in crime rates in urban and rural areas is grossly overblown. Looking at California numbers, a city-slicker has about a .9% chance of becoming a victim of violent crime, and hick has about a .6% chance. That's a small reduction to a small probability. For context, if your risk tolerance hasn't forced you to cut out meat and alcohol from your diet to avoid cancer, you're miscalculating risk if you think you should flee the cities to avoid violence.
Thank you for this. This is precisely my issue with public transport in the US (granted my experience has only been in SF, Oakland, NYC and Chicago).
It’s emotionally taxing when you need to keep your guard up all the time. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be on someone if they had kids to tow around as well.
How is driving not emotionally taxing the exact same way? Driving with my kids is fucking terrifying. I have 2 under 6, and I have to lock them into these giant car seats to keep them safe (to be clear I like modern car seats, their designs just remind me how vulnerable kids are). Every time I go through a intersection I worry what happens if someone runs the red and smashes into our side.
I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.
And when they get a bit older you need to stay in the house all day trying to keep them off the worst parts of the Internet because cars have completely destroyed kids freedom
> Every time I go through an intersection I worry what happens if someone runs the red and smashes into our side.
Something like this is a lot more rare than harassment on public transit. And not exactly avoidable. So it isn’t worth thinking about. But on public transit you have to maintain constant vigilance just to avoid the many bad situations that could come your way. You’re very exposed and vulnerable. The crime rates on transit are after everyone puts in the effort to avoid being a victim.
Is it actually true that car accidents are far more rare than harassment on the subway? I don't take public transit enough to comment (there is none here).
Car accidents have a much higher likelihood of maiming or killing me. Even if they're more rare, I would posit (but don't have numbers) that the total cost to society (including property damage) is MUCH higher.
Data point: I've been in two car wrecks. Once as a passenger where the driver spun it on the Mass Pike to 128 ramp, and once when I got T-boned on my way home from having my car serviced. That was my favorite car. Nobody's ever bothered me on public transport. Not on the MBTA, not on MBTA, Metro North, or LIRR commuter rail, not on Amtrak to New York, not on the New York public transit systems.
It's not just about crashes. It's also about close calls (in both directions, being hit and hitting others), people driving while checking their phones, rude drivers: tailgaters, honkers, high beamers, etc. The list is endless.
Because if you don't suck your have bad interactions monthly or less and when you do have them they're pretty easy to explain away in a way that doesn't involve the other guy having malice or whatever.
Maybe try going whatever speed the rest of the traffic is going. Less ire will be directed at you if you're not everyone's problem point.
I can make most of the same arguments about driving.
People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.
I take my kids on the NYC subway very often. It isn't emotionally taxing because the vast, vast majority of journeys encounter no issues at all. What you're describing is a self inflicted state of mind.
I don't drive as often but I've run into far more potentially dangerous situations driving on the highway with my kids than I have on the subway.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
Haven't seen any of that in 30 years of using public transport in several countries. Are you ok in US?
The closest to anarchy I have been in public transport was withnessin a hobo refusing to pay for the ride to trigger the police response and be booked.
No, not at all. Have you seen the news? We'll be at Weimar Republic levels of inflation soon and half the voters think the person that's causing it will fix it.
It is subsidized. Through taxes you pay the full prize anyways. Just that someone else than you who decides, what do with your money, like subsidized public transport.
My daily bicycle commute takes me right through the heart of my city's homeless district, and like with many cities things have gotten a lot worse since COVID.
Cars are far and away the biggest threat to my safety, and the source of all the harrassment I receive while out in public. I mean, every now and then some guttersnipe blurts out incoherencies at me, but that's not something to be afraid of.
I regard driving, in cities, to be an inherently anti-social activity. If you want a healthy community with safe and lively streets you got to be out in it, not sealed off in a protective cage.
If I see your wife and kids in trouble I'll intervene, don't worry.
Of course, motor vehicle crashes are the second biggest killer of kids after guns. I don't know where homeless people sit on the threat scale but it's a negligibly small amount.
That's a non-answer, so I assume that's a "no" on the wife, kids, and/or letting them pedal through tent city.
In any event, homeless people are low on the threat scale because people generally avoid riding a Schwinn through homeless encampments, which should be perfectly obvious but I guess not.
I don't have kids. The homeless district is easy to avoid, and there's a k-12 school right on the edge of it with many kids walking, cycling and taking the bus to school. I've never heard of a serious incident involving homeless people.
Here's a fun fact for you: statistically cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, and that's in spite of all the hazards they have to deal with while out riding.
> Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?
I have lived in and around more than one area known to have a high density of people experiencing homelessness. It seems a lot, lot scarier than it really is. Once you get used to just tuning them out it's fine. The vast, vast majority of the crime in that community happens amongst themselves. Are there exceptions to that? Of course. But the numbers are low, just like most crime.
Cyclists usually deserve it. You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road.
I watch Cyclists pull shit that's illegal on the road all day, and they refuse to simply USE THE SIDEWALK (infinitely safer for all involved). That way, when the cyclists inevitably do some dumbshit the only people at risk are pedestrians and the usual damage is at most a broken bone rather than roadkill.
Localities that ban cycling on sidewalks are spiritually and ontologically evil.
> deserve [to be harassed by people in cars]
no, they don't.
> You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road.
A driver's license is not required to use a road. It's required to operate a car. Cyclists explicitly have the right to use the road, including outside of bike lanes. When cyclists act unpredictably it is very, very frequently a response to motor vehicle traffic and pressure, because drivers are seemingly incapable of understanding that their tons of metal can hurt people.
Cyclists would love separated infrastructure, but the vast majority of transportation dollars go towards car infrastructure in the US.
> [the sidewalk is] infinitely safer for all involved
no, it isn't. This creates a lot more points of conflict with both drivers (who do not expect fast traffic on the sidewalk) and with pedestrians. Sidewalks are also often not appropriate for wheeled vehicles moving with any speed; terrain is uneven and turns are too sharp.
You're driving? Act like you have a driver's license, which requires you to respond safely to other road users including cyclists. Can't do that? Get the hell off the road.
Last time I tried riding on a sidewalk (which is legal where I live, but notably not everywhere) some random pedestrian who felt affronted pushed me off my bike, so ymmv.
>
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
Everyone loves driving until they have to:
* Pay through the nose for parking.
* Pay through the nose for tolls.
* Pay through the nose for gas, maintenance, insurance.
* Replace a car that they can't afford to keep running.
* Are stuck in endless traffic hell that them and all the other drivers on the road have created.
* Are seriously injured or killed by a reckless/drunk/idiot/inattentive/unlucky driver.
----
The first bullet point in particular drives people into a frothing rage. Drivers, as a group, are incredibly and irrationally entitled to free storage of their cars on public/private space.
The last bullet point is far more likely to happen to you in a car, than you are to be assaulted on a bus or train. Across my immediate family, I can count three serious crashes (Only one of which the family member in question was at fault for). None of us have ever been assaulted on public transit, and we've taken a lot of it.
If my direct connection bus came back - or at least bus frequency were increased - (Thanks, budget cuts, for adding a 10-25 minute transfer to my downtown to downtown commute), my car would once again be collecting dust in the garage.
People take transit when its relatively fast and gets them to where they need to go. That's the primary driver for ridership.
Spot on. Where I live now we have a single car for convenience, but we can go weeks without driving. It's amazing, and I don't understand how I managed to commute by driving for so many years without going crazy.
In my experience cars are much more dangerous than public transport.
I've taken public transport my whole life, in numerous countries, and only bought a car for the first time 7 years ago when moving back to the US. Never had any incident on public transport or felt unsafe. Was it always as comfortable and convenient as my car? No, but that's a separate issue.
I'm a weekend road cyclist and I've had a number of very close calls with cars -- invariably big pick up trucks, sometimes flying an American flag (you know the type) -- purposely rev up and buzz by me as close as possible on small country roads, sometimes honking as well or flipping the bird out the window. Any little stumble or twitch at that point and there were a couple of times I would have been in the hospital or dead.
Yeah, there are sometimes strange people on public transport, as well as homeless, etc. But I've encountered more *holes driving cars than on the bus or subway.
> Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced.
All of society requires this, not just public transit.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
You can have walkable neighborhoods and still allow some cars. They can only enter a neighborhood at low speed as a destination, to park there. To get from one neighborhood to another you have normal roads and highways. The Netherlands does this (although they have a lot of public transport as well. And bikes of course)
In a big American city. School issues as well American due to funding structure. I'm not saying there aren't problems at school in other countries, but not like that: schools in cheap US districts are extremely underfunded.
> I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night sky and here coyote's screeching in the background. I respect the fact I grew up in an environment that was NOT surrounded by pavement and was NOT surrounded by buildings. There was endless landscapes and forests of exploration. I could find any tree and build my fort. I could spend hours hiking with my dog and find no end. I could take a nap in a field of grass and not worry someone would cross my path. The Santa Cruz Mountains have so much to offer and I feel like there is so much to learn about them.
> just providing an alternate perspective that life beyond the boroughs is not just strip malls.
It kind of is. Where'd you buy your charcoal? Did it have a parking lot out front and two stores on either side of it sharing the same overall building?
Of course there are exceptions, maybe you're one of them. But they are so small numerically as to be irrelevant. The vast majority of the country is living nearly all their personal life in tract housing and their commercial and social life in a strip mall. I've travelled a lot, just calling it like I see it.
Regardless of all that though, if you like it then great for you!
My comment above was just noting that city living is fine. I keep seeing in the media that NYC is scary or dangerous or something and that's fucking ridiculous, it's not.
How is this such a common occurrence? I take the train to work almost every day in Australia and I’ve probably been asked for money twice in the last 3 years, and never seen a violent situation.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
Maybe this is just another "American version" of something - in Czechia, public transportation is truly safe (incidents happen, of course, but it's like one per year that makes it to the news), even at night.
This all comes down to "We can't have nice things in America because of our toxic mix of individualism and capitalism."
Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.
Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.
It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.
> This happened en masse many decades ago in America.
There was a name for this trend - White flight.
I grew up in southern suburbia and in walkable southern towns - they do exist, in pockets.
I learned two things from my experiences. First is that anywhere there is foot traffic, you will get homelessness, panhandling, crime, and just generally people you don't recognize. It's not because big cities aren't being policed adequately or anything policymakers are doing, it's just something that naturally comes with the territory.
The second lesson I took away is that we as a society often can't tell the difference between "This place makes me feel uncomfortable" and "This place isn't safe." Despite all of those issues I outlined above, I felt very safe and comfortable living day to day in urbanist spaces.
This is not a problem with public transport but with utter lack of urban planning and convoluted social dynamics in the USA.
Dense cities and lack of urban sprawl reults in awesome places to live and you don't need to even use public transport in those as everything is just close by.
Also - IMHO the problem with the USA is more focus on competition (you have to "win") instead of cooperation hence more fracutred society that yields more povery and "not-nice" public spaces...
> The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
I hate public transit because it takes 2x+ the time to get anywhere since it’s such an afterthought. The routes are horrible and the vehicles too infrequent.
When I lived in Berlin I could get anywhere in the city within 15-30 mins, it was insane.
I ride my bike or e-bike everywhere I can. Cars are the worst.
What he suggests is completely besides public transit, it's about spaces in general where cars aren't allowed or catered to. It doesn't just apply to big cities, but mid-sized and small cities have an absolute dearth of pedestrian-focused plazas. Small towns are extremely hostile to basic foot traffic. There's no reason for this to be the case. In Europe the small town equivalent will have a center where most of the commerce and services are, where cars are completely forbidden. You simply drive into town, park somewhere and carry out your business on foot. It's very nice.
Plazas do exist in the US, but they're rare. Very rare, especially outside of New England. That's what OP is talking about, public transit is a 'solution' to a different problem, and one that I don't like either. See, my biggest problem with urbanism is that it's overwhelmingly focused on building huge megacities, which are inherently unwalkable nonsense. Instead, walkability becomes rhetoric for any mode of transit that isn't a car. I hate that. I want walkable living spaces that are actually walkable, not urban environments where I walk to the train station because the city is too large for its own good.
I don't want to replace the personal car with public transit. It misses the point entirely. I don't want to have to use anything more intensive than an e-scooter to get around the place I live at all. Walking to the train station and riding that for 10-20 minutes to get to the other side of the city sucks. The social problems endemic to public transit in the US are just icing on the cake. Tokyo is a hellish nightmare compared to an Italian commune.
Or, you know, we could handle homelessness. I lived in Amsterdam for the last two years and despite walking everywhere and intentionally exploring, I never saw a person sleeping on the street, and the only time I was asked for money was an obvious tourist.
I don't think the NL government is remotely perfect, and they definitely are struggling to build enough housing, but their 'housing first' strategy towards homelessness seems to mostly work?
Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.
Well, it leads to the behavior that you mentioned. It's unavoidable and it'll keep getting worse as the price of housing in dense cities continues to soar.
Your only choice? Move to suburbs and wait for self-driving cars. I get downvoted every time I say this, but that's the simple truth.
I've spent a lot of time in Singapore, with literally the worlds lowest crime rates, highest trust in society, and best mass transit in the world.
It costs 100K USD to get a SHITTY car, like a Toyota Prius.
Everyone in Singapore is desperate to make lots of money, is desperate to buy a cool car, and is desperate to never step one foot onto the transit system again.
Mass Transit is a cope for being poor, even in a society with no crime and the highest trust in society. Using it is admitting that "I failed to make enough money to get out of here"
We have car culture because everyone wants it. Americans can literally buy a C8 corvette factory order at 20% off MSRP right now. The world salivates at such deals and is extremely jealous of our way of life.
Liberals who try to kill car culture are exactly why Trump got elected and why he's so popular right now.
As a dual EU-US citizen who has spent decades on each side, Western Europeans don't strike me as extremely jealous of the American way of life. Quite the opposite. But if believing that makes you feel better go ahead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The post-Giuliani years were great until we started implementing an approach maybe described as "property crime enforcement leads to injustice because it's due to inequality, and moreover should be treated as a societal issue" justice system adjustment. There, spikes of menacing and assaults on public transit occurred, to the point where a disconnect became quite obvious to commuters.
The problem with this narrative is that wealthy people take black cars to drive them around, leave the city on the weekends, and ultimately don't have the day to day concerns around safety.
Add to that an interesting fact that the most progressive neighborhoods are generally the safest (with an anti-police and criminal justice reform bent) while the poorest have a pro police attitude. Here's an interactive map that lets you compare votes across neighborhoods of the different Democratic candidates in the 2021 election where we had Adams making his pro-police rhetoric center to his campaign. Look where his support trends highest: https://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nycrcv2021/?office=mayor&c...
I also know Pontevedra from walking the Camino and I suspect its reliance on Camino tourism is probably a big driver for this move. You will know as well as I do that the only parts of the Camino that suck are when you are walking for miles alongside a busy highway. A bit grim but thankfully not very common.
There is another practical reality that separates the US from Europe specifically with respect to walkability. The US has much more extreme weather in many places. What would be called severe heat or cold in much of Europe, which I've suffered through for the week if need be, is normal weather in many parts of the US for several months on end. You need alternative transportation for those extended periods.
Few people enjoy being outside in a tropical swamp with a double-digit UV index. Same with the extreme cold that you get in the central US far from the ocean.
I live in Seattle, where many people walk everywhere all year (myself included), no car needed. But that is because the weather is perfect for that kind of thing, being 5-25°C with limited precipitation virtually the entire year. If I lived in Houston, for example, I would be driving in the summer regardless of how walkable the city is.
Europe also spans some extreme weather, from the frozen North to the scorching hot Meditarranean.
I am from Spain, where 40ºC in summer is normal but winters are mild. I have friends and colleagues from Finland and Latvia, which are pretty much the opposite. And yet all our countries are walkable.
And like in the US, population is mostly concentrated in the spots where it's not that extreme, so that's where most people are/would be able to benefit from human-centred urban design.
Difficult to call it sprawling given the geography, and I don't know what "pedestrianized" even means here since walking in many neighborhoods is both common and designed for.
There is plenty of accommodation for vehicles in Seattle, that is true. Even people that walk everywhere often own one in order to take advantage of the prodigious outdoor activities for which the region is famous.
It’s definitely very sprawling from Olympia to Mt Vernon. We only just managed to pedestrianize Pike Place Market. I struggle to think of a pedestrian neighborhood. Just cuz you can walk doesn’t rise to that level. Ballard no. It’s all cars and car parks. Fremont no. U district no. Cap Hill no. Queen Anne no. West Seattle no. They’re all car dominated neighborhoods without much pedestrian space and poor accommodation for cycling too.
I am Spanish, so I grew up with what you describe.
I now live in rural Japan, a country that outside of the big cities also suffers from awful American-style urban sprawl, and holy guacamole, how can people live like this? The area where I live is just big box stores and houses scattered everywhere, and you need a car to do anything. It has made me really appreciate my homeland...
> Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people.
Maybe most but there's plenty of public space that doesn't. People choose to live around the public spaces that do. Some even try to change that instead of moving somewhere that doesn't. The great thing about America is that there's plenty of everything for everyone, but it's not just going to come to you.
That's factually incorrect. Most of America has outlawed proper mixed-use zoning, which means those nice walkable neighborhoods are literally illegal to build.
Even if you don't want to live in a detached home deep in suburbia, there often isn't an affordable alternative.
There really aren't all that many options for people-centric urban spaces in the US. A handful of small districts in various cities, but nothing approaching the scale of such things in the thriving Spanish cities.
While the current Paris administration has its detractors, its policies, removing surface parking, expanding bike lanes, and lowering speed limits, have done tremendous good for air quality (see the Airparif study for details in [0]).
Paris may not yet be at Amsterdam’s scale, but only 5 % of daily trips in the city are made by car. It’s staggering that roughly 50 % of public space is allocated to cars [1], despite their minimal share of actual mobility. And I'm all in favor in further reducing car lanes, parking spots...
I was in Paris this year, for the first time in 10 years, and frankly, I didn't notice less traffic. All streets are full. There are certainly more electric cars, and fewer old ones. However, the streets are now crowded with Uber and taxi cabs. I didn't notice fewer cars.
A lot of streets have been closed to traffic (school streets in particular), and many lanes have been converted into bike lanes. It was harder to get around the city as a pedestrian/cyclist a decade ago.
It also really depends on where you went in the city. Were you just hanging around ile de city and the marais?
I go between NY and Paris and it's insane that New York basically has zero pedestrian streets, while Paris has so many. I used to live in SF and Chicago before, and same, there are no pedestrian streets, why?
It's a reason among others, but this bike-centric policy (pedestrians nor public transport are the priority) led to an exodus of families [0]. I am among them, as I realized pretty quickly that it's a real pain to move around, buy groceries, go to the doctor, and so on with very young children in Paris, especially if you don't own a car. And now you have to deal with the uncivil behavior of the cyclists, moreover.
It's the same everywhere, as most European cities are dominated by 20-35yo people. They vote for green parties and then move out when they have children, as they realize that the policies they supported are not child- or family-friendly at all. The extreme example is Seoul, with its zones where kids are forbidden. It's a shame, as families require more public services and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and so on), but they are being pushed away by childless youngsters who hate cars. Unfortunately, no middle ground seems acceptable for this crowd, so I'm unconvinced that it will change.
Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation, so they lead municipalities to decrease investment in this sector, which is, however, the most inclusive, safe and efficient way to move people around. This is also seen in Paris, where the bus speed has never been so slow, the fleet is aging,, while the city hall spends like a teenager on a weekend trip with daddy's credit card on new bike lanes.
In the EU at least, the next nail in the coffin will be the low-emissions zones that will make it prohibitively expensive to enter/leave the center, forcing families to leave metropolises altogether.
I think you are totally off. Never lived in Paris but I lived in Barcelona for many years, during the transformation to be more car-hostile and bikes and pedestrians friendly. I spent there my 20s-30s and left when I had a family but due to (public) school scarcity in our neighborhood and rent prices. But mobility was not the issue at all. It was actually a pleasure bring my daughter to her kindergarten by bike and then go to the office.
And I think Paris and Barcelona share a lot in that respect (the mayors - Hidalgo and Colau - met a lot to discuss exactly those topics and share experiences).
Barcelona is in Spain, on the Mediterranean, where the weather is fair all year long. It's not the case in many parts of the world. Bicycles are a rather dangerous mode of transportation, and I wouldn't use it with kids, especially in a city.
I would never go with my kids on a bike on any road that's shared with cars. The risk, as small as it is, is still unacceptable to me.
Don't know about Germany, but in Netherlands it's solved with having proper cycling infrastructure. It's the right approach, but it is still more of an exception. Where I am at they just painted cycle paths on existing roads and then tried to make it safer by cutting speed limit in half and eliminating lots of street parking. And now it's a mess that doesn't work well for anyone. Next elections are in a year, will be interesting to see how that will go.
Dangerous because a city provides many ways for a cyclist to fall or hit something or someone. In France, data shows that 2/3 of cyclists' "serious accidents" don't involve another road user.
https://www.cerema.fr/system/files/documents/2024/05/3._2024...
In other words, you want them to invest more money into building safer cyclist infrastructure?
An obstacle isn't going to magically pop into existence the moment you mount a bicycle. Car-centric road design can indeed be dangerous to cyclists, but that says more about the road design than it does about the concept of cycling. Build better roads and cycling isn't dangerous!
Do you live in a world where money is infinite? I'd rather have very good public transport, which is accessible to everyone, safe and can give physical workers so rest and a quiet time after work, than bike lanes everywhere.
And the problem with removing cars from the city center is that many users still need cars, either because they have families, or because they work and need a motorized vehicle (e.g a plumber).
Because a plumber needs to carry heavy things, such as a water heater tank, and possibly more as he will intervene on multiple places during his day? And that he may need to get back to the shop/depot in the suburb during the day to get additional parts, if needed? Do you live in a magical word where things teleport by themselves?
I've never worked with a plumber that has anything they need in their van / truck. They always need to go buy something. This departure generally doubles the cost of whatever plumbing is happening.
> 35% des cyclistes tués, 63% des cyclistes blessés gravement le sont dans un accident sans autre véhicule impliqué.
35% of cyclist deaths, and 63% of cyclist seriously injured occur in an accident with no other party involved.
Another graph in that report shows that a vast majority of cyclist deaths occur while cycling for leisure. I would hazard that most cycling in cities is utilitarian.
Yes, this will be the road racer guys (it is mostly guys) screwing up while descending an Alp or Pyrenee. Split-second safety margins and if you get it wrong on a 60kph descent - or someone else gets it wrong, or you suffer a mechanical failure - you're likely dead.
A city is a much more dangerous environment. You have bollards, stupid pedestrians who keep on trying to circulate on YOUR sidewalk, potholes, dogs, and so on.
It's really not, because speeds are so much lower - and injury is, by and large, related to kinetic energy which is the _square_ of speed.
OK, cycling at 50km/h in a city is dangerous and stupid (if you're even physically capable of doing so, which few are?). 30km/h in suburbs / 20km/h in the centre is mostly fine, and 10 for busy complicated spaces.
30km/h is slow enough to prevent the vast majority of crashes being fatal, and 20km/h will avoid most serious injuries.
Kinetic power is lower, that said you can still hurt yourself pretty bad depending on how you fall. A wrist doesn't need a lot of force to break, nor a skull needs to fall from high to cause trauma. A cyclist on a sidewalk going at 20km/h can cripple a child for life (not that the cyclist cares, but just for the example).
I broke my wrist by falling from my bike when I was younger, almost while stopped (my wheel got blocked in a tram rail).
And yet if you look at the public health statistics for the things _actually_ crippling children for life, "other people on bikes" are a very long way down the list - at least in most places; I don't know if Paris has a specific problem there. You can hurt yourself pretty bad in the home, after all - the major causes here seem to be cars and dogs.
(Before we even consider that - at population level and in developed Western countries - lack of physical activity, and an environment which actively suppresses it through sheer indifference if not outright hostility - is likely inflicting a far greater burden on childrens' health and wellbeing than trauma).
The statistics are low because many places banned cyclists from sidewalks? Purely speed-wise, being hit by a car at 50kmh while riding a bike at 25kmh is similar to being hit by a cyclist going at 25kmh while being static on a sidewalk. Why are cyclists concerned about cars but I should just think "trust the stats bro" when the 5th cyclist going at full speed came past me on a narrow sidewalk? France banned shared e-scooters after many scathing accidents, including deaths and people being crippled. I remember a professional pianist who get her hand broken this way and had to stop her career.[0]
But I guess she's just a statistic, right? Pedestrians, out of the way!
I don't disagree that commuting by bicycle can be hazardous, but the major risks to cyclist safety are cars, trucks and other cyclists (mainly e-bikes). Pedestrians, potholes, bollards, etc. are no worse than an inconvenience most of the time. You just don't build up enough speed to cause that much damage in a busy city due to a fall or colliding with a pedestrian. OTOH, even the mildest collision between a bike and a car is generally a Bad Time for the cyclist.
Source: me, who commutes by bike daily through a capital city.
The problem arises when cyclists want to use the space reserved for pedestrians (sidewalks), or ignore red lights, when pedestrians use the crosswalk. I am not against bicycle lanes, when it is doable, but cyclists should go on the road when there is none. And have insurance + numbered bikes if electrical.
It really matters what kind of cycling is being done with no other party involved. I injured myself only when I was doing "leisure cycling". I did get almost ran over by a dumb college student once during a commute ride, though.
I'm a huge supporter of public transit, but cyclists are a common enemy for everyone: cars, pedestrians, public transit-takers, other cyclists.
I remember seeing another study here on HN a couple of years ago that showed that actually, the all cause mortality of cyclists comunter was actually lower, because the higher risk of road accident was largely compensated by the benefits of exercise. But I can't find the article anymore.
It really depends on the city/quarter where you live. I live in the center of Barcelona and had no problems with two small kids at all. Supermarkets, real farmer's markets, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, etc are all within 10min walking distance. I work from home, but I could walk to the office it I wanted to. I don't have to leave the city at all.
Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
Yeah, if you live in the most expensive part of the town, which is often the epicenter, it may be ok. However, not everyone can afford this, or justify the expense, especially since you are pitted against childless couples that don't have to support children financially. Also, the presence of bikes on the sidewalk makes it hostile for vulnerable pedestrians, and generally turn a pleasant experience (walking in a city) into a stressful one.
Yes, gentrification is a thing around here too, but I also lived in the outskirts of the city and you don't need a car there either. They also have all the essentials. The fancy restaurants and theaters are 30min metro/bus away, but otherwise it is fine too. A car is a luxury in those quarters too.
Completely agree that the presence of bikes and scooters on the sidewalk is annoying and dangerous. The city changed the rules a few months ago and now there is a 500€ fine if you use them on the sidewalk. That fixed the problem. They have to use the street or one of the many bike lanes.
No idea how it is in Paris, but there are places where living happily in a city without owning a car is perfectly possible, even if you have small kids.
If bikes (not cars) are making a city "hostile to vulnerable pedestrians", that seems like a very good problem to have compared to the average car-centric city.
Bikes and cars. But cars have their own space (the road) and rules (red lights, crosswalks...), whereas cyclists ride at full speed on the pedestrian's space (the sidewalk).
It’s false that cyclists routinely ride on the sidewalk in Paris, let alone at full speed. They ride on the road (car and bus lanes) and in bike lanes. It’s true, however, that on some very popular bike routes (rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Michel/Sébastopol), there are enough cyclists that don’t stop at lights that pedestrians can’t easily safely cross. This is a solvable issue that’s independent from the modal share or infrastructure.
The argument that cyclists (implied: all cyclists) ride at full speed on pavement at all times is akin to arguing that cars (implied: all cars) go over the speed limit at all times. It’s daft at best, and utterly outlandish.
You should stop and have coffee in a street shared only by pedestrians and cyclists, and observe the behaviour of cyclists. I have observed it to be mostly slow, controlled, courteous and respectful of pedestrians.
I picked up my son today at the kindergarten, and we walked for 25 minutes back home. Here in Riga most cyclists go on the sidewalks, I'd say that 2/3 of them don't respect a minimum 1.5 meter safety distance, and about the same amount go as fast as they can. I stopped and scolded a food courrier (who is incentivized to go as fast as he can) who was slaloming between pedestrians as if it was a game.
No, I don't feel safe at all, and my son can't walk freely either. In Paris it's the same (my wife, who was pregnant then, got hit at a crosswalk by a cyclist who seemed to believe that red lights were for cars only). Even Le Monde published an piece about it!
I live in the 19th district of Paris—probably the cheapest district within city bounds, with the 20th, and not in the center—and I have no issue living with an under 2-year-old. Hell I even decide to go all the way to the 14th for his pediatrician appointments, on the subway. I can walk to something like 5 supermarkets and bodega-like markets, take the subway to a bunch more including specialized, I can walk to see a generalist, we walk to his daycare, etc. all < 10 minutes. I can’t imagine what you can’t do honestly.
Everyone is competing for space. I don't see how cities prevent building larger apartments. European cities are mostly built out anyway, and the tendency is rather more to split large apartments to cater to the childless crowd.
Cities prevent larger apartments through onerous zoning codes. It's so expensive to build because of the permits and the risk that only a narrow type of structure has a chance of profit.
> mostly built out
Look at rent in Asia. They actually build towers over there and they build large apartments for families as well as small apartments for couples. There's enough building that the housing market is diverse.
Central Paris is denser than Manhattan. At some point the bottleneck is not the amount of people you can cram into a m2 of land, but the underlying infrastructures.
> Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
How much does parking for that cost the rest of the week? How much is your car payment + insurance + fuel? Presumably you did the math and it's cheaper to have bought one, including a nominal amount for your time to rent one on Friday and return it Sunday night. So I'm just curious.
What you’re describing is perfectly possible without a car.
I live in Amsterdam and have a young family. We own an electric cargo bike that we use for groceries and to cart around our daughter. You can use it with an infant car seat and for larger kids.
When we need a car we use a car sharing app. There are around 10 cars within walking distance of our flat.
Many people in cities _want_ a car but don’t need one.
Cargo bikes are dangerous for children, there is little protection in case of an accident (not necessarily with a car, a bollard is enough) and well once you have one child in, you can't really have groceries. You can't use it when it's freezing. What you describe is typical of a one-child family in Netherland, but doesn't fit the reality of most of European cities. Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
> Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
You can bet all those car users also ride bikes though. It's just very common in the NL to live in one city and work in another, things like that. I know people who have cars they use to go to work and back and then take all other journies via foot, bike or public transport.
Peter Jacobsen (2003) analyzed multiple datasets and found that the risk per cyclist decreased as the total number of cyclists increased. He observed this pattern across intersections, cities, and time periods.
Yes, if you focus on one see fragment alone then I'm actually saying the opposite of that I said.
But being car centric or not doesn't even matter here. The argument that car owners don't think like cyclists doesn't apply to car owners who spend a significant portion of their week on bicycles.
I’m not saying that everyone in the Netherlands agrees with me. I’m just illustrating that it’s perfectly possible to live in a city like Paris or Amsterdam with a family and without a car.
Where do you put the toilet paper? The diapers? I can fill a 400 L boot easily with weekly groceries for a family of 4. Most cargo bikes have max 300L space, you have no space left for children.
So go twice a week? I'm not sure what to call people when they can't solve problems that easy
There may be issues with my solution, but if that solution is so obvious, maybe you could have used more words in your comment.
Twice a week doesn't solve the problem that you can have groceries + kids in a cargo bike. And we aren't all retired or in a cosy 30h job that allows back and forth all week.
Are they very dangerous for children? Are there statistics?
It doesn’t really freeze in Paris anymore so it's a moot point, but you can ride bikes when it does (you need different tires, just like cars, and a city that clears the roads, just like for cars).
A bike going at full speed on the sidewalk is dangerous to children, yes. It is why many cities banned cyclists there, which as a result led to a decrease in accidents. Pedestrians don't go at the same pace and can be particularly vulnerable, so I don't see why you need a statistic to understand this basic fact.
The article says that families are leaving because of high rent.
I personally love it when my kids have freedom of movement. Every family we know is the same way. Carting them around all day and then sitting and waiting at various activities just plain sucks.
"Her war on motorists, who last year were hit with a double whammy of speed cuts on the capital’s ring road and the tripling of parking fees for heavy vehicles, such as SUVs, has also sparked fury among families."
Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.
> Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.
This is simply false. I just mapped it from place des Fêtes to place de la Catalogne and selected only wheelchair-accessible options (note that this trip is _not_ easy to do because it goes from one end of Paris to the other). Driving it's 15 km, 45 minutes, using the ring road; public transportation takes 47 minutes (48, RER B, 59/88). You’ll notice the same pattern for, e.g. Parc Monceau to Place d’Italie, a 9 km trip (30 minute drive at 11:47am on a weekday, 45 minutes on public transportation).
Buses are slow _because of cars_. Fewer cars means faster buses. The subway is inaccessible except for line 14, but RER A and B, all tramways, and of course buses are all accessible. You can also use a baby carrier.
Because they target heavy vehicles, SUVs have no proper definition. But many decent family-friendly cars for 3 children with a large boot are in this category. In general, the city has greatly reduced surface parking, which creates a lot of problems for trade workers who need to intervene in the city and need a car.
In New York we had to suffer all these same arguments about low income trade workers with 9 kids that all need to be in different places at the same time etc etc etc. But congestion pricing passed any and it has been an incredible success. None of these arguments about parking hold up.
Not Paris, but I lived in an even larger metropolis (Beijing) for 6 years, with two young children, without a car. We took public transport and/or rode bikes most of the time, and took taxis when neither of those were possible/convenient. Even with the taxi fares it was much cheaper than owning a car.
> Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation,
For short trips maybe, but as a cyclist myself, I'd say cyclists are among those most likely to use public transportation for any trips that are beyond their cycling radius, or where cycling isn't feasible, instead of a car.
I'm seeing a similar trend in my country where even the culture in city centres is not conducive to having a large family, or a family at all even.
All the parents of 3+ children that I know live in the suburbs or even in the middle of nowhere in the case of one family totalling 7 at the moment, as their firstborn already moved out.
Personally I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so I moved to one that's half the size and live on the outskirts with my family, but in the 13 apartments connected to our staircase we're one of three families and the only ones not renting.
As someone with a family and a car, can't you use public transport for that? You can walk to local parks and have a doctor that is relatively nearby, but Paris has very extensive transport network and it is perfectly fine to move around without a car.
No one is arguing you should take your sick kid on a bike for one hour ride.
- Paris' subway doesn't have elevators, impossible with a stroller.
- Buses are crowded, very slow, and being blocked for >1h because of protests or roadworks with a sick newborn is a rather unpleasant experience. I did it already.
And in general, public transportation in Paris has degraded a lot. Who wants to explain to his 3-year-old son what this fine gentleman is doing while heating crack in the back of the train car?
There’s a reason why most Parisian families use a Yoyo stroller or another lightweight, foldable model: you can easily take them on the subway, and if you need help with the stairs, people are always willing to help (I’ve never seen anyone refuse).
Buses can be slow during peak hours because of traffic congestion, but during the day they’re fairly reliable and have plenty of space for strollers.
The Paris Metro is extensive, but I think you’re making very broad generalizations. It’s extremely rare (though unpleasant) to come across a drug addict, and I’ve never seen one during the day.
(Disclaimer: I live in central Paris with a newborn.)
I live in outer Paris (19th) and have the exact same experience. I’ve taken strollers on the subway without an issue and people are eager to help you (it should be easier, of course, but it’s doable). I've also taken the bus, the tramway, the RER. These days I’ll carry my son (almost 2) or take a baby carrier to go faster on the subway.
Bus are slow because of cars.
I’ve never seen a drug addict on the subway (you do see homeless people though certainly).
Yeah, so how do you fold a Yoyo with a newborn in the arms? You can't really, and some stations have a lot of stairs. Regarding drug addicts, I saw many, it really depends on where you live. My son was born in Paris, and we left as soon as we could because it felt really stupid to endure all of this. Buying a car felt like I discovered a time travel machine.
You can leave the newborn in the stroller and lower the whole thing yourself or with someone’s help. You can hold the newborn and ask someone to fold the stroller. You can take the bus or the tramway if you really want to avoid the subway.
I doubt it. Navigating the Paris Metro (or the London Underground) with a _suitcase_ is a shit show - even in relatively new stations. Whoever decided to put stairs in St Pancras with only a lift as an alternative should be condemned to step on lego every day of the rest of their lives.
There are loads of factors at play, to lay the blame of this demographic trend solely on bike-centric policy is, if I’m being very very generous, lazy. Since it’s the telegraph, about a foreign city, I would assume it’s disingenuous.
The article doesn’t even call out bike centric policies:
> “It is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have made life harder for families and the middle class. Construction work, difficult access to nurseries, skyrocketing rents, and social housing shortages have pushed Parisians to the suburbs or provinces.”
The “worst” callout in the article is triple parking fees for SUVs.
Oh.
Anyway.
It looks like there are loads of factors at play and I wouldn’t trust assigning blame to just one, especially when your supporting article only kinda sorta touches on that factor.
My message starts with "it's a reason among others".
And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.
An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.
i haven't made that experience at all, as i've got kids and pretty much never used the car for inner city trips. trips are daily kindergarden, doctor, visiting friends - we do all those with either bikes plus a kids trailer or public transport (i'd say roughly 50/50).
for the kindergarden commute we've used the car two or three times in almost 5 years, when we had to transport birthday party stuff (i.e. cake), but then we stopped even doing because using it was too much of a hassle.
You do realize that (i) "zones" are just restaurants / cafes / museums that have minimum age requirements and not some demarcated city blocks where children are banned and young adults party all day and (ii) this occurs semi-frequently in the west as well.
North Americans visiting Europe often grapple with why they enjoy European cities more than North American ones. It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings that we don't have") but very few notice that the main difference is the urban scale and the resulting walkability. The Netherlands has plenty of modernist and even brutalist architecture yet every city there is a pretty nice place to be. This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions. The layout of buildings together with the connective tissue of tram lines, bike lanes and sidewalks is what makes their cities alive and safe, not elaborate building facades (although they have some of that as well).
Important to note is how most cities have two (or more) zones; the old inner city for leisure, tourism, shopping and going out, the suburban areas around it where most people live, and industrial / office building estates where most people work.
Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.
I spent two weeks in Amsterdam South where I rented an apartment. Commuting to the centre on a tram or even cycling there was no problem. Even though the centre is where most tourists hang out, the surrounding neighbourhoods are just as walkable and bikeable as the inner city.
That's pretty much only an Amsterdam thing, and it is limited to a relatively small tourist-centered area. Even inside the Grachtengordel the majority of buildings are homes or offices.
Also, those "suburban" areas in Amsterdam aren't suburban: they are still built with a bicycle-, pedestrian-, and transit-first mindset. Those office buildings in Zuid are built right next to one of the busiest railway stations in the country, and the highly-paid lawyers will arrive at the office by bike from their nearby homes.
If you want Amsterdam's suburbs, you'll have to go to Almere: it was literally built as a commuter city for Amsterdam. And even there you'll have trouble finding areas which don't meet the definition of a 15-minute city.
Cities always have many areas. And of course the outer areas are not as good as the tourist focused inner city, but they are generally still pretty good urbanism.
Even European subburbs are generally better, smaller roads, more mixed use, more trees, more dynamics, more commercial and building times mixed in. The extreme separation between building types that became the standard in US zoning-codes simple never happened to the same extent in Europe.
I disagree that this is the norm and I don't think it's a goal to aspire to.
The nicest places for humans to exist in have a mixed-use basis. Yes some areas are purely industrial and some areas are dominated by retail or offices, that's fine. But fully segregated residential zones are depressing and nonsensical.
Most cities in Europe absolutely do not have suburban zones where most people live. Non-center areas also have their own leisure, going out, shopping places (usually mixed with the residential areas).
The suburbs purely for residential space where you have to go somewhere else for activities do exist, but usually over time they grow their own infrastructure for shopping and hanging out without needing to go far.
I can’t speak for other cities, but Paris absolutely does not fit that mold: the highest density of people is in the very center of the city (or immediately adjacent cities), where the tourists are. Suburban areas can’t possibly house “most people” because they’re way sparser.
> It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings […]") but very few notice that the main difference is […] the […] walkability.
I'd say both. We do have the history on show both because we have more of it, and sometimes the stuff from eras when the US as we think of it¹ existed tends to be better preserved despite the effects of WWI and WWII. But we also have it easy to get to, often safely on foot, in our cities².
