[HN Gopher] When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders
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When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders
Author : pseudolus
Score : 315 points
Date : 2022-07-31 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| duchenne wrote:
| It is worth noting that streets were dangerous even before cars.
| For instance, Pierre Curie (Nobel prize and husband of Marie
| Curie) was killed by a horse-powered truck in the streets of
| Paris in 1906. He was 46.
|
| But pedestrians at that time had the freedom to walk in the
| middle of the street at any time. You can clearly see it in this
| fascinating video of Paris in late 1890s:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo_eZuOTBNc
| bertil wrote:
| In those cases, it was easy to blame either the horse or the
| professional rider. Cars were driven by wealthy people who
| could not face that kind of responsibilities -- see _The Great
| Gatsby_.
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| Adjacent to this, the USA used to have great light rail /
| trolleys in even small and rural towns. If we just brought back
| rail, we would be able to improve walkability without rebuilding!
| mancerayder wrote:
| NYC has become extremely more hostile to pedestrians in only the
| last 4-5 years. Now, not only are you on the lookout for cars
| when crossing, but you have to add e-bikers and cyclists. Both of
| those often don't honor one way streets, so now you have to look
| both ways. They don't stop at red lights, so you have to look
| both ways when you have right of way. They ride on the sidewalk,
| so you have to be careful when turning a corner. Society loves
| these vehicles as eco-friendly, and carves out a part of the road
| for them.
|
| No one carves anything for pedestrians. It's time to leave the
| city, which now seems left for people in their 20s and people who
| generally don't care about any order whatsoever.
| dmartinez wrote:
| I tend to agree with you about e-bikes. A class 3 can go up to
| 28 MPH from the manufacturer, and getting them to go faster is
| an easy modification.
|
| For anyone that isn't aware, a Sur Ron X is essentially an
| electric dirt bike that can get up to 50 MPH when modified.
| asdff wrote:
| So what? I can go 45 mph on a human powered road bike
| downhill. 28mph isn't as scary as it seems and you'd be glad
| you had that speed when you have to inevitably take that
| ebike into mixed traffic with cars. I believe for motorcycles
| they say speed is safety for similar reasons, to be able to
| escape somewhat from dangerous car situations going on all
| around your spongy soft body.
| dmartinez wrote:
| I enjoy riding e-bikes, for the record. Going fast on an
| e-bike is like having happiness on tap. I think more people
| should own them so that we can collectively start to
| realize a different way of organizing transportation and
| commute.
|
| Regarding safety, when it is a bike vs a car, I agree that
| having more speed is better and safer for the cyclist.
|
| But the issue is when we have a bike vs a pedestrian. I've
| been a pedestrian next to groups of fast moving e-bikes. It
| can be pretty scary. Some cyclists can feel entitled to
| riding on the sidewalk, which at high speeds can really
| injure someone if they were to crash. E-bikes also weigh a
| lot more than a non-ebike (up to 120lb in some cases) so
| getting hit at top speed is a bigger deal than a normal
| bike.
|
| My overall point is that I think cyclists need to start
| behaving more like vehicles, rather than fast-moving
| pedestrians. Obviously we need more investment in biking
| infrastructure for that to happen, but with how fun and
| useful e-bikes are, I am optimistic that will eventually
| happen. As e-bikes become more common, I expect this to
| become a bigger part of the conversation.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Ah yes, bicycles, enemy #1 of walkable cities.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| It is a real problem that NYC street design gives so much
| space to cars while people walking, cycling and scootering
| are left to fight over the scraps. GP is correct that things
| are getting harder although I think they are wrong to blame
| individual behaviors instead of faulty infrastructure.
| mancerayder wrote:
| But there are bike lanes available. And markings that say
| yield to pedestrians. And lights for bikes in some cases.
| These things are generally completely ignored, leaving the
| pedestrian with the burden of watching everyone else.
|
| It's fine to have a preference for a bike-friendly city
| over a car-centric one, but one has to consider that almost
| any vehicle is going to be dangerous to a pedestrian, not
| just cars. Would you feel comfortable with an older member
| of your family taking a walk on a Sunday while trusting e
| bikers not to bowl them over turning around a corner on the
| sidewalk, going the opposite way on a one-way street, or
| running a red light?