> This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions.
Not wishing to put us down, but I'd say a fair chunk of that is historical accident. A lot of cities started out as smaller settlements that grew and merged, meaning there is a spread of housing, shows, workplaces, etc around the whole city because it used to be in each individual part before they merged over time. America's cities on average started at, or at least very quickly gained, a larger scale, and grew from the inside out rather than by several insides growing until their outsides merged.
Some European cities made the mistake of doing away with some of that and converting to a state closer to that of US cities, and many current efforts are more about returning to their roots than being newly person friendly.
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[1] essentially from the point the founding fathers went to find somewhere they could be prescriptivist about people's, lives because they weren't getting away with that as they wanted to over here, and perhaps a little before that
[2] though there is a fair amount of it that isn't as easy to get to unless you drive
The “Founding Fathers” generally refers to the politicians who were around during the revolutionary war (starting 1775). What you are describing in your [1] seems to be more a reference to the Pilgrims and Puritians (the early North American colonists who showed up around 1620).
The Founding Fathers also did a lot of controlling of some people’s lives (in that they enslaved a lot of people), but they didn’t have to go anywhere to do that.
Anyway, if you want to walk around some history in the US, you can do that in Boston. As you mentioned, a huge factor in the walkability of a city is just having the right population density before cars were invented. The oldest European areas in the mainland US (Spanish areas, in Florida) aren’t super walkable as far as I know.
Maybe it is a Northeast US thing or something, but it this mystery could also be resolved by visiting a college town, observing that it is quite nice and walkable without too many historical buildings…
Not all European cities live up to the stereotype. I've been to Germany a couple of times; most of the cities I've stayed in were quite nice, but Stuttgart came across as an American-style car hell and Frankfurt seemed quite dirty. (Berlin has a strange charm to it, actually, from a combination of modern architecture and historical preservation.)
They don't. Larger cities have many loops of busy highway belts embracing the city, and plenty of tunnels, parking lots and emissions (ie Madrid, Rome, Paris...). But there's always a sizeable walkable urban area, usually proportional to the overall city-size. Even Stuttgart has a nice downtown walking area [1] and a usable public transport system [2].
But, as a fun notice, Stuttgart could be somewhat of a "Detroit of Europe", being the home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, so there's added incentive, and pride, to be a car city.
There are (at least) two Youtube channels, Ray Delahanty | CityNerd and Not Just Bikes, that really drive home the point in their videos that car-centric cities really stink.
As nice as it is to see reviews of transit systems and urban planning in various cities worldwide, NJB's commentary style gets really obnoxious at times. He comes across as someone who believes that everyone who doesn't see things his way is irredeemably, irrationally evil and the reason we can't have nice things (tm).
The Not Just Bikes channel really makes clear the benefits of living in an environment that isn't designed around cars, but also the challenge of designing such an environment. You can't just plop in some busses and bike lanes and expect immediate improvement, you really need to think about transportation holistically. This means considering how cars, trucks, busses, bikes, pedestrians and everything will interact.
The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.
This is true, but urban mobility in the Netherlands was already great a few decades ago. It's just that once you get to that point, further improvements aren't that controversial anymore, because the benefits are obvious. Thus, the situation just kept on improving, and is doing so to this day.
While true, it's also important to remind that until the 70s we were on a path to MORE car traffic, MORE traffic deaths, etc. It took a significant protest for the tide to turn. Google around for "Stop de kindremoord" -- which translates to "Stop infanticide" -- to see the sheer scale of it all. There's plenty of english language articles on the topic.
Long story short: change is possible, but rarely easy. Even in places where it seems like things have always been like they are now.
Yes, it's hard work, but it is possible to see massive improvements in your own lifetime. It might even go faster now that there are so many clear examples already, at least when it comes to the technical aspects of urban planning. So hopefully more people decide to put in the effort :)
One factor here is the perception of safety. To choose public transit over a car, you have to feel safe walking to/from the station and you have to feel safe riding the train. This is especially true if you are at a physical disadvantage because of gender, disability, age, whatever. Because it's a perception thing, this is not just about statistics. A dirty, chaotic subway station just feels threatening to passengers.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
I love walking - both in places as a tourist, in NYC where I lived most of my life, and in my small north shore Long Island town today.
But similar to any other "product" the evaluation depends on the user's needs. As a single guy I loved that NYC was dense and walkable - because that meant (among other things) literally millions of date-able women within a 30 minute walk radius of my house. Great! Now as a dad of 3 I don't care about that at all - and the lower density suburb let's me have a backyard for my kids and makes shopping easy, or taking the kids to activities (yes you can do all those things without a car but people chose not to when they have choice)
There should be some sort of mom-friendliness factor in these conversations. If my whole town is old people, terminally single younger people and migrants (as seems to be the case for the city in question) then high density walk ability is perfect. What's the density and transportation situation in places people actually have kids?
I share this sentiment as well, but while living in a relatively small city with only around 150k people in northern Europe. I moved out to the "suburbs" after having my first kid and find enormous quality of life in being able to have a car and a house. The city center is getting increasingly more "hostile" to car traffic but there's nothing to be had there anyway. A side from restaurants and coffee shops you can get anything you need from the shopping areas on the city outskirts. In a sense I feel this is the best of both worlds: cities for city people, suburbs for suburbians.
As a fellow parent I find dense cities are worse. My kids are not welcome in most of the restaurants, bars, or shops - which is just as well because I couldn't afford to pay for regular family meals at any of them anyway. Even the parks are more art orientation - great for adults but no playground that my kids would enjoy. Not that it matters as 3 bedroom apartments are rare, and more than that impossible to find. They are often food deserts - it is easier for a farmer to get to a grocery store (they expect to drive but the uncontested roads are fast), you often need to drive to a grocery store as there is no option, of if there is one it is the expensive high end store not the discount supermarkets.
Note that most dense cities have within the same city limits less dense areas that look like suburbs. These are often called "inner city" they are generally affordable but because the schools are bad are not places I'd want to live. For this discussion I'm going to count them as suburbs...
It doesn't have to be like the above. I've seen dense cities around the world that are very family friendly. However not in the US.
There is also a gradient of density and walk/bike-ability between NYC, one of the densest cities in the country, and super spread-out car-dependent cul-de-sac suburbs, but the US often skips those middle steps.
Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated communities up and down a 4-lane 45mph highway and where the line of cars picking up kids from school each day backs out onto the road and blocks traffic.
They exist, but in New Jersey -- most of the "cities" (with the exception of downtown Jersey City and downtown Newark) would be called streetcar suburbs in an earlier time. I live in one of them, and it's great: I have a small, private backyard, but I'm also <15 minutes on foot from multiple public parks, restaurants, shops, etc.
Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.
And the cost to buy into these developments where they do exist suggests a supply and demand imbalance. Near me a new-ish 'town center' development with a mix of apartments, shops, restaurants, grocery store, townhouses, and single-family homes is easily double or triple the price of an equivalent house in a standard cul-de-sac neighborhood a 15 minute drive away.
I understand what you are saying. I raised my kids in an American suburb. But I grew up in a European town.
In places like Pontevedra, the kids can walk on their own to all the activities, once they are old enough. And nobody really needs a car. I didn't learn to drive until I was 23.
I grew up in Paris and that’s where I’m raising my son right now. I think there couldn’t be a kid-friendlier place (other than cost):
- I can walk to a gigantic park with many playgrounds in 5 minutes
- I can walk to a small little park with a few swings and a slide in 1 minute
- I can walk to a pool in 15 minutes
- I can walk to my son’s future kindergarten and elementary school in 2 minutes
- I can take public transportation to a gigantic zoo in a bit over 30 minutes (also a gigantic aquarium, playgrounds, etc. in the same area)
- I can take public transportation to a world-class kid science museum in under 30 minutes (also a kid-centered movie theater, indoor skydiving, bowling, many more play areas, etc. in the same spot)
- I can take public transportation to an amusement park in 45 minutes (1h to a second one, Disneyland Paris)
- There are tons of indoor play areas for days it rains I can walk to or take public transportation
- I have pediatrician and world-class pediatric hospitals walking distance, or a 5 minute wait away for EMS
And all of that much more safely than if I had to drive my kid everywhere (leading cause of death from 4 year onward IIRC. Once my son is old enough, he'll also be able to independently go to all that (say when he’s 12), which would be completely impossible in suburbia.
The only thing you can do in the suburbs is try to privatize all these resources, which is what a backyard is more-or-less (and a private pool, a home theater, buying tons of toys, etc.), but you inevitably get lesser versions as a result.
See, I'd almost see that the other way around, that it's easier for kids in a city with good public transport links because they can get around without having to drive. I live in a medium-sized city in Germany, and kids here can be really independent - you'll regularly see them on the trams in the morning going to school, or hanging out with friends in public spaces. My wife, who grew up here, used to make plans with her friend every summer where they'd figure out all the summer activities they wanted to do and how they'd get there and which buses they needed to take, and then they were basically set free to do that.
The other aspect is having things to do. A backyard is nice, but we have so many parks and playgrounds and cafes and museums and kids' clubs within 15-20 minutes of us that I don't think there's any danger of kids getting bored. And all of that is available on foot or by tram. With the Deutschland-Ticket in Germany, you don't even need to worry about tickets, just hop in and go. As someone who moved here from the UK where these sorts of cities are much less common, the high density and accessible public transport is one of the reasons my wife and I ended up staying here to have children rather than moving back to the UK.
I grew up in the city in France and man it was so much fun, I was outside all the time visiting my friends, I don't understand how kids can grow up in the suburbs tbh
I really wish the US could get more of this. I know here in Boston this has been a hot issue with the summer shutdown of Newberry on Sunday.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around -
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars.
One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway.
From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.
From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."
The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book.
Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.
My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time.
At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).
One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time.
>
Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.
If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.
The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.
Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.
Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.
Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.
That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.
I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
Great, let's do that when the negative externalities of cars are properly priced into their usage. This is the number one reason that's causing such sentiments, and rightly so. Expecting people to approach it differently before that is fixed is unrealistic. Currently, cars are subsidized to an absurdly higher level than public transit. That's the status quo. A change of that status quo means moving car subsidies to public transit subsidies, unless you raise taxes, which will make the exact same people defensive and hate you.
> At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.
But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.
I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.
It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.
I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.
That "state of equilibrium" is only unavoidable if there are infinite sources and sinks of people. That's a workable approximation if you're only studying one part of a much larger system, in isolation, but when considering the entire world, it falls down. If we have enough nice areas for everyone to live in them, that model stops being applicable.
And, well, a lot of people _can't_ have their own speed bubble.
Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.
And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.
The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.
I have a 4 year old and an 18 month old, and I don't own a car (nor does my partner).
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
Sure, it works in your context, you live in a city with 9 million people and you sometimes rent a car - fine. I live in a city 100x smaller. I literally don't know a person that doesn't own a car, or at least has access to a car.
The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.
A city 100x smaller is a city with 90k population. That's half of the population of the Upper West Side. And the UWS has an area of only 5 square kilometers. Unless you specifically choose to, you are not going to walk 3-4 km.
-10deg winters are certainly going to put a stop to much walking or biking, regardless of whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.
London has abysmal transport situation - any time I needed to traverse through city, it was 3+ hours of buses and trains/subway mix. Of course doing the same with car would be even worse.
Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.
Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.
Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.
I don't understand how you can spend 3+ hours getting around London. I live in Bristol and when we go to visit London, it takes about 3 hours including the train all the way from Bristol to London. Getting from A to B in London is probably 30-40 minutes tops using the underground.
> Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.
That also depends on weather around the year in a given country. Here in Poland travelling on a bike ranges from uncomfortable to impossible for 1/3 of the year.
It must be much worse than the weather in Norway and Finland, then. Or perhaps just an infrastructure problem? I imagine if they didn't clear the roads then driving could get pretty challenging too.
How do you know? I know many parents who move their kids around in bikes (many of those live in cities with less than 200k people) who specifically opted not own cars.
I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).
> Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.
So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.
Sure, but these are multi-million cities. They have amazing public transport.
The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.
Pretty rich that you are complaining about generalization now where you made the initial statement that the "Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density" which doesn't seem to have any limits in scope.
You made a clear assertion about the need for cars, regardless of urban density.
But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.
But
The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)
Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.
the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.
We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.
A single newborn can be handled without a car (if you spend used car prices on a stroller system!) - but if you have three kids under three, or five under 7, a car greatly simplifies things - or you need to hire additional wranglers.
It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.
Until you're the only adult in the car, driving along the motorway, and one of the kids in the back starts crying / gets car sick / needs the toilet when you're 15km from the next services. Granted, train toilets with a toddler aren't much fun either.
Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.
Singles - I agree. Even doubles, there are reasonable ones.
Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.
And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.
But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.
(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)
Very wrong. I'm not OP but I have two teens and we raised them from birth in a city and have never owned a car. We rent rarely and only to go on trips to places inaccessible by rail. All kids activities were walking distance or subway. Probably ten times as much as you can find in a suburb too. Also kids learn to ride the subway by high school if not middle school so they can be independent like no place else.
Simply untrue in many places. My next-door neighbour rides his bike with his daughter to school then rides to work at the nearby hospital (up a gnarly bank, too). I see many kids walking to school all year round. Kids are more than capable of making their own way to school from the age of 8-10, depending on the distance.
Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.
I mean that's a depressing existence for the kids. I walked and biked around everywhere since I was 6 or 7 years old, I'm extremely thankful I didn't have to rely on my parents being free to drive me around so I could see my friends.
The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.
You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers.
Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.
And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.
What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.
Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
In Beijing I would often take the long way around on a subway loop line so I could get a seat. The subway is just always crowded, and you could be standing for an hour if you don’t plan your route right. Most of the time I would just plan my day around a very early taxi ride to get to work and then return before the awful rush hour they had, but that was 10 years ago and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be an option anymore (I left Beijing in 2016), so smashing into the subway would be necessary, if you do some clever route adjustments you plan your trip through big transfer points where lots of people get off, guaranteeing yourself a seat (worked on my last trip there in April).
Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option.
At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.
Honestly this is one of the undersold advantages of public transit. It can be fun to optimize your path and switch things up both on a macro and micro timescale. In a car since I'm constantly aware of what I'm doing, taking a less efficient path feels like I'm wasting a part of my life. Taking a less efficient path on public transit feels like I'm taking more time to stop and appreciate my surroundings. Especially because sometimes that alternate path gives me a better view.
A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.
> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.
That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."
When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.
The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.
But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.
One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.
And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.
But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.
Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.
I have some of that, especially when I haven't been out for a while. Moving to a place where English isn't the main language helped me quite a bit to get into the right headspace. Also realizing no one really cares about me. This is fun: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png
Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.
Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.
>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.
>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...
The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
> The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence.
This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by.
> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people.
I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.
FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people.
Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.
Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards.
First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common.
Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason.
Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane.
Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate.
I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city.
London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better.
Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable.
I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!
I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent.
To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces.
Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.
Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm.
I suppose even if you sub in "goal to cause death/injury" vs "recklessness that could reasonably be expected to produce injury despite not being the goal" and it would still hold true.
Personally I think it's contentious whether drunk driving etc injuries can be considered "intentional" even if they are expected and reckless. When I think of intentional injuries, I'm thinking of ones where the perpetrator has that as their preferred outcome, something I don't think applies to most drunk driving injuries.
How many indiscriminate neck stabbings are there per year in your town? And I can’t help but ask the obvious, how many indiscriminate deaths by car (i.e young child struck by truck) are there?
I looked up, i.e. Chicago. There were double the number of homicides vs fatal car accidents. I don't pretend those can be compared 1:1, but I'll note when I took public transit it wasn't just the risk of being on the transit but also getting dumped out near areas that were violent assault / murder hot spots.
The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.
In this particular situation it doesn't appear to, but in many states you only have the right to 'stand your ground' in places you are legally allowed to be, so if you don't pay your fare you eliminate any sort of "stand your ground" defense as to why you stabbed someone you thought was threatening your life rather than ran away.
So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.
I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain.
I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.
But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer.
EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it.
I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.
And I say that while owning a comfortable car.
I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.
Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.
But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.
When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.
Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.
Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.
I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.
> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.
The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".
I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
>I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history
Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.
There are two big problems with this though.
First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.
Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".
Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.
For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.
> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident.
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
As someone that lived in Switzerland, that is great as long as one doesn't live in small towns outside train lines, with buses that only go up to 9PM during the week, or hardly run during weekends.
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Their loss. But that's simply yet another reason to move towards a market-based approach; people can choose whatever works best for them as an individual even if others think it's a terrible choice.
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.
That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.
I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.
The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics.
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases,
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
This isn't my experience, but I understand some countries have overloaded public transit systems. When I've been in those countries, it's been simple enough to just let an overloaded train pass and grab the next one.
Ok but you let that train pass you might lose the connection to the bus at the other end. Or the next train or bus might not be for half an hour. Now you're late to wherever you were going.
Right, so, again, it sounds like your public transit is underfunded or something. Where I live I can depend on there being another train within 8 minutes no matter where I'm going, or a bus, or I can just hop on a ubike and I can be confident there'll be a space and station within a couple hundred meters.
I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.
During the rush hour, the next train is going to be just as packed. And if you wait long enough for things to quiet down, you're not going to be at work on time.
>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.
I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station...
Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
In switzerland you pay income taxes based on your city/neighborhood.
This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.
But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.
It's a very balanced system.
In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.
>> How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?
Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.
My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?
> Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment.
That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.
>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.
I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?
Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.
> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.
I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.
> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.
Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.
There's a huge spectrum between dense city center and suburbia; at present, I do consider my area to be "walkable", but it's not anywhere close to a dense city and there sure aren't "corporate HQs" anywhere nearby.
I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.
And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.
I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.
I've seen many times how some people react to a single bus lane or even a tiny bicycle lane as though cars are getting the raw end of the deal when 90%+ of infrastructure is for cars.
Those get even more unhinged pushback! Read any comments section on an article with a bike lane being put in, even if that bike lane takes no lanes from the road!
I guess it depends on demand. If bikes are 100-to-1 then make a bike lane, if the other way around maybe not. Need to remember that tax-payers actually fund this stuff so can't just force random stuff on them.
That is true, but the thing is, without bike lanes, people won't switch to bikes in certain traffic conditions. Cyclists pay taxes btw. too and a bicycle with its low weight is magnitudes cheaper for the roads, then the SUV tanks.
I guess it is reasonable to run some experiments, set up some bike lanes for a period of time. If they are used, keep them, if not maybe consider removing them.
Good point regarding the costs. The other advantage of dedicated / purpose-built bike paths is they likely don't have to be built to the same spec as ones designed for vehicle use (I assume - not a civil engineer).
Careful, this often ends up with cities and towns building isolated pilot bike lanes that go nowhere and then ripping them out when nobody uses them.
The value of a bike lane isn't in the lane in isolation, in the same way that the value of a street isn't in that street alone. It's in the ability of that lane/street to get you where you need or want to go.
It's nicer for the drivers too because you don't have to lag behind a slow-moving bike in a single lane.
And, more abstractly, if a dedicated bike lane means more people taking the bicycle, that also means fewer cars on the road, making it that much more pleasant for those who continue to drive.
Speaking as someone who enjoys driving, I'm all for dedicated bike lanes, even if that means reducing car lanes.
unfortunately i think the crab bucket mentality kicks in when sitting in stop and go traffic and seeing someone breeze by in a bike lane makes people so enraged they’re against cycling infrastructure for the rest of their lives
I keep wishing there was a better way to project invitation when in this situation. All I’ve come up with is to appear happy and relaxed—sit upright, look around and smile, eat something as I roll.
We’re so instinctively competitive though it feels hopeless.
I don’t think it’s the number of people transported that is hard to get one’s head around—it’s imagining using a subway to get to all of their destinations which are spread all over and separated by at least a quarter mile of parking lots and 8 lane highways. In their mind, this would require an absurd amount of subway or bus lines and tons of transitions and it would take an eternity to get to their destination and they might interact with lower class people and so on. The thing they don’t understand is that without cars you can build all of those destinations much closer together in a single walkable place that you just need transit to get to/from. When you take away the cars, you don’t need gargantuan parking lots or 8 lane highways.
People don’t pick their mode of transportation based on space efficiency.
They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
There’s also the matter of weather, which is less obvious to people who don’t live in locations that see extreme weather or deep snow. Safety and cleanliness is another issue depending on the location. There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
People who hold up numeric metrics like number of people transported per unit area don’t understand why people prefer to hop in their car and go to their destination rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.
If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.
The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.
Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.
People very much prefer sedentary lifestyle too, yet is very bad for your health.
Likewise, cars are nice as long as you continue to ignore all the negative externalities it has - pollution, climate change and above all the massive waste of space in parking lots and highways that could be used better.
> rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.
> They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities.
Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.
> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.
> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.
That's only true because of car-centric design, not a rule of the universe. We can easily make public transport the better transport option if we wanted to.
Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.
Well, in the Netherlands it's also very flat, which makes enabling cycling there a much smaller achievement than anywhere else, except possibly Vatican City. Now we have battery-powered bikes more things are accessible for more people, but the clock starts now for those places.
I mean sure, if you take a surface-level look at things that is true, but the Dutch government has spent a lot of time, money and effort into actually thinking about their urban design and how they tackle building their cities for the quality of life of its inhabitants, rather than the QoL of its inhabitant's cars. It helps, of course, that it's a flat country, but just being flat isn't enough, it takes deliberate planning and good choices being made at the governmental level.
What's the excuse with cities like Oulu in Finland, which isn't flat and is covered in snow more often than it is dry? Despite those 2 potentially huge issues, they still have incredible cycling infrastructure. Or Switzerland, where in my experience in at least Geneva and Bern the cycling infrastructure was also superb despite the mountainous terrain? No one's saying you need a cross-country bicycle highway, as long as the dense urban centers have good bike infrastructure it's more than enough.
Also I didn't even mention bikes in the comment you were replying to, I was talking about public transport like trains, trams and buses. Again, Switzerland despite being extremely mountainous has a world-class rail system that literally cuts through massive mountains.
You shouldn't be packing people like sardines. If your subway is that full then you should be adding more trains, or building more lines to ease congestion. (depending on your cities exact situation). In the US we have made building for a reasonable price impossible and then say it is impossible to fix the problems, but it shouldn't be like that.
Building more lanes does work - but people misunderstand induced demand. Really induced demand should be called fixing suppressed demand. If you get induced demand it means you need a lot more lanes. We can't afford the 50 layers of highway bridges needed to build enough lanes, but transit is a lot more space efficient and so we could afford it.
How about if cities were built in such a way that you would just have buildings and podium being pedestrian and bike friendly with all transportation network being 1 level underground (or 2 levels) all as self driving EV pods. This may increase the no of possible 'roads' and does not sound as far fetched in terms of overall costs. Emergency vehicles can be given an exemption to operate on the podium
Tunneling underground is extremely expensive. Individual self driving pods aka cars are very expensive. But most importantly cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground, plus now you have to build entrances and exits to the underground system everywhere. Traveling also becomes a lot less appealing when you're in a black tube all the time rather than seeing the city around you. It's also not possible because the underground is not just unoccupied but there is already other existing infrastructure down there.
What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.
> cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground
I don't think the entire "car tunnels" thing is reasonable either, but this one is wrong. The bottleneck for cars is the inherent interference in the 2-dimensional streets. If you shove them all in a few tunnels right until they get into a low-transit region close to the destination, it would increase their capacity by a lot.
It's also a huge amount of money that is better used some other way. But it has an effect.
Surface streets aren't inherently 2D, though - you can build overpasses and underpasses and above-grade highways. We just don't, because it's hideously expensive.
pods (i guess 2 to 4 passengers) simply do not scale. It doesn't matter whether you put them underground or not. The only solution is for people to not use them.
One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.
Underground is expensive. Cars are heavy and need a lot of ventalation. Lets leave the cars at ground level and move humans to underground or skyway systems - thus getting them out of the weather (I live where is snows so this is a very useful feature. People who live where it doesn't snow generally report hot summers and so again want to be inside anyway)
People who primarily drive cars? People who primarily drive cars when competitive options exist? People who argue for cars in areas where its not very feasible? People who prefer car oriented cities?
I think most people who primarily drive arent estimating subways at all.
Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.
I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.
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Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
> Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or
As someone who will have a runny nose all day if I sit next to that lady, yes I do worry about her perfume more than I worry about the drunk driver. While the drunk driver is a worse situation if the odds hit me, the odds the perfumed lady is too close to me is much higher.
Thats right. The risks of a perfume lady are way too scary. Cars never have any odors, just fumes, soot and particulate matter, brake dust. The air quality of cities is so much better than that of forests because of cars. The risks couldn't be more clear: 10 million deaths from air pollution[1] and pollution causing every kind of disease (except STIs) from cars vs hundreds of millions of deaths from perfume lady in train.
This is what all economists get slightly wrong? They say humans are rational agents, soak in all the information, calculate the costs and benefits with the probabilities and make rational decisions. But humans almost always make emotional decisions. A perfume lady is way more scarier than a 5000 lb vehicle hurtling down at 60 mph, custom built to protect the person driving the vehicle, on surfaces built for vehicles and vehicles only (trillions of dollars in maintenance and tens of trillions of dollars healthcare costs).
For me the immediate effects of perfume lady are worse than the other effects. I'm not downplaying the others, I'm just stating the reality that she makes my life miserable in a way that is very clear.
Statistics don't apply to individuals. If you are a single mom with a bad knee, a car will make your life easy, while public transport will be hard. The car will be safer, cheaper, more manageable because walking with kids and their things to the bus or train may be too challenging.
An average human is a hermaphrodite because roughly half are men and half are women.
Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.
Because there is only a fixed amount of land a city can ever possibly sustain. Urban sprawl all you want, but eventually you run out of land to keep expanding into or the city goes broke because there aren't enough revenue generating properties in a given area to cover the cost of servicing those areas. At some point more has to turn into better and more efficient.
If you think the time spent traversing all that space is completely worthless. Otherwise it makes sense to make things dense so that people can mostly reach whatever things they want to reach by walking a short distance or taking a quick tram connection, etc.
I mean, mine does lol. Of course this is the Netherlands so it'll be different to the states, but I literally live across the street from a train station, and it goes directly to the dead center of the city in less than 5 minutes. There's a train every 10 minutes. The same journey is, minimum, 15 minutes by car (or 10 by bus since we have dedicated bus lanes), at the end of which you have to find a parking spot. You then still have to actually get to your destination cause the chances of parking in the center are slim to none. People really underestimate how much of our public land is taken up by cars just... sitting there, doing fucking nothing.
With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.
> Oh and you might be odor sensitive
I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.
I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money.
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
>big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
> There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
The mixed-use development, which was practically banned during the automobile era, is a great example of doing more with less. As you mention, being able to walk over to your local school, or park, or market, or clothing shop, etc. helps reduce the need for car travel for small things, which allows us to have fewer cars on the road, spend less on infrastructure, and make driving a little more pleasant.
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
I think you are making an actively counterproductive conflation between "banning random crap" and the automobile. I think they only happened together because of luck and timing.
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
I broadly agree with you, and frankly what I'm advocating for is to get the government out of zoning and transportation precisely because of the problems you mention, but also because of the negative externalities caused by it.
Today we do not have market choices, because the Federal Highway Administration and every state department of transportation enforces and reinforces centralized design patterns that as we can see today no longer work (and likely never did). It's baked into their raison d'être. Unfortunately, as you also note, items like roads and housing developments live in the public sphere and so we can't and won't completely divorce the government from managing those projects or regulations, but we can examine what works well and increases attributes we want more of and do our best to drive regulation toward those attributes, and in some cases remove regulation to see more of those attributes. In my mind, work that increases walking, biking (or other similar transportation), and rail provide the best mix of low government regulation and effective development patterns which preserve most of the other things we like, such as cars and convenience.
I'm not sure I'm in favor of banning random crap, or maybe you read something into my comment that I didn't intend?
Plenty of big houses with yards in the surburbs in European cities, almost exclusively actually, and very often cheaper than much smaller flats in the city centers. They're still connected to the public transport system too.
Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain when you need to walk to the nearest bus station to get to work. You can reduce the issues with public transport somewhat (at the expense of its density and cost advantages) but you can never completely eliminate them compared to personal vehicles that get you from door to door.
> Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
If you have streets as narrow as in e.g. Florence, the rain can only hit you from above, whereas in car-centric suburbia rain can hit you from the sides in basically all directions - so an umbrella blocking the top isn't enough, you need a car.
In other words, the problem here that the car is solving, is a problem that the car is causing.
You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
> You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km.
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
For some reason, urbanists like to attack suburbs while also saying that everything is so far apart and takes so long. If you want to live in a city, live in a city, but don't pretend that it's the only way to live.
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day.
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
There is great train service from the suburbs to Manhattan, but I worked from home and moved to a different metro area. As it stands, parking by the office in the city I live near is about $150-200/month. Taking the train there and back every day from somewhere in the city would be about $150/month.
> Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
Yeah, that's why you build stations periodically and run trains at faster speeds than cars.
I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.
For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.
But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!
Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.
I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.
So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
I'm actually the opposite, it really fucks with my ears - I think it's probably the pressure change but I don't care to experiment too much, I'm lucky if I'm not out of action for a week after landing.
I could stand to wait an hour, have to do a ridiculous dance for "security", traipse two miles across a vast building designed on the wrong scale for humans and so on, that's all fine, but the flying I do not like at all.
In Germany, even if it takes the same amount of time, door to door, usually flying is half price, and isn't hit as often in delays as having your ICE stopped in the middle of nowhere, and then miss one of the two connections yet to come.
It is an interesting exercise to see how frequently people start using their Bahn app, trying to work around what might be their way to still make it into the destination, as the pause times between stations increase.
The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.
US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
Anecdotally, among myself and my friends we have more stories of problems with theft and encounters with hostile people from very brief travels to Europe than all time spent on public transport in the USA. To be fair, I haven’t lived in NYC where public transport is famously more dangerous.
I also suspect that foreigners are more targeted for wallet thefts while traveling in Europe.
However, watching multiple friends get pickpocketed on European public transport and having to shake some sketchy people who were being aggressive with women in our group during our brief travels shattered my illusions that European public transport is universally superior in safety.
Edit to add: I also thought it was funny when we met up with someone’s friend in a populous European city who refused to ride public transportation with us. He would drive his car from point to point and meet up with us at the destination. He seemed to believe that the underground was not something people his age liked and was surprised we were riding it without a second thought.
It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.
I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
I could imagine Paris and London in that list, despite both being very safe for locals (and.. both being Northern Europe)- but perhaps less safe for tourists.
I would imagine Prague being a middle-European tourist destination that is plagued much worse by this (but, also, very safe for locals- I lived there briefly).
Not to pick on you specifically as I think your comment was fine but I always get a chuckle[1] about the "duality of europe" that you see on the parts of the internet that are dominated by the white collar english speakers.
Depending upon the issue you might reduce europe down to the rich western bits. You might include or exclude the former soviet influenced areas depending upon the context. You might only look at nations on the Mediterranean or only exclude them, etc, etc.
Yet whenever you look at the US you always include the whole thing no exceptions.
[1]just to be clear, by "I get a chuckle" I mean "the way we just accept this behavior is a condemnation of the community and the people who make it up"
> I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
Okay, but then why can’t we Americans just exclude the bad parts of America and only allow you to compare to the good parts?
Why must every America-Europe comparison be about the worst case American cities (usually taken from headlines) but only compared to a select subset of European locations?
Because the USA is one country and Europe is a collection of vastly different countries.
You would likely agree that the USA and Mexico are incomparable and its sort of the same, though the EU evens some things out: its much less far reaching than a federal government.
That said: happy to compare the best case US public transport to the Nordics. Literally anywhere in the Nordics to anywhere in the US.
The upper middle class in the US also takes public transit, but there is not enough sense of social shame to get people to behave well. I also highly doubt that people who are truly wealthy in northern Europe take the train.
The same points also apply to EU public transport. Maybe your area is better but where I live it's definitely mostly the poorer and less domesticated that you find in public transport.
I am with you. It is not only about lanes but also parking. My in laws live in a very car centric city and it is crazy the way all distances are multiplied when everything need a dedicated parking space. There is almost nothing left at walking distance and every time I visit I have the feeling I spend all my day in a car instead of ... doing stuff.
This was one of the things I realized living in a very car friendly city without a car. SO SO MUCH of my walking was just walking past/through GIANT parking lots.
It's pretty amazing how much time you can save by being able to park in front of whatever you want to get into. Starting at the same point I've beaten cars that should have gotten there 20 minutes faster according to google maps.
I save a lot of time by taking a parking spot far from the door and just walking. People who drive spend a lot more time than they think looking for a parking spot close to the door. Plus nobody cares if I take up 3 parking spots way out there (so long as I'm not in a lane of course) so I can stop whereever without checking for the lines saving even more time not trying to get perfectly in the parking spot.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses that's particularly focused on his long career in the government of New York, is, quite aside from a fascinating psychological portrait and a parable about how bad it is when someone has untrammeled power in a bureaucracy, an absolutely fantastic case study in how building more roads makes traffic worse. And it was published in 1974! For anyone that cares to find out we've know this for decades and have absolutely failed to do anything about it - pretty depressing.
Caro has a way with words; one of my favorite turns was when Moses declared traffic a problem "solved for a generation", only for Caro to begin the next paragraph with a description of the traffic jams that began to develop a few weeks after that particular road (I believe the Bronx River Parkway) opened.
Yeah, the reader of the audiobook is pretty good, although I slightly prefer Grover Gardner, who recorded the audiobooks for his series on LBJ, as a narrator. If you like The Power Broker, I'd highly recommend those.
But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable.
So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.
Urban planning has a term for this - the Downs Thomson paradox. Over time, traffic tends to increase up to a point at which equivalent journeys on transit/bike/foot are quicker.
What this means of course is that an effective way of reducing traffic is by speeding up the alternatives.
> But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
I hate driving even when I'm alone on the road. I'm forced to stare at the road when I want to be doing something else. I can't even take a break, since a simple 5 minute nap has high odds of killing me even if I'm the only car on the road.
Plus cars are slower than trains or airplanes. Even on the autobahn with unlimited speed allowed, most people are not going nearly as fast as a high speed train, much less an airplane.
Don't get me wrong, I ride my bike to work, but it's abundantly clear that (at least americans) really fucking love cars.
To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.
No it isn't clear that Americans love cars. Some Americans love cars or course, but for many they are something they think they must have but they don't really care about the car. People want to get places, people need to get food, and so one - a car enables all of those things, but they are a tool to get things done, not the point. They do not think there is any other tool that will work, but that doesn't mean they care about that tool. They are against transit because they think it is a waste of money since even after spending that money it still wouldn't work (this may or may not be true) and so it isn't worth it.
There is a reason everyone zips around in them on Wall-e. Wait until we have full self driving and drone delivery. Then even when you are in traffic you can get your burger, soda and TV in without wasting any time!
This is level one understanding of public transport systems. “We should build metros and then everything will be better”
There’s cities that are not setup for efficient public transportation or walkable living. Redesign it from ground up and put a metro smack bang through the middle. Until then, it’s just not going to work.
People, and especially people who like the idea of walkable cities that reside in council chairs, often miss this fundamental step.
“Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.
You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them
Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.
You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.
People always say stuff like this, but plenty of European cities like Utrecht have shown that it's very much possible to turn the tide. A few years ago Utrecht replaced an entire highway and turned it (back) into a canal and the area is indescribably nicer in every way, it's called the Catharijnesingel.
This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.
Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.
I think you are being unnecessarily defeatist. Cities can’t be redesigned from the ground up, but at the same time we’ve seen that investment into roads can’t fix traffic in cities once they reach a certain population and density.
The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.
People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!
Car infrastructure takes so much space that you can repurpose parts of it in place. Just turn one of the lanes into a tram line, make dedicated bus lanes. On huge parking lots you can just split parts of and build housing or more smaller stores there.
Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?
I grew up in London where it is almost always preferable to take public transport anywhere central (cars work fine in suburbs).
I prefer to walk and take public transport, but where I live now (small town) busses are infrequent, and fairly short journeys can require changing. It can take two hours on the bus to get somewhere that is less than half an hour by car.
I think people here would be delighted with more public transport. The main complaint I hear about roads is not repairing potholes which is not hugely expensive. The problem is that the political push is to use a stick (make cars more expensive and inconvenient) rather than a carrot (provide better public transport).
I completely agree. You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens. It's a self-destructive cycle and a betrayal of drivers. We're sold a promise of freedom and speed, but what we get is a constant, grinding battle. We spend our lives in traffic and our wallets on fuel/tax, and the very infrastructure meant to liberate us ends up imprisoning us.
The starkest example of this for me is comparing Orlando, Florida with Malmö, Sweden. Orlando is the end game of car-centric planning. The city feels bigger than its population suggests because you spend half an hour in a car just to get anywhere. The eight-lane highways and endless parking lots are supposed to make driving easier, but they create the very congestion that makes driving miserable. This architecture of disconnection means fewer spontaneous encounters and more social isolation. The city is designed for a machine, not for people.
In contrast, Malmö's population is actually larger than Orlando's, yet a 30-minute bike ride can get you literally anywhere. The largest road through the city center is a quiet, two-lane street that prioritises people over cars; as there are large crossings and lights. This isn't an accident, it's a choice. The city's excellent public transportation and extensive bike lanes make the car a choice, not a necessity and because it's penalised: the only drivers are the ones who need to be driving, for which now there are open roads (as long as you're patient).
The truth is, every person on a bus, a train, or a bike is one less car in front of you. Giving people real alternatives is the only thing that can truly reduce traffic. This isn't an attack on cars. It's a demand for sanity, a call to build cities that work for everyone, including those who choose to drive.
> You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens
That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).
Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.
> If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city.
No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.
Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.
> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway
Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
> this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
If someone chooses to not make a trip then I count it as impossible. I could walk across the North Pole to Europe, but I think everyone would agree when I say the trip is impossible anyway despite that.
> This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
You absolute can and I disagree with the studies. Now I will agree that building 50 layers of highway bridges needed is not a reasonable thing to do, but it still a solvable engineering challenge if we wanted to put the money into it.
I mean, you’re right you need systems and people need to get places.
But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.
Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.
I suppose it is because Florida has a lot of modern development, but the number of disconnected subdivisions there is relatively extreme. In much of the US you can easily walk to the thing you can see.
There is always some private company benefiting when a town/city rejects public transport. I remember reading an article about a town that rejected public transport, there was intense door-to-door lobbying by some Koch brothers funded group. It was a small town, I suppose they were just testing their lobbying efforts before deploying the same in large cities.
All this to say, if the public is sufficiently informed, they are not going to reject public transport. We've been brainwashed that car centric transport is the best.
This is just a factor of car driving being wildly more inefficient at "people-carrying" than public transport. That is why "improving things" for cars just makes things worse-you're spending your sparse resources (money, land, manpower) more and more inefficiently.
Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric.
Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.
'Climatists' is a strange way of putting this because pulling everything we do back to human scale will be a huge boon to solving the climate crisis. As someone who's worried about threats to the future of the species in the form of climate change I'd be all for a human centric movement.
Exactly. If you have plenty of community spaces spread around an urban area - cafes, pubs, small businesses, public parks - you both reduce the amount of travel required, and strengthen local communities
> Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers.
I 100% agree. I live in Newcastle, a city that is fairly car centric, but we have a Metro line and have had pushes to increase bus and bicycle transport (though Labour are generally bad for active travel).
My brother moved to Leeds, one of the largest cities in Europe without a Metro or tram. Driving anywhere in the city is fucking awful. The planners clearly kept trying to add one more lane and the result is congestion everywhere, even at quiet times.
I've also driven round Liverpool and Manchester and found, though they're better as they have Metro lines, the car-centric roads are still really awful to drive on.
Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing.
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.
> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
okay, can't we have a middle ground then? On one side, nothing happens because of corruption, regulation, partisan interests etc. On the other end, there is authoritarian regime that can get things done at insane speed but at the cost of the environment and its people. Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
Yes it is hard. What makes it hard is the analisys of the problem is wrong and so we don't know how to fix it. Some of the problems were hinted at above, but the response of why we do it that way was also hinted at and should give anyone wanting to fix the problem pause. There are many other problems that are at fault too that were not hinted at. Some of them I know (but I'd need a book to write out), but there are hints of more things that I'm not aware of. I also have reason to suspect some of what I "know" is actually wrong, but I don't know what and cannot know until someone tries it thus showing why it is wrong.
> Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
It is, it takes political effort and most importantly it takes adequate staffing on the state/local government for supervision and proper tender processes, and both is really short in supply - one might say that the latter is done on purpose as an excuse to privatize yet another piece of public infrastructure.
Of course a private toll road company can build faster and keep up with maintenance, it doesn't have to deal with tender bullshit, it can hire enough of its own staff to make sure vendors don't screw them over, and if it's a large enough company they can hire their own construction crews. Oh and obviously it can provide a source of extra income for the grifter politicians that vote for the privatization...
> Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
You say this like China is the country openly flaunting the climate, purposely pushing for more carbon emissions to enrich a few people, calling climate change a hoax, 1984'ing all government research and policy on climate change, and forbidding agencies from even researching it, selling off public lands for profit.
That's not China, that's the good ol USA
Oh, and the USA also sent multiple completely innocent people to gulags.
Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway.
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)
Just did some very light googling - building out, repairing and developing new road infrastructure seems to have around 2:1 or 2.5:1 ROI - Public transport, active transport seems to have around 4:1 to 5:1 ROI.
Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere.
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation:
* Reduces air pollution
* Noise pollution
* Allows a focus on human centric urban planning
* Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue
* Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Thanks for this useful comment, too rare in this discussion unfortunately.
One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too.
> In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process.
A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.)
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
> A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
I see what you're saying and it exposes a gap in my logic. I think the reason _I_ see it as hard is because I live in one of those gaps, so service is relatively limited compared to places further east with more density. Buuut the whole point is that, even though there are 95k of us in my town, we're still expensive to service for a 50 mile ride to the hub.
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going.
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.
They’re flexible (don’t need to rip up rails to change routes) but they cost a lot more to run (tyres, fuel, maintenance, staffing cost) to carry fewer people. A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver, and are way more energy efficient to boot.
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
> A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
> the bus shares the cost of the road with other users
A bus does much more damage to the road than a tramway though (to say nothing of trucks, these are even worse). Anything rail based, the load from weight and movement is transferred via the rails and subterranean sleepers to the foundation, whereas a decently used bus road will need to be resurfaced at least every five years, more in a hotter climate as the buses will inevitably seriously groove the asphalt. Tramways is more like every 20 if not 30 years until you need to do a full replacement.
On top of that, this "the cost is already paid" math is annoying to me on a personal ethical level because it excuses putting people into cars and freight onto trucks because "they already are there".
> A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A single Class R 3.3 tramway vehicle (~36 tons) in Munich carries 218 people, more if you squish the passengers ("Sardinenbüchse" feeling). Munich's largest bus with a carriage unit, in contrast, carries 130 people [1] at ~20 tons. The gain from regenerative braking that you get on tramways actually matters at that scale, and as said, drivers are already short in supply.
Fully agree on your calculation regarding traffic by the way, however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Cost is already paid is important. We need to get freight around. Roads because they are flexible are the best way to do that. When the roads are not congested (which if we are only talking freight they are not even in the densest cities) sharing with other users makes sense (in a dense city cars quickly turn into congestion, but we are only adding buses to the existing freight system so we can ignore that). Sure a bus does more damage than a car, but there are other freight users doing a lot of damage so you need to build for that use anyway. Thus we will have the roads anyway, the question is do we build something else as well and is that worth the costs - here buses are a lot cheaper.
What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.
There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.
> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)
They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.
I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.
Compared with light railway/tram, they need more energy per km traveled due to friction and malleability losses in the tires, they emit fine dust from tires and brakes, and usually they pack significantly less people than a railcar so you need more vehicles and especially more drivers for a bus network.
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
There's also the "south east Qld option" (which I'm certain is the region you're describing in your comment) where the government is so roadbrained that all public transport solutions inevitably end up as some form of bus, further adding to congestion and making it worse for everyone, drivers, public transport users and active transport users.
The other problem is that city councils historically have run busses, whereas the State Government runs the rail, so a lot of our bus network competes with the rail instead of working together as an integrated network. At least the ticketing is integrated, but the network still has never felt like it’s designed to work together as an integrated transit network.
Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
I hold out hope that many more Americans will get E bikes, and demand separated bike lanes. There's plenty of room for them on most American roads especially newer suburbs.
+1 to urban arrow. Schlep my infant and pre-k kid in it every day of the year and the older kid loves it, is more engaged with the community (she has mentally mapped it and we commonly stop to talk to neighbors in a way we can’t in car), and I can actually fit more kids in it than the car. The car requires a car seat for each kid, which won’t fit across the back seat— the bike takes in an infant seat, and space for two kids on the bench.
This. The quickest & most pleasant places to drive a car are the places with the fewest large single-mode roads & - importantly - even fewer cars on them.
Simply & beautifully satirized by the "bro just one more lane bro, bro I swear just one more lane and it'll fix the traffic bro," meme from a few years ago.
If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.
That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.
I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.
> It's not an either-or. You can have streets which are car-friendly, bike-friendly, and pedestrian-friendly at the same time. Just look at the Dutch, they've been doing it for years. That is until recently in some big cities, though, where some less knowledgeable politicians have also adopted this false populist either-car-or-bike concept. Though the traditional principle still applies to about 99% of the country's roadworks, and it works really well.
Adding onto that, sentences like "made for people, not cars" absolutely validate my point that this is nothing but populist activism. I'm hoping that we can all have a honest, intellectual discussion on how to make infrastructure better for everyone. Just make sure to always remember in every discussion about this topic: it is never either-or, not even in the densely populated Netherlands.
You can have streets which are car-friendly (for exceptional or emergency purposes where you need the car) by getting rid of all frivolous car use. There's no feasible alternative, because congestion always destroys car-friendliness except in very sparsely populated areas. And you can only eliminate that congestion by promoting more scalable alternatives to the use of private motor vehicles.
I understand where it's coming from, but I have to disagree about the populist activism part. I don't think that pedestrians should worry about how to fit cars in their proposed solutions. That's something for the car proposers to do. It's not like the other way around is different. Just take a walk in any big city and you will see how pedestrians are a second thought in most of the roads.
I'd argue that the design of public infrastructure should be a discussion which every citizen is equally involved in, with the goal of finding a solution that works for all. Chanting an us-versus-them narrative does nothing but stifle this discussion, and accepting it as legitimate results in decisions being made by special interest groups (team-car or team-pedestrian) rather than the residents whom actually make use of the infrastructure in question.
To me, whether there's enough space for cars and walkability are both part of how dense a city is. Leaving room for cars must make a city less dense and usually less pleasant for pedestrians as well; in the same way, a suburban area with single family homes and limited low-rise apartments needs car infrastructure because public transport gets worse the longer each trip is and the fewer riders there are.
You can accommodate both regions within one city, but they can't overlap without compromising one or the other (edit: although this compromise is a desirable middle ground for some people). Note that Pontevedra built huge free parking areas on the outskirts of its urban area. For their whole city it's not either-or, but in any given place they've had to make a decision.
The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
If you haven't discovered the problems with this model, then it's only because not enough of your neighbours have had the same idea.
Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.
Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.
Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.
As the other user said, it doesn't scale. I'll give you my personal experience. I have been living in the greater Toronto area for 23 years, having moved here when I was 9. I live in one of the "cities" surrounding Toronto. This city was initially just a suburb of Toronto, that people moved to because houses were bigger and cheaper. Now it is a "city" of more than 700,000 people, in part because everyone moved here from Toronto, and in part due to high immigration in recent years. I put city in quotes because it's not really built like a city, it's still developed like a suburb with a large dependence on cars and poor public transport. All the good jobs are still in Toronto, so people still commute to Toronto for work. Before COVID and wfh, it used to take me 1.5 hours to commute to Toronto (one way), and I still had to drive to the train station. Forget driving to Toronto, it would take you just as long, if not longer, and parking costs are ridiculous. As this city grew, everyone wanted to move here for the same reason as you, bigger and cheaper houses. Now the houses are still bigger, but definitely not cheaper, and it takes forever to get anywhere. There are also less things to do because everything depends on cars.
I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.
The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.
There's simply not enough space in a city to accommodate everyone's car. Houston is 70% roads+parking lots and they're still congested
Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.
In America this concept is taken to the absolute extreme. Everywhere I go there are entire forests being razed to build developments of huge single-family homes and nothing else.
There is nowhere to go without driving. Kids who grow up in the suburbs are pretty much trapped on an island. There’s nowhere to explore because the surrounding 5 mile radius might be nothing but more developments
Nobody is seriously advocating for a society with zero cars. The goal is simply to have a more balanced system. It's about creating towns and cities where you have the freedom to walk, bike, or take reliable public transport, so you're not forced to use a car for every single trip.
That's fine. If you don't care about life and culture in a city, and are satisfied with your townhouse in some arbitrary quiet town, then that's fine? Just don't expect that you can just go into the city with a car whenever you feel like it.
Not the best counterpoint to the argument IMHO, especially considering there are tens/hundred of thousand of people that do the same as you, and that has only driven rent cost up in the extended Milan metropolitan area, even 30-40 km further away from the city, and with roads that are not nearly capable enough to carry commuters' traffic, it just transforms the underlying issues into massive, daily traffic jams anywhere in the immediate area
While you are not totally wrong, it's very true that car centric society has enabled the sprawling suburbs iconic of America (a large home and yard for everyone), from a sustainability standpoint, freely developed heavily packed cities win hands down. It's so much easier and more efficient to take care of everyone in one spot rather than sprawled out all over the place.
Sustainability and efficiency, sure - you're definitely right on that. I'm going to take a bit of a devil's advocate role here though:
There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shifting in the geographic region (water, food, electricity generation) that has to occur in the surrounding area which negatively impacts not only the city but the environments it pulls those resources out of.
Sprawl leaves room to interweave humans with the rest of the natural world in a way in which densely packed cities do not. It leaves room for trees to grow, critters to roam, rain water to be reclaimed into aquifers. It also spreads the strain of resource extraction and reduces the impact from hot spots at the most granular level.
Car focussed development destroys far more land (e.g. parking) than similar size developments that enable walking/cycling/public transport.
Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.
Funny enough the USSR and tons of the developed western Europe (Barcelona) had and still have "superblocks" which are far better than car polutting everywhere. Yours, sustainable? Keep dreaming.
You can live in the small suburban village and reach the downtown by rail or bike. And people will always want to live and congregate in the city center, because that's the most productive part of the city. But unless your city center literally looks like Manhattan, it can still fit plenty more people.
> This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it
Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.
> Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers
Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min.
You don't need to own a car to live in a house with a garden if you have proper public transport.
And you can live in the city and have plenty of access to nature as well. And cites don't need to be ugly and ful of skyscrapers.
> To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way.
People living remotely with cars are the opposite of sustainable, in fact, literally every study on the subject shows the opposite. Not communing makes it better, but its still nowhere near as good as a city.
I was talking about large cities like Tokyo, not in Switzerland. Most of Europe has terrible housing polices.
In Switzerland you have to move out of the city center but because the S-Bahn you can be in the city very fast. In Luzern for exmaple, places like Ebikon or Emmenbrück, Horw.
The drivers in my country emigrated to Switzerland.
I jest, but it's true that my city of 650k souls is in a dire need of around 100 bus/tram drivers and that many emigrated to rich countries which provide an overall better standard of work/living.
Personally for minor errands I cycle because I can't rely on public transport and neither can anyone else, so there's traffic congestion everywhere. I'm not happy with this, but I don't really have other options.
Public transport usually requires a medium-to-high density to be sustainable. However, it can get saturated - in Paris, the subway and the trams are full for long periods during the day, even at midnight! It makes the experience really unpleasant when you have no alternative.
I love quality public transportation. The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport, as it's expensive and their electorate wants bike lanes, making the situation worse for everyone. In my city, they removed the parking space near the farmer's market, but didn't add any bus line or renovate the tram, which doesn't allow disabled people or just strollers to hop in. How are we supposed to come there?
> The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport,
That's my complaint too. We've added plenty of things to make driving worse where I am, but there's no real alternative presented. I can walk a mile to a bus stop in the sun where the bus may or may not show up for an hour (they promise they will improve it eventually) and will then drop me off somewhere I still have to walk most of a mile from. They made the road to the bus stop a bit worse to walk on and I gave up.
I would love to not have to drive. But I'm not really given the option, I'm just given less parking so that there's a nice bike lane I can jump into when someone comes barrelling down the sidewalk.
I'm not really arguing that the world adopts the Paris metro system. First of all, there are turn stills everywhere which is nowhere to be found in Zürich. Why not create choke points and erect this annoying block everywhere in front of people who wish to reach their destination as quickly as possible. Great idea.
In Luxembourg, public transport is for free. Also great.
My favourite thing about living in the Netherlands is that kids have freedom. They can bike to school, their friends’ houses, sports, town etc and parents aren’t their taxi.
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Having grown up in the Netherlands and having a decision to make where we want our kids to grow up (US spouse), this feels painful to read. I suppose the SWE salaries aren't worth it.
Another problem is that they very seldom make walking pathways between cul de sacs.
These 2 houses are 100 meters from each other but you have to walk 1700 meters and most of the distance is without any sidewalk, only "Odell Cir" has it. The small amount of sidewalk is so narrow and close to the cars that it is hardly a sidewalk.
Shout out to @NotJustBikes in general. Infrastructure should be built for humans first. This benefits cars as well: more accessible for walking / cycling / public transport = less congested for when you do need a car.
Money is great for a lot of things, but money alone would definitely not be enough to get me to live in the USA, especially now that I'm preparing to have kids.
For a period in my 20’s when I wasn’t well paid I lived in some nice places car free (San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Berkeley) but this was when rent was cheap and I didn’t have a family.
Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.
In which European city is this true? I can't think of any. Certainly not London/Paris/Amsterdam/Munich/Warsaw.
For comparison, Amsterdam's price per square meter for apartments is some 30% higher than in Seattle and my big tech company that offers total compensation around $500k/yr for L5 in Seattle pays low $200s (converted to USD) in Amsterdam. The only colleagues I know who live in a single family home within reasonable biking distance are late career (L6/L7) American expats.
In any European city, that has a decent tech job market, owning a house (even a small one by American standards) in walking/biking distance of the office means you're rich rich.
Really interesting, can you share the salaries, cost, and size of three high-paying jobs in: NYC, London, and Paris? Curious about the big houses you're getting for cheap in London and Paris!
Hah, I had a feeling that was a NJB video. It is generally surreal to me that even smaller settlements in Europe have more, shall we say, evolvability than North American ones, and (at least in some cases owing to their antiquity) prioritize the needs of pedestrians.
American cities, almost all were also built before the car. At least the city centers. Both US and European cities grew after WW2.
The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.
In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.
European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.
The problem for America is that moneyed interests (big car manufacturers) would frequently sabotage or otherwise salt the earth for public transportation projects.
One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.
Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.
Yeah I went to an informal town hall recently at my library about bike commuting in our city. An older gent was pretty adamant that our suburb has pretty much always been car-dependent and couldn't ever be anything else, and didn't care much for my reply that many European cities were on track to be the same until the 70s.
> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewalks where available, and took alternate routes through the woods, the cemetery, private property, etc. to avoid busy areas. This is anecdotal, of course, but no kid from my town ever got hit by a car when I was growing up (one kid did die chasing a ball into the street, though).
I'm all for building bike lanes and public transport. And also not all suburban areas are equal - I've definitely seen areas of the US where I would not feel safe riding a bike even as an adult. But I think whatever is keeping kids confined to their homes is just as much a cultural change as it is a lack of infrastructure.
New england's suburbs & small towns are the outlier in the US. I grew up in the south and my experience exactly mirrors that of the CA resident you're responding to.
No amount of cultural change is going to make suburban charlotte a good place for 8 year olds to bike alone.
I was fortunate to raise my kids in an exurb that's popular for scenic and uncongested roads. We get a lot of road bikers on the weekends. That means it's relatively safe for kids to ride their bikes all over town. This gave my kids a lot of independence at a younger age than most.
In my city (Tampere, Finland, pop. ~260,000) the annual number of traffic accidents leading to injury has halved since 2010. A big driver has been the decision in 2015 to lower the speed limits on all local streets from 40km/h (25 mi/h) to 30 km/h (~20 mi/h), with appropriate traffic calming measures implemented where necessary. (Industrial zones are exempt.)
Well, there are a couple of those. But mainly we’re talking about the basic things: narrowing lanes, speed bumps, raised zebra crossings, preventing through traffic, rebuilding intersections as roundabouts and so on. The key points to preventing speeding are
* reducing drivers' perceived safety, and
* making it more uncomfortable for the drivers to speed.
I was walking in a narrow street in Granada, Spain yesterday and two guys on their scooters where going at 40mph, on a street meant mostly for pedestrians. They pollute like cars (the stink is the same, even if smaller engine.) When people talk about cars ruining cities designed for walking, they should include scooters. They look cute in movies but they are not so pleasant to have around in practice. I don't mind the electric scooters the type you stand on because if you're going really fast on a narrow pedestrian and you hit someone it won't be so fatal, and you will get hurt probably equally, so people generally don't ride them at maximum speed. Also, they're essential for take-away food delivery.
I completely understand dedicating space to public transport instead of cars. But dedicating space to cars seems entirely reasonable in isolation, because the city has an interest in making it possible to get there. Parking spaces store cars - but is that their entire function? Or is that just an aspect of enabling people to drive into the city?
Consider the fact that you cannot in fact store a freezer in a public parking space. Nor even a car, actually, beyond a certain period of time, precisely because it's all about enabling movement.
Many places have on street parking that is used by residents (e.g. you get the "have to move my car twice a month because of street sweepers" effect). It's possible that's what the quote is referring to.
Compare Brookline MA, which allows on-street parking, but only during the day to neighborhoods in Boston proper which has free on-street parking permits for residents.
I don't pay nearly weekly road taxes for my freezer. I pay for my cars and bikes, so that the law grants me that ability to park. It's easy to understand.
I'm always wondering how Americans feel traveling to Europe and being able to walk in cities. It must be so surreal that they either have to move, or they can't fathom that these cities are practical to live in.
> traveling to Europe and being able to walk in cities
All of Greece is car oriented. Of course if you stay near Acropolis you get the impression of walk-ability. Spain outside of the historic city centers is car oriented. Average mileage traveled by car per person in Germany is about the same as is in Canada.
I can continue your generalization about my home city - Montreal. Which is walk-able .. but not really, see the second part here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4
To me, it's a big reason why Americans love Disney World: you can drive to your local airport, fly to Florida, take a shuttle bus to your resort (that handles your luggage for you), and then rely on Disney's private network of bus routes, monorails, gondolas, boats, etc., instead of having to drive yourself.
In fact, if you use their transportation network, you actually get somewhat better treatment: in all of the parks, there's a shorter walk to/from the transit terminal than to your car, and in one of them (Magic Kingdom), you are required to park a distance from the park and take a connecting ferry.
That's what I used to tell my friends in France: "I think Americans see France like a theme park, they really enjoy it but they think it's not possible to live there, they probably just think it's a nice place to visit"
I live in New York as a European and damn, it's very pedestrian unfriendly, you have to cross these large roads everywhere, so much noise pollution, roads are so large. It's still the most pedestrian friendly city in the US, and that's why I'm here, but incomparable with Europe
It's not surreal at all, and most Americans marvel at how tiny and unliveable the houses are.
Europeans must marvel at being able the size of living accommodations in the US. They can not even fathom in their brains what it's like not to be crammed into a tiny 20sqm flat.
I feel like this common conversation is missing a dimension. Car vs. public transport is too flat.
I prefer that cities are walkable and have good inter and intra public transport. So I'm with the anti-car crowd on that.
However, I do not prefer cities in general. So I'm with the pro-car people on this one. I enjoy the trend of spacious car-friendly suburbs and rural areas. I value the space and freedom over the conveniences of the city.
Tbf they should do this in London too. They're looking to pedestrianise Oxford Street, but who knows when that will happen as we need to allow plenty of time for the government to find the right contractors to shovel money at for a project delivered overtime and underbudget.
A lot of it over here is for show, like ULEZ where huge range rovers are somehow exempt. Or where LTNs are always put on the richest streets in the nicest neighborhoods for reasons of "think of the wee children playing in the street" when there are plenty of children living outside of LTNs. Just a coincidence that all the properties inside an LTN are worth >£850k.
These threads always turn into fights between car vs. non-car people. But the answer should just be more of everything. More bike lanes, car lanes, buses, trains, parking, etc. Close a street or two off to car traffic, maybe just on weekends initially, to create a nice walkable downtown area.
People always seem to talk about these things like it's one size fits all, when needs vary massively from one city to another. And even from one neighborhood to another.
Bike lanes and public transport will reduce traffic congestion as long as they are well-designed and people actually use them. And being able to get into a car and drive somewhere is incredibly convenient when traffic is light and parking is plentiful.
I'm not very familiar with Houston, but a quick google search shows that there is a big project underway right now to add more lanes in Houston [1]. So it would seem that civil engineers there have found a place to put more car lanes that they think will help with traffic congestion.
> At which point do you have enough car lanes?
As long as Houston is growing (currently it is the second fastest growing city in the US), I don't think there will ever be enough. They need to continuously improve their transportation infrastucture to keep up with a growing population. As I said above, I think this should include bike lanes and public transportation too. But if engineers identify a solution to alleviate traffic congestion by building more roads, then I think that is worth considering, too.
Look at Greater Tokyo. 37 million people - and they have everything. Pedestrians, cyclists, cars, taxies, buses, surface roads, expressways, trains, subways, monorails, high speed rail, ferries, etc. All interconnected, and all being used to capacity at rush hour every day. It's absolutely insane, but every time I visit I'm in awe at how easy it is to get around (albeit unpleasant at times).
One thing that contributes to cars being non-intrusive in Tokyo is just that there are many less of them than in American cities as there are many systems that de-incentivize having a car in the city.
To buy a car you need a certificate from the police attesting that you have a free parking spot of a certain size. The expressway tolls in Japan are often more expensive than gas for any long distance travel (and even the gas is expensive because there is basically no domestic oil production). The process of getting a license is much more intensive than in America. Japan has significantly more strict drunk driving laws than America (>0.03% for up to 3 years in prison, >0.05% is up to 5). Many workplaces don't allow you to drive to work (even if you could find parking) because by law their workman's comp insurance has to cover commuting and getting a policy that covers driving costs extra. There is absolutely no on-street residential parking.
All of these are deliberate policy choices that contribute to making the majority of road traffic in Tokyo be commercial and for most residents to default to some other form of transit.
I think Tokyo proves my point. You see less bikes on the road and more on the sidewalks. Roads are relatively narrow and bike lanes are less common there than the West.
Perhaps I could have been more clear, but that was my major point of contention. Bike lanes on the road are problematic. And of course its a given that the trains will have their own dedicated paths.
The comment you’re quoting also says Tokyo “would be a lot better for cycling if they installed more dedicated infrastructure, but it works as-is” and overall refers to Tokyo as a success in terms of bicycle adoption.
I'm hoping for a self driving taxi + trains combo to maybe solve the problem.
For one a self driving taxi fleet could take up vastly less space - you'd no longer need one car per person, you'd need far fewer parking spots, most cars could be single or double seaters again taking less space and running more efficiently.
The space savings could be used to boost rail-based public transit options, which would see more adoption as self driving taxis make last-mile transport cheaper and easier. A bunch of positive feedback loops driving public transit adoption and improvements.
Result is cleaner and more efficient transport for all, and vast amounts of space returned from serving cars to serving people.
So a tax financed site telling how it's great to have more tax and regulations.
Not surprising.
Find it very weird to have government trying to gerrymander things just as we are on the cusp of EV transition and autonomy.
Go take a ride in a Tesla with FSD, the future is here, let it come in, get out of the way.
In a few years with autonomous vehicles the need for vehicle ownership wild radically decrease and with that a huge need for parking space will simply vanish.
What I suggest instead:
make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible
create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate)
Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
The car-centric alternative requires more expensive infrastructure and more aggressive zoning regulations
Your EV argument does not address the main issue of urban sprawl in car-centric design and how the ever-increasing infrastructure costs (and decreased revenue: parking lots dont create wealth) are bankrupting cities.
I really love these posts almost as much as i love the signs blocking cars from a certain area of my city's center, except for -amongst the common sense exceptions- cars owned by the office of the mayor. Rules for thee, or something or other. Is it fair to have more public transportation, bike lanes, bus lanes, walkable paths? yes. Is it fair to lock entire urban areas from cars? Not at all.
To me, it's more than just reduce traffic, but a sign that government is investing in its people. In order for a traffic free/minimal zone to thrive, you need policies that promote affordable housing, policing policy that reduces crime without being "brutal". The population also must accept certain civil responsibilities as trust and respect must go both ways.
In Norway the public transportation in Oslo has become so bad that it's essentially no longer reliable. If I want to get somewhere in time, I have to use a car or a bicycle.
Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
Not to be a doomer but I think public transport has peaked in many places in Europe except the big famous standouts like Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc
The UK government for example is reducing subsidies for the railway and raising prices sometimes even 12-14% per year. This would be unimaginable 10 years ago. We have many railway workers who feel underpaid and some that feel they deserve the same pay as speciality doctors. This gets directly paid for by price rises. It is strike again /again/ for the railways.
I think the time is now that governments don't care about public transport
This isn't really true. Lots of investment in public transit in the Nordic countries. Austria is doing quite well. Switzerland of course to. Italy is doing better then many would have expected 20 years ago. In Paris they are building some of the most massive expansion in a long time, and even many smaller cities are building tram lines, and the TGV is putting up record numbers.
In the Baltic a massive rail expansion is happening. Former eastern countries like Czechia still have a good rail system and starting to upgrade it. Poland is upgrading in many places as well.
Spain has globally the best construction cost for new infrastructure and they are expanding things like Madrid metro.
The UK is doing badly as usual as of recently but despite the price rises, their network is incredibly full and well used.
> Lots of investment in public transit in the Nordic countries.
This is my favourite phrase. "lots of investment". Crime, drugs and violence gets worse, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in police — just meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
Public transport gets more expensive and worse every year, but there is a "lots of investment" in public transport — meaning we keep sending more money and getting worse results.
Energy is getting more expensive, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in energy — meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
But it's okay, you should be happy, at least there is "lots of investment", what are you going to do with your money anyway, after all you can't go anywhere because it's unsafe, the public transportation is probably not working, and you don't have money for it after paying your bills because of all the "investment" anyway, and even if you did the government can always find more things to "invest" the money in.
Having just traveled all over Northern Europe, your doomer nonsense about 'crimes, drugs and violence' is hilarious. For example the automated metro in Copenhagen is a case of investment with great results.
> can't go anywhere because it's unsafe
I'm sure this is true in the fantasy land that exist in your head.
I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
> Also,
Those sound like a bunch of far-right wing talking points. Do you have statistics to back any of this up?
And they don't match my own experience even a little bit. Because in most countries cars tend to cost more overall and are generally less safe.
> A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone.
t was an absolutely delight walking around the city, being able to walk on the roads or crossing roads because traffic has been reduced so much. That a fantastic policy that made the city more attractive.
The city was extremely welcoming and navigating on food or by bus or train was fantastic. There were tons of people around and lots of people in all the restaurants and museums. Plenty of people hanging out at the beautiful water-front.
The claim that it 'doesn't work' is just pure nonsense. It only doesn't work if you want to drive in from the subburbs on a daily basis.
> governments always fail eventually
So we should have cities without governments? If you want to privatize the operations of some public transit, that is potentially reasonable. But 'governemnt=bad does not mean therefore we need cars everywhere'.
> once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result
This has been stupid quite a bit, there is literally a field of urban studies, and it universally find the exact opposite.
> , because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore
Ah here it is. That's the '15 min city is a globalist conspiracy to make us prisoners in our own city' nonsense. You have dipped deep into it haven't you?
Please anybody that reads this, go to Oslo and enjoy the beautiful, vibrant, save city it actually is.
> I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
More than half of the times I want to use the train to get to work it's cancelled or delayed on one of the busiest train routes in the city during peak time. Quite often the train is so full, due to delays and cancellations, that I have to either go back home and bicycle, or wait for the next train, which again may be delayed or cancelled.
This is with the trains being out of commission for the whole of July for "repairs".
I almost entirely avoid the train and public transport now because, unlike the government, if I'm not on time or don't do my job, it actually does have negative consequences for me.
Your experience as a tourist has no weight. A city should not be built for tourists, but for it's citizens.
Prioritizing people is by any means the way to go, but it's not hassle-free.
It has an impact on businesses and delivery operators that end up being obstructed.
Ideally I think one should move towards layered cities, pedestrians on the ground while beneath them roads, parkings and especially train and train carts thrive.
What this article doesn't mention is that economically, people are so much more productive then cars.
The land value of your city will be so much better if you have a walkable city. Walkable is always the start, then you map bikes, and public transport on top.
You will have city that is economically productive and vibrant.
This is nice and all for tourists and people that live in the city center. But then if you don't live in the actual city and need to drive for half an hour to reach the city, spend half an hour searching for parking, then take a half an hour bus, then it's not so funny.
Imagine a city without personal cars in its inner limits. Residents who decide to own a personal car can park it in a Park&Ride which also includes unlimited transit access for the duration of the parking.
Deliveries, you say? Those aren't personal cars, but I'll comply. Businesses will be able to drive in the cities, within the permitted times/routes.
Emergency vehicles? Those aren't personal cars, either. They're also allowed.
Show me a city which banned personal cars and we'll check whether P+R transit to anywhere within is 2h. You can't, because there is no such city. It's personal cars that slow down transit, including preventing new rails being built to not dismay cherished drivers.
Glad to be proven wrong for the lucky folks living in the suburbs of such marvellous city without being second class citizens, pity that you didn't provide such example, while being so eager to talk others down.
A lot of people in the US seems to have a candy colored version of the EU in their heads that mainly consists of an idealized version of these cities and free shit.
Ofc, things look great if you spend a few days in expensive hotel or furbished AirBnB ruining things for locals. And in that time visit a few local places for food or get groceries for a few meals. But this is vastly different from living such places for years and trying to pay for it with local wages...
Unfortunately, there is a lot of ideology in the issue of restricting car traffic in cities, for example, the Netherlands is often cited as an example, but they forget that it is one of the most motorized countries in the world (80% of families have a car, and 33% have two), and has one of the densest networks of motorways in the world, and 78% of trips in the Netherlands are made by car, and the average distance of a bicycle trip is only 5 kilometers. I do not argue that local restrictions or a ban on cars, especially in the center, make life more comfortable, but this does not mean that it is necessary to restrict it everywhere.
I often ride a bike, but it is generally surprising that after a century of development of the car, the creation of comfortable climate control systems, noise insulation and multimedia, I am seriously asked to take children to school in the rain, wind or snow on a bike. For me, this sounds like regression
Pontevedra has around 80K inhabitants, so it's practical to design it this way. But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise. Not everyone can afford to live in the center (nor is there space for them, and building taller than a certain number of meters or floors is often forbidden for various reasons), so people begin moving farther out.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
I would argue that a public transportation network is a requirement, maybe even a prerequisite, for high density. Manhattan simply could not work without the various public transportation methods -- if everyone commuting in from CT, LI, NJ, upstate NY, etc., had to drive in, would there even be enough space for all those cars on the island?
> But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
It's not about being bigger, but having high population density.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
Cities can scale far further than that and cars make the situation worse, not better. The Amsterdam metropolitan area houses in the ballpark of two and a half million people, most of them not living in the city center.
In my US town, which I believe gets high walkability scores, they've shifted more pedestrian-hostile in the last few years (while incidentally also managing to tick off many drivers and brick&mortar small business owners).
For one thing, the "separated" bike lanes are hated by many drivers and business owners, and seem more dangerous for pedestrians than before. (Reduced visibility of cars, and now almost universal reckless freeway-like use by motorized e-bikes/scooters which more normal bikes are now mimicking.)
Also, during Covid, they let restaurants spread out onto the sidewalks and street parking of very busy streets, and now this is not only pretty unpleasant and unhealthy seating for customers (desperate for even the slightest hint of what human-friendly planning could be like), but tends to be an obstacle course for people who just want to walk on the already problematic sidewalks.
And in stretches of the sidewalk on major streets that don't have restaurants blocking them, at any moment, someone will come plowing through at full speed on one of those huge 'e-bikes' with the huge tires.
The one a few nights ago, through dense walkers on the sidewalk of the central business drag along a main street, at high speed... the rider of the 'e-bike' the size of a large motorcycle was clearly paying close attention, and his face looked like he was operating at near the edge of his ability to avoid hitting anyone (which would cripple or kill them), with the confidence and judgment that comes from being barely 20. Which confidence should gamble only his own life and limb, not those of others.
I think the bike rental stations on the sidewalks (now including e-bikes) also now lead to even sensible people being desensitized to riding the sidewalk, since you have to go some length of sidewalk with the bike just to access the station. Many people end up riding right up to it, and accustomed to that, even though it's illegal in at least some cases.
(The first thing I would do is temporarily outlaw all the motorized bikes/scooters, except for people with official medical reasons, it's gotten so bad. Until we can treat them as motor vehicles with sufficient regulations, and re-educate people not to be completely stupid bordering on psychotic. Then, after correcting for all the backsliding on safety and street life, we can resume thinking about the cars, which, even though 4-wheel drivers have long been called "Massholes", lately the 4-wheel car drivers been paragons of responsibility, compared to 2-wheel drivers in general.)
I am going to be downvoted for this but I am not wrong.
The thing most mass transportation advocates need to understand when it comes to the US is that we don't want cars necessarily for convenience, we want them to be able to avoid other people. We don't want to have to endure the constant micro aggressions of other passengers. We certainly don't want to have to endure the assaults, murders and rapes that happen. We don't want to be forced to mix with the most violent of society while unarmed and packed liked sardines.
Every argument you make about cars being more dangerous are 100% valid, we just don't care. We would rather die 10 times due to an accident than a violent murder. Its just our nature. Until you can get crime to essentially zero or ensure either an armed officer in every train car or allow citizens to carry mass transportation will not be a thing in the US. Especially not in Red states. I'm talking complete removal of all inconveniences, including things as minor as someone playing their music loudly on a blue tooth speaker. This murder of the Ukrainian woman combined with the treatment of Penny essentially killed any hope of mass transit being popular in Red states for the next 100 years. I am not arguing for or against Penny's actions I am simply stating the effect that it had on most people that support what he did, the same people that would need to support mass transit for it to catch on.
Again I am not arguing numbers here, mass transportation is obviously statistically safer than car travel by a massive degree. I am arguing human nature. We will not subject ourselves to criminals and intentional violence when there is an alternative no matter how much more dangerous that alternative ends up being
This linked article and the comment section remind me how I admire American maximalism. No half-measures - want to be able to drive everywhere? Let's bulldoze whole cities to make them car-oriented. Tired of the concept after a few generations? FUCK CARS, let's have Pontevedra everywhere.
Meanwhile there are places in the US that managed to preserve a more balanced approach. Take for example the borough of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania:
At first glance it looks like a typical car-oriented landscape, but note the presence of sidewalks. There's on-street parking, but hardly any driveway visible, because they're at the back, connected to one-way alleys.
That is brilliant. On one hand the area is fully walkable, on the other everyone gets to live in their detached house with a garage and whatnot. You can drive, but you can also walk. Hell, you could probably even cycle through those alleys as cars use them only to park, so they won't be speeding through there.
This would lead to literally murder in my part of upstate New York. Heck, my neighbor will even park on his own lawn to avoid the ten foot walk from the pavement.
I did. The person had bags all around them, things rolling out of them, and at one point dropped a box of coke cans on me that thankfully didn’t explode. The situation looked terrible and completely impractical. But people helped him gather his things.
TL;DR: «Only “necessary traffic” is allowed in Pontevedra: vehicles used for emergency and public safety, public services (including garbage and water trucks, etc.), transportation of people with reduced mobility, and accessing private garages are permitted 24/7. However, loading and unloading for commercial supplies, home delivery, transporting bulky objects, and house moving and related activities, are permitted only during certain hours.»
I am from there, and it's a bullshit law that does not think on people that can't afford electric or low emissions cars. Therefore, sooner or later, Court will erase that absurd law.
I mean look at Bologna, you can walk across the city centre and never get a single drop if it's raining. Same for the summer sun. Human-scale architecture and planning pays off.
That's how the EU liberals are losing the last drop of good-will that they have from the general (lumpen) populace. But good for them they all stand behind gentrification.
I feel like a bit of a failure when it comes to transport. I tried for many years to cycle to work in Dublin covering 25km on an ebike, but gave up after several nasty incidents that almost resulted in serious injury (for example my head almost going under the wheel of a van). I've experienced so much hatred, verbal and physical violence from drivers — and I'm the kind of cyclist that is fully lit, clad in high-vis and stopping at all traffic lights.
About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.
The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.
I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!
I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.
It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.
This is a problem when the public transport system isn't built with these exact issues in mind. You're right, it shouldn't take 2 hours for that commute, and all the other issues you pointed out are legitimate. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn't been adapted to make things better for the people using public transport.
As a comparison to the Netherlands, public transport always has right of way vs regular traffic, they have their own dedicated lanes that traffic isn't allowed into (this includes taxis! They can use the public transport lanes) and even their traffic signals treat them preferentially. I take a bus very often, and quite often it won't stop at a single red light because the traffic lights are programmed to help the flow of public transport, despite the street it travels on having 5 or 6 different traffic lights. In many cities, only public transport is allowed in some of the denser streets too, so they don't have to compete with other drivers on the road.
Trams, metros and trains are pretty obvious as to why they work so well.
Same with bike lanes. First of all, whenever they can be they are wholly separated from the main traffic and live in their own independent lanes. If a bike has to join regular streets, they have the right of way and these situations are kept at an absolute minimum. The streets and intersections themselves are also designed so that drivers are forced into driving safely via traffic easing measures and low speed limits. Plus, everyone here bikes, so there isn't the same type of animosity or stigma you see elsewhere because drivers understand what it's like to be a cyclist and view it as a normal thing.
So it's not your fault and you shouldn't feel bad, it's the fault of your government for not investing into proper public transport infrastructure. They are trying to squeeze in public transport infra into existing road infra, whereas what they should be doing is redesigning the current infra to make sure public transport is better integrated.
And, guess what, the roads here are still awesome for drivers! Other than the centers of the bigger cities, there isn't much congestion to speak of and the highways are of extremely high quality (to the point we have a billion memes about feeling the bumps of Belgium as soon as you cross the border). It's not like NL is a car-free utopia, something like 65% of people still have cars, the difference is that there are alternate options that are just as good, and often better than driving. That's the secret sauce to good public transport.
The Dutch model is frequently cited by campaigners here as how things should be done. Unfortunately, as you point out, our government doesn’t really care. Investment is a patchwork of half arsed attempts here and there depending on local pressure. There are only two tram lines in the country and people keep driving their cars into the trams. Bus lanes are clogged with taxis and the Gardai (police) are absent from our roads.
A recent local council attempt to remove a couple of parking spaces and install a shared space in the area I live was met with a wave of anger and vitriolic abuse. In a public consultation people were complaining about how it would prevent them bringing some elderly relative to the GP in the snow, while transporting a fridge. Meanwhile the area is permanently clogged with cars dodging a nearby toll making the place extremely unpleasant to use as an amenity.
It’s incredibly frustrating and saddening to contribute to the problems after trying so hard to do better.
The slow death of Europe by 1000s of cuts. Put migrant activity on top of that and bye bye.
There is a posibility between "muh America is car-centric, and btw i am bad at driving so i hate driving" and "you have to walk even in bad wrarher and when you are 70, think about the climate bruh".
I live in a pretty walkable Spanish city, and 70-year-olds are having a blast here. Even when they can no longer walk and they need to use various mobility devices, they can use the pedestrian infrastructure to move around the city and hang aroun the bars with their friends and families (and they do it basically every day, as far as I can tell). The same population in the US would be basically homebound.
Or Memphis, which is smack dab in the middle of a permanently Republican supermajority state, yet has three times the murder rate and twice the robbery rate of NYC.
Is there a charitable explanation for why people cherrypick a single homicide in a metro of 8 million people and somehow act like it's proof for the downfall of liberal democracy?
Especially when by most relevant metrics, illiberal democracy performs dramatically worse?