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > But there are bike lanes available.
|
| "Available" is a strong word. There are many streets in
| NYC that lack them, and Casey Neistat's infamous video on
| bike lanes illustrates what happens in places where they
| exist.
|
| I am already jaded to the point of having no trust in
| people to adhere to lights or signs when they believe it
| is in their interest to do otherwise. Anyone could
| jaywalk, drive in the bike lane, blow a red, or take a
| rolling stop, or make an illegal right-on-red. If you do
| not have infrastructure that violently enforces those
| rules, such as concrete bollards, or make them extremely
| convenient and desirable for individuals to choose to
| follow, such as detection loops that turn the light green
| as soon as it is safe to cross, those rules may as well
| not exist.
|
| > Would you feel comfortable with an older member of your
| family taking a walk on a Sunday while trusting e bikers
| not to bowl them over turning around a corner on the
| sidewalk, going the opposite way on a one-way street, or
| running a red light?
|
| If you ask me why I'd feel uncomfortable, it's because of
| cars, by a long shot, every time. The risk profile in
| both probability and magnitude is just so much worse with
| cars. Take space away from cars and give it back to
| people; it creates tons of additional space for everyone
| to maneuver, improves visibility, and calms the streets,
| all of which filters down to preventing accidents that
| people on bikes and scooters cause as well.
| gnufied wrote:
| What I wouldn't give to have a planned neighborhood where cars
| are banned. It would be kids wonderland.
|
| In US at least even inside gated communities u can't leave kids
| (3-6) by themselves because cars. Imagine all those kids having
| fun without parent supervision.
| burlesona wrote:
| This is my dream too. I'm starting to work on it, doing some
| very early research now. Consider filling out my survey if you
| want to weigh in: https://airtable.com/shrdtCXsJfbzZ719W
| bjoli wrote:
| I live in such an area. With 2 exceptions, there is an area of
| just over .5 km2 (138 acres) where there are virtually no cars.
|
| I can let my kids out anytime.
|
| It was built during the "million program" where the Swedish
| state built apartments for a shitload of people and elevated
| the living standards for about 2 million people.
|
| For some reason it is not considered a nice area, but in many
| ways it is heaven. I can bike to work in 12 minutes. My son's
| preschool is just 5 minutes away by foot. We have a moderately
| sized grocery store and a pharmacy within crawling distance.
|
| All areas in the "million programme" are not like that, but one
| pretty general idea was that since people living there didn't
| have their own garden they should have access to ample green
| spaces.
| hammock wrote:
| Here is one idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airpark
|
| > In US at least even inside gated communities u can't leave
| kids (3-6) by themselves because cars.
|
| This part is sad to me because it seems we are stuck
| envisioning a place where all the houses face the roads, and
| all the walking paths are next to the roads and the only place
| kids can play is in the road or next to the road!
|
| As an alternative, imagine a house that backs up to a park.
| Instead of playing in the front by the road, play in the back
| without conditions (I can recommend you some examples).
|
| Or, imagine even in a downtown of a city, a one-block-long
| gated community with dense townhouses facing each other, an
| oasis away from traffic (again I can share examples)
|
| These exist today, they aren't just in some urbanist
| sketchbook. They aren't super common and maybe people just
| don't think of them.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It isn't cars that kept me from leaving my 3 year old
| unsupervised. It's not like there aren't other (in many cases
| more significant) dangers to a young child.
| concordDance wrote:
| Most notably: other children
| scrollaway wrote:
| Stranger Danger, eh?
|
| I hope your kids will find a better life for theirs.
|
| https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| What a snide comment.
|
| You know nothing about the GP's neighborhood or living
| situation. Dismiss it as "stranger danger" if you wish, but
| what if their concerns about the safety of unsupervised
| children is rooted in some genuine concern? Again, they
| just said cars weren't the _main_ reason. Doesn't that
| imply something else?
| iso1631 wrote:
| I wouldn't trust a 3 year old to not jump off a wall, stick
| their head down a drain, eat some random berries, etc.
| asdff wrote:
| Sounds like the stuff I was doing in recess in
| kindergarten honestly. The kids will be alright. You
| can't watch them for every waking second as it is.
| lp251 wrote:
| we're you in kindergarten at 3? remarkable!
| macintux wrote:
| I wouldn't even trust a 3-year-old to run around on pavement
| unsupervised without giving themselves a concussion.
| krater23 wrote:
| All those kids would be run over by speeding bikers. Just try
| to be pedestrian in the nederlands cities...
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _What I wouldn 't give_
|
| Then I have good news for you: for not that much effort, you
| can move to Europe. Several cities here are bike friendly and
| becoming more so every week.
|
| Here are the streets that are becoming pedestrian in Brussels,
| two weeks from now:
| https://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels-2/248559/the-brussels...
| drstewart wrote:
| Some major streets in Brussels banning cars doesn't mean
| Europe is a car free society
|
| By your own logic, can't he just stay in the US?
|
| https://www.amny.com/transit/times-square-car-
| free-1-3198229...
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| As an American honestly considering this because I hate the
| car-dependent lifestyle... any advice on where to start? I'm
| OK with lower compensation. I suspect I have the savings to
| purchase a home or at least rent for a year. I speak...
| modest french, and I'm willing to learn another language.
|
| Emigration seems tough without a company sponsoring you,
| though.
| dixie_land wrote:
| If you have money for a house the look into countries that
| incentivize investment immigration. Some of them might even
| consider real estate for that purpose. And once you get
| through the door aren't EU open border anyways?
| vander_elst wrote:
| IMO middle and northern Europe might be a good fit.
| grardb wrote:
| If you're able to work as a freelancer, consider looking
| into the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty (DAFT).
| Basically, you start a company in the Netherlands with
| EUR4500 set aside for it, and you get residency for two
| years. You can continue renewing the visa every two years
| as long as your business isn't dormant. This is how my wife
| and I moved to the Netherlands last year. The main catch is
| that you legally will not be allowed to be a full-time
| employee anywhere, so any money you make has to come
| through your business. You can have a full-on "BV" where
| you pay yourself a salary, which comes with nice tax
| benefits, but it's more complex to set up than the
| "eenmanszaak," which basically just means you're a
| freelancer. Alternatively, you could just get a job at a
| company with an office over here. However, your residency
| will of course be contingent on your employment. Many
| companies here don't require that you speak Dutch since
| virtually everyone in the country is fluent in English, and
| much business is conducted in English.
|
| My understanding is that Portugal is another easy place to
| move to. However, it's a bit more difficult. I don't know
| the specifics, but I think you need to buy property valued
| at EUR200k or higher or something. It's cheaper than the
| Netherlands, but English is less spoken, and my
| understanding is that there's a huge influx of immigrants
| (especially American) which are driving up the cost of
| living for locals.
|
| You can also check out the "IWantOut" subreddit.
| tjr225 wrote:
| > Then I have good news for you: for not that much effort,
| you can move to Europe.
|
| Do you _honestly_ believe this to be true for most Americans?
|
| In any case, what if we simply want these things in our own
| country? You do know it is possible to love America and feel
| at home here in spite of its flaws... right? Weird comment,
| dude.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm responding to someone who said "what I wouldn't give".
|
| If someone tells me "I'd do anything to live somewhere like
| this", then yes, I'll inform them of their possibilities.
| tjr225 wrote:
| If you read the article it is clearly about America.
| scrollaway wrote:
| And if you read the two comments in question?
| tjr225 wrote:
| I would expect suggesting possible immigration/leaving
| extended family/taking a massive pay cut over improving
| ones home would be a preposterous response! I suspect you
| know its preposterous but are enjoying some sort of pride
| in Europe? The idea that you need to move to a different
| continent for something so simple and attainable by other
| means is... Idk, you've lost me. Have a good one!
| rr888 wrote:
| > In US at least even inside gated communities u can't leave
| kids (3-6) by themselves because cars.
|
| Because cars is the wrong answer. In the 60s and 70s the kids
| were running around the streets all day and cars then were
| bigger and harder to control.
|
| (I'm assuming you mean 5-10 yo as 3/4/5 really do need
| supervision even in safe environments)
| ska wrote:
| > In the 60s and 70s the kids were running around the streets
| all day and cars then were bigger and harder to control.