Because you can gauge how you feel when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative. I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly in the data we see from cities in blue states, to support their policies. Or that victims are exhausted by the lack of prosecution and sentencing, and stop reporting things.
> I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly
People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
> when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative.
I happen to live in one of those war-torn anarchist cities that was claimed by Fox and friends to be an open charnel pit back in 2020, and I assure you, there is something off with a narrative.
Specifically, the narrative that my city is a lawless hellscape.
That narrative (along with the sudden and immediate need for the military to be illegally deployed in it) is back, by the way.
> People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
They do. I’ve seen games like changing the rules by which deaths are counted as homicides and when. For example by requiring certain things are proven before it can be counted in a reported stat.
And this happens on such a regular and systemic, and party-lines nature, so that all these liberal cities consistently undercount homicides by such incredible margins, despite all their police forces leaning heavily towards authoritarian-right?
Do you have any proof for this, or is this a 'the earth is flat' sort of assertion? Can I just as confidently assert that it's actually the Republican-ran states that dramatically doctor and undercount homicide stats?
Maybe Memphis actually has 10x the homicide rate of NYC...
You seem to be living in a distant parallel world.
Here is how it looks like on the actual world: urban centers are dominated by Democrats in almost every state. The leniency regarding criminals comes from Democrats, specially regarding violent criminals.
Cities only prosecute misdemeanors, and have no control over felony investigations or prosecutions. Police departments in all cities politically lean hard-right.
The state and the PD has far more influence over access to firearms and serious crime than a city's politics do. A city's authority is largely limited to handing out parking tickets and graffiti citations.
And republican supermajority states have never had any issue overriding any municipal legislature or policies that they don't like. It's as easy as drafting a piece of legislature for them. Municipalities don't enjoy even the illusion of sovereignty, or, really, any codified rights in the US.
----
And if you think it's the cities; fault, why is the homicide rate outside of cities in deep-Republican states so high? Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas... All have a horrible state-wide violent crime problem. How many more decades of Republican supermajorities will they need to bury the myth that Republican policies reduce crime?
Your assumptions are incorrect: felony prosecution is not outside local control, and police politics are irrelevant.
How many times a PD arrests a criminal then a judge later releases? That criminal with 30-year history would never be free if judged in a rural county instead of urban NYC or Charlotte.
The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
Taking car transport to the extreme is bad, but the narrative that life in a small flat and commute by public transport is the future is dystopian, too.
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
EVs still produce air pollution from tyre, brake, and road surface abrasion. There is also new research that indicates resuspension of particles is a major source of roadway-related pollution.
No, people walk, run, shop, sit, use a bike and use a car, cars are just cars. If something is "built for cars" its just built for one of many tings people do. If its "built for people", it should be built for most of the tings people do.
That’s cute. But if you don’t have the public transportation infrastructure & enough housing it’s totally infeasible. People who drive the cars are not the city residents. They are the ones who cannot afford living in the city and have to commute from far away.
This is a very backwards way of looking at the issue. The public transportation infrastructure and denser housing used to exist throughout north American cities, but was bulldozed to make room for comically wide roads, oversized single family houses (increasinly occupied by empty-nesters not utilizing all the now empty space), parking lots, malls, and big box stores.
Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.
Did they also bulldoze the skyscrapers that we are missing to house all of the suburbs population in the cities ?
It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
Skyscrapers aren't practical in most places. On Manhattan you've got sky high land prices and excellent rock, so hence skyscrapers.
But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper.
Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots.
But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house.
The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.
Skyscrapers add density but they're only part of the solution. North American cities have plenty of skyscrapers and plenty of single family homes but they have a servere lack of dense multi family housing units.
> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.
It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.
It's all fine and dandy until you realize that economy pays a big buck for faster and more comfortable ways of transporting a body. (And it's been this way since time memorial).
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where:
1. People live for retirement and pleasure.
2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there).
3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
You can transport your body faster by walking than by taking a car. But of course, this depends on how you design a city. If I have a supermarket 5 minute walk from home, is going to be faster than taking the car out, and finding a parking lot and finally walking to the supermarket.
And let's not forget, that if you want a more fair society, you cannot assume that just everybody can afford a car. I went to university by bus and it was a horrible experience. I could only dream of the modern cheap electric vehicles. But still, the city I studied has barely any infrastructure for this, and you risk your life every time, even though it would be PERFECT for this.
Car infrastructure isn’t faster though, because it pushes everything apart. Noth America is a vast sea of parking with a building sprinkled here and there, so a five minute bike ride to shops with little parking is replaced by a thirty minute drive to a big box with 12 acres of parking.
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is such a modern take on life, we have to run everywhere to consume as much as possible as fast as possible. The irony is that you're probably missing out more of what makes life "life" by being entirely driven by FOMO and checking boxes of the infinite TODO list.
What's funny is that the faster the means of transportation the more time we spend time in them, commute times are getting longer, you're most likely literally missing opportunities due to cars more than anything else.
In any city the shortest distance in total time spent is by bike.
Even if it is widely dangerous to do so (most american cities i've ever visited)
You can hem and haw - but its pretty bang on
When you then add finding parking at the ends of your trip to it it is crazyly more efficient timewise.
Now even copenhagen denmark has rain causing many more to take a car or public transport (that works).
But it is very clear that the time argument is simply not true.
Now you can argue convenience at the start of the trip vs agony in the end (finding that parking space)
Or for "need to lug an ikea sofa across time"
Or even for "my kids and familiy needs to go as well"
That's super fine, and all true - but 70-80% of ALL trips in cars are by 1 person sitting in 1 car.
So moving just 10% of car users to alternate means free up a tremendous amount of space in the city.
I love my car, my bikes and my public transports and each does something nice for me - but seriously do you think cities like l.a. are even livable on a human scale - people don't even walk if the distance is over 1000meters.
I certainly agree with the idea of "uhm lets try to plan for otherthings than cars going forward"
It's not as straightforward as that. Sure, a car gives you more freedom - if you need to go further out for stuff. But if you live in a dense city, you won't need it - your job is in walking / cycling distance, all shops are, etc.
The other factor I found is that quality and affordability of housing is inversely proportinal to access to services/public transit; that is, in the Netherlands you can live like a king in eastern Groningen for the same amount of money you buy a starter home in the Randstad, but to get to the nearest city you're looking at at least an hour's travel (by car or bus/train).
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is what’s known as "fomo". Arguments driven on fear never sustainable.
Also apparently you have never been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the aftermath of a massive event. Or maybe county closes major roadway for repairs. Or a _single_ motor vehicle accident brings an entire highway to a halt for _hours_ (many people rubber necking as well …)
> Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
I will be very surprised if there's anywhere in the world where the expected loss from being robbed on the street while walking exceeds the expected loss from being in a car accident while driving.
Getting in a car is by far the most dangerous thing most people do routinely.
I'm from Pontevedra. It has been the major's long-term project (~ 20 years) to make the city for the pedestrians: and he's done it. This works mainly because of two things: 1) the city is small and it takes aprox 30 min to walk it entirely from end to end, and 2) it is mostly flat. Only a smooth hill from "orillamar" to "alameda/peregrina". Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo). This means tha people from these villages commute by car to the city, which has really poor parking capacity. And the most important thing: there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality. My partner works in Santiago and I work in the UK. There is no future for us in our city unless we want to study and compete for a position with thousands of other Spaniards. I firmly believe the major should also prioritise quality jobs. It is pretty nice for tourists to experience a city with no cars, but the reality of most locals is that they either leave or settle to accept precarious jobs.
> Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo).
He can't! Mayors in Spain do not have the authority to establish public transportation outside their municipality, as is the case of the villages you mention. That would fall under the authority of the Xunta de Galicia, which as you surely know, has done a terrible job with that in all Galician cities, not just Pontevedra. (I'm from A Coruña).
Man, I was near A Coruña a few weeks back and was marvelling at how great it was that I could stick my friends on a bus in a small town and they’d get to Santiago. You have public transit.
Where I live in Portugal, there’s nothing - no buses at all, no taxis, zero public transit of any kind. You drive, you walk, or you ride your donkey.
There are bus stops, from when there used to be buses, but there have been none in 20 years.
I'm curious where you are in Portugal. I visited for a few months back in 2017, and I didn't get a sense of the transit, but there were lots of nice new roads to drive on (which I get is not the right answer here).
Huh! I didn't know this. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, we all know what the Xunta is doing...
I'm looking for a place to move to in 5-10 years, and A Coruña is one of the places I've been researching! A friend from Spain says it's too cloudy/rainy. What do you think about the weather and any points in general about your city?
Maybe I shouldn't answer because housing is becoming prohibitively expensive so I shouldn't incentivize people to come here, but people have helped me in HN in the past :) So I'll do it.
In my view it's a city with awesome quality of life. Indeed it's cloudy, rainy and windy but it's better than most Galician cities (cough, Santiago, cough) and not that bad in the grand scheme of things, depends on what you compare to. 20 or 30 years ago I used to very strongly prefer the climate in southern Spain to that in Galicia, but with climate change things have changed a lot. We now have an actual summer that lasts for 3-4 months (it used to be one month, with luck :)), winters are mild, and we don't have the sweltering summer heat that is common in other parts of Spain. If you really need a lot of sun you won't like it, but if you're OK with weather being somewhat unpredictable as long as temperatures are mild (to give you an idea, we use heating for around 5 months but only turn it on like ~1 hour a day, and we don't feel there is need for AC), I'd say it's fine.
In general, pros:
- Great surroundings with coast, beaches, cliffs, the port, etc.; everything easily reachable by foot or bike from the city center (there are beaches in the city center).
- A 12 km long seafront walk (also friendly for cycling and running) with nice surroundings and sights.
- Nice size, in my opinion: big enough to have plenty of things to do, but small enough to be manageable (in Madrid in theory you have more stuff to do, but in practice my friends who live there end up going to things in their district because moving around is cumbersome. In A Coruña it's easy to get to an event anywhere in the city).
- The city is extremely safe. I have been here for 20 years and I think in all that time I only got asked for money by a junkie at 3 AM once. Nothing more serious than that ever happened to me (and I used to go clubbing night a lot, and still often take walks at night).
- Punches above its weight when it comes to events. From St John's night (23rd June) to early September there are events literally every day - concerts, book/art/medieval/comic/science fairs, exhibitions, workshops, and so on. The rest of the year not so much but still more than in other cities I know of comparable size.
- Also lots of things to do with children, if you have them. Many events specifically for them, apart from not one but three science museums plus an aquarium. And of course the above mentioned beaches.
- Like many Spanish cities, it has plenty of lively walkable streets to go shopping, for some wine/tapas, dining, etc. A lot of street life, unless in very rainy days.
- Galician food is top notch.
- While we are far from northern European levels of bicycle usage, lately there has been quite a lot of progress, with bike lanes and a bike-sharing service that works quite well.
- The city is booming right now, the economy is going well, people have work, so there is a lot of activity in general. (This may change, though. A political change in Spain is incoming and IMO it's not going to be for the better).
- You can reach other interesting cities, like Santiago or Pontevedra, by highway or even better, by train. Santiago is less than half an hour away by train and they are frequent.
So-so:
- Public transport has room for improvement, but it works. Maybe with some wait but it'll take you anywhere.
Cons:
- Still too many cars and pollution for my taste (although we're making progress). Although of course, much less than in any US city, and the city is perfectly walkable.
- The amount of dogs is absolutely insane. Honestly, I travel a lot and I haven't seen a city even close to the amount of dogs you see here. I guess it's maybe not a con if you have one :) But to me it's very annoying, because there's always people that lets them loose near children or that doesn't pick up their excrements, so finding dog poo is very common. And it's difficult not to hear some neighbor with a dog that barks.
- Construction quality tends to be bad. Most buildings are from the 60s-70s boom, ugly blocks with poor insulation. Much of the housing prior to that has little natural light and much of the housing after that has little space.
- Also related to this, the city center, tourist areas and parts of the city by the sea, etc. are beautiful; but many neighborhoods are ugly as hell, full of soulless blocks that have little to envy from Soviet architecture.
- Housing prices are skyrocketing both for buying and renting.
- Since we are in a corner of Spain, traveling tends to be inconvenient. We do have high-speed rail to Madrid which works very well, but if you want to go further, you typically need to take a flight to Madrid or Barcelona and there are not many, so layovers tend to get long.
> three science museums
I'm in. :-)
But I'm not coming for five, maybe ten years, so at least I won't be the one crowding your city for a bit.
Thanks for taking the risk of overcrowding!
What's your current city? To find something comparable...
I've lived all over the place. Currently New York, but not looking to replicate that. Goal is someplace walkable with nice weather and people, and adequate health care. We've spent time in Portugal, Uruguay, Argentina, Thailand, England, and several others for brief visits. Oh, and decent internet :-)
What would it take to change the monopoly of the Xunta de Galicia? Or reform them?
I've been to Pontevedra and actually I thought it was something of a public transport hub! I was there because I was changing buses.
Looking at Google Maps, there's a bus (XG628007) every 20 minutes from Marin to Pontevedra that takes 18 minutes for 7 km, along with at least two other bus routes which are less frequent and less direct.
How much more public transport could you ask for? There are subway stops in Manhattan with less frequent service. It's not practical to build rail to every village. An express bus might save some commuters 10 minutes, but it looks like the population is spread out along the coast so this would not be a huge benefit.
Maybe the buses are always late or cancelled, but that seems like a cultural problem rather than the mayor "forgetting" to provide them.
Public transport just serves as an excuse to argue against car-free policies. Public transport can never be good enough to cover any rural alley cost-effectively. It also does not need to, cities don't need to justify makong themselves more livable to their citizens, at the cost of commuters who only see the city as a parking lot and roads.
The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.
Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.
It works great when done well but generally the people with expensive inner suburb real estate typically fight tooth and nail to prevent that.
Anyone care to give a detailed argument for this position. Whenever I'm buying/renting a place in the city I always check its proximity to subway/train/bus stops and how frequently those vehicles stop by. That's even when I have a car. So the solution would seem to be build out inner suburb public transportation out at the same time or beforehand so there's less inner suburb real estate people fighting it? Yeah easier said than done, but it's still worth it to eliminate kneejerk opposition when you can.
I've always argued - given the tech we have - that one's municipal rates and taxes should include a public transport rebate.
Say the first €x /month,year is free, thereafter you pay as normal.
Use it or lose it.
It's true there is a bus to Marin every 20min but it uses a _single_ fixed route. People that live far away (>1km) from this path spend less time driving to Pontevedra than walking to the nearest bus stop.
It is not just increasing frequency, it is a matter of providing alternative routes to serve an important part of the population.
You could also bicycle to the stop? It's not really practicle to cover any rural location 1km apart with a bus stop.
> [...] there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality.
Alas, this is basically how it works in most of southern Europe, including my home country Italy. I don't know how much a small-town mayor can do to reverse years of bad political choices at the national level.
I'm not saying the mayor should change what is not under his radar. I'm saying the mayor should attract private companies for locals that don't want to be public state workers.
Thanks for the perspective. I think it's difficult for small cities like Pontevedra to create high quality jobs. There are not enough people to support rich doctors, lawyers, accountants and such. Factories can be established, but most people employed in a factory won't have a "high-quality" job. What other type of high-quality job could the city create?
[1] population ~ 80k, but working population ~ 50k.
Your perspective is really skewed here. 80k is easily enough to support multiple hospitals, specialist doctors, many dentists, and several multi hundred employee specialized companies.
I live in a city like this. We have muni employees, a hospital, some startups, plenty of non-tech jobs. There are doctors, lawyers, accountants, tradespeople, restaurants.. 80k is a LOT of people.
Side note: an hospital in Spain can be a relatively building with a few specialists, perhaps 20 people working here counting the staff. On many other countries an hospital is a huge building with dozens of specialists. The small places are "medical/care center". For sure there’s specialized jobs here too.
Clinics with 20 workers are not typically called hospitals, but rather "Centro de salud" or "Ambulatorio".
A "hospital" is a place with beds where patients stay overnight. All the countries where I have lived, including Spain, make this distinction.
I mean the option is civil servant vs no jobs
having an factory literally only positive from there
> close by villages, max 5km
a good cycle path would do wonders there. a flat 5km ride is doable for almost everyone, including seniors and children.
regarding jobs: that's got nothing to do with the carless center. to the contrary - for remote work, it'd be perfect.
Do you know the funny thing? There is a cycle path from Pontevedra that stops ~500 meters before Marin (although still Pontevedra jurisdiction). It has been like this for years. Those 500 meters are ocean. We can't cycle through...
Someone's never heard of a triathlon...
looking at the map, everythin is on one side of the ocean, so a bit longer cycle path would do, no ?
How do the employment prospects compare to other Spanish cities? It's one thing to say prioritise quality jobs but it seems breaking the mold in one dimension is hard enough, but to do it for 2 dimensions at the same time is pretty tough.
The situation they describe is true in the overwhelming majority of Spanish cities of comparable size. It is an actively discussed topic in Spain that there is a serious problem with people having to move to Madrid or Barcelona for jobs and the rest of the country emptying out. Regions with no coast that aren't Madrid are now often called "la España vaciada" ("the emptied Spain"). Near the sea cities don't empty so much, but often most jobs are in tourism so there is still a lack of high-skilled jobs.
There are a few cities of that size that are more dynamic, because they have managed to attract some IT/biomedical/etc. Santiago, which they mention, probably falls into that bucket, although it's still far from being a skilled jobs powerhouse. And anyway it's an exception rather than the rule, and I'd say it's mostly related to having a university with over five centuries of history and all the ecosystem that generates, not to anything a mayor could do.
There are a lot of places with crappy job markets and plenty of cars. I'm thinking of southern Italy for instance. At least they put the city on the map for something positive. Better than being just another anonymous place with poor job prospects and, who knows, maybe getting some attention helps with the economy.
Exactly the point, those that celebrate these victories from the outside, completely lack the perspective what it means for the people on the suburbs, let alone everyone else not fortunate to afford housing in the city center.
Cities don't need to cater to people moving out to the suburbs, who only view the city as a road and a parking lot. Citizens of the city have every right to make it attractive and livable for themselves.
Pity that whole thing with having a job, and wanting to get some better living standards.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
Having lost access to the city center during my teenage years certainly gave me a perspective on those that talk from above, without worries about everyone else.
Around here, people voluntarily move to the suburbs because they want a house and a garden or simply larger flats for a lower price. And then they demand that prople inside the city center cater to them and turn their city into a parking lot for those not living there. I'm glad this is now being slowly reversed, and that cities actually look after their citizens rather than commuters that moved away because they wanted large houses.
As if, living in the suburbs means having larger houses.
Feeling lucky living into one of those matchbox sized flat up on the 15th floor, while community 4h per day, distributed between several buses, train and subway lines.
> Around here
And around here people are moving out of the city because they cannot afford a flat in the city.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
People in Spain live in the suburbs by choice.
it really doesnt work like that in Spain. The associations say the US has with what a suburd is, and of suburban life, does not translate to Spanish city planning. A better word for "suburb" in Spain would be "outskirts" of city—somewhere you might be pushed to for financial reasons. They are often urbanised areas of cheap apartment blocks, and if rural, not in a fancy way, e.g. large spacious houses. The discussion on this thread is coming from a cultural misunderstanding.
There are of course also very nice houses around cities, and rural ones out from that, but they rarely characterise suburbs in Spain (Barcelona is an exception I've noticed, and Madrid has some satellite towns and cities North of city that are very plush, though not the suburbs).
As someone that grew up between Portugal and Spain, you can only be joking, by choice!, thanks for making my day.
Unless you mean those CEOs of construction companies, and offshore factories, with their villas and high powered sports cars.
I really would have liked my parents had such a "choice"!
Thank you for the real "insider" information. As usual govt tries to get rid of something, but by their incompetence they create other problems.
Me myself living in a large city, try to avoid car as much as possible. But when the incompetence kicks in, the public transport fails at so many levels, I have to use my car, or I'd spend 2-3 times more on commuting (e.g. instead of 1hr - 3hrs daily)
This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first stops on our trip through Spain and as an American it was stunning.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
I was in Spain last month and what stood out is that walkability requires mom and pop stores as well as more integrated neighborhoods with small commercial shops mixed into residential. Small shops seemed to be the majority in the city centers. The only large store I saw was a Lidl. They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars. And these are located in a neighborhood center serving the surrounding community.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
I think big box stores are popular largely because it would be inconvenient to drive between many smaller shops just to find the same variety of goods. It’s the same dynamic we see with car-dependent shopping malls, where the main advantage is being able to park once and visit multiple stores. If instead you had to re-park at each individual store, the experience would be far less convenient.
But if a town is designed to be fully walkable so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), then I think the appeal of large one-stop-shop stores is greatly reduced.
"so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), "
That is funny to read that, because indoor malls were meant to replicate the experience of shopping in a commercial area in a city, not the opposite.
It actually failed though. I feel terrible, sleepy and only want to get out after more than half an hour in these indoor malls. Probably something that has to do with artificial light and aircons.
The gruen transfer...look it up :)
Interesting. I guess the loud music and high temperature in some clothing stores is meant to achieve the same. They look like methofs law inforcement would use in an hostage situation.
In my case it gives me the urge of leaving as soon as possible. I could see how it could create impulse buy but most of the time I go to a shopping mall, it is to be able to try out clothing before buying and I will just lose patience and go away if it doesn't fit well. I tend to avoid them as much as I can anyway.
> But if a town is designed to be fully walkable
That is the point here. And do you always need to do all your shopping at once?If things were more walkable you can defer some shopping to other days.
You go to Midtown Manhattan and you continue to find plenty of chain stores like Target. Large scale stores are fine. Just don't dedicate space to parking. If you must, use underground parking garages not surface parking lots. You can cater to lots of shoppers if you assume shoppers will walk there or take public transportation.
It's easy to forget the large Department Store started in downtown areas with plentiful multi-story buildings. We tend to remember the few that remain now as the anchors at the ends of malls, but they started as more natural vertical extensions of urban development.
> They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars.
It's very common all over Europe, they are simply called "markets".
Yeah, that's hilarious, that's what markets ARE. That's how they were created. Like, thousands of years ago.
Mixed use zoning and some rules on what businesses can open would go a long way. Where I live I can walk to a small downtown that spans a few blocks with a train station. Unfortunately there is no where to buy groceries. There's like 3 ice cream shops, 3 pizza joints, and 9 salons though.
Is there no demand for grocery stores? Seems like they naturally would pop up to fill demand
Grocery stores are pretty low-margin, and need a certain amount of demand (for the size Americans are used to).
Some convenience stores get moderately close to being a grocery store.
It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry (and of course, only one of each type) and have people still willing to shop there.
American-sized grocery stores are relatively new though. When I lived in Germany downtowns had plenty of smaller, specialized stores. There'd be several small butchers, small bakeries and sometimes even a fish monger. Stores that carried produce would usually beer less specialized but there still would be plenty of small ones like Spa and Edeka used to have small locations in walkable areas. And of course proper markets at various frequencies.
> It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry
Liquor store comes to mind. There are two cigar shops, two wine shops and a beer shop downtown. Just weird priorities I guess.
I meant specifically what the smallest size you could get and people would still see you as a grocery store.
Basically, what is the minimum things you need for them to carry?
We have a very large number of grocery stores. They just aren't in walking distance of the downtown area. So there's demand, but apparently not enough for a bodega with produce.
I don't know about that. There have been large grocery stores and retailers in Washington DC for years, and walkability is fine. It's most comfortable when it's just one or two in a neighborhood, of course, but a block's a block.
Major retailers for sure but DC stores are typically more compact than their suburban counterparts. IMO it’s great. I far prefer the small WF in Logan Circle to a giant one in NOVA - it’s much faster to get in and out and still has everything I need.
I would say that the causality goes in the other direction. We have big stores Carrefour and even some Coscos, but not in the middle of walkable cities.
>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc. It was great. You'd get the occasional guy that jumps on, makes a speech about how he's raising money for something or other, and walks around trying to sell chocolate bars. And there was the occasional dangerous person, insisting on getting up in your face.
So long as this sort of behavior remains at a very low level, something like maybe once every couple of weeks, that's probably okay. But public transit loses all appeal if it happens often. If it rises to the level of violence, everybody starts thinking about the suburbs.
Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced. If it is not, and other options present themselves, people will choose the other options.
This happened en masse many decades ago in America. Those that could decamped for other places where their social expectations were met.
I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
All this applies to cars as well. Drivers are wild and driving is absurdly dangerous. I hate driving because other drives act like they are the car in the world - particularly post covid. Here in Toronto turn signals feel like they have been uninstalled. We have a ton of street racers tearing up the roads. I see motorcyclists pop wheelies and rip down major streets weekly.
All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I sit on the bus watching 10~25% of drivers on their phones watching videos at 60mph on my way to work. All ages too, including surprising old people. I live on a street that's posted 25 MPH and watch people impatient with the light down the block try to cut around traffic at ~40 down a narrow 1.5 lane street. Several times this year I've watched people cross a double yellows to drive into oncoming traffic to make a turn or skip past traffic. On Monday I was late to work because a driver ran into a pedestrian, stopped, then drove off, leaving him bleeding from the head on the side of the road.
Yeah, let's talk about antisocial behaviors. I'm getting to the point where I think roads should be designed specifically to inconvenience drivers. And I am one, I like being able to drive across the state, or across town to places that can take a long time by transit. Cars can be great.
> All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I would argue that drivers are worse. I've had motorists stop me while crossing a multilane street asking for directions. I'm thinking, "WTF, this isn't a safe place to stop and talk." I've also have had drivers pass by me while I was laying on the road. (One time after flipping on my bike because of street car tracks. The other time after being struck by another vehicle.) And these are normal people I'm talking about here, not some "big scary" stereotype.
I've had panhandlers walk up to me at stop lights in suburban sprawl cities. I find it very hard to believe that the GP hasn't experienced the same.
Would you agree that being able to drive away from that situation is different from sharing space in a confined metal tube for 20+ minutes?
If you're sitting next to a homeless person for 20+ minutes you're not in danger, you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate.
"you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate."
This is the sort of vacuous moral posturing that loses elections and if it wins them, it makes cities unlivable.
Why should I be fine sitting next to someone who shit his pants several times and likely has lice and scabies? And yes, it occassionally happens even in Czech public transport.
If you not just tolerate this, but scold people for being disgusted, the public transport system will lose the middle class and with it, any benevolence of the tax payer.
Civilizations always have some minimum for public behavior. Not stinking to high heaven in closed spaces is one of them. If you fight against such bare minimums and tell people that they are bad people for requiring them, you are promoting pure, unadulterated barbarism.
I don't know how it is in Czechia, but here in the US, we have a long and storied history of suburbanization, white flight, redlining, exclusionary covenents and discriminatory mortgaging.
The result is entire generations of people who grew up in suburban sprawl, isolated away from anyone who didn't look like them. I don't expect to be able to convince those people to suddenly turn over a new leaf - if anything, the argument was lost long before I was born.
You cannot make public transportation both useful and sufficiently sanitized to where these sorts of people won't be bothered. It's an impossible standard - at least for a country as diverse as ours.
At this point, what is there to lose by speaking the truth?
My experience is that panhandlers on the road like to post up at long red lights, at which point you’re effectively forced to share space with them for N minutes unless you intend to run a red light. In the subway, you just change cars.
(I’m riding the subway right now, and two people just changed cars because of weak A/C.)
Well, as one data point, I've been driving in the Northeast US since 1996, mostly around Philadelphia and Boston, and that has never once happened to me.
Saw a juggler in Barcelona do this. Was juggling at the lights, then ran around asking for tips. Ran up to me too, as a pedestrian, but I was crossing the lights then so he decided to focus on the cars instead.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.
You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.
>>> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
>People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
> The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
I mean, as a first approximation, about twice as many people die in car crashes than are murdered in the US every year so...
It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes on public transit. If I have an uber or a private taxi or even a private collectivo which is a private system that works like public transit in much the 3rd world, if I get sick of someone panhandling for the Nth time I can kick them the fuck out.
If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.
Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.
I don't think that's true at all. Police in NYC are able to remove passengers who are being a nuisance, there just aren't enough of them to police every car of every subway train.
In my experience (as an NYC resident) the people causing problems on the subway aren't just being assholes for the sake of it. They're homeless, have mental issues or frequently both. I suspect when you visit Germany or Japan you're seeing the effects of much more comprehensive social nets that actually care for these people rather than let them fall through the cracks and live on subway trains.
You don't need police to trespass someone in private transit though. You can just tell them to leave, and if they don't they can be made to leave (depending on the state). If you're familiar with bouncers you understand this function.
Expecting a police to be available to every transit disturbance, I agree, is not going to end with a functional outcome.
I'm not sure why there would be a distinction, really. The NYC subway has a specific transit police force who would act as the "bouncers" in this scenario. Either way it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Disruptive passengers can be ejected on public transit.
You don't see the difference between every driver being able to be a bouncer, and only sworn police being able to be a bouncer?
Private citizens generally can't trespass people on public property. You have to get a policeman and the policeman has to cite a specific policy or law they have violated.
The private system in this case is way more pragmatic since every driver that is already on the bus has bouncing rights.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the original discussion. You said:
> It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes
My response to was to say I do not believe that is true at all. Passengers on public transit do not have freedom of speech to be assholes.
Well you just admitted it applies more to public transit because they need a police to kick them out. If I can be an asshole and no one is able to show up and stop me, I have effectively the freedom 'de facto' to be an asshole even if I do not have 'de jure' freedom to be an asshole.
Personally I'm not so sure police in NYC can kick people out for 1st amendment protected activity, which was what I specifically referenced the asshole activity being under the umbrella of. That was your assertion, that while I contested how pragmatic it might be, I never stated whether I believed it was true or not.
Drivers are given the latitude to kick passengers off public transportation for a range of reasons including violating the rules of conduct.
If I'm reading this correctly, you're talking about panhandling as an example of asshole activity that you believe is protected by the 1st amendment. Specifically, in NYC, it was ruled that panhandling is not protected speech on public transportation, see Young v New York City Transit Authority.
Of course, if the passenger refuses to leave or stop, the driver can't physically force them to and must escalate to a police force. Although, I imagine that's similar in many other countries as well.
I don't think it has anything to do with free speech laws, it's simply civics and the lack of it in American society due to a multitude of factors.
American society doesn't understand collectivism in any level, your country has been built upon individualism without much care for collective living, you just reap what you've sown.
Have you considered that America is a wealthy country, where anyone with a job even flipping burgers can buy a 150cc motorcycle and then take his girl on a date without a process that involves getting accosted by a paranoid schizophrenic?
You can basically buy a small motorcycle or scooter or fast e-bike on credit for the cost of maintaining a bus pass. It's only a rational choice for elderly or people with such mental or physical disabilities they can't maintain or operate similarly cheap alternatives. The end result is public transit gets dominated by hood rats, mentally ill, homeless, and a few elderly and people with disabilities, and due to the first amendment you can't stop the first couple classes from harassing the rest so as soon as a normal person gets their 50cc scooter or whatever similarly cheap other option fixed they go right back on that.
Sweden is also a wealthy country, even more here in Stockholm, people can lease cars for cheap, can buy scooters, etc., and public transport is still great: clean, reliable, covers a huge area since it's very sprawlwd, with almost no disturbances (in more than 10 years I can count on my digits the amount of times I've seen someone being mildly disturbing to others passengers). I only cycle and ride public transport here since I never cared (nor had to care) about getting a Swedish driver's licence.
The issue is not free speech, it's how your society educates people to be citizens.
If the US builds high density corridors supported by high frequency, reliable public transit connecting desirable destinations (housing with shopping, CBDs, etc), I'm willing to bet a lot that every social class will be represented on those public transit lines.
Yeah, great.. I was recently hit by a paranoid schizophrenic on a E scooter.. More logically he could have been denied access since he had plenty of public transportation options where he wouldn't have gone on to eventually maime people.
I don't have any reason to believe a paranoid schizophrenic capable of buying and maintaining a scooter is going to be any more persuaded to use public transit than anyone else. They are going to use alternatives for the same reason the rest of us do.
The ones using public transit are generally the ones with functional issues to the point they can't even get to that point of having a functional e scooter to crash.
Court systems persuade people based on weighing rights, necessities and probable harm. Reduce public transit and their decisions change, increase it and they may make incompetent pilot free zones.
USA has many successful "collectivist" examples in its history. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_durin...
I'm not sure that's quite the case, because as a country we do tend to be rather compassionate when motivated to do so. You frequently hear from travelers "Americans are the nicest folks you'll meet" and I generally believe that's true. It's not about individualism vs collectivism, but lack of empathy enforced through transportation methods that by design create a lack of social cohesion.
Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
> You frequently hear from travelers "Americans are the nicest folks you'll meet"
It's fake niceness, it's the American way of being "polite", most times I interact with Americans it's pretty clear it's surface-level niceness, more like a theater than genuinely being it. To me it's quite grating and makes Americans feel untrustworthy.
> Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
I live in Sweden and usually tell people that it's the most individualistic collectivisc place I've been to, people are individualistic in the sense of self-sufficiency but care about the collective if you are acting against it. In that sense we are much more collectivisc than the USA, whenever I've been in the US it's very clear that most aren't caring for the collective aspect at all.
Yes you're right comrade. If an American is ever nice just remember they're actually untrustworthy and it's all theater.
I know you are being facetious, but its hard to get past the uncomfortable theatre of 'this is all just fake nice for tips' if you are visiting from a non-tipping country.
Being nice and being empathetic are very different things. Niceties are protocol; you can be empathetic and considerate while displaying very different types of mannerisms.
Ok. Americans are nice, kind, empathetic, polite, and considerate.
Or is there more you want to quibble about on this topic?
I’ve found a good chunk of Americans to be vacuous, self centered and obsessed with performative individualism. Other people don’t need to make a show about their kindness.
Americans might be nice, but they're not necessarily kind.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
OP is right. The demand is huge and supply is tiny. Even with those scary panhandlers people are jamming onto public transport (when it actually exists) and going far far out of their way to experience walkable areas.
> zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional
Crime in NYC is exceedingly low and the schools are great. Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
>Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
Because I'm not in the top 0.1%.
"Why don't you just move into a $2-5 million dollar home?" is an astonishing take.
Wait. Are the pedestrian friendly cities battlegrounds with panhandlers with horrible schools, or are they wildly expensive luxury destinations that are in such high demand that only the 0.1% can live there?
I'd think "it can be both" would be obvious, but clearly not.
Rich people have been enjoying a different standard of life even in the midst of abject poverty since forever, but I guess this is news to some.
So, OP is right. Despite the Nextdoor-tier rant about panhandlers the demand for walkable cities is huge. So huge that the super rich will pay handsomely and put up with panhandlers on top of it to live outside of car hell.
At least one wealthy family in NYC I met doesn't use surface transport for much... they use helicopters or have things/people/shopping/restaurants brought to them.
Had an experience where a store sent tailors, stylists, a manager, and a ton of inventory so that they could clothes shop while still in their home. Apparently, this was "normal". My shock was a source of great amusement to them.
They did the same thing with restaurants, movies, concerts, even a play... the staff, etc. came to them.
I have no idea just how wealthy they were (Brazilian who owned many businesses in oil and gas production) but I had never seen (or even heard of) such service.
I don’t think your wealthy acquaintances are representative.
I’ve lived in NYC my entire life, and I know plenty of wealthy people. Most take the subway; a small but not insignificant minority drive or are driven everywhere.
You mean the skies aren’t filled with everyone riding helicopters?
The skies are so filled with copters that you can walk from building to building on their blades.
I think we're talking about the difference between millionaires and billionaires (they are definitely billionaires).
This sounds more like and impoverished life than a wealthy one.
(Clearly I am referring to the life experience, rather than how much money they have and how they spend it.)
That's an amazingly reductive take on a complex issue, and it infers something which was not implied.
At no point did I suggest that walkable cities were not in demand, only that the current state is less than ideal for a large number of people, to which your solution was "be rich".
No my point is that if OP were wrong then these places would be cheap.
I don't understand why you're phrasing that like it's a dichotomy. It's clearly both.
It's almost like the US has a... missing middle?
The UWS above 96th is quite affordable. Manhattan Valley is pretty, safe, and close to the park.
According to Zillow they start at about a million for 2/1 apartments and go up from there.
We have completely different definitions for affordable, unless $250K+/yr jobs are just falling out of the sky.
Renting is perfectly fine. NYC has the strongest tenant protection laws in the country.
Renting has to support the mortgage on that. The only difference between being able to afford a house and affording rent is having the capital for a down payment
That’s not really true. Renting is significantly more affordable than buying in NYC right now. I don’t know the exact reasons, but presumably most landlords bought a long time ago and refinanced when rates were low.
There are many teachers, social workers, and bartenders living on the UWS. Hardly the top 0.1%.
I imagined they thought you'd consider renting, not just buying. (It's still expensive, but not top-0.1% expensive.)
Just rented a 2 bedroom on the Upper West Side. The rent is $4600 a month. And these bedrooms are tiny.
Not everyone can "simply move to" Upper West Side.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
These are not issues with public transit. These are issues with municipalities that don't invest in their citizens.
For one example, public transit connects people to jobs. Some people in nicer areas with good jobs fight against public transit because they don't want the working class to have easy access to their neighborhood. So, again, the issue isn't public transit, it's people who don't want to share their municipality's resources. New York today has free kindergarten, universal school lunches and the excelsior scholarship program. Thanks to investments like this, we see crime in NY today is lower than even Giuliani's tenure as mayor...
> Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner."
That literally all of society.
The American idea that you live in suburban home that is a quasi gated community, drive into a parking garage, then go up to an office, only interact with workmates and then driving back out with no social interaction other then work is just not how most society worked for all of history. And its not how the US worked until the 1960.
The reality is, violence and death on the roads, is far more common then on public transport. There are tons road rage incidents, an absurdly high number. Those lead to all kinds of problems and quite often shootings. You are in more danger then on public transport generally. And yet I almost never hear about that when Americans talk about transport policy.
But yes, there does need to be rules enforcement. But on the other hand its also true that the US often has very user-hostile design principles in pretty much every aspect of their city design and policing policy. And that often invites or re-enforces bad behavior.
And social policy. You have too many people wandering around in a psychological state one negative interaction away from an incident that could easily escalate to murder.
Such people exist in every country, yes, but fewer in most places.
I lived in Manhattan (Chelsea) and took the subway to work and most other outings (when I could not walk) in the few years before Covid.
It was fine. You would get some people trying to sell stuff or in some kind of distress, but it was not all the time and it was easy to manage.
Americans who don't live in dense cities (and use transit) seem to be obsessed with the idea that these are some intolerable dystopias that must be dismantled.
It was the best place I have ever lived, except for the weather...
I found the density of Manhattan oppressive and stifling. Coming from Wrigleyville, in Chicago, it felt very impersonal and alienating.
I ended up buying a house in an internal suburb (a former suburb from the 1930s that had been swallowed by the city) that is also a historic neighborhood (so it's character cannot be destroyed by developers).
It’s fine that not everyone likes the same things.
What bother me is a loud minority of anti-urbanists complaining about cities they don’t live in and pushing for policies that hurt them. All while economic data clearly shows cities are more productive and subsidize they rest of society.
Funny, I find Wrigleyville oppressive. I lived by that red line for a few years. It takes a lot of patience to live there.
When I lived there it was middle class Polish and gay (since Boystown is right next to it).
Pierogis, coffee, and cute little shops. That and great music.
I was right by Halsted and Addison. By oppressive I mean brutal in a sense. The drunks falling into the street. People shitting in my alley. Trying to get on and off the red line during a game. The huge crowds. Fights on the El platform. Cat calling. Harassment. People sleeping in my stairwell.
It was rather eventful let's say. I just didn't really know what I was getting into being new to the city. It's pretty amazing what you grow accustom to.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
As a european I read this comment, its sort of implications, and reckon US must be hell in some areas. TBH London has seen a big drop in health, pan handlers have "lightly" started appearing on public transport, I think I only began noticing it since 2020.
My point is even with the occasionaly pan handler in London, that statement wouldn't make sense, as it is not "obviosuly bad" in that regard.
Well, panhandling was just one thing mentioned, and to focus on that to the exclusion of the others seems disingenuous.
But it does depend on the nature of the panhandling, doesn't it? Passive panhandling is one thing, and aggressive panhandling is something else, right?
The point is that people will accept some level of anti-social behavior, however they define that, and above that level they do not. No amount of bluster or "why I just never" or incredulity doesn't change that. If you want walkable cities with good public transit you make it attractive and hospitable to a wide majority of people.
Or don't, no skin off my nose, but acting shocked that there are people who think and react differently than you do is silly IMO.
Im confused, you seem to be offended for some reason
EDIT> I reread your comment what on earth are you talking about? Im not acting shocked, and nothing about my reply is anything to do with other people having differing opinions.
Fair enough, though I'm not offended. I detected condescension where none was meant, and I apologize for that.
No worries bro its all good man
As a North American who has contended with public transit in many different cities on this continent, I can tell you, you should infer that a person making comments like this has been primed by conservative media to: fear everyone who isn't exactly like them, overestimate the crime in cities, demand a fascist police state, blame the victims of circumstance (and be blind to the systemic issues that put them in said circumstances), blindly dismiss any honest attempts to fix the underlying issues as "communism".
>The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!"
A cousin was visiting us in our nice suburb. We had a slow, not-busy road we walked on when we lived there, and we'd wave to anyone; neighbors, vehicles, etc. Our cousin was sort of uncomfortable, and asked "do you know all these people?" I explained that we knew some of them but were just being polite and friendly. She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't think this occurred to her at the time, but that means she lives in a pretty awful place. Why exactly would it be _dangerous_ to wave at someone in a friendly way? There's only one answer to that question; because you live around violent or unstable people.
Before anyone says I'm just privileged, I've lived in rough areas before, and I can't fathom why anyone would put up with that sort of daily violence, noise and general degradation of quality of life if they otherwise didn't have to. We ultimately ended up moving out of the city just like you said because the crime was getting worse year by year. Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less) And if you go and try to get him to turn it down there's a significant chance you'll be met with violence? Or people harassing your wife if she's ever "foolish" enough to walk down the street without you? Or to need to explain to your wife "hey, we can't walk through that group of kids, I can't really defend you against more than two attackers." All of these were regular issues for us. Home invasions on our block started ramping up, we knew people who were attacked, shot, killed, just while walking home.
To your point, this wasn't academic. It can be quite the 3rd rail to try to explain _why_ the violence in the city is bad, what is the cause and what is the solution. But when we're talking about my family's safety, I just don't care. I'm not going to live like that, and would have done almost anything to get my family out of that sort of situation. I really can't even fathom people who would write these things off. "Sure, my wife might be murdered and abused in a home invasion, but there are really cool walk-able restaurants!" It's pathological.
Sure, when you compare a "nice suburb" to a "rough area" of the city you'll come to such conclusions. But if the city you lived in is anything like mine, that disorder you experienced is likely highly localized to those "rough areas". Given this, it might be more helpful to compare a "nice suburb" to a "nice area" in a city.
I'm glad you chose the experience of taking a walk as your original example because it was instrumental in helping me to decide that I wanted to raise my family in the city.
COVID offered an opportunity for my young family to spend a month in the suburbs and the thing that sticks with me now after all these years later is how much I hated taking our then 1 year-old for a walk as compared to the city. In the suburbs we walked past the same houses on the same sidewalk-lacking streets barely seeing anyone else. If we wanted anything beyond that it required loading our toddler into the car.
Compare this to a nice area of the city where the density allows for a vast array of possible destinations and plenty of folks to smile or wave at on the way. Walks these days could be to the local park on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, or to the local Italian Ice spot because the weather hasn't gotten too cold yet. While it's still possible to have those experiences in the suburbs, it's hard to be as spontaneous when you've got to consider things like car seats and parking.
> She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I was born and raised in urban environments.
Let me translate this for rural (or fake rural aka suburbia) minded folks:
In cities people don't wave except to people they actually know/have seen several times because...
It's gauche, awkward, weird.
There are just too many people in cities and nobody can pretend their city is just one big village. People just go on with their lives and don't wave 1 million times per day. Waving is reserved to actual acquaintances.
In this specific case, it was most likely a bad neighborhood or someone with a heightened sense of fear due to reasons that cannot be clarified without knowing the person directly.
> (Boston) .... Why exactly would it be _dangerous_ to wave at someone in a friendly way?
It's not dangerous at all to do this. It's just considered odd & borderline impolite to do that. It's hard to explain to an outsider, but you see it brought up a ton on places like r/boston. The stereotype is that people in the northeast are "kind but not nice". By and large we don't engage in frivolity like greeting random people when walking around.
This is also true of the tube in London - if you talk to a stranger on the morning commute you may as well have peed in their backpack - the response is about the same.
And it can make sense. A lot of people are packed in small space and commuting. Not exactly an uplifting part of the day. I can understand it's considered polite to try to keep quiet.
What's funny is where I live now in Italy (outside of the big tourists areas) is the exact opposite. Any line or idle time you have with random people will become a conversation. It's almost weird to not have a conversation.
>She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
This is the most hilarious thing I've read on this site. Your cousin might get some weird looks waving to random people, but why would they feel unsafe? I have never known more of my neighbors than in Boston, and I've lived all over the U.S.
People in New England are generally not at all polite but very kind.
Like if you waved at someone they'd give you the bird but if you dropped your groceries someone would help you pick them up.
I live in a rough area. The kind of problems it brings are far, far, far more manageable than the kind of problems that trying to exist in a "nice" area where some large fraction of people will hate me for how I live and have no real problems so they'll focus on me. Nobody gives a shit what you do in the hood. If you don't make part of your living doing some sort of business outside the law the violence will probably never visit you. That said, despite violence being not great, property crime generally is quite low here compared to even much nicer areas in other corners of the country so that takes a lot of the inconvenience off IMO.
I think the mistake you're making is assuming the entirety of all cities are rough areas. There are plenty of rough suburbs you don't want to live in either.
> She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't really understand this. It's well known people in the NE don't simply wave at everyone. I grew up in the south so it's odd to me to not ask any person I interact with how their day is going, but I've never seen it as some safety issue. Just different culturally.
> Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less)
I'm not sure if this is alluding to race, so I'll ignore that part, but kids are going to be kids. Suburbs, city, doesn't matter - if you have teenagers around you'll have things like this. When we lived in a suburb my wife always complained about the kids doing this and I would always chuckle because at one point I was one of those kids ;)
I live in Seattle and we wave to our neighbors every day. We also have block parties with big cookouts, kids running up and down the streets and sidewalks playing with each other after school, and I get to enjoy a highly walkable lifestyle. My son's normal is multiple parks within a few blocks, walking to a small grocery store to pickup ingredients to make dinner, and having multiple friends he can walk to and visit throughout the day.
are you my neighbor? Sounds like where I am, but with only one small corner market in walking distance. There used to be a bigger grocery/deli until about 5 years ago. Now it feels like we're in a bit of a donut hole within Seattle.
The semi rural and rural US south is, in many places, much more dangerous based on crime statistics. Stranger danger is also much less of a factor than is perceived.
Maybe. But I know that many blue cities also play games with crime metrics and what gets classified as what. Not to mention the utter lack of prosecution and consequences trains citizens to stop reporting, leading to the data changing in misleading ways.
> But I know that many blue cities also play games with crime metrics
How do you *know* this?
You've fallen for right wing propaganda. Crime has continuously fallen since the 70's. Individual areas of cities might get worse (there's a cyclical nature to newly built up, desirable areas aging and becoming low-income as other areas get rebuilt), but it is an indisputable fact that you are less likely to be violently attacked today than just about any other point in living history.
And the difference in crime rates in urban and rural areas is grossly overblown. Looking at California numbers, a city-slicker has about a .9% chance of becoming a victim of violent crime, and hick has about a .6% chance. That's a small reduction to a small probability. For context, if your risk tolerance hasn't forced you to cut out meat and alcohol from your diet to avoid cancer, you're miscalculating risk if you think you should flee the cities to avoid violence.
Thank you for this. This is precisely my issue with public transport in the US (granted my experience has only been in SF, Oakland, NYC and Chicago).
It’s emotionally taxing when you need to keep your guard up all the time. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be on someone if they had kids to tow around as well.
How is driving not emotionally taxing the exact same way? Driving with my kids is fucking terrifying. I have 2 under 6, and I have to lock them into these giant car seats to keep them safe (to be clear I like modern car seats, their designs just remind me how vulnerable kids are). Every time I go through a intersection I worry what happens if someone runs the red and smashes into our side.
I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.
Driving is exhausting.
And when they get a bit older you need to stay in the house all day trying to keep them off the worst parts of the Internet because cars have completely destroyed kids freedom
> Every time I go through an intersection I worry what happens if someone runs the red and smashes into our side.
Something like this is a lot more rare than harassment on public transit. And not exactly avoidable. So it isn’t worth thinking about. But on public transit you have to maintain constant vigilance just to avoid the many bad situations that could come your way. You’re very exposed and vulnerable. The crime rates on transit are after everyone puts in the effort to avoid being a victim.
Two thoughts...
Is it actually true that car accidents are far more rare than harassment on the subway? I don't take public transit enough to comment (there is none here).
Car accidents have a much higher likelihood of maiming or killing me. Even if they're more rare, I would posit (but don't have numbers) that the total cost to society (including property damage) is MUCH higher.
Data point: I've been in two car wrecks. Once as a passenger where the driver spun it on the Mass Pike to 128 ramp, and once when I got T-boned on my way home from having my car serviced. That was my favorite car. Nobody's ever bothered me on public transport. Not on the MBTA, not on MBTA, Metro North, or LIRR commuter rail, not on Amtrak to New York, not on the New York public transit systems.
I've been in two accidents and been in the car where a fight broke out on the red line twice.
And I've been driving a hell of a lot more than the years I rode the subway....
> I've been in two accidents and been in the car where a fight broke out on the red line twice.
Were you an active participant in the fights?
If not, wouldn't the fair comparison be a count of how many car crashes you have driven past?
>Were you an active participant in the fights?
I wasn't an "active participant" in the accidents either. Both were minor rear endings.
It's not just about crashes. It's also about close calls (in both directions, being hit and hitting others), people driving while checking their phones, rude drivers: tailgaters, honkers, high beamers, etc. The list is endless.
Oh, and my God, the mind numbing boredom.
Because if you don't suck your have bad interactions monthly or less and when you do have them they're pretty easy to explain away in a way that doesn't involve the other guy having malice or whatever.
Maybe try going whatever speed the rest of the traffic is going. Less ire will be directed at you if you're not everyone's problem point.
I can make most of the same arguments about driving.
People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.
When I lived in a pretty wealthy suburb some of the most dangerous people around were those driving home from the bar.
I take my kids on the NYC subway very often. It isn't emotionally taxing because the vast, vast majority of journeys encounter no issues at all. What you're describing is a self inflicted state of mind.
I don't drive as often but I've run into far more potentially dangerous situations driving on the highway with my kids than I have on the subway.
I’m much more worried about my teenager driving than I am him taking public transport.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
Haven't seen any of that in 30 years of using public transport in several countries. Are you ok in US?
The closest to anarchy I have been in public transport was withnessin a hobo refusing to pay for the ride to trigger the police response and be booked.
No, not at all. Have you seen the news? We'll be at Weimar Republic levels of inflation soon and half the voters think the person that's causing it will fix it.
Pontevedra is at least 100 times smaller then NYC, it's more comparable to the suburbs that you're moving your family to.
Yep, population of 80,000 vs 8,000,000.
The problems you mentioned are policing and welfare problems, both things that America sucks at.
Or it becomes too expensive like in germany. Then it will suck too.
€58 a month for all local/regional public transport is very cheap.
Where I am, in another part of western Europe, a single-region ticket is normally ~30-50% more expensive than the all-of-Germany ticket.
It is subsidized. Through taxes you pay the full prize anyways. Just that someone else than you who decides, what do with your money, like subsidized public transport.
My daily bicycle commute takes me right through the heart of my city's homeless district, and like with many cities things have gotten a lot worse since COVID.
Cars are far and away the biggest threat to my safety, and the source of all the harrassment I receive while out in public. I mean, every now and then some guttersnipe blurts out incoherencies at me, but that's not something to be afraid of.
I regard driving, in cities, to be an inherently anti-social activity. If you want a healthy community with safe and lively streets you got to be out in it, not sealed off in a protective cage.
Do you have a wife? Kids? Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?
I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.
"wife I forbid you from traveling on that road"
Do you have a wife?
My wife is far more risk adverse than I am. We'd be moving if she had to bike through a Hooverville to buy milk.
If I see your wife and kids in trouble I'll intervene, don't worry.
Of course, motor vehicle crashes are the second biggest killer of kids after guns. I don't know where homeless people sit on the threat scale but it's a negligibly small amount.
That's a non-answer, so I assume that's a "no" on the wife, kids, and/or letting them pedal through tent city.
In any event, homeless people are low on the threat scale because people generally avoid riding a Schwinn through homeless encampments, which should be perfectly obvious but I guess not.
I don't have kids. The homeless district is easy to avoid, and there's a k-12 school right on the edge of it with many kids walking, cycling and taking the bus to school. I've never heard of a serious incident involving homeless people.
Here's a fun fact for you: statistically cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, and that's in spite of all the hazards they have to deal with while out riding.
I for once don't let mine out of the house without a full face cover so strangers on the street don't get any ideas, so I'm right there with you.
> Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?
I have lived in and around more than one area known to have a high density of people experiencing homelessness. It seems a lot, lot scarier than it really is. Once you get used to just tuning them out it's fine. The vast, vast majority of the crime in that community happens amongst themselves. Are there exceptions to that? Of course. But the numbers are low, just like most crime.
Cyclists usually deserve it. You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road.
I watch Cyclists pull shit that's illegal on the road all day, and they refuse to simply USE THE SIDEWALK (infinitely safer for all involved). That way, when the cyclists inevitably do some dumbshit the only people at risk are pedestrians and the usual damage is at most a broken bone rather than roadkill.
Localities that ban cycling on sidewalks are spiritually and ontologically evil.
> deserve [to be harassed by people in cars] no, they don't.
> You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road. A driver's license is not required to use a road. It's required to operate a car. Cyclists explicitly have the right to use the road, including outside of bike lanes. When cyclists act unpredictably it is very, very frequently a response to motor vehicle traffic and pressure, because drivers are seemingly incapable of understanding that their tons of metal can hurt people.
Cyclists would love separated infrastructure, but the vast majority of transportation dollars go towards car infrastructure in the US.
> [the sidewalk is] infinitely safer for all involved
no, it isn't. This creates a lot more points of conflict with both drivers (who do not expect fast traffic on the sidewalk) and with pedestrians. Sidewalks are also often not appropriate for wheeled vehicles moving with any speed; terrain is uneven and turns are too sharp.
You're driving? Act like you have a driver's license, which requires you to respond safely to other road users including cyclists. Can't do that? Get the hell off the road.
Last time I tried riding on a sidewalk (which is legal where I live, but notably not everywhere) some random pedestrian who felt affronted pushed me off my bike, so ymmv.
>and they refuse to simply USE THE SIDEWALK
How do you get to a sidewalk on a different block without going on the road?
Drivers mostly hate other drivers but they do occasionally take some time to hate other road users as well.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
Everyone loves driving until they have to:
* Pay through the nose for parking.
* Pay through the nose for tolls.
* Pay through the nose for gas, maintenance, insurance.
* Replace a car that they can't afford to keep running.
* Are stuck in endless traffic hell that them and all the other drivers on the road have created.
* Are seriously injured or killed by a reckless/drunk/idiot/inattentive/unlucky driver.
----
The first bullet point in particular drives people into a frothing rage. Drivers, as a group, are incredibly and irrationally entitled to free storage of their cars on public/private space.
The last bullet point is far more likely to happen to you in a car, than you are to be assaulted on a bus or train. Across my immediate family, I can count three serious crashes (Only one of which the family member in question was at fault for). None of us have ever been assaulted on public transit, and we've taken a lot of it.
If my direct connection bus came back - or at least bus frequency were increased - (Thanks, budget cuts, for adding a 10-25 minute transfer to my downtown to downtown commute), my car would once again be collecting dust in the garage.
People take transit when its relatively fast and gets them to where they need to go. That's the primary driver for ridership.
Spot on. Where I live now we have a single car for convenience, but we can go weeks without driving. It's amazing, and I don't understand how I managed to commute by driving for so many years without going crazy.
In my experience cars are much more dangerous than public transport.
I've taken public transport my whole life, in numerous countries, and only bought a car for the first time 7 years ago when moving back to the US. Never had any incident on public transport or felt unsafe. Was it always as comfortable and convenient as my car? No, but that's a separate issue.
I'm a weekend road cyclist and I've had a number of very close calls with cars -- invariably big pick up trucks, sometimes flying an American flag (you know the type) -- purposely rev up and buzz by me as close as possible on small country roads, sometimes honking as well or flipping the bird out the window. Any little stumble or twitch at that point and there were a couple of times I would have been in the hospital or dead.
Yeah, there are sometimes strange people on public transport, as well as homeless, etc. But I've encountered more *holes driving cars than on the bus or subway.
> Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced.
All of society requires this, not just public transit.
>Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
Tokyo got this solved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KMYAEIXVzA
You can have walkable neighborhoods and still allow some cars. They can only enter a neighborhood at low speed as a destination, to park there. To get from one neighborhood to another you have normal roads and highways. The Netherlands does this (although they have a lot of public transport as well. And bikes of course)
You are 1,000,000,000% more likely to die hit by a car as a pedestrian than die from a panhandler asking for a buck
>>but that's just life in the big city!
In a big American city. School issues as well American due to funding structure. I'm not saying there aren't problems at school in other countries, but not like that: schools in cheap US districts are extremely underfunded.
This may be the US (or NYC) public transport experience but it is generally not the European one.
I took my kid to school in Downtown Brooklyn on the subway today. It was great.
New York is great and the subway is amazing. I remain mystified by what I see people say on cable news or podcasts.
Or maybe everyone secretly just really loves strip malls, who knows.
From a website I read last night:
> Mountain Life
> I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night sky and here coyote's screeching in the background. I respect the fact I grew up in an environment that was NOT surrounded by pavement and was NOT surrounded by buildings. There was endless landscapes and forests of exploration. I could find any tree and build my fort. I could spend hours hiking with my dog and find no end. I could take a nap in a field of grass and not worry someone would cross my path. The Santa Cruz Mountains have so much to offer and I feel like there is so much to learn about them.
https://santacruzmtns.com/About.html
A bit weird they decided to include some barbs about how their environment was NOT like some city, even when trying to be positive.
Living rent free in their minds. New Yorkers don't think about them at all, just like the scene from Mad Men.
I think you're right. It's strange getting into a taxi and seeing NY1 – there really is minimal consideration of the rest of the country.
Me? I was just providing an alternate perspective that life beyond the boroughs is not just strip malls.
I've spent a bunch of time in Manhattan. Cumulatively, many months of my life. It's a fun experience, but I'm not interested in raising my kids there.
> just providing an alternate perspective that life beyond the boroughs is not just strip malls.
It kind of is. Where'd you buy your charcoal? Did it have a parking lot out front and two stores on either side of it sharing the same overall building?
Of course there are exceptions, maybe you're one of them. But they are so small numerically as to be irrelevant. The vast majority of the country is living nearly all their personal life in tract housing and their commercial and social life in a strip mall. I've travelled a lot, just calling it like I see it.
Regardless of all that though, if you like it then great for you!
My comment above was just noting that city living is fine. I keep seeing in the media that NYC is scary or dangerous or something and that's fucking ridiculous, it's not.
Note that almost the entirety of their post is a quote, so probably they don’t have many additional details.
Not you, the person you were quoting. They are the one that decided to include all the “NOT” stuff, right?
How is this such a common occurrence? I take the train to work almost every day in Australia and I’ve probably been asked for money twice in the last 3 years, and never seen a violent situation.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
Maybe this is just another "American version" of something - in Czechia, public transportation is truly safe (incidents happen, of course, but it's like one per year that makes it to the news), even at night.
This all comes down to "We can't have nice things in America because of our toxic mix of individualism and capitalism."
Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.
Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.
It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.
You can have nice things also. Eg the inner city of Park City, Utah is also car free, and busses are running for free in the winter season.
> This happened en masse many decades ago in America.
There was a name for this trend - White flight.
I grew up in southern suburbia and in walkable southern towns - they do exist, in pockets.
I learned two things from my experiences. First is that anywhere there is foot traffic, you will get homelessness, panhandling, crime, and just generally people you don't recognize. It's not because big cities aren't being policed adequately or anything policymakers are doing, it's just something that naturally comes with the territory.
The second lesson I took away is that we as a society often can't tell the difference between "This place makes me feel uncomfortable" and "This place isn't safe." Despite all of those issues I outlined above, I felt very safe and comfortable living day to day in urbanist spaces.
This is not a problem with public transport but with utter lack of urban planning and convoluted social dynamics in the USA.
Dense cities and lack of urban sprawl reults in awesome places to live and you don't need to even use public transport in those as everything is just close by.
Also - IMHO the problem with the USA is more focus on competition (you have to "win") instead of cooperation hence more fracutred society that yields more povery and "not-nice" public spaces...
> The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
I live in a rather smallish city/town (~45k).
I hate public transit because it takes 2x+ the time to get anywhere since it’s such an afterthought. The routes are horrible and the vehicles too infrequent.
When I lived in Berlin I could get anywhere in the city within 15-30 mins, it was insane.
I ride my bike or e-bike everywhere I can. Cars are the worst.
What he suggests is completely besides public transit, it's about spaces in general where cars aren't allowed or catered to. It doesn't just apply to big cities, but mid-sized and small cities have an absolute dearth of pedestrian-focused plazas. Small towns are extremely hostile to basic foot traffic. There's no reason for this to be the case. In Europe the small town equivalent will have a center where most of the commerce and services are, where cars are completely forbidden. You simply drive into town, park somewhere and carry out your business on foot. It's very nice.
Plazas do exist in the US, but they're rare. Very rare, especially outside of New England. That's what OP is talking about, public transit is a 'solution' to a different problem, and one that I don't like either. See, my biggest problem with urbanism is that it's overwhelmingly focused on building huge megacities, which are inherently unwalkable nonsense. Instead, walkability becomes rhetoric for any mode of transit that isn't a car. I hate that. I want walkable living spaces that are actually walkable, not urban environments where I walk to the train station because the city is too large for its own good.
I don't want to replace the personal car with public transit. It misses the point entirely. I don't want to have to use anything more intensive than an e-scooter to get around the place I live at all. Walking to the train station and riding that for 10-20 minutes to get to the other side of the city sucks. The social problems endemic to public transit in the US are just icing on the cake. Tokyo is a hellish nightmare compared to an Italian commune.
Or, you know, we could handle homelessness. I lived in Amsterdam for the last two years and despite walking everywhere and intentionally exploring, I never saw a person sleeping on the street, and the only time I was asked for money was an obvious tourist.
I don't think the NL government is remotely perfect, and they definitely are struggling to build enough housing, but their 'housing first' strategy towards homelessness seems to mostly work?
Funny enough it is the same with the cinema for me, too much impolite behaviour so I prefer to watch at home.
I can tell if you've never been to the city or you're dishonest? No one I've ever met is afraid of public transit.
"Nobody I know voted for Nixon."
Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.
Somebody ought to tell the people trying to solve a housing shortage that depopulation is the real problem.
There is "housing shortage" and "affordable housing shortage", and these are two things that sound similar but are actually very different.
I think it’s worth noting “cities that are losing population” and “cities that have underdeveloped public transportation” correlate closely.
Are you kidding? I see antisocial, dangerous, and violent behaviors from other people driving cars every single day...
> I'm a big supporter of urbanism.
Well, it leads to the behavior that you mentioned. It's unavoidable and it'll keep getting worse as the price of housing in dense cities continues to soar.
Your only choice? Move to suburbs and wait for self-driving cars. I get downvoted every time I say this, but that's the simple truth.
No one wants public transit!
I've spent a lot of time in Singapore, with literally the worlds lowest crime rates, highest trust in society, and best mass transit in the world.
It costs 100K USD to get a SHITTY car, like a Toyota Prius.
Everyone in Singapore is desperate to make lots of money, is desperate to buy a cool car, and is desperate to never step one foot onto the transit system again.
Mass Transit is a cope for being poor, even in a society with no crime and the highest trust in society. Using it is admitting that "I failed to make enough money to get out of here"
We have car culture because everyone wants it. Americans can literally buy a C8 corvette factory order at 20% off MSRP right now. The world salivates at such deals and is extremely jealous of our way of life.
Liberals who try to kill car culture are exactly why Trump got elected and why he's so popular right now.
The propaganda machine is still going as strong as ever.
Having ridden in a Ferrari in Singapore, I get the impression that paying car tax is a bit of a flex.
As a dual EU-US citizen who has spent decades on each side, Western Europeans don't strike me as extremely jealous of the American way of life. Quite the opposite. But if believing that makes you feel better go ahead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The post-Giuliani years were great until we started implementing an approach maybe described as "property crime enforcement leads to injustice because it's due to inequality, and moreover should be treated as a societal issue" justice system adjustment. There, spikes of menacing and assaults on public transit occurred, to the point where a disconnect became quite obvious to commuters.
The problem with this narrative is that wealthy people take black cars to drive them around, leave the city on the weekends, and ultimately don't have the day to day concerns around safety.
Add to that an interesting fact that the most progressive neighborhoods are generally the safest (with an anti-police and criminal justice reform bent) while the poorest have a pro police attitude. Here's an interactive map that lets you compare votes across neighborhoods of the different Democratic candidates in the 2021 election where we had Adams making his pro-police rhetoric center to his campaign. Look where his support trends highest: https://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nycrcv2021/?office=mayor&c...
I also know Pontevedra from walking the Camino and I suspect its reliance on Camino tourism is probably a big driver for this move. You will know as well as I do that the only parts of the Camino that suck are when you are walking for miles alongside a busy highway. A bit grim but thankfully not very common.
There is another practical reality that separates the US from Europe specifically with respect to walkability. The US has much more extreme weather in many places. What would be called severe heat or cold in much of Europe, which I've suffered through for the week if need be, is normal weather in many parts of the US for several months on end. You need alternative transportation for those extended periods.
Few people enjoy being outside in a tropical swamp with a double-digit UV index. Same with the extreme cold that you get in the central US far from the ocean.
I live in Seattle, where many people walk everywhere all year (myself included), no car needed. But that is because the weather is perfect for that kind of thing, being 5-25°C with limited precipitation virtually the entire year. If I lived in Houston, for example, I would be driving in the summer regardless of how walkable the city is.
Europe also spans some extreme weather, from the frozen North to the scorching hot Meditarranean.
I am from Spain, where 40ºC in summer is normal but winters are mild. I have friends and colleagues from Finland and Latvia, which are pretty much the opposite. And yet all our countries are walkable.
And like in the US, population is mostly concentrated in the spots where it's not that extreme, so that's where most people are/would be able to benefit from human-centred urban design.
And yet Seattle has very few pedestrianized spaces for the size of the city. It’s as car dominated and sprawling as any major North American city.
Difficult to call it sprawling given the geography, and I don't know what "pedestrianized" even means here since walking in many neighborhoods is both common and designed for.
There is plenty of accommodation for vehicles in Seattle, that is true. Even people that walk everywhere often own one in order to take advantage of the prodigious outdoor activities for which the region is famous.
It’s definitely very sprawling from Olympia to Mt Vernon. We only just managed to pedestrianize Pike Place Market. I struggle to think of a pedestrian neighborhood. Just cuz you can walk doesn’t rise to that level. Ballard no. It’s all cars and car parks. Fremont no. U district no. Cap Hill no. Queen Anne no. West Seattle no. They’re all car dominated neighborhoods without much pedestrian space and poor accommodation for cycling too.
Olympia and Mt Vernon are not part of Seattle. Does anyone think Segovia and Toledo are part of Madrid?
It definitely is sprawling compared to your typical European city.
I am Spanish, so I grew up with what you describe.
I now live in rural Japan, a country that outside of the big cities also suffers from awful American-style urban sprawl, and holy guacamole, how can people live like this? The area where I live is just big box stores and houses scattered everywhere, and you need a car to do anything. It has made me really appreciate my homeland...
There's such a clear appetite for more human-centered design
> Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people.
Maybe most but there's plenty of public space that doesn't. People choose to live around the public spaces that do. Some even try to change that instead of moving somewhere that doesn't. The great thing about America is that there's plenty of everything for everyone, but it's not just going to come to you.
That's factually incorrect. Most of America has outlawed proper mixed-use zoning, which means those nice walkable neighborhoods are literally illegal to build.
Even if you don't want to live in a detached home deep in suburbia, there often isn't an affordable alternative.
There really aren't all that many options for people-centric urban spaces in the US. A handful of small districts in various cities, but nothing approaching the scale of such things in the thriving Spanish cities.
There's plenty of everything, as long as all you want is cars.
While the current Paris administration has its detractors, its policies, removing surface parking, expanding bike lanes, and lowering speed limits, have done tremendous good for air quality (see the Airparif study for details in [0]).
Paris may not yet be at Amsterdam’s scale, but only 5 % of daily trips in the city are made by car. It’s staggering that roughly 50 % of public space is allocated to cars [1], despite their minimal share of actual mobility. And I'm all in favor in further reducing car lanes, parking spots...
[0] in french - https://www.airparif.fr/actualite/2025/comment-la-qualite-de... [1] https://www.transportshaker-wavestone.com/urban-transports-s...
After moving to the US it was shocking to me how much urban space in many cities is taken up by surface parking lots. A real blight on downtowns.
I was in Paris this year, for the first time in 10 years, and frankly, I didn't notice less traffic. All streets are full. There are certainly more electric cars, and fewer old ones. However, the streets are now crowded with Uber and taxi cabs. I didn't notice fewer cars.
A lot of streets have been closed to traffic (school streets in particular), and many lanes have been converted into bike lanes. It was harder to get around the city as a pedestrian/cyclist a decade ago.
It also really depends on where you went in the city. Were you just hanging around ile de city and the marais?
I go between NY and Paris and it's insane that New York basically has zero pedestrian streets, while Paris has so many. I used to live in SF and Chicago before, and same, there are no pedestrian streets, why?
Because the whole point is to stop poor people from driving and lining up the pockets of the car manufacturers.
It's a reason among others, but this bike-centric policy (pedestrians nor public transport are the priority) led to an exodus of families [0]. I am among them, as I realized pretty quickly that it's a real pain to move around, buy groceries, go to the doctor, and so on with very young children in Paris, especially if you don't own a car. And now you have to deal with the uncivil behavior of the cyclists, moreover.
It's the same everywhere, as most European cities are dominated by 20-35yo people. They vote for green parties and then move out when they have children, as they realize that the policies they supported are not child- or family-friendly at all. The extreme example is Seoul, with its zones where kids are forbidden. It's a shame, as families require more public services and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and so on), but they are being pushed away by childless youngsters who hate cars. Unfortunately, no middle ground seems acceptable for this crowd, so I'm unconvinced that it will change.
Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation, so they lead municipalities to decrease investment in this sector, which is, however, the most inclusive, safe and efficient way to move people around. This is also seen in Paris, where the bus speed has never been so slow, the fleet is aging,, while the city hall spends like a teenager on a weekend trip with daddy's credit card on new bike lanes.
In the EU at least, the next nail in the coffin will be the low-emissions zones that will make it prohibitively expensive to enter/leave the center, forcing families to leave metropolises altogether.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/09/06/why-the-mi...
I think you are totally off. Never lived in Paris but I lived in Barcelona for many years, during the transformation to be more car-hostile and bikes and pedestrians friendly. I spent there my 20s-30s and left when I had a family but due to (public) school scarcity in our neighborhood and rent prices. But mobility was not the issue at all. It was actually a pleasure bring my daughter to her kindergarten by bike and then go to the office.
And I think Paris and Barcelona share a lot in that respect (the mayors - Hidalgo and Colau - met a lot to discuss exactly those topics and share experiences).
Barcelona is in Spain, on the Mediterranean, where the weather is fair all year long. It's not the case in many parts of the world. Bicycles are a rather dangerous mode of transportation, and I wouldn't use it with kids, especially in a city.
People in Germany and the Netherlands must extra hardened I guess, since everyone bikes around there, even with their kids in tow.
I would never go with my kids on a bike on any road that's shared with cars. The risk, as small as it is, is still unacceptable to me.
Don't know about Germany, but in Netherlands it's solved with having proper cycling infrastructure. It's the right approach, but it is still more of an exception. Where I am at they just painted cycle paths on existing roads and then tried to make it safer by cutting speed limit in half and eliminating lots of street parking. And now it's a mess that doesn't work well for anyone. Next elections are in a year, will be interesting to see how that will go.
Dangerous why? Because of all the cars?
Dangerous because a city provides many ways for a cyclist to fall or hit something or someone. In France, data shows that 2/3 of cyclists' "serious accidents" don't involve another road user. https://www.cerema.fr/system/files/documents/2024/05/3._2024...
In other words, you want them to invest more money into building safer cyclist infrastructure?
An obstacle isn't going to magically pop into existence the moment you mount a bicycle. Car-centric road design can indeed be dangerous to cyclists, but that says more about the road design than it does about the concept of cycling. Build better roads and cycling isn't dangerous!
Do you live in a world where money is infinite? I'd rather have very good public transport, which is accessible to everyone, safe and can give physical workers so rest and a quiet time after work, than bike lanes everywhere.
And the problem with removing cars from the city center is that many users still need cars, either because they have families, or because they work and need a motorized vehicle (e.g a plumber).
Why do you think a plumber requires a car and not, say, an electric cargo bicycle?
Because a plumber needs to carry heavy things, such as a water heater tank, and possibly more as he will intervene on multiple places during his day? And that he may need to get back to the shop/depot in the suburb during the day to get additional parts, if needed? Do you live in a magical word where things teleport by themselves?
I've never worked with a plumber that has anything they need in their van / truck. They always need to go buy something. This departure generally doubles the cost of whatever plumbing is happening.
The data you present does not say that:
> 35% des cyclistes tués, 63% des cyclistes blessés gravement le sont dans un accident sans autre véhicule impliqué.
35% of cyclist deaths, and 63% of cyclist seriously injured occur in an accident with no other party involved.
Another graph in that report shows that a vast majority of cyclist deaths occur while cycling for leisure. I would hazard that most cycling in cities is utilitarian.
Yes, this will be the road racer guys (it is mostly guys) screwing up while descending an Alp or Pyrenee. Split-second safety margins and if you get it wrong on a 60kph descent - or someone else gets it wrong, or you suffer a mechanical failure - you're likely dead.
A city is a much more dangerous environment. You have bollards, stupid pedestrians who keep on trying to circulate on YOUR sidewalk, potholes, dogs, and so on.
It's really not, because speeds are so much lower - and injury is, by and large, related to kinetic energy which is the _square_ of speed.
OK, cycling at 50km/h in a city is dangerous and stupid (if you're even physically capable of doing so, which few are?). 30km/h in suburbs / 20km/h in the centre is mostly fine, and 10 for busy complicated spaces.
30km/h is slow enough to prevent the vast majority of crashes being fatal, and 20km/h will avoid most serious injuries.
Kinetic power is lower, that said you can still hurt yourself pretty bad depending on how you fall. A wrist doesn't need a lot of force to break, nor a skull needs to fall from high to cause trauma. A cyclist on a sidewalk going at 20km/h can cripple a child for life (not that the cyclist cares, but just for the example).
I broke my wrist by falling from my bike when I was younger, almost while stopped (my wheel got blocked in a tram rail).
And yet if you look at the public health statistics for the things _actually_ crippling children for life, "other people on bikes" are a very long way down the list - at least in most places; I don't know if Paris has a specific problem there. You can hurt yourself pretty bad in the home, after all - the major causes here seem to be cars and dogs.
(Before we even consider that - at population level and in developed Western countries - lack of physical activity, and an environment which actively suppresses it through sheer indifference if not outright hostility - is likely inflicting a far greater burden on childrens' health and wellbeing than trauma).
The statistics are low because many places banned cyclists from sidewalks? Purely speed-wise, being hit by a car at 50kmh while riding a bike at 25kmh is similar to being hit by a cyclist going at 25kmh while being static on a sidewalk. Why are cyclists concerned about cars but I should just think "trust the stats bro" when the 5th cyclist going at full speed came past me on a narrow sidewalk? France banned shared e-scooters after many scathing accidents, including deaths and people being crippled. I remember a professional pianist who get her hand broken this way and had to stop her career.[0]
But I guess she's just a statistic, right? Pedestrians, out of the way!
[0] https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/blessee-par-une-trottinett...
I don't disagree that commuting by bicycle can be hazardous, but the major risks to cyclist safety are cars, trucks and other cyclists (mainly e-bikes). Pedestrians, potholes, bollards, etc. are no worse than an inconvenience most of the time. You just don't build up enough speed to cause that much damage in a busy city due to a fall or colliding with a pedestrian. OTOH, even the mildest collision between a bike and a car is generally a Bad Time for the cyclist.
Source: me, who commutes by bike daily through a capital city.
The problem arises when cyclists want to use the space reserved for pedestrians (sidewalks), or ignore red lights, when pedestrians use the crosswalk. I am not against bicycle lanes, when it is doable, but cyclists should go on the road when there is none. And have insurance + numbered bikes if electrical.
"63% of cyclist seriously injured occur in an accident with no other party involved" Is exactly what I said, as 63% is roughly 2/3.
It really matters what kind of cycling is being done with no other party involved. I injured myself only when I was doing "leisure cycling". I did get almost ran over by a dumb college student once during a commute ride, though.
I'm a huge supporter of public transit, but cyclists are a common enemy for everyone: cars, pedestrians, public transit-takers, other cyclists.
I remember seeing another study here on HN a couple of years ago that showed that actually, the all cause mortality of cyclists comunter was actually lower, because the higher risk of road accident was largely compensated by the benefits of exercise. But I can't find the article anymore.
It really depends on the city/quarter where you live. I live in the center of Barcelona and had no problems with two small kids at all. Supermarkets, real farmer's markets, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, etc are all within 10min walking distance. I work from home, but I could walk to the office it I wanted to. I don't have to leave the city at all.
Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
Yeah, if you live in the most expensive part of the town, which is often the epicenter, it may be ok. However, not everyone can afford this, or justify the expense, especially since you are pitted against childless couples that don't have to support children financially. Also, the presence of bikes on the sidewalk makes it hostile for vulnerable pedestrians, and generally turn a pleasant experience (walking in a city) into a stressful one.
Yes, gentrification is a thing around here too, but I also lived in the outskirts of the city and you don't need a car there either. They also have all the essentials. The fancy restaurants and theaters are 30min metro/bus away, but otherwise it is fine too. A car is a luxury in those quarters too.
Completely agree that the presence of bikes and scooters on the sidewalk is annoying and dangerous. The city changed the rules a few months ago and now there is a 500€ fine if you use them on the sidewalk. That fixed the problem. They have to use the street or one of the many bike lanes.
No idea how it is in Paris, but there are places where living happily in a city without owning a car is perfectly possible, even if you have small kids.
If bikes (not cars) are making a city "hostile to vulnerable pedestrians", that seems like a very good problem to have compared to the average car-centric city.
Bikes and cars. But cars have their own space (the road) and rules (red lights, crosswalks...), whereas cyclists ride at full speed on the pedestrian's space (the sidewalk).
It’s false that cyclists routinely ride on the sidewalk in Paris, let alone at full speed. They ride on the road (car and bus lanes) and in bike lanes. It’s true, however, that on some very popular bike routes (rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Michel/Sébastopol), there are enough cyclists that don’t stop at lights that pedestrians can’t easily safely cross. This is a solvable issue that’s independent from the modal share or infrastructure.
The argument that cyclists (implied: all cyclists) ride at full speed on pavement at all times is akin to arguing that cars (implied: all cars) go over the speed limit at all times. It’s daft at best, and utterly outlandish.
You should stop and have coffee in a street shared only by pedestrians and cyclists, and observe the behaviour of cyclists. I have observed it to be mostly slow, controlled, courteous and respectful of pedestrians.
I picked up my son today at the kindergarten, and we walked for 25 minutes back home. Here in Riga most cyclists go on the sidewalks, I'd say that 2/3 of them don't respect a minimum 1.5 meter safety distance, and about the same amount go as fast as they can. I stopped and scolded a food courrier (who is incentivized to go as fast as he can) who was slaloming between pedestrians as if it was a game.