|
| Car _density_ has increased a lot in many of these places, as
| has average speed (due to widening efforts, it seems). They
| are also bigger and also heavier on average. Or at least
| weight has been increasing since the 80s. It did dip a bit
| earlier from then, as the large steel frame cars shrunk due
| to gas prices. Visibility is a mixed bag but is often worse
| now in the front (cabs are much higher), which is pretty
| critical for the kids-running-around scenario. Pickups are
| especially egregious in this way. They are much bigger, much
| heavier, and have terrible visibility these days. They are a
| growing segment for reasons unrelated to their nominal
| function.
|
| A friend recently commented after visiting his childhood home
| (parents still lived there). He spent the Sunday evening on
| the front porch, an recalled when he was a kid they would
| probably have been playing street hockey all evening in the
| neighbourhood, but that would be impossible now.
| scrollaway wrote:
| What is the right answer, then?
|
| For what it's worth: the right answer is still cars, just
| indirectly. Yes there are more factors but those factors are
| caused by how American suburbia is designed and evolved over
| the last fifty decades, which, surprise ...
|
| Walking to school is impossible in most of the US. Biking to
| school on six lane stroads is unthinkable especially for a
| child. Mobility is freedom and independence, and that
| independence is removed from American children. And so things
| evolve in exactly one direction: that of less and less
| freedom to roam the dangerous streets.
|
| Parents of children in the 60s and 70s were raised with their
| full freedom and had no reason to prevent their kids from
| roaming the streets. It takes multiple generations for these
| changes to take effect in the mindsets of people. America
| will take decades to heal from its car centric mistakes...
| when it finally starts.
| tjr225 wrote:
| > Walking to school is impossible in the US.
|
| This is not true where I live in Tacoma, WA. In fact, in
| our neighborhood on the North End, I would guess somewhere
| around 40% of kids walk to school. There is an elementary
| school two blocks away from me, and a middle school five or
| so blocks away. The private schools are a bit further and
| would require driving or cycling.
|
| The neighborhoods I used to live in the residential areas
| of the Seattle core(Madrona,Leschi,CD) were similar.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Google maps says that my primary school is an over 4 hour
| walk from my house.
| tjr225 wrote:
| Well I have no idea where you live or how that relates to
| my comment?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Your example of being in a big city does not represent
| most of the US.
| wizofaus wrote:
| HN won't let me reply to your subsequent comment, but 83%
| of the US population lives in urban areas - I'd be
| willing to bet in most of those, the closest school being
| anything like a 4 hour walk from home is very much an
| anomaly. FWIW, my partner grew up in rural Japan where
| her school would have been pretty close to a 4 hour walk
| away, so she took the only realistic option available:
| bicycle.
| slifin wrote:
| Cars have only increased in size, but the main issue when
| everyone hops in a car is that it creates unsafe environment
| for everyone not in the car
|
| Even if we ignore the threat of being run over, constant
| noise, pollution, less space for walking etc
|
| Cars create a vacuum where if you were mugged in plain day
| light next to a motorway everyone knows the chances of being
| helped by a motorist is incredibly low
|
| But if there are more pedestrians around you, the chance of
| getting help from a stranger goes up
|
| Cars create dangerous deserts everywhere and that's why we
| don't let kids out
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > Cars create a vacuum where if you were mugged in plain
| day light next to a motorway everyone knows the chances of
| being helped by a motorist is incredibly low. But if there
| are more pedestrians around you, the chance of getting help
| from a stranger goes up
|
| One is more likely to be mugged in New York than in a
| Kansas suburb. Long before cars existed, people have been
| terrorized by highwaymen on country roads with little help
| or recourse. If anything, cars have likely reduced muggings
| as fewer people on the streets have created fewer
| opportunities to be overtaken and robbed.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > the chance of getting help from a stranger goes up
|
| Or maybe a large clump of people makes everyone more likely
| to experience the bystander effect.
| juve1996 wrote:
| I don't buy this argument. Cars are extremely heavy these
| days, and while they have better control, they're also much
| faster on average. On top of that, there are bigger vehicles
| going around, like enormous trucks and SUVs with horrendous
| blind spots and horrible handling.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Car-oriented infrastructure has become more and more common
| over the decades.
|
| Plus, cars today are actually heavier IIRC, and faster.
| masklinn wrote:
| > What I wouldn't give to have a planned neighborhood where
| cars are banned. It would be kids wonderland.
|
| It would also require the neighbourhood to have much more
| relaxed (and saner) zoning rules than the average, and
| historically it's been the exact opposite.
| chasd00 wrote:
| My sisters gated community is mostly golf cart only. Which is
| pretty nice because even her kids drive it to the marina and
| pool/water park.
| Tade0 wrote:
| My pet theory is that just like everything in nature keeps
| evolving into crabs, eventually every mode of personal
| transportation evolves into a golf cart.
|
| The Japanese have kei cars, the Dutch and other people living
| in bicycle-centric cities cargo bikes - sometimes you just
| need the extra luggage space.
| dmartinez wrote:
| This project in Tempe, AZ markets itself as the first planned
| car-free community in the US:
|
| https://culdesac.com/
|
| I'm hoping that if it is successful, developers will build
| similar projects elsewhere.
| matsemann wrote:
| A similar book about history of cars in Norway is "Et land pa
| fire hjul": https://respublica.no/produkter/et-land-pa-fire-hjul/
|
| It's very interesting to read how a few rich people getting cars
| changed the whole capitol. Tens of thousands of pedestrians had
| to move out of the way for these few, and everything changed
| permanently. Or how most traffic safety organizations were really
| pro-car organizations, and in the media always shifted the blame
| over to pedestrians being uncultivated and walking where they
| shouldn't be etc.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| To take another slant on the article, you can see how the laws
| and systems were adapted to support the automobile from where
| they were before. There were no stop signs, speed limits, license
| requirements, or traffic lights in the 1920s. Fast forward to
| today and we see E-Bikes and E-Scooters being banned from
| different areas, having speed caps put on, not being allowed on
| sidewalks, into bike paths, trails, etc. There is no adaptation
| in most locations.
|
| People are finally moving away from automobiles, but officials
| are choosing to make it much more difficult for people to use new
| forms of transportation. E-Scooters have been called a scourge
| just about everywhere they show up. They're vilified in city
| after city, due to the lack of supporting infrastructure and
| incompatibility with roads. In some places, officials want
| scooters to ride in 50 mph traffic - which all cyclists know is a
| death wish, but not on the unused sidewalks. Many cyclists blame
| e-bikes and scooters for the problems caused by cars, and want to
| hoard the infrastructure to themselves. Pedestrian safety is an
| easy scare tactic, but in reality, e-scooters and e-bikes make
| being a pedestrian much more feasible and increase the use of
| bike paths and sidewalks. I'd like to see a comparison of
| pedestrians killed by e-scooters on a sidewalk vs. pedestrians on
| sidewalks vs. cars or even cars vs. e-scooters. If a place ends
| up with scooters on the sidewalks, the city should build a
| mobility lane, not kick them out into the street. I'm interested
| to see how planners and cities adjust to using a bike to get to
| work no longer requiring lycra and a shower. If you do the math,
| being able to travel at 10-15 MPH for 30 minutes under electric
| power, can get you just about anywhere in most cities in the USA.
| It's really a question of having safe infrastructure to get you
| there.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Interesting problem that will soon become a historical
| curiousity, because _there is clearly no alternative._ Even if*
| we immediately ban the sale of gaoline-powered vehicles to be
| driven in cities, that'd be too little.
|
| For five years I've lived near a suburban arterial street that's
| busy from 6 a.m. to midnight most days. I've seen _no diminution_
| of traffic in that time. This is madness.
|
| We either create a workable rational solution or consign
| ourselves to our individual fates.
| esarbe wrote:
| > "A developed nation is not a place where the poor own cars, but
| where the rich use public transportation."
|
| - Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogota
|
| We have gone so awfully off the bend with our cities; not places
| to live but places to drive through. I'm hoping that with the
| trend to more homeoffice, we can maybe scale back the commuting a
| bit and go back a step towards cities for living, with community
| neighborhoods, parks and public spaces everywhere.
|
| Just imagine turning the streets of your local city into green
| lanes, with lots of excellent public transport. That would be
| amazing.