No, I don't feel safe at all, and my son can't walk freely either. In Paris it's the same (my wife, who was pregnant then, got hit at a crosswalk by a cyclist who seemed to believe that red lights were for cars only). Even Le Monde published an piece about it!
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/our-times/article/2024/11/17/anti-...
I live in the 19th district of Paris—probably the cheapest district within city bounds, with the 20th, and not in the center—and I have no issue living with an under 2-year-old. Hell I even decide to go all the way to the 14th for his pediatrician appointments, on the subway. I can walk to something like 5 supermarkets and bodega-like markets, take the subway to a bunch more including specialized, I can walk to see a generalist, we walk to his daycare, etc. all < 10 minutes. I can’t imagine what you can’t do honestly.
Childless couples aren't competing for 4 bedroom apartments. The problem is that cities forbid construction of those.
Neither do families, as that's out of reach financially. In a dense city centre a three bedroom apartment is already a sign of wealth.
Everyone is competing for space. I don't see how cities prevent building larger apartments. European cities are mostly built out anyway, and the tendency is rather more to split large apartments to cater to the childless crowd.
Cities prevent larger apartments through onerous zoning codes. It's so expensive to build because of the permits and the risk that only a narrow type of structure has a chance of profit.
> mostly built out
Look at rent in Asia. They actually build towers over there and they build large apartments for families as well as small apartments for couples. There's enough building that the housing market is diverse.
Architectural preservation. Which may not be all a negative thing, but central Paris is low-rise compared to Manhattan, Berlin or even central London.
Central Paris is denser than Manhattan. At some point the bottleneck is not the amount of people you can cram into a m2 of land, but the underlying infrastructures.
> Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
How much does parking for that cost the rest of the week? How much is your car payment + insurance + fuel? Presumably you did the math and it's cheaper to have bought one, including a nominal amount for your time to rent one on Friday and return it Sunday night. So I'm just curious.
What you’re describing is perfectly possible without a car.
I live in Amsterdam and have a young family. We own an electric cargo bike that we use for groceries and to cart around our daughter. You can use it with an infant car seat and for larger kids.
When we need a car we use a car sharing app. There are around 10 cars within walking distance of our flat.
Many people in cities _want_ a car but don’t need one.
Cargo bikes are dangerous for children, there is little protection in case of an accident (not necessarily with a car, a bollard is enough) and well once you have one child in, you can't really have groceries. You can't use it when it's freezing. What you describe is typical of a one-child family in Netherland, but doesn't fit the reality of most of European cities. Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
> Also Netherland has a rather high amount of cars per head, so not everyone thinks like you ;-)
You can bet all those car users also ride bikes though. It's just very common in the NL to live in one city and work in another, things like that. I know people who have cars they use to go to work and back and then take all other journies via foot, bike or public transport.
In short it's not an either/or thing.
Lol sounds very car-centric to me, commuting to work by car. ;-)
Peter Jacobsen (2003) analyzed multiple datasets and found that the risk per cyclist decreased as the total number of cyclists increased. He observed this pattern across intersections, cities, and time periods.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10574383_Safety_in_...
Yes, if you focus on one see fragment alone then I'm actually saying the opposite of that I said.
But being car centric or not doesn't even matter here. The argument that car owners don't think like cyclists doesn't apply to car owners who spend a significant portion of their week on bicycles.
I’m not saying that everyone in the Netherlands agrees with me. I’m just illustrating that it’s perfectly possible to live in a city like Paris or Amsterdam with a family and without a car.
Impossible to go to a store, buy groceries for a week with two kids on a bike. And at some point the cargo bike gets as big as a small car.
that's exactly my situation and many of my friends and no problem at all :)
Where do you put the toilet paper? The diapers? I can fill a 400 L boot easily with weekly groceries for a family of 4. Most cargo bikes have max 300L space, you have no space left for children.
So go twice a week? I'm not sure what to call people when they can't solve problems that easy There may be issues with my solution, but if that solution is so obvious, maybe you could have used more words in your comment.
Twice a week doesn't solve the problem that you can have groceries + kids in a cargo bike. And we aren't all retired or in a cosy 30h job that allows back and forth all week.
Are they very dangerous for children? Are there statistics?
It doesn’t really freeze in Paris anymore so it's a moot point, but you can ride bikes when it does (you need different tires, just like cars, and a city that clears the roads, just like for cars).
A bike going at full speed on the sidewalk is dangerous to children, yes. It is why many cities banned cyclists there, which as a result led to a decrease in accidents. Pedestrians don't go at the same pace and can be particularly vulnerable, so I don't see why you need a statistic to understand this basic fact.
The article says that families are leaving because of high rent.
I personally love it when my kids have freedom of movement. Every family we know is the same way. Carting them around all day and then sitting and waiting at various activities just plain sucks.
Fourth paragraph:
"Her war on motorists, who last year were hit with a double whammy of speed cuts on the capital’s ring road and the tripling of parking fees for heavy vehicles, such as SUVs, has also sparked fury among families."
Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.
> Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.
This is simply false. I just mapped it from place des Fêtes to place de la Catalogne and selected only wheelchair-accessible options (note that this trip is _not_ easy to do because it goes from one end of Paris to the other). Driving it's 15 km, 45 minutes, using the ring road; public transportation takes 47 minutes (48, RER B, 59/88). You’ll notice the same pattern for, e.g. Parc Monceau to Place d’Italie, a 9 km trip (30 minute drive at 11:47am on a weekday, 45 minutes on public transportation).
Buses are slow _because of cars_. Fewer cars means faster buses. The subway is inaccessible except for line 14, but RER A and B, all tramways, and of course buses are all accessible. You can also use a baby carrier.
That just says people are mad about parking fees.
And I don't know why you need an SUV in Paris. Seems like an unnecessary luxury that most people wouldn't care for.
https://www.paris.fr/pages/tarifs-suv-modalites-de-controle-...
Because they target heavy vehicles, SUVs have no proper definition. But many decent family-friendly cars for 3 children with a large boot are in this category. In general, the city has greatly reduced surface parking, which creates a lot of problems for trade workers who need to intervene in the city and need a car.
In New York we had to suffer all these same arguments about low income trade workers with 9 kids that all need to be in different places at the same time etc etc etc. But congestion pricing passed any and it has been an incredible success. None of these arguments about parking hold up.
Who doesn't like a good regressive tax? Anyway, Manhattan isn't really a family-friendly place, so the issue is different.
Not Paris, but I lived in an even larger metropolis (Beijing) for 6 years, with two young children, without a car. We took public transport and/or rode bikes most of the time, and took taxis when neither of those were possible/convenient. Even with the taxi fares it was much cheaper than owning a car.
> Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation,
For short trips maybe, but as a cyclist myself, I'd say cyclists are among those most likely to use public transportation for any trips that are beyond their cycling radius, or where cycling isn't feasible, instead of a car.
I'm seeing a similar trend in my country where even the culture in city centres is not conducive to having a large family, or a family at all even.
All the parents of 3+ children that I know live in the suburbs or even in the middle of nowhere in the case of one family totalling 7 at the moment, as their firstborn already moved out.
Personally I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so I moved to one that's half the size and live on the outskirts with my family, but in the 13 apartments connected to our staircase we're one of three families and the only ones not renting.
As someone with a family and a car, can't you use public transport for that? You can walk to local parks and have a doctor that is relatively nearby, but Paris has very extensive transport network and it is perfectly fine to move around without a car.
No one is arguing you should take your sick kid on a bike for one hour ride.
- Paris' subway doesn't have elevators, impossible with a stroller.
- Buses are crowded, very slow, and being blocked for >1h because of protests or roadworks with a sick newborn is a rather unpleasant experience. I did it already. And in general, public transportation in Paris has degraded a lot. Who wants to explain to his 3-year-old son what this fine gentleman is doing while heating crack in the back of the train car?
There’s a reason why most Parisian families use a Yoyo stroller or another lightweight, foldable model: you can easily take them on the subway, and if you need help with the stairs, people are always willing to help (I’ve never seen anyone refuse).
Buses can be slow during peak hours because of traffic congestion, but during the day they’re fairly reliable and have plenty of space for strollers.
The Paris Metro is extensive, but I think you’re making very broad generalizations. It’s extremely rare (though unpleasant) to come across a drug addict, and I’ve never seen one during the day.
(Disclaimer: I live in central Paris with a newborn.)
I live in outer Paris (19th) and have the exact same experience. I’ve taken strollers on the subway without an issue and people are eager to help you (it should be easier, of course, but it’s doable). I've also taken the bus, the tramway, the RER. These days I’ll carry my son (almost 2) or take a baby carrier to go faster on the subway.
Bus are slow because of cars.
I’ve never seen a drug addict on the subway (you do see homeless people though certainly).
Yeah, so how do you fold a Yoyo with a newborn in the arms? You can't really, and some stations have a lot of stairs. Regarding drug addicts, I saw many, it really depends on where you live. My son was born in Paris, and we left as soon as we could because it felt really stupid to endure all of this. Buying a car felt like I discovered a time travel machine.
You can leave the newborn in the stroller and lower the whole thing yourself or with someone’s help. You can hold the newborn and ask someone to fold the stroller. You can take the bus or the tramway if you really want to avoid the subway.
Tramway doesn't go into Paris, and asking someone to fold a stroller multiple times a day- no, just no.
I doubt it. Navigating the Paris Metro (or the London Underground) with a _suitcase_ is a shit show - even in relatively new stations. Whoever decided to put stairs in St Pancras with only a lift as an alternative should be condemned to step on lego every day of the rest of their lives.
There are loads of factors at play, to lay the blame of this demographic trend solely on bike-centric policy is, if I’m being very very generous, lazy. Since it’s the telegraph, about a foreign city, I would assume it’s disingenuous.
The article doesn’t even call out bike centric policies:
> “It is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have made life harder for families and the middle class. Construction work, difficult access to nurseries, skyrocketing rents, and social housing shortages have pushed Parisians to the suburbs or provinces.”
The “worst” callout in the article is triple parking fees for SUVs.
Oh.
Anyway.
It looks like there are loads of factors at play and I wouldn’t trust assigning blame to just one, especially when your supporting article only kinda sorta touches on that factor.
My message starts with "it's a reason among others".
And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.
An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.
If you had a source for those claims, it might be interesting.
https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2024/07/12/paris_ra2023-circulati...
First chart shows that average speed for cars have decreased steadily. For surface parking a simple google search will help you find it.
The part that I don’t see is how this is actually a significant causal factor driving families out.
i haven't made that experience at all, as i've got kids and pretty much never used the car for inner city trips. trips are daily kindergarden, doctor, visiting friends - we do all those with either bikes plus a kids trailer or public transport (i'd say roughly 50/50).
for the kindergarden commute we've used the car two or three times in almost 5 years, when we had to transport birthday party stuff (i.e. cake), but then we stopped even doing because using it was too much of a hassle.
You do realize that (i) "zones" are just restaurants / cafes / museums that have minimum age requirements and not some demarcated city blocks where children are banned and young adults party all day and (ii) this occurs semi-frequently in the west as well.
Why should a cafe be a "no kid zone"? How do you think you'd feel as a parent ? Or if there were "No Koreans zone"?
"The West" is a rather large part of the world.
North Americans visiting Europe often grapple with why they enjoy European cities more than North American ones. It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings that we don't have") but very few notice that the main difference is the urban scale and the resulting walkability. The Netherlands has plenty of modernist and even brutalist architecture yet every city there is a pretty nice place to be. This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions. The layout of buildings together with the connective tissue of tram lines, bike lanes and sidewalks is what makes their cities alive and safe, not elaborate building facades (although they have some of that as well).
Important to note is how most cities have two (or more) zones; the old inner city for leisure, tourism, shopping and going out, the suburban areas around it where most people live, and industrial / office building estates where most people work.
Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.
[0] https://www.amsterdamsights.com/about/neighborhoods.html
I spent two weeks in Amsterdam South where I rented an apartment. Commuting to the centre on a tram or even cycling there was no problem. Even though the centre is where most tourists hang out, the surrounding neighbourhoods are just as walkable and bikeable as the inner city.
That's pretty much only an Amsterdam thing, and it is limited to a relatively small tourist-centered area. Even inside the Grachtengordel the majority of buildings are homes or offices.
Also, those "suburban" areas in Amsterdam aren't suburban: they are still built with a bicycle-, pedestrian-, and transit-first mindset. Those office buildings in Zuid are built right next to one of the busiest railway stations in the country, and the highly-paid lawyers will arrive at the office by bike from their nearby homes.
If you want Amsterdam's suburbs, you'll have to go to Almere: it was literally built as a commuter city for Amsterdam. And even there you'll have trouble finding areas which don't meet the definition of a 15-minute city.
Cities always have many areas. And of course the outer areas are not as good as the tourist focused inner city, but they are generally still pretty good urbanism.
Even European subburbs are generally better, smaller roads, more mixed use, more trees, more dynamics, more commercial and building times mixed in. The extreme separation between building types that became the standard in US zoning-codes simple never happened to the same extent in Europe.
I disagree that this is the norm and I don't think it's a goal to aspire to.
The nicest places for humans to exist in have a mixed-use basis. Yes some areas are purely industrial and some areas are dominated by retail or offices, that's fine. But fully segregated residential zones are depressing and nonsensical.
Most cities in Europe absolutely do not have suburban zones where most people live. Non-center areas also have their own leisure, going out, shopping places (usually mixed with the residential areas).
The suburbs purely for residential space where you have to go somewhere else for activities do exist, but usually over time they grow their own infrastructure for shopping and hanging out without needing to go far.
American cities lack medium density mixed commercial-residential areas.
I can’t speak for other cities, but Paris absolutely does not fit that mold: the highest density of people is in the very center of the city (or immediately adjacent cities), where the tourists are. Suburban areas can’t possibly house “most people” because they’re way sparser.
It's still very doable (preferable even) to navigate those other neighbourhoods without a car though.
> It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings […]") but very few notice that the main difference is […] the […] walkability.
I'd say both. We do have the history on show both because we have more of it, and sometimes the stuff from eras when the US as we think of it¹ existed tends to be better preserved despite the effects of WWI and WWII. But we also have it easy to get to, often safely on foot, in our cities².
> This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions.
Not wishing to put us down, but I'd say a fair chunk of that is historical accident. A lot of cities started out as smaller settlements that grew and merged, meaning there is a spread of housing, shows, workplaces, etc around the whole city because it used to be in each individual part before they merged over time. America's cities on average started at, or at least very quickly gained, a larger scale, and grew from the inside out rather than by several insides growing until their outsides merged.
Some European cities made the mistake of doing away with some of that and converting to a state closer to that of US cities, and many current efforts are more about returning to their roots than being newly person friendly.
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[1] essentially from the point the founding fathers went to find somewhere they could be prescriptivist about people's, lives because they weren't getting away with that as they wanted to over here, and perhaps a little before that
[2] though there is a fair amount of it that isn't as easy to get to unless you drive
The “Founding Fathers” generally refers to the politicians who were around during the revolutionary war (starting 1775). What you are describing in your [1] seems to be more a reference to the Pilgrims and Puritians (the early North American colonists who showed up around 1620).
The Founding Fathers also did a lot of controlling of some people’s lives (in that they enslaved a lot of people), but they didn’t have to go anywhere to do that.
Anyway, if you want to walk around some history in the US, you can do that in Boston. As you mentioned, a huge factor in the walkability of a city is just having the right population density before cars were invented. The oldest European areas in the mainland US (Spanish areas, in Florida) aren’t super walkable as far as I know.
Yeah, my I had a little brain-o there and was meaning the Pilgrim Fathers not the Founding Fathers.
Maybe it is a Northeast US thing or something, but it this mystery could also be resolved by visiting a college town, observing that it is quite nice and walkable without too many historical buildings…
Alternatively: go on a cruise. Everything you want, neatly packed into a single easily walkable building.
Not all European cities live up to the stereotype. I've been to Germany a couple of times; most of the cities I've stayed in were quite nice, but Stuttgart came across as an American-style car hell and Frankfurt seemed quite dirty. (Berlin has a strange charm to it, actually, from a combination of modern architecture and historical preservation.)
They don't. Larger cities have many loops of busy highway belts embracing the city, and plenty of tunnels, parking lots and emissions (ie Madrid, Rome, Paris...). But there's always a sizeable walkable urban area, usually proportional to the overall city-size. Even Stuttgart has a nice downtown walking area [1] and a usable public transport system [2].
But, as a fun notice, Stuttgart could be somewhat of a "Detroit of Europe", being the home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, so there's added incentive, and pride, to be a car city.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/aQCEYkc3oWsKpD9F7
[2] https://www.travelstuttgart.com/transport-in-stuttgart.html
There are (at least) two Youtube channels, Ray Delahanty | CityNerd and Not Just Bikes, that really drive home the point in their videos that car-centric cities really stink.
https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd
https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes
As nice as it is to see reviews of transit systems and urban planning in various cities worldwide, NJB's commentary style gets really obnoxious at times. He comes across as someone who believes that everyone who doesn't see things his way is irredeemably, irrationally evil and the reason we can't have nice things (tm).
The Not Just Bikes channel really makes clear the benefits of living in an environment that isn't designed around cars, but also the challenge of designing such an environment. You can't just plop in some busses and bike lanes and expect immediate improvement, you really need to think about transportation holistically. This means considering how cars, trucks, busses, bikes, pedestrians and everything will interact.
The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.
This is true, but urban mobility in the Netherlands was already great a few decades ago. It's just that once you get to that point, further improvements aren't that controversial anymore, because the benefits are obvious. Thus, the situation just kept on improving, and is doing so to this day.
While true, it's also important to remind that until the 70s we were on a path to MORE car traffic, MORE traffic deaths, etc. It took a significant protest for the tide to turn. Google around for "Stop de kindremoord" -- which translates to "Stop infanticide" -- to see the sheer scale of it all. There's plenty of english language articles on the topic.
Long story short: change is possible, but rarely easy. Even in places where it seems like things have always been like they are now.
Yes, it's hard work, but it is possible to see massive improvements in your own lifetime. It might even go faster now that there are so many clear examples already, at least when it comes to the technical aspects of urban planning. So hopefully more people decide to put in the effort :)
some more:
https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateTown
https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity
https://www.youtube.com/@CityBeautiful
more bike oriented, but that often overlaps with city planning and design:
https://www.youtube.com/@Shifter_Cycling
One factor here is the perception of safety. To choose public transit over a car, you have to feel safe walking to/from the station and you have to feel safe riding the train. This is especially true if you are at a physical disadvantage because of gender, disability, age, whatever. Because it's a perception thing, this is not just about statistics. A dirty, chaotic subway station just feels threatening to passengers.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
I love walking - both in places as a tourist, in NYC where I lived most of my life, and in my small north shore Long Island town today.
But similar to any other "product" the evaluation depends on the user's needs. As a single guy I loved that NYC was dense and walkable - because that meant (among other things) literally millions of date-able women within a 30 minute walk radius of my house. Great! Now as a dad of 3 I don't care about that at all - and the lower density suburb let's me have a backyard for my kids and makes shopping easy, or taking the kids to activities (yes you can do all those things without a car but people chose not to when they have choice)
There should be some sort of mom-friendliness factor in these conversations. If my whole town is old people, terminally single younger people and migrants (as seems to be the case for the city in question) then high density walk ability is perfect. What's the density and transportation situation in places people actually have kids?
I share this sentiment as well, but while living in a relatively small city with only around 150k people in northern Europe. I moved out to the "suburbs" after having my first kid and find enormous quality of life in being able to have a car and a house. The city center is getting increasingly more "hostile" to car traffic but there's nothing to be had there anyway. A side from restaurants and coffee shops you can get anything you need from the shopping areas on the city outskirts. In a sense I feel this is the best of both worlds: cities for city people, suburbs for suburbians.
As a fellow parent I find dense cities are worse. My kids are not welcome in most of the restaurants, bars, or shops - which is just as well because I couldn't afford to pay for regular family meals at any of them anyway. Even the parks are more art orientation - great for adults but no playground that my kids would enjoy. Not that it matters as 3 bedroom apartments are rare, and more than that impossible to find. They are often food deserts - it is easier for a farmer to get to a grocery store (they expect to drive but the uncontested roads are fast), you often need to drive to a grocery store as there is no option, of if there is one it is the expensive high end store not the discount supermarkets.
Note that most dense cities have within the same city limits less dense areas that look like suburbs. These are often called "inner city" they are generally affordable but because the schools are bad are not places I'd want to live. For this discussion I'm going to count them as suburbs...
It doesn't have to be like the above. I've seen dense cities around the world that are very family friendly. However not in the US.
There is also a gradient of density and walk/bike-ability between NYC, one of the densest cities in the country, and super spread-out car-dependent cul-de-sac suburbs, but the US often skips those middle steps.
Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated communities up and down a 4-lane 45mph highway and where the line of cars picking up kids from school each day backs out onto the road and blocks traffic.
They exist, but in New Jersey -- most of the "cities" (with the exception of downtown Jersey City and downtown Newark) would be called streetcar suburbs in an earlier time. I live in one of them, and it's great: I have a small, private backyard, but I'm also <15 minutes on foot from multiple public parks, restaurants, shops, etc.
Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.
And the cost to buy into these developments where they do exist suggests a supply and demand imbalance. Near me a new-ish 'town center' development with a mix of apartments, shops, restaurants, grocery store, townhouses, and single-family homes is easily double or triple the price of an equivalent house in a standard cul-de-sac neighborhood a 15 minute drive away.
I understand what you are saying. I raised my kids in an American suburb. But I grew up in a European town.
In places like Pontevedra, the kids can walk on their own to all the activities, once they are old enough. And nobody really needs a car. I didn't learn to drive until I was 23.
I grew up in Paris and that’s where I’m raising my son right now. I think there couldn’t be a kid-friendlier place (other than cost):
- I can walk to a gigantic park with many playgrounds in 5 minutes - I can walk to a small little park with a few swings and a slide in 1 minute - I can walk to a pool in 15 minutes - I can walk to my son’s future kindergarten and elementary school in 2 minutes - I can take public transportation to a gigantic zoo in a bit over 30 minutes (also a gigantic aquarium, playgrounds, etc. in the same area) - I can take public transportation to a world-class kid science museum in under 30 minutes (also a kid-centered movie theater, indoor skydiving, bowling, many more play areas, etc. in the same spot) - I can take public transportation to an amusement park in 45 minutes (1h to a second one, Disneyland Paris) - There are tons of indoor play areas for days it rains I can walk to or take public transportation - I have pediatrician and world-class pediatric hospitals walking distance, or a 5 minute wait away for EMS
And all of that much more safely than if I had to drive my kid everywhere (leading cause of death from 4 year onward IIRC. Once my son is old enough, he'll also be able to independently go to all that (say when he’s 12), which would be completely impossible in suburbia.
The only thing you can do in the suburbs is try to privatize all these resources, which is what a backyard is more-or-less (and a private pool, a home theater, buying tons of toys, etc.), but you inevitably get lesser versions as a result.
See, I'd almost see that the other way around, that it's easier for kids in a city with good public transport links because they can get around without having to drive. I live in a medium-sized city in Germany, and kids here can be really independent - you'll regularly see them on the trams in the morning going to school, or hanging out with friends in public spaces. My wife, who grew up here, used to make plans with her friend every summer where they'd figure out all the summer activities they wanted to do and how they'd get there and which buses they needed to take, and then they were basically set free to do that.
The other aspect is having things to do. A backyard is nice, but we have so many parks and playgrounds and cafes and museums and kids' clubs within 15-20 minutes of us that I don't think there's any danger of kids getting bored. And all of that is available on foot or by tram. With the Deutschland-Ticket in Germany, you don't even need to worry about tickets, just hop in and go. As someone who moved here from the UK where these sorts of cities are much less common, the high density and accessible public transport is one of the reasons my wife and I ended up staying here to have children rather than moving back to the UK.
I grew up in the city in France and man it was so much fun, I was outside all the time visiting my friends, I don't understand how kids can grow up in the suburbs tbh
I really wish the US could get more of this. I know here in Boston this has been a hot issue with the summer shutdown of Newberry on Sunday.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around -
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars.
One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
(edit: spelling)
From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense.
From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."
The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book.
Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.
My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time.
At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).
One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. >
Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.
If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.
The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.
Who is paying for these unprofitable roads?
If it's the people (eventually) then it's just accounting.
All these things can be referenced, and checked. Rural roads are paved because they're used (the ones that aren't - they're gravel or mud).
How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?
Because they aren't. They enable almost all economic activity that involves moving things or people around.
Objectively they are not profitable. If you count gas taxes that are collected, we're only covering about a quarter of the cost to maintain them.
Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.
Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.
That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.
Even if you don't demand profitability, there still needs to be cost/benefit analysis done.
Do you build one rail line or two? Do you build one bus route or two? Do you expand a road or build a new one?
Making it a train vs car or rail vs road obscures the problem AND the solution.
I remember pointing this out to someone who said public transportation was unprofitable and his response was "I don't care".
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
Someone’s going to push this and the result will be billing the bus for road usage per person …
Great, let's do that when the negative externalities of cars are properly priced into their usage. This is the number one reason that's causing such sentiments, and rightly so. Expecting people to approach it differently before that is fixed is unrealistic. Currently, cars are subsidized to an absurdly higher level than public transit. That's the status quo. A change of that status quo means moving car subsidies to public transit subsidies, unless you raise taxes, which will make the exact same people defensive and hate you.
> At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.
But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.
There was a city that did that - the busses were "on demand" - much more like a taxi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1yM9mzCAE
Minibuses are a thing. You could easily run them at off-times and on more sparsely-used routes.
> Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life.
Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).
It's awesome but eventually I discovered people wanted to kill me for that honor, and mostly stopped it.
I in fact did that too for a while. Definitely the most fun form of commute.
That said, my biggest gripe with driving/riding as a commute is that I get really bored of taking the exact same route every single day.
I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US.
It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
> it's a shame that we've let it go so far,
It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.
I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.
That "state of equilibrium" is only unavoidable if there are infinite sources and sinks of people. That's a workable approximation if you're only studying one part of a much larger system, in isolation, but when considering the entire world, it falls down. If we have enough nice areas for everyone to live in them, that model stops being applicable.
And, well, a lot of people _can't_ have their own speed bubble.
Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.
And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.
The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.
Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
I have a 4 year old and an 18 month old, and I don't own a car (nor does my partner).
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
(I live in London, United Kingdom)
Sure, it works in your context, you live in a city with 9 million people and you sometimes rent a car - fine. I live in a city 100x smaller. I literally don't know a person that doesn't own a car, or at least has access to a car.
The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.
A city 100x smaller is a city with 90k population. That's half of the population of the Upper West Side. And the UWS has an area of only 5 square kilometers. Unless you specifically choose to, you are not going to walk 3-4 km.
You don't live in a city. You live in a suburb.
This is a problem with city design, not city size.
That's exactly what "making cities work for people instead of cars" is all about.
It sounds like your city is about the same size as the city featured in this article, which has a population of 83,000.
-10deg winters are certainly going to put a stop to much walking or biking, regardless of whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit.
Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.
London has abysmal transport situation - any time I needed to traverse through city, it was 3+ hours of buses and trains/subway mix. Of course doing the same with car would be even worse.
Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.
Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.
Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.
I don't understand how you can spend 3+ hours getting around London. I live in Bristol and when we go to visit London, it takes about 3 hours including the train all the way from Bristol to London. Getting from A to B in London is probably 30-40 minutes tops using the underground.
> Thats how most of Europe lives.
THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.
False. Cargo bikes exist and are capable of hauling kids and groceries. You can get them e-assist, so you don't have to be a dedicated cyclist.
If you need to travel more than ~2-3 miles or so to get groceries or get to school (in a populous area) that's a failure of urban planning.
Yes, there will be some people with mobility limitations who still needs cars, but that's a tiny minority of the overall population.
> Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.
As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.
That also depends on weather around the year in a given country. Here in Poland travelling on a bike ranges from uncomfortable to impossible for 1/3 of the year.
It must be much worse than the weather in Norway and Finland, then. Or perhaps just an infrastructure problem? I imagine if they didn't clear the roads then driving could get pretty challenging too.
How do you know? I know many parents who move their kids around in bikes (many of those live in cities with less than 200k people) who specifically opted not own cars.
I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).
That is definitely not true in many parts of Japan.
In Amsterdam I guarantee you they don’t.
Source: grew up there.
> Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.
For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.
So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.
Sure, but these are multi-million cities. They have amazing public transport.
The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.
Pretty rich that you are complaining about generalization now where you made the initial statement that the "Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density" which doesn't seem to have any limits in scope.
You made a clear assertion about the need for cars, regardless of urban density.
But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.
But
The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)
Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.
the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.
We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.
A single newborn can be handled without a car (if you spend used car prices on a stroller system!) - but if you have three kids under three, or five under 7, a car greatly simplifies things - or you need to hire additional wranglers.
It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.
Until you're the only adult in the car, driving along the motorway, and one of the kids in the back starts crying / gets car sick / needs the toilet when you're 15km from the next services. Granted, train toilets with a toddler aren't much fun either.
Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.
Singles - I agree. Even doubles, there are reasonable ones.
Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.
And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.
But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.
(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)
Yet, most cars you see in the streets are single-occupancy.
Very wrong. I'm not OP but I have two teens and we raised them from birth in a city and have never owned a car. We rent rarely and only to go on trips to places inaccessible by rail. All kids activities were walking distance or subway. Probably ten times as much as you can find in a suburb too. Also kids learn to ride the subway by high school if not middle school so they can be independent like no place else.
Simply untrue in many places. My next-door neighbour rides his bike with his daughter to school then rides to work at the nearby hospital (up a gnarly bank, too). I see many kids walking to school all year round. Kids are more than capable of making their own way to school from the age of 8-10, depending on the distance.
Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.
Really depends where you are. But not in a major city, in the UK its not.
Ask me how i know
I mean that's a depressing existence for the kids. I walked and biked around everywhere since I was 6 or 7 years old, I'm extremely thankful I didn't have to rely on my parents being free to drive me around so I could see my friends.
The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
> take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power.
Internet marketing, for example.
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.
You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers.
Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.
And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.
> Plan your route so you get access to a seat
What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.
Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
In Beijing I would often take the long way around on a subway loop line so I could get a seat. The subway is just always crowded, and you could be standing for an hour if you don’t plan your route right. Most of the time I would just plan my day around a very early taxi ride to get to work and then return before the awful rush hour they had, but that was 10 years ago and I’m afraid it wouldn’t be an option anymore (I left Beijing in 2016), so smashing into the subway would be necessary, if you do some clever route adjustments you plan your trip through big transfer points where lots of people get off, guaranteeing yourself a seat (worked on my last trip there in April).
Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.
Sure, but at this point we are just hacking the system. Which is fine, I guess, no harm is done, but it feels wrong :)
Honestly this is one of the undersold advantages of public transit. It can be fun to optimize your path and switch things up both on a macro and micro timescale. In a car since I'm constantly aware of what I'm doing, taking a less efficient path feels like I'm wasting a part of my life. Taking a less efficient path on public transit feels like I'm taking more time to stop and appreciate my surroundings. Especially because sometimes that alternate path gives me a better view.
A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.
> Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit.
That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."
When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.
The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.
But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.
One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.
And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.
But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.
Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.
Government policy should not be formed on the basis of "me" problems. (Not merely yours, but generally.)
I have some of that, especially when I haven't been out for a while. Moving to a place where English isn't the main language helped me quite a bit to get into the right headspace. Also realizing no one really cares about me. This is fun: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png
What a dream, planning a seat, in which country is such pleasure possible outside August?
Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.
>I don't see myself ever not being a driver.
Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.
>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.
>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...
The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
> The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence.
This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by.
> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/
[2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/
[3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people.
I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.
FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people.
Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.
Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
I wouldn't qualify Tokyo's public transit system as poor. In fact, the only one that might rival it in Europe would be the one in Moscow.
Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards.
First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common.
Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason.
Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane.
Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate.
I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city.
London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better.
Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable.
I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!
From a perspective of "packing people in"? Tokyo is absolutely poor.
The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.
I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent.
To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces.
Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
That safety is illusionary. Cars are dangerous, more dangerous than subways.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.
Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm.
Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".
I suppose even if you sub in "goal to cause death/injury" vs "recklessness that could reasonably be expected to produce injury despite not being the goal" and it would still hold true.
Personally I think it's contentious whether drunk driving etc injuries can be considered "intentional" even if they are expected and reckless. When I think of intentional injuries, I'm thinking of ones where the perpetrator has that as their preferred outcome, something I don't think applies to most drunk driving injuries.
How many indiscriminate neck stabbings are there per year in your town? And I can’t help but ask the obvious, how many indiscriminate deaths by car (i.e young child struck by truck) are there?
I looked up, i.e. Chicago. There were double the number of homicides vs fatal car accidents. I don't pretend those can be compared 1:1, but I'll note when I took public transit it wasn't just the risk of being on the transit but also getting dumped out near areas that were violent assault / murder hot spots.
The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.
You forgot the "who didn’t even pay his fare"... which makes a big difference.
In this particular situation it doesn't appear to, but in many states you only have the right to 'stand your ground' in places you are legally allowed to be, so if you don't pay your fare you eliminate any sort of "stand your ground" defense as to why you stabbed someone you thought was threatening your life rather than ran away.
So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.
> Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
This concern never even occurred to me. Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
> Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
Indeed they are. GP has done an extremely poor job of risk assessment.
No. Gullible people who believe such nonsense are the bigger challenge ;)
I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain.
I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.
But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer.
EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it.
I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.
And I say that while owning a comfortable car.
I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.
Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.
But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.
When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.
Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.
Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this.
I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.
> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.
The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".
I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
>I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history
Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.
There are two big problems with this though.
First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.
Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
> From a quality of life point of view
The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".
Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.
For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
> I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)
The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.
> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people
Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.
One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.
> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.
> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...
Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads.
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident.
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
As someone that lived in Switzerland, that is great as long as one doesn't live in small towns outside train lines, with buses that only go up to 9PM during the week, or hardly run during weekends.
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Not for all the other people around you, no.
Their loss. But that's simply yet another reason to move towards a market-based approach; people can choose whatever works best for them as an individual even if others think it's a terrible choice.
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.
That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
That's not an unreasonable take in my opinion, but then the point of the person I'm responding to is 'let's silo costs and let the market decide' and if we're going to do that, however unpractical, I'd bet a lot of money that driving a car would become unaffordable.
I'd take that bet, were I a betting man. There are 0.85 vehicles per capita in the US. Making roads an average of 1/0.85 = 17.6% more expensive for car owners is very unlikely to break the bank for any significant number of people.
The current cost of owning and operating an automobile is around 12K USD assuming 15K miles driven yearly according to BTS [0]. This would push it up to a little over 14K USD.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
[1] https://carsbibles.com/what-percentage-of-oil-is-used-for-ca...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
This wouldn't increase the total cost of "owning and operating an automobile" by 17.6%, just the portion of that which funds road construction. Hard to quantify exactly how much that is since it's currently just part of your taxes. I don't think it's included in the BTS numbers. At the federal level at least it's pretty insignificant, only 2% of the Federal budget at most (I doubt most would even notice a 17.6% * 2% = 0.35% increase in their federal taxes). If I'm reading things right, the DOT budget is an even lower percentage of my state taxes. I think most road construction is funded at a more local level than that though so it's hard to say the exact impact without looking at individual villages/towns/cities.
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics.
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
> for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly
Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).
As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
> Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases,
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
>I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position.
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
This isn't my experience, but I understand some countries have overloaded public transit systems. When I've been in those countries, it's been simple enough to just let an overloaded train pass and grab the next one.
Ok but you let that train pass you might lose the connection to the bus at the other end. Or the next train or bus might not be for half an hour. Now you're late to wherever you were going.
Right, so, again, it sounds like your public transit is underfunded or something. Where I live I can depend on there being another train within 8 minutes no matter where I'm going, or a bus, or I can just hop on a ubike and I can be confident there'll be a space and station within a couple hundred meters.
I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.
During the rush hour, the next train is going to be just as packed. And if you wait long enough for things to quiet down, you're not going to be at work on time.
This doesn't happen to me where I live. It's time to increase your city's transportation budget!
In many S and RE trains in Germany you do get to strecht a lot, assuming you manage to get into the wagon.
>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.
I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station...
Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
In switzerland you pay income taxes based on your city/neighborhood.
This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.
But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.
It's a very balanced system.
In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.
>> How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?
Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.
My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?
Good points but maybe cities offer something more than just proximity. I think cities is about the culture, meeting people and vibes.
> Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment.
That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.
>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.
I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?
> I would hazard that most in fact don't.
Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.
> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.
I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.
> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.
Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.
There's a huge spectrum between dense city center and suburbia; at present, I do consider my area to be "walkable", but it's not anywhere close to a dense city and there sure aren't "corporate HQs" anywhere nearby.
I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.
And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.
I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.
I've seen many times how some people react to a single bus lane or even a tiny bicycle lane as though cars are getting the raw end of the deal when 90%+ of infrastructure is for cars.
Some cities build dedicated bike paths. This is much nicer as you aren't fighting with cars that way.
Those get even more unhinged pushback! Read any comments section on an article with a bike lane being put in, even if that bike lane takes no lanes from the road!
In some places the only way to make a bike bath is to reduce a car lane.
I am all for it out of general principle, but most car drivers will likely disagree.
It makes no difference, I’ve seen people pushback even when that lane doesn’t remove a regular road lane!
I guess it depends on demand. If bikes are 100-to-1 then make a bike lane, if the other way around maybe not. Need to remember that tax-payers actually fund this stuff so can't just force random stuff on them.
That is true, but the thing is, without bike lanes, people won't switch to bikes in certain traffic conditions. Cyclists pay taxes btw. too and a bicycle with its low weight is magnitudes cheaper for the roads, then the SUV tanks.
I guess it is reasonable to run some experiments, set up some bike lanes for a period of time. If they are used, keep them, if not maybe consider removing them.
Good point regarding the costs. The other advantage of dedicated / purpose-built bike paths is they likely don't have to be built to the same spec as ones designed for vehicle use (I assume - not a civil engineer).
Careful, this often ends up with cities and towns building isolated pilot bike lanes that go nowhere and then ripping them out when nobody uses them.
The value of a bike lane isn't in the lane in isolation, in the same way that the value of a street isn't in that street alone. It's in the ability of that lane/street to get you where you need or want to go.
Because bikes on roads with cars suck for both.
It's nicer for the drivers too because you don't have to lag behind a slow-moving bike in a single lane.
And, more abstractly, if a dedicated bike lane means more people taking the bicycle, that also means fewer cars on the road, making it that much more pleasant for those who continue to drive.
Speaking as someone who enjoys driving, I'm all for dedicated bike lanes, even if that means reducing car lanes.
unfortunately i think the crab bucket mentality kicks in when sitting in stop and go traffic and seeing someone breeze by in a bike lane makes people so enraged they’re against cycling infrastructure for the rest of their lives
Or some of them can make the mental transition towards "hey, I could also be the one enjoying a free ride instead of being stuck in my car here"
I keep wishing there was a better way to project invitation when in this situation. All I’ve come up with is to appear happy and relaxed—sit upright, look around and smile, eat something as I roll.
We’re so instinctively competitive though it feels hopeless.
Depends if I seat cozy drinking my warm take away coffee while it is pouring rain or snow.
nah its more like no right of way on right turns. the breaking of fundamental rules by adding bikes.
I don’t think it’s the number of people transported that is hard to get one’s head around—it’s imagining using a subway to get to all of their destinations which are spread all over and separated by at least a quarter mile of parking lots and 8 lane highways. In their mind, this would require an absurd amount of subway or bus lines and tons of transitions and it would take an eternity to get to their destination and they might interact with lower class people and so on. The thing they don’t understand is that without cars you can build all of those destinations much closer together in a single walkable place that you just need transit to get to/from. When you take away the cars, you don’t need gargantuan parking lots or 8 lane highways.
People don’t pick their mode of transportation based on space efficiency.
They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
There’s also the matter of weather, which is less obvious to people who don’t live in locations that see extreme weather or deep snow. Safety and cleanliness is another issue depending on the location. There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
People who hold up numeric metrics like number of people transported per unit area don’t understand why people prefer to hop in their car and go to their destination rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.
If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.
The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.
Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.
> end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
And all the associated pollution, overheating and flooding issues that go along with it
People very much prefer sedentary lifestyle too, yet is very bad for your health. Likewise, cars are nice as long as you continue to ignore all the negative externalities it has - pollution, climate change and above all the massive waste of space in parking lots and highways that could be used better.
> rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.
> They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities.
Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.
> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.
> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...
You choose where you live and work
You have never ridden the TTC in Toronto.....
None of that matters when you consider the potential horror of interacting with another human.
Subways are great for high-bandwidth routes. Cars are great for everything. It's like wifi vs cat6.
That's only true because of car-centric design, not a rule of the universe. We can easily make public transport the better transport option if we wanted to.
Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.
Well, in the Netherlands it's also very flat, which makes enabling cycling there a much smaller achievement than anywhere else, except possibly Vatican City. Now we have battery-powered bikes more things are accessible for more people, but the clock starts now for those places.
I mean sure, if you take a surface-level look at things that is true, but the Dutch government has spent a lot of time, money and effort into actually thinking about their urban design and how they tackle building their cities for the quality of life of its inhabitants, rather than the QoL of its inhabitant's cars. It helps, of course, that it's a flat country, but just being flat isn't enough, it takes deliberate planning and good choices being made at the governmental level.
What's the excuse with cities like Oulu in Finland, which isn't flat and is covered in snow more often than it is dry? Despite those 2 potentially huge issues, they still have incredible cycling infrastructure. Or Switzerland, where in my experience in at least Geneva and Bern the cycling infrastructure was also superb despite the mountainous terrain? No one's saying you need a cross-country bicycle highway, as long as the dense urban centers have good bike infrastructure it's more than enough.
Also I didn't even mention bikes in the comment you were replying to, I was talking about public transport like trains, trams and buses. Again, Switzerland despite being extremely mountainous has a world-class rail system that literally cuts through massive mountains.
Sure, if you pack people like sardines. If anything, trying to achieve this kind of density is what pushes people away from public transport.
You shouldn't be packing people like sardines. If your subway is that full then you should be adding more trains, or building more lines to ease congestion. (depending on your cities exact situation). In the US we have made building for a reasonable price impossible and then say it is impossible to fix the problems, but it shouldn't be like that.
I thought building more lanes does not work. So why would building more lines work. Soon there will be induced demand and they will be even fuller.
Building more lanes does work - but people misunderstand induced demand. Really induced demand should be called fixing suppressed demand. If you get induced demand it means you need a lot more lanes. We can't afford the 50 layers of highway bridges needed to build enough lanes, but transit is a lot more space efficient and so we could afford it.
Because rail infra scales really well, bus infra scales well, and bike infra scales well -- while car infra scales disastrously.
How about if cities were built in such a way that you would just have buildings and podium being pedestrian and bike friendly with all transportation network being 1 level underground (or 2 levels) all as self driving EV pods. This may increase the no of possible 'roads' and does not sound as far fetched in terms of overall costs. Emergency vehicles can be given an exemption to operate on the podium
Tunneling underground is extremely expensive. Individual self driving pods aka cars are very expensive. But most importantly cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground, plus now you have to build entrances and exits to the underground system everywhere. Traveling also becomes a lot less appealing when you're in a black tube all the time rather than seeing the city around you. It's also not possible because the underground is not just unoccupied but there is already other existing infrastructure down there.
What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.
> cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground
I don't think the entire "car tunnels" thing is reasonable either, but this one is wrong. The bottleneck for cars is the inherent interference in the 2-dimensional streets. If you shove them all in a few tunnels right until they get into a low-transit region close to the destination, it would increase their capacity by a lot.
It's also a huge amount of money that is better used some other way. But it has an effect.
Surface streets aren't inherently 2D, though - you can build overpasses and underpasses and above-grade highways. We just don't, because it's hideously expensive.
pods (i guess 2 to 4 passengers) simply do not scale. It doesn't matter whether you put them underground or not. The only solution is for people to not use them.
One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.
Underground is expensive. Cars are heavy and need a lot of ventalation. Lets leave the cars at ground level and move humans to underground or skyway systems - thus getting them out of the weather (I live where is snows so this is a very useful feature. People who live where it doesn't snow generally report hot summers and so again want to be inside anyway)
Yes, this sounds nice in principle. Also insanely expensive, difficult to build, and basically just completely unfeasible in reality.
What do you mean by "car oriented people."
People who primarily drive cars? People who primarily drive cars when competitive options exist? People who argue for cars in areas where its not very feasible? People who prefer car oriented cities?
I think most people who primarily drive arent estimating subways at all.
Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.
I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.
---
Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
> Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or
As someone who will have a runny nose all day if I sit next to that lady, yes I do worry about her perfume more than I worry about the drunk driver. While the drunk driver is a worse situation if the odds hit me, the odds the perfumed lady is too close to me is much higher.
Thats right. The risks of a perfume lady are way too scary. Cars never have any odors, just fumes, soot and particulate matter, brake dust. The air quality of cities is so much better than that of forests because of cars. The risks couldn't be more clear: 10 million deaths from air pollution[1] and pollution causing every kind of disease (except STIs) from cars vs hundreds of millions of deaths from perfume lady in train.
This is what all economists get slightly wrong? They say humans are rational agents, soak in all the information, calculate the costs and benefits with the probabilities and make rational decisions. But humans almost always make emotional decisions. A perfume lady is way more scarier than a 5000 lb vehicle hurtling down at 60 mph, custom built to protect the person driving the vehicle, on surfaces built for vehicles and vehicles only (trillions of dollars in maintenance and tens of trillions of dollars healthcare costs).
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
For me the immediate effects of perfume lady are worse than the other effects. I'm not downplaying the others, I'm just stating the reality that she makes my life miserable in a way that is very clear.
Move to a different train car?
Statistics don't apply to individuals. If you are a single mom with a bad knee, a car will make your life easy, while public transport will be hard. The car will be safer, cheaper, more manageable because walking with kids and their things to the bus or train may be too challenging. An average human is a hermaphrodite because roughly half are men and half are women.
Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.
But why wouldnt I prefer having orders of magnitude more space, given the option?
Because there is only a fixed amount of land a city can ever possibly sustain. Urban sprawl all you want, but eventually you run out of land to keep expanding into or the city goes broke because there aren't enough revenue generating properties in a given area to cover the cost of servicing those areas. At some point more has to turn into better and more efficient.
If you think the time spent traversing all that space is completely worthless. Otherwise it makes sense to make things dense so that people can mostly reach whatever things they want to reach by walking a short distance or taking a quick tram connection, etc.
I mean, mine does lol. Of course this is the Netherlands so it'll be different to the states, but I literally live across the street from a train station, and it goes directly to the dead center of the city in less than 5 minutes. There's a train every 10 minutes. The same journey is, minimum, 15 minutes by car (or 10 by bus since we have dedicated bus lanes), at the end of which you have to find a parking spot. You then still have to actually get to your destination cause the chances of parking in the center are slim to none. People really underestimate how much of our public land is taken up by cars just... sitting there, doing fucking nothing.
With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.
> Oh and you might be odor sensitive
I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.
I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know.
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
> it's a design choice
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money.
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
>big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
> There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
The mixed-use development, which was practically banned during the automobile era, is a great example of doing more with less. As you mention, being able to walk over to your local school, or park, or market, or clothing shop, etc. helps reduce the need for car travel for small things, which allows us to have fewer cars on the road, spend less on infrastructure, and make driving a little more pleasant.
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
I think you are making an actively counterproductive conflation between "banning random crap" and the automobile. I think they only happened together because of luck and timing.
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
I broadly agree with you, and frankly what I'm advocating for is to get the government out of zoning and transportation precisely because of the problems you mention, but also because of the negative externalities caused by it.
Today we do not have market choices, because the Federal Highway Administration and every state department of transportation enforces and reinforces centralized design patterns that as we can see today no longer work (and likely never did). It's baked into their raison d'être. Unfortunately, as you also note, items like roads and housing developments live in the public sphere and so we can't and won't completely divorce the government from managing those projects or regulations, but we can examine what works well and increases attributes we want more of and do our best to drive regulation toward those attributes, and in some cases remove regulation to see more of those attributes. In my mind, work that increases walking, biking (or other similar transportation), and rail provide the best mix of low government regulation and effective development patterns which preserve most of the other things we like, such as cars and convenience.
I'm not sure I'm in favor of banning random crap, or maybe you read something into my comment that I didn't intend?
Plenty of big houses with yards in the surburbs in European cities, almost exclusively actually, and very often cheaper than much smaller flats in the city centers. They're still connected to the public transport system too.
If that’s what they choose then why make it illegal to build anything else?
Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain when you need to walk to the nearest bus station to get to work. You can reduce the issues with public transport somewhat (at the expense of its density and cost advantages) but you can never completely eliminate them compared to personal vehicles that get you from door to door.
> Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
Rain has been solved: with enclosed vehicles that take you from your home to your destination.
If you have streets as narrow as in e.g. Florence, the rain can only hit you from above, whereas in car-centric suburbia rain can hit you from the sides in basically all directions - so an umbrella blocking the top isn't enough, you need a car.
In other words, the problem here that the car is solving, is a problem that the car is causing.
Yes. People at ancient times like the 20th century had technologies that could protect them from the rain while they walked.
It's too bad that we lost that knowledge. But we could probably rediscover it with a moderate investment on research.
There's things like umbrellas, you know.
No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.
You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
> You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km.
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
For some reason, urbanists like to attack suburbs while also saying that everything is so far apart and takes so long. If you want to live in a city, live in a city, but don't pretend that it's the only way to live.
Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day.
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
There is great train service from the suburbs to Manhattan, but I worked from home and moved to a different metro area. As it stands, parking by the office in the city I live near is about $150-200/month. Taking the train there and back every day from somewhere in the city would be about $150/month.
> Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
You're just rejecting his hypothetical - Manhattan is dense.
Yeah, that's why you build stations periodically and run trains at faster speeds than cars.
I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.
For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.
But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!
Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.
I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.
So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
Pretty similar for me - I travel to London from Edinburgh quite a lot and I much prefer taking the train.
Before Brexit I got the train from London to Amsterdam. 3h45 direct, clean, comfortable and so much more civilised than flying.
Even after brexit it’s very possible. I understand InOui may start offering competing services in the channel tunnel.
I actually don't mind the flying bit of flying - but I loathe all the faffing about and waiting at airports.
I'm actually the opposite, it really fucks with my ears - I think it's probably the pressure change but I don't care to experiment too much, I'm lucky if I'm not out of action for a week after landing.
I could stand to wait an hour, have to do a ridiculous dance for "security", traipse two miles across a vast building designed on the wrong scale for humans and so on, that's all fine, but the flying I do not like at all.
In Germany, even if it takes the same amount of time, door to door, usually flying is half price, and isn't hit as often in delays as having your ICE stopped in the middle of nowhere, and then miss one of the two connections yet to come.
It is an interesting exercise to see how frequently people start using their Bahn app, trying to work around what might be their way to still make it into the destination, as the pause times between stations increase.
I’m worried that my young child will die crossing the street. Sorry—these two just aren’t the same!
Exactly. Cars isolate you from other people and just as importantly the weather all the way.
>there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
Or urine.
Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".
Come to Europe, especially northern Europe.
The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.
US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
> Come to Europe
Anecdotally, among myself and my friends we have more stories of problems with theft and encounters with hostile people from very brief travels to Europe than all time spent on public transport in the USA. To be fair, I haven’t lived in NYC where public transport is famously more dangerous.
I also suspect that foreigners are more targeted for wallet thefts while traveling in Europe.
However, watching multiple friends get pickpocketed on European public transport and having to shake some sketchy people who were being aggressive with women in our group during our brief travels shattered my illusions that European public transport is universally superior in safety.
Edit to add: I also thought it was funny when we met up with someone’s friend in a populous European city who refused to ride public transportation with us. He would drive his car from point to point and meet up with us at the destination. He seemed to believe that the underground was not something people his age liked and was surprised we were riding it without a second thought.
Famously more dangerous? NYC? What on earth are you talking about
It’s mostly a meme not backed up by any serious facts. Politically, both sides get kudos for pretending cities are more dangerous than they actually are.
I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
I could imagine Paris and London in that list, despite both being very safe for locals (and.. both being Northern Europe)- but perhaps less safe for tourists.
I would imagine Prague being a middle-European tourist destination that is plagued much worse by this (but, also, very safe for locals- I lived there briefly).
Where were you in Europe?
Not to pick on you specifically as I think your comment was fine but I always get a chuckle[1] about the "duality of europe" that you see on the parts of the internet that are dominated by the white collar english speakers.
Depending upon the issue you might reduce europe down to the rich western bits. You might include or exclude the former soviet influenced areas depending upon the context. You might only look at nations on the Mediterranean or only exclude them, etc, etc.
Yet whenever you look at the US you always include the whole thing no exceptions.
[1]just to be clear, by "I get a chuckle" I mean "the way we just accept this behavior is a condemnation of the community and the people who make it up"
> I was quite careful to say "Northern Europe" because there are some very touristy places that attract criminals who specifically prey on tourists.
Okay, but then why can’t we Americans just exclude the bad parts of America and only allow you to compare to the good parts?
Why must every America-Europe comparison be about the worst case American cities (usually taken from headlines) but only compared to a select subset of European locations?
Because the USA is one country and Europe is a collection of vastly different countries.
You would likely agree that the USA and Mexico are incomparable and its sort of the same, though the EU evens some things out: its much less far reaching than a federal government.
That said: happy to compare the best case US public transport to the Nordics. Literally anywhere in the Nordics to anywhere in the US.
The upper middle class in the US also takes public transit, but there is not enough sense of social shame to get people to behave well. I also highly doubt that people who are truly wealthy in northern Europe take the train.
I'm in Europe. Hungary though, mind you, not the fancier part of Europe. Trains here are late, sticky, and lawless.
Southern Europe is quite far from the well connected city dream that often gets discussed here.
The same points also apply to EU public transport. Maybe your area is better but where I live it's definitely mostly the poorer and less domesticated that you find in public transport.
I am with you. It is not only about lanes but also parking. My in laws live in a very car centric city and it is crazy the way all distances are multiplied when everything need a dedicated parking space. There is almost nothing left at walking distance and every time I visit I have the feeling I spend all my day in a car instead of ... doing stuff.
This was one of the things I realized living in a very car friendly city without a car. SO SO MUCH of my walking was just walking past/through GIANT parking lots.
It's pretty amazing how much time you can save by being able to park in front of whatever you want to get into. Starting at the same point I've beaten cars that should have gotten there 20 minutes faster according to google maps.
I save a lot of time by taking a parking spot far from the door and just walking. People who drive spend a lot more time than they think looking for a parking spot close to the door. Plus nobody cares if I take up 3 parking spots way out there (so long as I'm not in a lane of course) so I can stop whereever without checking for the lines saving even more time not trying to get perfectly in the parking spot.
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses that's particularly focused on his long career in the government of New York, is, quite aside from a fascinating psychological portrait and a parable about how bad it is when someone has untrammeled power in a bureaucracy, an absolutely fantastic case study in how building more roads makes traffic worse. And it was published in 1974! For anyone that cares to find out we've know this for decades and have absolutely failed to do anything about it - pretty depressing.
Caro has a way with words; one of my favorite turns was when Moses declared traffic a problem "solved for a generation", only for Caro to begin the next paragraph with a description of the traffic jams that began to develop a few weeks after that particular road (I believe the Bronx River Parkway) opened.
Seconded - I'm currently listening to the audiobook of this book and I find it utterly fascinating.
Yeah, the reader of the audiobook is pretty good, although I slightly prefer Grover Gardner, who recorded the audiobooks for his series on LBJ, as a narrator. If you like The Power Broker, I'd highly recommend those.
Nobody likes to hear this, including me,
But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable.
So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.
Urban planning has a term for this - the Downs Thomson paradox. Over time, traffic tends to increase up to a point at which equivalent journeys on transit/bike/foot are quicker.
What this means of course is that an effective way of reducing traffic is by speeding up the alternatives.
"But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation."
Not if you are like me and likely to take a short nap after a long day at work...
Edit: I own a car, I use it all the time. But I also use the train a lot - all depends where I want to go and what I will be doing when I get there.
Edit2: I sometimes even drive to the train station, get out of my car and into a train!
> But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
I hate driving even when I'm alone on the road. I'm forced to stare at the road when I want to be doing something else. I can't even take a break, since a simple 5 minute nap has high odds of killing me even if I'm the only car on the road.
Plus cars are slower than trains or airplanes. Even on the autobahn with unlimited speed allowed, most people are not going nearly as fast as a high speed train, much less an airplane.
Don't get me wrong, I ride my bike to work, but it's abundantly clear that (at least americans) really fucking love cars.
To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.
No it isn't clear that Americans love cars. Some Americans love cars or course, but for many they are something they think they must have but they don't really care about the car. People want to get places, people need to get food, and so one - a car enables all of those things, but they are a tool to get things done, not the point. They do not think there is any other tool that will work, but that doesn't mean they care about that tool. They are against transit because they think it is a waste of money since even after spending that money it still wouldn't work (this may or may not be true) and so it isn't worth it.
Yes.
That's why everybody should heavily subsidize public transportation.
There is a reason everyone zips around in them on Wall-e. Wait until we have full self driving and drone delivery. Then even when you are in traffic you can get your burger, soda and TV in without wasting any time!
This is level one understanding of public transport systems. “We should build metros and then everything will be better”
There’s cities that are not setup for efficient public transportation or walkable living. Redesign it from ground up and put a metro smack bang through the middle. Until then, it’s just not going to work.
People, and especially people who like the idea of walkable cities that reside in council chairs, often miss this fundamental step.
“Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
You can adapt cities.
Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.
You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them
Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.
You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.
People always say stuff like this, but plenty of European cities like Utrecht have shown that it's very much possible to turn the tide. A few years ago Utrecht replaced an entire highway and turned it (back) into a canal and the area is indescribably nicer in every way, it's called the Catharijnesingel.
This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.
Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.
I think you are being unnecessarily defeatist. Cities can’t be redesigned from the ground up, but at the same time we’ve seen that investment into roads can’t fix traffic in cities once they reach a certain population and density.
The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.
I beg to differ. A few Dutch cities did exactly that. Here's a video with a great example of the city I live near:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kql9bBNII
Utrecht did something similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPGOSrqXrjs
People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!
Car infrastructure takes so much space that you can repurpose parts of it in place. Just turn one of the lanes into a tram line, make dedicated bus lanes. On huge parking lots you can just split parts of and build housing or more smaller stores there.
Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?
I grew up in London where it is almost always preferable to take public transport anywhere central (cars work fine in suburbs).
I prefer to walk and take public transport, but where I live now (small town) busses are infrequent, and fairly short journeys can require changing. It can take two hours on the bus to get somewhere that is less than half an hour by car.
I think people here would be delighted with more public transport. The main complaint I hear about roads is not repairing potholes which is not hugely expensive. The problem is that the political push is to use a stick (make cars more expensive and inconvenient) rather than a carrot (provide better public transport).
I completely agree. You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens. It's a self-destructive cycle and a betrayal of drivers. We're sold a promise of freedom and speed, but what we get is a constant, grinding battle. We spend our lives in traffic and our wallets on fuel/tax, and the very infrastructure meant to liberate us ends up imprisoning us.
The starkest example of this for me is comparing Orlando, Florida with Malmö, Sweden. Orlando is the end game of car-centric planning. The city feels bigger than its population suggests because you spend half an hour in a car just to get anywhere. The eight-lane highways and endless parking lots are supposed to make driving easier, but they create the very congestion that makes driving miserable. This architecture of disconnection means fewer spontaneous encounters and more social isolation. The city is designed for a machine, not for people.
In contrast, Malmö's population is actually larger than Orlando's, yet a 30-minute bike ride can get you literally anywhere. The largest road through the city center is a quiet, two-lane street that prioritises people over cars; as there are large crossings and lights. This isn't an accident, it's a choice. The city's excellent public transportation and extensive bike lanes make the car a choice, not a necessity and because it's penalised: the only drivers are the ones who need to be driving, for which now there are open roads (as long as you're patient).
The truth is, every person on a bus, a train, or a bike is one less car in front of you. Giving people real alternatives is the only thing that can truly reduce traffic. This isn't an attack on cars. It's a demand for sanity, a call to build cities that work for everyone, including those who choose to drive.
And if you don’t have a bike you can rent one instantly and nearby from an app like https://www.malmobybike.se/
> You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens
That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).
Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.
> If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city.
No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.
Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.
> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway
Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
> this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
If someone chooses to not make a trip then I count it as impossible. I could walk across the North Pole to Europe, but I think everyone would agree when I say the trip is impossible anyway despite that.
> This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
You absolute can and I disagree with the studies. Now I will agree that building 50 layers of highway bridges needed is not a reasonable thing to do, but it still a solvable engineering challenge if we wanted to put the money into it.
I mean, you’re right you need systems and people need to get places.
But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.
Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.
I suppose it is because Florida has a lot of modern development, but the number of disconnected subdivisions there is relatively extreme. In much of the US you can easily walk to the thing you can see.
There is always some private company benefiting when a town/city rejects public transport. I remember reading an article about a town that rejected public transport, there was intense door-to-door lobbying by some Koch brothers funded group. It was a small town, I suppose they were just testing their lobbying efforts before deploying the same in large cities.
All this to say, if the public is sufficiently informed, they are not going to reject public transport. We've been brainwashed that car centric transport is the best.
Then there is Japan, they kept a station open just for one girl, so she can get to school - https://www.ndtv.com/feature/kyu-shirataki-station-japanese-...
This is just a factor of car driving being wildly more inefficient at "people-carrying" than public transport. That is why "improving things" for cars just makes things worse-you're spending your sparse resources (money, land, manpower) more and more inefficiently.
Car-centric does not mean driver-centric.
Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric.
Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.
'Climatists' is a strange way of putting this because pulling everything we do back to human scale will be a huge boon to solving the climate crisis. As someone who's worried about threats to the future of the species in the form of climate change I'd be all for a human centric movement.
Exactly. If you have plenty of community spaces spread around an urban area - cafes, pubs, small businesses, public parks - you both reduce the amount of travel required, and strengthen local communities
Lovely way of looking at it
> Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers.
I 100% agree. I live in Newcastle, a city that is fairly car centric, but we have a Metro line and have had pushes to increase bus and bicycle transport (though Labour are generally bad for active travel).
My brother moved to Leeds, one of the largest cities in Europe without a Metro or tram. Driving anywhere in the city is fucking awful. The planners clearly kept trying to add one more lane and the result is congestion everywhere, even at quiet times.
I've also driven round Liverpool and Manchester and found, though they're better as they have Metro lines, the car-centric roads are still really awful to drive on.
Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing.
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.
> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
okay, can't we have a middle ground then? On one side, nothing happens because of corruption, regulation, partisan interests etc. On the other end, there is authoritarian regime that can get things done at insane speed but at the cost of the environment and its people. Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
Yes it is hard. What makes it hard is the analisys of the problem is wrong and so we don't know how to fix it. Some of the problems were hinted at above, but the response of why we do it that way was also hinted at and should give anyone wanting to fix the problem pause. There are many other problems that are at fault too that were not hinted at. Some of them I know (but I'd need a book to write out), but there are hints of more things that I'm not aware of. I also have reason to suspect some of what I "know" is actually wrong, but I don't know what and cannot know until someone tries it thus showing why it is wrong.
> Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?
It is, it takes political effort and most importantly it takes adequate staffing on the state/local government for supervision and proper tender processes, and both is really short in supply - one might say that the latter is done on purpose as an excuse to privatize yet another piece of public infrastructure.
Of course a private toll road company can build faster and keep up with maintenance, it doesn't have to deal with tender bullshit, it can hire enough of its own staff to make sure vendors don't screw them over, and if it's a large enough company they can hire their own construction crews. Oh and obviously it can provide a source of extra income for the grifter politicians that vote for the privatization...
> Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
>China just openly sharts on nature
You say this like China is the country openly flaunting the climate, purposely pushing for more carbon emissions to enrich a few people, calling climate change a hoax, 1984'ing all government research and policy on climate change, and forbidding agencies from even researching it, selling off public lands for profit.
That's not China, that's the good ol USA
Oh, and the USA also sent multiple completely innocent people to gulags.
Where's your high horse now?
Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway.
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)
> Public transport gives much better ROI for more people
That's a bold claim without data.
Just did some very light googling - building out, repairing and developing new road infrastructure seems to have around 2:1 or 2.5:1 ROI - Public transport, active transport seems to have around 4:1 to 5:1 ROI.
Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere.
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
So when shown the data you asked for, you find a way to dismiss it. Brilliant :)
You seem to be implying the opposite, also without data. Now THAT is a bold claim.
This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Thanks for this useful comment, too rare in this discussion unfortunately.
One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too.
> In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process.
A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.)
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
> A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
I see what you're saying and it exposes a gap in my logic. I think the reason _I_ see it as hard is because I live in one of those gaps, so service is relatively limited compared to places further east with more density. Buuut the whole point is that, even though there are 95k of us in my town, we're still expensive to service for a 50 mile ride to the hub.
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going.
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities.
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.
What's wrong with buses?
They’re flexible (don’t need to rip up rails to change routes) but they cost a lot more to run (tyres, fuel, maintenance, staffing cost) to carry fewer people. A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver, and are way more energy efficient to boot.
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
> A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
> the bus shares the cost of the road with other users
A bus does much more damage to the road than a tramway though (to say nothing of trucks, these are even worse). Anything rail based, the load from weight and movement is transferred via the rails and subterranean sleepers to the foundation, whereas a decently used bus road will need to be resurfaced at least every five years, more in a hotter climate as the buses will inevitably seriously groove the asphalt. Tramways is more like every 20 if not 30 years until you need to do a full replacement.
On top of that, this "the cost is already paid" math is annoying to me on a personal ethical level because it excuses putting people into cars and freight onto trucks because "they already are there".
> A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A single Class R 3.3 tramway vehicle (~36 tons) in Munich carries 218 people, more if you squish the passengers ("Sardinenbüchse" feeling). Munich's largest bus with a carriage unit, in contrast, carries 130 people [1] at ~20 tons. The gain from regenerative braking that you get on tramways actually matters at that scale, and as said, drivers are already short in supply.
Fully agree on your calculation regarding traffic by the way, however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/setzt-anhaenger-busse...
Cost is already paid is important. We need to get freight around. Roads because they are flexible are the best way to do that. When the roads are not congested (which if we are only talking freight they are not even in the densest cities) sharing with other users makes sense (in a dense city cars quickly turn into congestion, but we are only adding buses to the existing freight system so we can ignore that). Sure a bus does more damage than a car, but there are other freight users doing a lot of damage so you need to build for that use anyway. Thus we will have the roads anyway, the question is do we build something else as well and is that worth the costs - here buses are a lot cheaper.
What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.
There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.
> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)
They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.
I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.
Compared with light railway/tram, they need more energy per km traveled due to friction and malleability losses in the tires, they emit fine dust from tires and brakes, and usually they pack significantly less people than a railcar so you need more vehicles and especially more drivers for a bus network.
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
There's also the "south east Qld option" (which I'm certain is the region you're describing in your comment) where the government is so roadbrained that all public transport solutions inevitably end up as some form of bus, further adding to congestion and making it worse for everyone, drivers, public transport users and active transport users.
You guessed correctly :)
The other problem is that city councils historically have run busses, whereas the State Government runs the rail, so a lot of our bus network competes with the rail instead of working together as an integrated network. At least the ticketing is integrated, but the network still has never felt like it’s designed to work together as an integrated transit network.
Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
I think it is not just car-centric. It is "private mobility"-centric.
In towns, and large towns especially, public mobility should be the rule and private one the exception. If any.
And maybe also for long distance mobility.
Might I suggest bikes are a great form of private mobility?
I hold out hope that many more Americans will get E bikes, and demand separated bike lanes. There's plenty of room for them on most American roads especially newer suburbs.
American Fietser is in Carmel, Indiana and evidently loves using his Urban Arrow everywhere.
+1 to urban arrow. Schlep my infant and pre-k kid in it every day of the year and the older kid loves it, is more engaged with the community (she has mentally mapped it and we commonly stop to talk to neighbors in a way we can’t in car), and I can actually fit more kids in it than the car. The car requires a car seat for each kid, which won’t fit across the back seat— the bike takes in an infant seat, and space for two kids on the bench.
I can’t reply to sibling comment here but indeed, an urban arrow can carry 4 kids + adult if you put a seat on the back.
> Might I suggest bikes are a great form of private mobility?
Yes you may. They fall short though for distances bigger than a couple of km, when carrying something or by bad weather.
I do 5-10 km happily on a regular basis with kids and cargo
Only for short hauls.
But that's not a personal pod on a pseudo-train that a tech-bro could sell me
I’m sure we can find a way to make cargo bikes a status symbol.. hoodmaps already shows the part of Utrecht I couldn’t afford as cargo bike moms :-)
This. The quickest & most pleasant places to drive a car are the places with the fewest large single-mode roads & - importantly - even fewer cars on them.
Extremely off-topic, but do you have ADHD?
No, why?
Simply & beautifully satirized by the "bro just one more lane bro, bro I swear just one more lane and it'll fix the traffic bro," meme from a few years ago.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
I actually counted these two: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/417/129/282...
If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.
That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.
I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.
Katy Freeway's at 26 and counting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas
"One more lane" is so much easier to ridicule because of America, so thank you.
Something I said a couple days ago:
> It's not an either-or. You can have streets which are car-friendly, bike-friendly, and pedestrian-friendly at the same time. Just look at the Dutch, they've been doing it for years. That is until recently in some big cities, though, where some less knowledgeable politicians have also adopted this false populist either-car-or-bike concept. Though the traditional principle still applies to about 99% of the country's roadworks, and it works really well.
Adding onto that, sentences like "made for people, not cars" absolutely validate my point that this is nothing but populist activism. I'm hoping that we can all have a honest, intellectual discussion on how to make infrastructure better for everyone. Just make sure to always remember in every discussion about this topic: it is never either-or, not even in the densely populated Netherlands.
You can have streets which are car-friendly (for exceptional or emergency purposes where you need the car) by getting rid of all frivolous car use. There's no feasible alternative, because congestion always destroys car-friendliness except in very sparsely populated areas. And you can only eliminate that congestion by promoting more scalable alternatives to the use of private motor vehicles.
I hadn't visited Madrid in over 20 years, and found the burial of the M30 (and, increasingly, the radial highways) extremely impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Río
There's also the subway (impressive sprawl, infrastructure itself not so much), and decent buses.
Plenty of areas have also been closed to car traffic.
I'm all for restricting traffic, but it doesn't need to be completely either-or, even in a larger city.
I understand where it's coming from, but I have to disagree about the populist activism part. I don't think that pedestrians should worry about how to fit cars in their proposed solutions. That's something for the car proposers to do. It's not like the other way around is different. Just take a walk in any big city and you will see how pedestrians are a second thought in most of the roads.
I'd argue that the design of public infrastructure should be a discussion which every citizen is equally involved in, with the goal of finding a solution that works for all. Chanting an us-versus-them narrative does nothing but stifle this discussion, and accepting it as legitimate results in decisions being made by special interest groups (team-car or team-pedestrian) rather than the residents whom actually make use of the infrastructure in question.
To me, whether there's enough space for cars and walkability are both part of how dense a city is. Leaving room for cars must make a city less dense and usually less pleasant for pedestrians as well; in the same way, a suburban area with single family homes and limited low-rise apartments needs car infrastructure because public transport gets worse the longer each trip is and the fewer riders there are.
You can accommodate both regions within one city, but they can't overlap without compromising one or the other (edit: although this compromise is a desirable middle ground for some people). Note that Pontevedra built huge free parking areas on the outskirts of its urban area. For their whole city it's not either-or, but in any given place they've had to make a decision.
The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
If you haven't discovered the problems with this model, then it's only because not enough of your neighbours have had the same idea.
Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.
Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.
Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_401
As the other user said, it doesn't scale. I'll give you my personal experience. I have been living in the greater Toronto area for 23 years, having moved here when I was 9. I live in one of the "cities" surrounding Toronto. This city was initially just a suburb of Toronto, that people moved to because houses were bigger and cheaper. Now it is a "city" of more than 700,000 people, in part because everyone moved here from Toronto, and in part due to high immigration in recent years. I put city in quotes because it's not really built like a city, it's still developed like a suburb with a large dependence on cars and poor public transport. All the good jobs are still in Toronto, so people still commute to Toronto for work. Before COVID and wfh, it used to take me 1.5 hours to commute to Toronto (one way), and I still had to drive to the train station. Forget driving to Toronto, it would take you just as long, if not longer, and parking costs are ridiculous. As this city grew, everyone wanted to move here for the same reason as you, bigger and cheaper houses. Now the houses are still bigger, but definitely not cheaper, and it takes forever to get anywhere. There are also less things to do because everything depends on cars.
I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.
The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.
There's simply not enough space in a city to accommodate everyone's car. Houston is 70% roads+parking lots and they're still congested
Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.
In America this concept is taken to the absolute extreme. Everywhere I go there are entire forests being razed to build developments of huge single-family homes and nothing else.
There is nowhere to go without driving. Kids who grow up in the suburbs are pretty much trapped on an island. There’s nowhere to explore because the surrounding 5 mile radius might be nothing but more developments
Nobody is seriously advocating for a society with zero cars. The goal is simply to have a more balanced system. It's about creating towns and cities where you have the freedom to walk, bike, or take reliable public transport, so you're not forced to use a car for every single trip.
Plenty of lunatics advocating zero cars. They are actually damaging less holistic approaches.
That's fine. If you don't care about life and culture in a city, and are satisfied with your townhouse in some arbitrary quiet town, then that's fine? Just don't expect that you can just go into the city with a car whenever you feel like it.
Not the best counterpoint to the argument IMHO, especially considering there are tens/hundred of thousand of people that do the same as you, and that has only driven rent cost up in the extended Milan metropolitan area, even 30-40 km further away from the city, and with roads that are not nearly capable enough to carry commuters' traffic, it just transforms the underlying issues into massive, daily traffic jams anywhere in the immediate area
While you are not totally wrong, it's very true that car centric society has enabled the sprawling suburbs iconic of America (a large home and yard for everyone), from a sustainability standpoint, freely developed heavily packed cities win hands down. It's so much easier and more efficient to take care of everyone in one spot rather than sprawled out all over the place.
Sustainability and efficiency, sure - you're definitely right on that. I'm going to take a bit of a devil's advocate role here though:
There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shifting in the geographic region (water, food, electricity generation) that has to occur in the surrounding area which negatively impacts not only the city but the environments it pulls those resources out of.
Sprawl leaves room to interweave humans with the rest of the natural world in a way in which densely packed cities do not. It leaves room for trees to grow, critters to roam, rain water to be reclaimed into aquifers. It also spreads the strain of resource extraction and reduces the impact from hot spots at the most granular level.
Car focussed development destroys far more land (e.g. parking) than similar size developments that enable walking/cycling/public transport.
Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.
??? Sprawl is actually environmentally friendly? What in the world? Densely packed cities by definition take up less space than suburbs.
Funny enough the USSR and tons of the developed western Europe (Barcelona) had and still have "superblocks" which are far better than car polutting everywhere. Yours, sustainable? Keep dreaming.
You can live in the small suburban village and reach the downtown by rail or bike. And people will always want to live and congregate in the city center, because that's the most productive part of the city. But unless your city center literally looks like Manhattan, it can still fit plenty more people.
What nonsense.
> This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it
Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.
> Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers
Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min.
You don't need to own a car to live in a house with a garden if you have proper public transport.
And you can live in the city and have plenty of access to nature as well. And cites don't need to be ugly and ful of skyscrapers.
> To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way.
People living remotely with cars are the opposite of sustainable, in fact, literally every study on the subject shows the opposite. Not communing makes it better, but its still nowhere near as good as a city.
> Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.
Citation is really needed for this one. Especially if you consider Swiss real estate "affordable."
I was talking about large cities like Tokyo, not in Switzerland. Most of Europe has terrible housing polices.
In Switzerland you have to move out of the city center but because the S-Bahn you can be in the city very fast. In Luzern for exmaple, places like Ebikon or Emmenbrück, Horw.
> You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min. [1]
[1] Trust me. Blindly. Please?
When this is the only reason, trains are far superior. Show me the country where I can drive 120km/h / 75mph through the city center.
Interesting use of the word “sustainable”.
There are other means of in-city transportation, you know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Railway
Writing this on a tram in Zürich. At this hour(peak hours) they depart ever 2-3 minutes or so. Walking distance is 50 meters.
It feels great.
Now let me hear your objections to why public transport could never work at your location
The drivers in my country emigrated to Switzerland.
I jest, but it's true that my city of 650k souls is in a dire need of around 100 bus/tram drivers and that many emigrated to rich countries which provide an overall better standard of work/living.
Personally for minor errands I cycle because I can't rely on public transport and neither can anyone else, so there's traffic congestion everywhere. I'm not happy with this, but I don't really have other options.
Switzerland's extreme wealth makes them a bit of an outlier though, other european countries are probably a fairer comparisons for most places.
I would argue having functioning public transport is a must to generate extreme wealth.
I travel all across Europe for work and only few places has similarly functioning public transport as Zürich. Stockholm city center, that's about it.
I am not from Switzerland.
Public transport usually requires a medium-to-high density to be sustainable. However, it can get saturated - in Paris, the subway and the trams are full for long periods during the day, even at midnight! It makes the experience really unpleasant when you have no alternative.
Man, you really public transportation, you've been all over this thread sniping every positive comment about public transportation
I love quality public transportation. The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport, as it's expensive and their electorate wants bike lanes, making the situation worse for everyone. In my city, they removed the parking space near the farmer's market, but didn't add any bus line or renovate the tram, which doesn't allow disabled people or just strollers to hop in. How are we supposed to come there?
> The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport,
That's my complaint too. We've added plenty of things to make driving worse where I am, but there's no real alternative presented. I can walk a mile to a bus stop in the sun where the bus may or may not show up for an hour (they promise they will improve it eventually) and will then drop me off somewhere I still have to walk most of a mile from. They made the road to the bus stop a bit worse to walk on and I gave up.
I would love to not have to drive. But I'm not really given the option, I'm just given less parking so that there's a nice bike lane I can jump into when someone comes barrelling down the sidewalk.
I'm not really arguing that the world adopts the Paris metro system. First of all, there are turn stills everywhere which is nowhere to be found in Zürich. Why not create choke points and erect this annoying block everywhere in front of people who wish to reach their destination as quickly as possible. Great idea.
In Luxembourg, public transport is for free. Also great.
That's the reason nobody uses public transport in Paris: it's too crowded.
My location isn't urban and those in the nearest cities don't care about making it convenient for me to get there.
It's a trade off, but I've never been as comfortable when living in an urban area so it is what it is.
Yeah, it's not for every location.
My favourite thing about living in the Netherlands is that kids have freedom. They can bike to school, their friends’ houses, sports, town etc and parents aren’t their taxi.
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Having grown up in the Netherlands and having a decision to make where we want our kids to grow up (US spouse), this feels painful to read. I suppose the SWE salaries aren't worth it.
Also this is one of the best towns to cycle in the Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w&ab_channel=NotJu...
Another problem is that they very seldom make walking pathways between cul de sacs.
These 2 houses are 100 meters from each other but you have to walk 1700 meters and most of the distance is without any sidewalk, only "Odell Cir" has it. The small amount of sidewalk is so narrow and close to the cars that it is hardly a sidewalk.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/28.8760292,-81.9827997/28.87...
Edit: compare to this: longer distance for cars but there is a direct walking path: https://www.google.dk/maps/dir/55.6714604,12.3530984/55.6716...
Shout out to @NotJustBikes in general. Infrastructure should be built for humans first. This benefits cars as well: more accessible for walking / cycling / public transport = less congested for when you do need a car.
Money is great for a lot of things, but money alone would definitely not be enough to get me to live in the USA, especially now that I'm preparing to have kids.
This reminds of an SUV killing a 7 year old and parents were jailed for 'manslaughter' instead of the driver (North Carolina, US).
https://abcnews.go.com/US/parents-charged-manslaughter-boy-s...
It seems like those comfy US coastal salaries usually buy you either:
- A largish house in the subs, and a nice car that you'll be seeing a lot of, unfortunately.
- A tiny house closer to work.
While European SWE salaries are significantly lower, they can generally buy you a decent house close to work.
For a period in my 20’s when I wasn’t well paid I lived in some nice places car free (San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Berkeley) but this was when rent was cheap and I didn’t have a family.
Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.
In which European city is this true? I can't think of any. Certainly not London/Paris/Amsterdam/Munich/Warsaw.
For comparison, Amsterdam's price per square meter for apartments is some 30% higher than in Seattle and my big tech company that offers total compensation around $500k/yr for L5 in Seattle pays low $200s (converted to USD) in Amsterdam. The only colleagues I know who live in a single family home within reasonable biking distance are late career (L6/L7) American expats.
In any European city, that has a decent tech job market, owning a house (even a small one by American standards) in walking/biking distance of the office means you're rich rich.
Really interesting, can you share the salaries, cost, and size of three high-paying jobs in: NYC, London, and Paris? Curious about the big houses you're getting for cheap in London and Paris!
They didn’t say that?
Agreed, last summer we contemplated moving back to CA for work but wouldn’t want that for our kids.
And hello from Houten :-). If you’re here and want to talk bikes maybe we could have a coffee some time!
Hacker News bike meet when? We'll have to get jerseys! :^)
Sounds good! I’m in Houten :-)
Hah, I had a feeling that was a NJB video. It is generally surreal to me that even smaller settlements in Europe have more, shall we say, evolvability than North American ones, and (at least in some cases owing to their antiquity) prioritize the needs of pedestrians.
American cities, almost all were also built before the car. At least the city centers. Both US and European cities grew after WW2.
The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.
In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.
European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.
The problem for America is that moneyed interests (big car manufacturers) would frequently sabotage or otherwise salt the earth for public transportation projects.
One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.
Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.
Interestingly the town in the video is actually quite new- built in the eighties.
Yeah I went to an informal town hall recently at my library about bike commuting in our city. An older gent was pretty adamant that our suburb has pretty much always been car-dependent and couldn't ever be anything else, and didn't care much for my reply that many European cities were on track to be the same until the 70s.
> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewalks where available, and took alternate routes through the woods, the cemetery, private property, etc. to avoid busy areas. This is anecdotal, of course, but no kid from my town ever got hit by a car when I was growing up (one kid did die chasing a ball into the street, though).
I'm all for building bike lanes and public transport. And also not all suburban areas are equal - I've definitely seen areas of the US where I would not feel safe riding a bike even as an adult. But I think whatever is keeping kids confined to their homes is just as much a cultural change as it is a lack of infrastructure.
New england's suburbs & small towns are the outlier in the US. I grew up in the south and my experience exactly mirrors that of the CA resident you're responding to.
No amount of cultural change is going to make suburban charlotte a good place for 8 year olds to bike alone.
I think New England towns are better, especially back when we sold cars and not giant SUVs and trucks.
Same in Midwest
I was fortunate to raise my kids in an exurb that's popular for scenic and uncongested roads. We get a lot of road bikers on the weekends. That means it's relatively safe for kids to ride their bikes all over town. This gave my kids a lot of independence at a younger age than most.
In my city (Tampere, Finland, pop. ~260,000) the annual number of traffic accidents leading to injury has halved since 2010. A big driver has been the decision in 2015 to lower the speed limits on all local streets from 40km/h (25 mi/h) to 30 km/h (~20 mi/h), with appropriate traffic calming measures implemented where necessary. (Industrial zones are exempt.)
A map link showing the current state:
https://kartat.tampere.fi/oskari?zoomLevel=7&coord=327979.56...
I hope the traffic calming measure is the speed display that shows a sad face when you are speeding.
Well, there are a couple of those. But mainly we’re talking about the basic things: narrowing lanes, speed bumps, raised zebra crossings, preventing through traffic, rebuilding intersections as roundabouts and so on. The key points to preventing speeding are
* reducing drivers' perceived safety, and
* making it more uncomfortable for the drivers to speed.
That's an area surrounded by a lot of water!
TIL that Nokia originated in Tampere.
Thank you for the information sharing!
A lot of water indeed, and it’s not even considered a part of what’s called the Finnish Lakeland proper! [1]
And yep, Nokia is literally the name of the town it originates from.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Lakeland
I was walking in a narrow street in Granada, Spain yesterday and two guys on their scooters where going at 40mph, on a street meant mostly for pedestrians. They pollute like cars (the stink is the same, even if smaller engine.) When people talk about cars ruining cities designed for walking, they should include scooters. They look cute in movies but they are not so pleasant to have around in practice. I don't mind the electric scooters the type you stand on because if you're going really fast on a narrow pedestrian and you hit someone it won't be so fatal, and you will get hurt probably equally, so people generally don't ride them at maximum speed. Also, they're essential for take-away food delivery.
I love this quote from the mayor:
The fact that you park your private car in a public space is crazy: if you don’t have room for your freezer, do you put it on the sidewalk?
I dont think its a very good analogy.
I completely understand dedicating space to public transport instead of cars. But dedicating space to cars seems entirely reasonable in isolation, because the city has an interest in making it possible to get there. Parking spaces store cars - but is that their entire function? Or is that just an aspect of enabling people to drive into the city?
Consider the fact that you cannot in fact store a freezer in a public parking space. Nor even a car, actually, beyond a certain period of time, precisely because it's all about enabling movement.
Yeah, it's a not perfect analogy.
But, when talking about the expectation* that every public space have acres of free-to-use public parking, it makes a fair amount of sense.
* In my experience, this is a very common expectation in the USA.
Many places have on street parking that is used by residents (e.g. you get the "have to move my car twice a month because of street sweepers" effect). It's possible that's what the quote is referring to.
Compare Brookline MA, which allows on-street parking, but only during the day to neighborhoods in Boston proper which has free on-street parking permits for residents.
I don't pay nearly weekly road taxes for my freezer. I pay for my cars and bikes, so that the law grants me that ability to park. It's easy to understand.
I'm always wondering how Americans feel traveling to Europe and being able to walk in cities. It must be so surreal that they either have to move, or they can't fathom that these cities are practical to live in.
> traveling to Europe and being able to walk in cities
All of Greece is car oriented. Of course if you stay near Acropolis you get the impression of walk-ability. Spain outside of the historic city centers is car oriented. Average mileage traveled by car per person in Germany is about the same as is in Canada.
I can continue your generalization about my home city - Montreal. Which is walk-able .. but not really, see the second part here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4
To me, it's a big reason why Americans love Disney World: you can drive to your local airport, fly to Florida, take a shuttle bus to your resort (that handles your luggage for you), and then rely on Disney's private network of bus routes, monorails, gondolas, boats, etc., instead of having to drive yourself.
In fact, if you use their transportation network, you actually get somewhat better treatment: in all of the parks, there's a shorter walk to/from the transit terminal than to your car, and in one of them (Magic Kingdom), you are required to park a distance from the park and take a connecting ferry.
That's what I used to tell my friends in France: "I think Americans see France like a theme park, they really enjoy it but they think it's not possible to live there, they probably just think it's a nice place to visit"
Believe it or not, we do have cities in the US with walkable areas :)
I am in Madison, Wisconsin and we have a number of areas like State Street where walking is the norm: https://visitdowntownmadison.com/
By and large this is not the case but it isn't as if it's unimaginable what it would be like.
I've visited Madison and really liked it, but I wouldn't compare it to the walkability of any European city
New York City at least is extremely walk able/bike able and car unfriendly.
I live in New York as a European and damn, it's very pedestrian unfriendly, you have to cross these large roads everywhere, so much noise pollution, roads are so large. It's still the most pedestrian friendly city in the US, and that's why I'm here, but incomparable with Europe
It's not surreal at all, and most Americans marvel at how tiny and unliveable the houses are.
Europeans must marvel at being able the size of living accommodations in the US. They can not even fathom in their brains what it's like not to be crammed into a tiny 20sqm flat.
I think you're talking about suburbs in the US, I understand you have a lot of space but it seems like a very isolated way of living
https://archive.ph/9z7IP
Thank you, this comment should be higher (maybe even sticky), we managed to kill the original server (504).
Relevant for USA: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2023/04/07/car-free-cities/
Do you want to live here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
I feel like this common conversation is missing a dimension. Car vs. public transport is too flat.
I prefer that cities are walkable and have good inter and intra public transport. So I'm with the anti-car crowd on that.
However, I do not prefer cities in general. So I'm with the pro-car people on this one. I enjoy the trend of spacious car-friendly suburbs and rural areas. I value the space and freedom over the conveniences of the city.
Tbf they should do this in London too. They're looking to pedestrianise Oxford Street, but who knows when that will happen as we need to allow plenty of time for the government to find the right contractors to shovel money at for a project delivered overtime and underbudget.
A lot of it over here is for show, like ULEZ where huge range rovers are somehow exempt. Or where LTNs are always put on the richest streets in the nicest neighborhoods for reasons of "think of the wee children playing in the street" when there are plenty of children living outside of LTNs. Just a coincidence that all the properties inside an LTN are worth >£850k.
These threads always turn into fights between car vs. non-car people. But the answer should just be more of everything. More bike lanes, car lanes, buses, trains, parking, etc. Close a street or two off to car traffic, maybe just on weekends initially, to create a nice walkable downtown area.
People always seem to talk about these things like it's one size fits all, when needs vary massively from one city to another. And even from one neighborhood to another.
Bike lanes and public transport will reduce traffic congestion as long as they are well-designed and people actually use them. And being able to get into a car and drive somewhere is incredibly convenient when traffic is light and parking is plentiful.
Where do you put the "more car lanes"?
Houston is almost entirely lanes and parking, they're still congested. At which point do you have enough car lanes?
The rest of the lanes sure; a fully used bike lane like Boulevard de Sébastopol is worth 8 lanes of car traffic. That helps. But more car lanes?
> Where do you put the "more car lanes"?
I'm not very familiar with Houston, but a quick google search shows that there is a big project underway right now to add more lanes in Houston [1]. So it would seem that civil engineers there have found a place to put more car lanes that they think will help with traffic congestion.
> At which point do you have enough car lanes?
As long as Houston is growing (currently it is the second fastest growing city in the US), I don't think there will ever be enough. They need to continuously improve their transportation infrastucture to keep up with a growing population. As I said above, I think this should include bike lanes and public transportation too. But if engineers identify a solution to alleviate traffic congestion by building more roads, then I think that is worth considering, too.
[1] https://www.txdot.gov/about/newsroom/local/houston/i45-const...
I would say more of everything but NOT all in the same place.
Look at Greater Tokyo. 37 million people - and they have everything. Pedestrians, cyclists, cars, taxies, buses, surface roads, expressways, trains, subways, monorails, high speed rail, ferries, etc. All interconnected, and all being used to capacity at rush hour every day. It's absolutely insane, but every time I visit I'm in awe at how easy it is to get around (albeit unpleasant at times).
One thing that contributes to cars being non-intrusive in Tokyo is just that there are many less of them than in American cities as there are many systems that de-incentivize having a car in the city.
To buy a car you need a certificate from the police attesting that you have a free parking spot of a certain size. The expressway tolls in Japan are often more expensive than gas for any long distance travel (and even the gas is expensive because there is basically no domestic oil production). The process of getting a license is much more intensive than in America. Japan has significantly more strict drunk driving laws than America (>0.03% for up to 3 years in prison, >0.05% is up to 5). Many workplaces don't allow you to drive to work (even if you could find parking) because by law their workman's comp insurance has to cover commuting and getting a policy that covers driving costs extra. There is absolutely no on-street residential parking.
All of these are deliberate policy choices that contribute to making the majority of road traffic in Tokyo be commercial and for most residents to default to some other form of transit.
I think Tokyo proves my point. You see less bikes on the road and more on the sidewalks. Roads are relatively narrow and bike lanes are less common there than the West.
Perhaps I could have been more clear, but that was my major point of contention. Bike lanes on the road are problematic. And of course its a given that the trains will have their own dedicated paths.
a comment about bikes on the sidewalk in tokyo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801479
The comment you’re quoting also says Tokyo “would be a lot better for cycling if they installed more dedicated infrastructure, but it works as-is” and overall refers to Tokyo as a success in terms of bicycle adoption.
Yes, and it doesnt put everything together. IE bikes on the road
I'm hoping for a self driving taxi + trains combo to maybe solve the problem.
For one a self driving taxi fleet could take up vastly less space - you'd no longer need one car per person, you'd need far fewer parking spots, most cars could be single or double seaters again taking less space and running more efficiently.
The space savings could be used to boost rail-based public transit options, which would see more adoption as self driving taxis make last-mile transport cheaper and easier. A bunch of positive feedback loops driving public transit adoption and improvements.
Result is cleaner and more efficient transport for all, and vast amounts of space returned from serving cars to serving people.
At least that's the dream!
So a tax financed site telling how it's great to have more tax and regulations. Not surprising. Find it very weird to have government trying to gerrymander things just as we are on the cusp of EV transition and autonomy. Go take a ride in a Tesla with FSD, the future is here, let it come in, get out of the way. In a few years with autonomous vehicles the need for vehicle ownership wild radically decrease and with that a huge need for parking space will simply vanish.
What I suggest instead: make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate) Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
The car-centric alternative requires more expensive infrastructure and more aggressive zoning regulations
Your EV argument does not address the main issue of urban sprawl in car-centric design and how the ever-increasing infrastructure costs (and decreased revenue: parking lots dont create wealth) are bankrupting cities.
I really love these posts almost as much as i love the signs blocking cars from a certain area of my city's center, except for -amongst the common sense exceptions- cars owned by the office of the mayor. Rules for thee, or something or other. Is it fair to have more public transportation, bike lanes, bus lanes, walkable paths? yes. Is it fair to lock entire urban areas from cars? Not at all.
I think there's a distinction between limiting cars and banning them outright
Yeah, semantics. In the end, the outcome is the same.
To me, it's more than just reduce traffic, but a sign that government is investing in its people. In order for a traffic free/minimal zone to thrive, you need policies that promote affordable housing, policing policy that reduces crime without being "brutal". The population also must accept certain civil responsibilities as trust and respect must go both ways.
In Norway the public transportation in Oslo has become so bad that it's essentially no longer reliable. If I want to get somewhere in time, I have to use a car or a bicycle.
Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
Not to be a doomer but I think public transport has peaked in many places in Europe except the big famous standouts like Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc
The UK government for example is reducing subsidies for the railway and raising prices sometimes even 12-14% per year. This would be unimaginable 10 years ago. We have many railway workers who feel underpaid and some that feel they deserve the same pay as speciality doctors. This gets directly paid for by price rises. It is strike again /again/ for the railways.
I think the time is now that governments don't care about public transport
This isn't really true. Lots of investment in public transit in the Nordic countries. Austria is doing quite well. Switzerland of course to. Italy is doing better then many would have expected 20 years ago. In Paris they are building some of the most massive expansion in a long time, and even many smaller cities are building tram lines, and the TGV is putting up record numbers.
In the Baltic a massive rail expansion is happening. Former eastern countries like Czechia still have a good rail system and starting to upgrade it. Poland is upgrading in many places as well.
Spain has globally the best construction cost for new infrastructure and they are expanding things like Madrid metro.
The UK is doing badly as usual as of recently but despite the price rises, their network is incredibly full and well used.
But I wouldn't take the UK as typical.
> Lots of investment in public transit in the Nordic countries.
This is my favourite phrase. "lots of investment". Crime, drugs and violence gets worse, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in police — just meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
Public transport gets more expensive and worse every year, but there is a "lots of investment" in public transport — meaning we keep sending more money and getting worse results.
Energy is getting more expensive, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in energy — meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
But it's okay, you should be happy, at least there is "lots of investment", what are you going to do with your money anyway, after all you can't go anywhere because it's unsafe, the public transportation is probably not working, and you don't have money for it after paying your bills because of all the "investment" anyway, and even if you did the government can always find more things to "invest" the money in.
Having just traveled all over Northern Europe, your doomer nonsense about 'crimes, drugs and violence' is hilarious. For example the automated metro in Copenhagen is a case of investment with great results.
> can't go anywhere because it's unsafe
I'm sure this is true in the fantasy land that exist in your head.
Do your far right-wing rants somewhere else.
You can ignore the actual data showing that violent crime is rising, like the government and media does, but it does not mean it's not rising.
You can ignore the data on the public transport delays and cancellations, like the government and media does, but it does not mean it's not rising.
I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
> Also,
Those sound like a bunch of far-right wing talking points. Do you have statistics to back any of this up?
And they don't match my own experience even a little bit. Because in most countries cars tend to cost more overall and are generally less safe.
> A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone.
t was an absolutely delight walking around the city, being able to walk on the roads or crossing roads because traffic has been reduced so much. That a fantastic policy that made the city more attractive.
The city was extremely welcoming and navigating on food or by bus or train was fantastic. There were tons of people around and lots of people in all the restaurants and museums. Plenty of people hanging out at the beautiful water-front.
The claim that it 'doesn't work' is just pure nonsense. It only doesn't work if you want to drive in from the subburbs on a daily basis.
> governments always fail eventually
So we should have cities without governments? If you want to privatize the operations of some public transit, that is potentially reasonable. But 'governemnt=bad does not mean therefore we need cars everywhere'.
> once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result
This has been stupid quite a bit, there is literally a field of urban studies, and it universally find the exact opposite.
> , because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore
Ah here it is. That's the '15 min city is a globalist conspiracy to make us prisoners in our own city' nonsense. You have dipped deep into it haven't you?
Please anybody that reads this, go to Oslo and enjoy the beautiful, vibrant, save city it actually is.
> I was just in Oslo and public transport was fantastic and the city was fantastic.
More than half of the times I want to use the train to get to work it's cancelled or delayed on one of the busiest train routes in the city during peak time. Quite often the train is so full, due to delays and cancellations, that I have to either go back home and bicycle, or wait for the next train, which again may be delayed or cancelled.
This is with the trains being out of commission for the whole of July for "repairs".
I almost entirely avoid the train and public transport now because, unlike the government, if I'm not on time or don't do my job, it actually does have negative consequences for me.
Your experience as a tourist has no weight. A city should not be built for tourists, but for it's citizens.
Prioritizing people is by any means the way to go, but it's not hassle-free.
It has an impact on businesses and delivery operators that end up being obstructed.
Ideally I think one should move towards layered cities, pedestrians on the ground while beneath them roads, parkings and especially train and train carts thrive.
What this article doesn't mention is that economically, people are so much more productive then cars.
The land value of your city will be so much better if you have a walkable city. Walkable is always the start, then you map bikes, and public transport on top.
You will have city that is economically productive and vibrant.
This is nice and all for tourists and people that live in the city center. But then if you don't live in the actual city and need to drive for half an hour to reach the city, spend half an hour searching for parking, then take a half an hour bus, then it's not so funny.
First sort out how people can manage to visit cities without having to own a car on first place.
Most European villages and town are unreachable without cars.
Some can already consider themselves lucky if there is a daily connection into one direction.
Everyone likes to think we are all living in Paris, Berlin within city boundaries.
The topic is about cities, not about rural areas. No cars in cities, simple. This concept will probably blow your mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_and_ride
Imagine a city without personal cars in its inner limits. Residents who decide to own a personal car can park it in a Park&Ride which also includes unlimited transit access for the duration of the parking.
Deliveries, you say? Those aren't personal cars, but I'll comply. Businesses will be able to drive in the cities, within the permitted times/routes.
Emergency vehicles? Those aren't personal cars, either. They're also allowed.
I live in Germany, and don't need any lessons in Park and Ride.
What I need is a transport infrastructure that cares about people that live outside city central area.
Maybe it will blow your mind that with P+R some of us take about 2h to come to work, versus 45m with a car.
Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy? P+R isn't even a known concept.
Show me a city which banned personal cars and we'll check whether P+R transit to anywhere within is 2h. You can't, because there is no such city. It's personal cars that slow down transit, including preventing new rails being built to not dismay cherished drivers.
Pity that such miracle cities don't exist for people living in the suburbs, with their 4x connections on average, from door to door.
Indeed, such a city would prove you lot wrong.
Glad to be proven wrong for the lucky folks living in the suburbs of such marvellous city without being second class citizens, pity that you didn't provide such example, while being so eager to talk others down.
Maybe because there isn't such El Dorado.
I already said as much. Here's the quote from above:
> You can't, because there is no such city.
Waiting to be proven wrong with a counter example, shouldn't be so hard, to find at least one, instead of answering me with useless words.
A lot of people in the US seems to have a candy colored version of the EU in their heads that mainly consists of an idealized version of these cities and free shit.
Ofc, things look great if you spend a few days in expensive hotel or furbished AirBnB ruining things for locals. And in that time visit a few local places for food or get groceries for a few meals. But this is vastly different from living such places for years and trying to pay for it with local wages...
Don't forget to throw out the stinking loud gas mopeds and motorbikes while you're at it!
And taxis. Or whatever new bullshit name they use.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of ideology in the issue of restricting car traffic in cities, for example, the Netherlands is often cited as an example, but they forget that it is one of the most motorized countries in the world (80% of families have a car, and 33% have two), and has one of the densest networks of motorways in the world, and 78% of trips in the Netherlands are made by car, and the average distance of a bicycle trip is only 5 kilometers. I do not argue that local restrictions or a ban on cars, especially in the center, make life more comfortable, but this does not mean that it is necessary to restrict it everywhere.
I often ride a bike, but it is generally surprising that after a century of development of the car, the creation of comfortable climate control systems, noise insulation and multimedia, I am seriously asked to take children to school in the rain, wind or snow on a bike. For me, this sounds like regression
Pontevedra has around 80K inhabitants, so it's practical to design it this way. But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise. Not everyone can afford to live in the center (nor is there space for them, and building taller than a certain number of meters or floors is often forbidden for various reasons), so people begin moving farther out.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
>Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car
if everyone is driving, noone is. This is simple game theory and a system fault happens when there are too many cars. You can't widen city streets.
For example: public transportation in NY is often faster and cheaper than a car + parking.
I would argue that a public transportation network is a requirement, maybe even a prerequisite, for high density. Manhattan simply could not work without the various public transportation methods -- if everyone commuting in from CT, LI, NJ, upstate NY, etc., had to drive in, would there even be enough space for all those cars on the island?
> But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
It's not about being bigger, but having high population density.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
Cities can scale far further than that and cars make the situation worse, not better. The Amsterdam metropolitan area houses in the ballpark of two and a half million people, most of them not living in the city center.
I would love this.
In my US town, which I believe gets high walkability scores, they've shifted more pedestrian-hostile in the last few years (while incidentally also managing to tick off many drivers and brick&mortar small business owners).
For one thing, the "separated" bike lanes are hated by many drivers and business owners, and seem more dangerous for pedestrians than before. (Reduced visibility of cars, and now almost universal reckless freeway-like use by motorized e-bikes/scooters which more normal bikes are now mimicking.)
Also, during Covid, they let restaurants spread out onto the sidewalks and street parking of very busy streets, and now this is not only pretty unpleasant and unhealthy seating for customers (desperate for even the slightest hint of what human-friendly planning could be like), but tends to be an obstacle course for people who just want to walk on the already problematic sidewalks.
And in stretches of the sidewalk on major streets that don't have restaurants blocking them, at any moment, someone will come plowing through at full speed on one of those huge 'e-bikes' with the huge tires.
The one a few nights ago, through dense walkers on the sidewalk of the central business drag along a main street, at high speed... the rider of the 'e-bike' the size of a large motorcycle was clearly paying close attention, and his face looked like he was operating at near the edge of his ability to avoid hitting anyone (which would cripple or kill them), with the confidence and judgment that comes from being barely 20. Which confidence should gamble only his own life and limb, not those of others.
I think the bike rental stations on the sidewalks (now including e-bikes) also now lead to even sensible people being desensitized to riding the sidewalk, since you have to go some length of sidewalk with the bike just to access the station. Many people end up riding right up to it, and accustomed to that, even though it's illegal in at least some cases.
(The first thing I would do is temporarily outlaw all the motorized bikes/scooters, except for people with official medical reasons, it's gotten so bad. Until we can treat them as motor vehicles with sufficient regulations, and re-educate people not to be completely stupid bordering on psychotic. Then, after correcting for all the backsliding on safety and street life, we can resume thinking about the cars, which, even though 4-wheel drivers have long been called "Massholes", lately the 4-wheel car drivers been paragons of responsibility, compared to 2-wheel drivers in general.)
I am going to be downvoted for this but I am not wrong.
The thing most mass transportation advocates need to understand when it comes to the US is that we don't want cars necessarily for convenience, we want them to be able to avoid other people. We don't want to have to endure the constant micro aggressions of other passengers. We certainly don't want to have to endure the assaults, murders and rapes that happen. We don't want to be forced to mix with the most violent of society while unarmed and packed liked sardines.
Every argument you make about cars being more dangerous are 100% valid, we just don't care. We would rather die 10 times due to an accident than a violent murder. Its just our nature. Until you can get crime to essentially zero or ensure either an armed officer in every train car or allow citizens to carry mass transportation will not be a thing in the US. Especially not in Red states. I'm talking complete removal of all inconveniences, including things as minor as someone playing their music loudly on a blue tooth speaker. This murder of the Ukrainian woman combined with the treatment of Penny essentially killed any hope of mass transit being popular in Red states for the next 100 years. I am not arguing for or against Penny's actions I am simply stating the effect that it had on most people that support what he did, the same people that would need to support mass transit for it to catch on.
Again I am not arguing numbers here, mass transportation is obviously statistically safer than car travel by a massive degree. I am arguing human nature. We will not subject ourselves to criminals and intentional violence when there is an alternative no matter how much more dangerous that alternative ends up being
If there is no correlation between actual crime rates and perception of crime rates there is no reason to do anything about actual crime rates.
This linked article and the comment section remind me how I admire American maximalism. No half-measures - want to be able to drive everywhere? Let's bulldoze whole cities to make them car-oriented. Tired of the concept after a few generations? FUCK CARS, let's have Pontevedra everywhere.
Meanwhile there are places in the US that managed to preserve a more balanced approach. Take for example the borough of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fgs9pBLmGCgWbtLGA?g_st=ac
At first glance it looks like a typical car-oriented landscape, but note the presence of sidewalks. There's on-street parking, but hardly any driveway visible, because they're at the back, connected to one-way alleys.
That is brilliant. On one hand the area is fully walkable, on the other everyone gets to live in their detached house with a garage and whatnot. You can drive, but you can also walk. Hell, you could probably even cycle through those alleys as cars use them only to park, so they won't be speeding through there.
This would lead to literally murder in my part of upstate New York. Heck, my neighbor will even park on his own lawn to avoid the ten foot walk from the pavement.
I had a neighbour like that, only it was right in front of our apartment building.
Needless to say, we didn't get along.
Sounds amazing. When I visited Venice in 1997, I appreciated the lack of cars about as much as the presence of the canals.
I have never once in my life seen someone with groceries on the metro. I have no car and kids.
I did. The person had bags all around them, things rolling out of them, and at one point dropped a box of coke cans on me that thankfully didn’t explode. The situation looked terrible and completely impractical. But people helped him gather his things.
This is the kind of story that makes you believe cities can change
Fifteen-Minute Cities and Chat Control are brought to you by the same people
Yep. It comes down to attacking the options and freedom individuals can have.
> Made for People, Not Cars
cars are just people that move from A to B.
if there is no sensible way to move where you need to go it is not a city made for humans but just hostile to people and their requirements.
i need exactly 63 downvotes please, don't be cheap.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196547
TL;DR: «Only “necessary traffic” is allowed in Pontevedra: vehicles used for emergency and public safety, public services (including garbage and water trucks, etc.), transportation of people with reduced mobility, and accessing private garages are permitted 24/7. However, loading and unloading for commercial supplies, home delivery, transporting bulky objects, and house moving and related activities, are permitted only during certain hours.»
I am from there, and it's a bullshit law that does not think on people that can't afford electric or low emissions cars. Therefore, sooner or later, Court will erase that absurd law.
I mean look at Bologna, you can walk across the city centre and never get a single drop if it's raining. Same for the summer sun. Human-scale architecture and planning pays off.
That's how the EU liberals are losing the last drop of good-will that they have from the general (lumpen) populace. But good for them they all stand behind gentrification.
I feel like a bit of a failure when it comes to transport. I tried for many years to cycle to work in Dublin covering 25km on an ebike, but gave up after several nasty incidents that almost resulted in serious injury (for example my head almost going under the wheel of a van). I've experienced so much hatred, verbal and physical violence from drivers — and I'm the kind of cyclist that is fully lit, clad in high-vis and stopping at all traffic lights.
About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.
The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.
I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!
I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.
It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.
This is a problem when the public transport system isn't built with these exact issues in mind. You're right, it shouldn't take 2 hours for that commute, and all the other issues you pointed out are legitimate. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn't been adapted to make things better for the people using public transport.
As a comparison to the Netherlands, public transport always has right of way vs regular traffic, they have their own dedicated lanes that traffic isn't allowed into (this includes taxis! They can use the public transport lanes) and even their traffic signals treat them preferentially. I take a bus very often, and quite often it won't stop at a single red light because the traffic lights are programmed to help the flow of public transport, despite the street it travels on having 5 or 6 different traffic lights. In many cities, only public transport is allowed in some of the denser streets too, so they don't have to compete with other drivers on the road.
Trams, metros and trains are pretty obvious as to why they work so well.
Same with bike lanes. First of all, whenever they can be they are wholly separated from the main traffic and live in their own independent lanes. If a bike has to join regular streets, they have the right of way and these situations are kept at an absolute minimum. The streets and intersections themselves are also designed so that drivers are forced into driving safely via traffic easing measures and low speed limits. Plus, everyone here bikes, so there isn't the same type of animosity or stigma you see elsewhere because drivers understand what it's like to be a cyclist and view it as a normal thing.
So it's not your fault and you shouldn't feel bad, it's the fault of your government for not investing into proper public transport infrastructure. They are trying to squeeze in public transport infra into existing road infra, whereas what they should be doing is redesigning the current infra to make sure public transport is better integrated.
And, guess what, the roads here are still awesome for drivers! Other than the centers of the bigger cities, there isn't much congestion to speak of and the highways are of extremely high quality (to the point we have a billion memes about feeling the bumps of Belgium as soon as you cross the border). It's not like NL is a car-free utopia, something like 65% of people still have cars, the difference is that there are alternate options that are just as good, and often better than driving. That's the secret sauce to good public transport.
The Dutch model is frequently cited by campaigners here as how things should be done. Unfortunately, as you point out, our government doesn’t really care. Investment is a patchwork of half arsed attempts here and there depending on local pressure. There are only two tram lines in the country and people keep driving their cars into the trams. Bus lanes are clogged with taxis and the Gardai (police) are absent from our roads.
A recent local council attempt to remove a couple of parking spaces and install a shared space in the area I live was met with a wave of anger and vitriolic abuse. In a public consultation people were complaining about how it would prevent them bringing some elderly relative to the GP in the snow, while transporting a fridge. Meanwhile the area is permanently clogged with cars dodging a nearby toll making the place extremely unpleasant to use as an amenity.
It’s incredibly frustrating and saddening to contribute to the problems after trying so hard to do better.
The slow death of Europe by 1000s of cuts. Put migrant activity on top of that and bye bye.
There is a posibility between "muh America is car-centric, and btw i am bad at driving so i hate driving" and "you have to walk even in bad wrarher and when you are 70, think about the climate bruh".
HN are a special kind of nonsense crowd.
I live in a pretty walkable Spanish city, and 70-year-olds are having a blast here. Even when they can no longer walk and they need to use various mobility devices, they can use the pedestrian infrastructure to move around the city and hang aroun the bars with their friends and families (and they do it basically every day, as far as I can tell). The same population in the US would be basically homebound.
Urban is usually associated with panhandling, trash, public urination and crime.
> "Galicia is mainly and historically ruled by the right-wing Popular Party"... (Galician Nationalist Bloc)
So they likely have much stricter standards of what constitutes acceptable urban behavior...
... than, say, New York, where very recently a person with 30-year criminal history has allegedly killed a couple...
... or in Charlotte, where an Ukrainian refugee was fatally stabbed in the light rail.
Or Memphis, which is smack dab in the middle of a permanently Republican supermajority state, yet has three times the murder rate and twice the robbery rate of NYC.
Is there a charitable explanation for why people cherrypick a single homicide in a metro of 8 million people and somehow act like it's proof for the downfall of liberal democracy?
Especially when by most relevant metrics, illiberal democracy performs dramatically worse?
Because you can gauge how you feel when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative. I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly in the data we see from cities in blue states, to support their policies. Or that victims are exhausted by the lack of prosecution and sentencing, and stop reporting things.
> I suspect a lot of crimes aren’t tracked or classified properly
People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
> when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative.
I happen to live in one of those war-torn anarchist cities that was claimed by Fox and friends to be an open charnel pit back in 2020, and I assure you, there is something off with a narrative.
Specifically, the narrative that my city is a lawless hellscape.
That narrative (along with the sudden and immediate need for the military to be illegally deployed in it) is back, by the way.
> People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
They do. I’ve seen games like changing the rules by which deaths are counted as homicides and when. For example by requiring certain things are proven before it can be counted in a reported stat.
And this happens on such a regular and systemic, and party-lines nature, so that all these liberal cities consistently undercount homicides by such incredible margins, despite all their police forces leaning heavily towards authoritarian-right?
Do you have any proof for this, or is this a 'the earth is flat' sort of assertion? Can I just as confidently assert that it's actually the Republican-ran states that dramatically doctor and undercount homicide stats?
Maybe Memphis actually has 10x the homicide rate of NYC...
You seem to be living in a distant parallel world.
Here is how it looks like on the actual world: urban centers are dominated by Democrats in almost every state. The leniency regarding criminals comes from Democrats, specially regarding violent criminals.
Memphis' Paul Young is affiliated with the Democratic Party https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-mem...
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t...
Cities only prosecute misdemeanors, and have no control over felony investigations or prosecutions. Police departments in all cities politically lean hard-right.
The state and the PD has far more influence over access to firearms and serious crime than a city's politics do. A city's authority is largely limited to handing out parking tickets and graffiti citations.
And republican supermajority states have never had any issue overriding any municipal legislature or policies that they don't like. It's as easy as drafting a piece of legislature for them. Municipalities don't enjoy even the illusion of sovereignty, or, really, any codified rights in the US.
----
And if you think it's the cities; fault, why is the homicide rate outside of cities in deep-Republican states so high? Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas... All have a horrible state-wide violent crime problem. How many more decades of Republican supermajorities will they need to bury the myth that Republican policies reduce crime?
Your assumptions are incorrect: felony prosecution is not outside local control, and police politics are irrelevant.
How many times a PD arrests a criminal then a judge later releases? That criminal with 30-year history would never be free if judged in a rural county instead of urban NYC or Charlotte.
The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
> Your assumptions are incorrect: felony prosecution is not outside local control, and police politics are irrelevant.
Felony prosecution is done by DAs, which are subservient to the state.
Police politics is completely relevant, because they prioritize enforcement and have incredible leeway in its execution.
> The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
Those policies are ultimately set at the state level, because that's who DAs are accountable to.
> And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
Is that why the Republican party has elected a convicted felon to lead it?
Taking car transport to the extreme is bad, but the narrative that life in a small flat and commute by public transport is the future is dystopian, too.
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
EVs still produce air pollution from tyre, brake, and road surface abrasion. There is also new research that indicates resuspension of particles is a major source of roadway-related pollution.
This review is a good jumping-off point for research on the subject if you are interested: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096669232...
How is it dystopian? I loved having a small flat in a city where I biked everywhere. When I needed a car I used on demand rentals.
People also drive cars, so a better title is: Made for pedestrians, not cars.
No, people walk, run, shop, sit, use a bike and use a car, cars are just cars. If something is "built for cars" its just built for one of many tings people do. If its "built for people", it should be built for most of the tings people do.
Well people who drive probably cover much less road when they are not driving.
You learn something every day.
That’s cute. But if you don’t have the public transportation infrastructure & enough housing it’s totally infeasible. People who drive the cars are not the city residents. They are the ones who cannot afford living in the city and have to commute from far away.
This is a very backwards way of looking at the issue. The public transportation infrastructure and denser housing used to exist throughout north American cities, but was bulldozed to make room for comically wide roads, oversized single family houses (increasinly occupied by empty-nesters not utilizing all the now empty space), parking lots, malls, and big box stores.
Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.
Did they also bulldoze the skyscrapers that we are missing to house all of the suburbs population in the cities ?
It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
Skyscrapers aren't practical in most places. On Manhattan you've got sky high land prices and excellent rock, so hence skyscrapers.
But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper.
Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots.
But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house.
The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.
Skyscrapers add density but they're only part of the solution. North American cities have plenty of skyscrapers and plenty of single family homes but they have a servere lack of dense multi family housing units.
> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.
It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.
It's all fine and dandy until you realize that economy pays a big buck for faster and more comfortable ways of transporting a body. (And it's been this way since time memorial).
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where: 1. People live for retirement and pleasure. 2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there). 3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
You can transport your body faster by walking than by taking a car. But of course, this depends on how you design a city. If I have a supermarket 5 minute walk from home, is going to be faster than taking the car out, and finding a parking lot and finally walking to the supermarket.
And let's not forget, that if you want a more fair society, you cannot assume that just everybody can afford a car. I went to university by bus and it was a horrible experience. I could only dream of the modern cheap electric vehicles. But still, the city I studied has barely any infrastructure for this, and you risk your life every time, even though it would be PERFECT for this.
Car infrastructure isn’t faster though, because it pushes everything apart. Noth America is a vast sea of parking with a building sprinkled here and there, so a five minute bike ride to shops with little parking is replaced by a thirty minute drive to a big box with 12 acres of parking.
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is such a modern take on life, we have to run everywhere to consume as much as possible as fast as possible. The irony is that you're probably missing out more of what makes life "life" by being entirely driven by FOMO and checking boxes of the infinite TODO list.
What's funny is that the faster the means of transportation the more time we spend time in them, commute times are getting longer, you're most likely literally missing opportunities due to cars more than anything else.
In any city the shortest distance in total time spent is by bike.
Even if it is widely dangerous to do so (most american cities i've ever visited)
You can hem and haw - but its pretty bang on
When you then add finding parking at the ends of your trip to it it is crazyly more efficient timewise.
Now even copenhagen denmark has rain causing many more to take a car or public transport (that works).
But it is very clear that the time argument is simply not true.
Now you can argue convenience at the start of the trip vs agony in the end (finding that parking space)
Or for "need to lug an ikea sofa across time"
Or even for "my kids and familiy needs to go as well"
That's super fine, and all true - but 70-80% of ALL trips in cars are by 1 person sitting in 1 car. So moving just 10% of car users to alternate means free up a tremendous amount of space in the city.
I love my car, my bikes and my public transports and each does something nice for me - but seriously do you think cities like l.a. are even livable on a human scale - people don't even walk if the distance is over 1000meters.
I certainly agree with the idea of "uhm lets try to plan for otherthings than cars going forward"
Agreed. What's the way forward though? https://www.romania-insider.com/insurance-union-one-cyclist-...
'In Romania, one cyclist dies every two days'
What's the number for pedestrians? Half of all road deaths are of people not in cars. That's not an argument in favor of cars.
It's not as straightforward as that. Sure, a car gives you more freedom - if you need to go further out for stuff. But if you live in a dense city, you won't need it - your job is in walking / cycling distance, all shops are, etc.
The other factor I found is that quality and affordability of housing is inversely proportinal to access to services/public transit; that is, in the Netherlands you can live like a king in eastern Groningen for the same amount of money you buy a starter home in the Randstad, but to get to the nearest city you're looking at at least an hour's travel (by car or bus/train).
What a shitty take.
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is what’s known as "fomo". Arguments driven on fear never sustainable.
Also apparently you have never been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the aftermath of a massive event. Or maybe county closes major roadway for repairs. Or a _single_ motor vehicle accident brings an entire highway to a halt for _hours_ (many people rubber necking as well …)
Ah yes because massive events happen everyday therefore I should need to never ever have a car and choose the way I want to travel.
Tell me you have never driven during rush hour traffic in a major US city without telling me directly…
> Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
I will be very surprised if there's anywhere in the world where the expected loss from being robbed on the street while walking exceeds the expected loss from being in a car accident while driving.
Getting in a car is by far the most dangerous thing most people do routinely.
How about we enforce existing laws first?!!!
It is dangerous for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks, because cyclists on their electric motorbikes are driving there 30 mph!
Aggresive off-leash dogs are everywhere! Entire cities, parks and streets are one big dog toilet!
can't understand why your opinion is down rated. You're so right pal.