| supertrope wrote:
| Bogota has a mass transit system with BRT stations and
| double/triple length buses. This was done to avoid the upfront
| capital cost of a metro while still providing most of the
| benefits of frequent high capacity service. Now it is extremely
| crowded and an upgrade to an actual metro is needed but has not
| happened.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A lot of literature from that time (perhaps most well known, "The
| Great Gatsby") have cars and their drivers as the antagonist.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Today they treat pedestrians as dangerous obstacles.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I can fly to Schiphol airport, get on a train without even
| stepping outdoors, ride to a suburb on the far side of Amsterdam
| in time for a morning meeting, walk to my hotel, all without even
| a taxi ride. On this side of the ocean, I have to call for a limo
| to the airport because the commuter rail schedule is too sparse,
| the trains are too crowded for being under-provisioned. The
| diesel locomotives are as polluting as if everyone on the train
| drove their cars instead. There is no long term parking at the
| train stations. The subway stop at the airport is far from the
| terminals. Bad transportation is a drag on the US economy. How
| much productivity sits on our highways for hours each day?
| car_hacker wrote:
| beowulfey wrote:
| Reading this infuriates me. I can't believe so much effort was
| put into giving cars higher priority than pedestrians. What a
| tremendous detriment. And it's so hard to undo! People always
| stick to the status quo; we need even more work to undo all of
| it. What a waste.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I don't have a car and absolutely hate the car-centric culture of
| American cities (I live in SF).
|
| That being said, this article is completely wrong and draws the
| wrong conclusions. People were anti-car early on because most
| people didn't have cars. Later, people stopped being anti-car
| because most people had cars. The article would have you believe
| that at no point in time did the majority of people want car-
| centric city streets and that it was forced on them by a small
| minority of people interested in selling cars. That simply isn't
| the case. Vocal opposition to cars faded away as more people
| owned them.
|
| It's important to understand the status quo correctly if we ever
| want to change things. The sad reality is that most people want
| cars, even in dense cities. As I look out my apartment window on
| a Sunday morning, with pleasant weather and a walkable green
| neighborhood, I still count far more cars going by than people on
| foot or bicycle. Hopefully that would change if we made it easier
| and safer for people to walk, but it's not productive to pretend
| most people secretly hate cars.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > The sad reality is that most people want cars
|
| The sad reality is that most people NEED cars
|
| Only the rich can afford to not need cars.
|
| Now back to your regularly scheduled car hate.
| ska wrote:
| > The sad reality is that most people NEED cars
|
| That was a choice, though. We (especially in North America)
| have decided collectively to build infrastructure in such a
| way that most people will have strong reasons to use cars, as
| a result most people want cars. We did not have to do that,
| or at least there was no compelling reason to do it to the
| degree that we have.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Well, there was a compelling reason. Massive funds from an
| auto and oil industry lobby rooted in excuses such as the
| american car tourist dream and a life in a segregated
| suburb. Where we arrived is IMO almost wholly corrupt,
| perhaps one of the biggest astro-turfing campaigns ever
| seen.
| ska wrote:
| That (roughly, with different emphasis) is a the choice
| I'm talking about. It was not based purely on rational
| planning, and it was a choice.
|
| That in turn made it compelling for individuals, often,
| but that's not the same thing.
| asdff wrote:
| It depends on the city honestly. In LA county, cars save you
| time but you can get everywhere, eventually, on a bus. Again,
| the key word is eventually, so bring a book and it will be
| like teleporting. Ridership reflects this. If you can afford
| to buy convenience you do so. 70% of LA metro riders are very
| low income, median income for riders on the system is
| $19,000. In other words most riders can't even entertain the
| idea of affording a car. Even a 20 year old beater car in CA
| might be a few hundred alone just to register a year, whereas
| low income people can ride metro for free.
|
| https://www.nlc.org/article/2021/05/14/expanding-l-a-
| metros-...
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Except the reason streets became car-centric was due to
| lobbying from car companies to remove streetcars.
|
| Once streetcars were gone, people had to own cars.
| welshwelsh wrote:
| >it's not productive to pretend most people secretly hate cars
|
| Actually, I think that's exactly what we should do.
|
| Most people don't have a strong opinion on cars. They
| originally bought cars due to marketing. If we talk about how
| great cars are, most people will agree. If we talk about how
| terrible cars are, most people will agree.
|
| Don't worry about what people think. Just keep talking about
| the benefits of walkable carefree cities, and that will become
| the new popular opinion.
| dionidium wrote:
| There's no evidence this is true and boatloads of evidence
| that it isn't. For one thing, when people can afford cars,
| they buy them. And if you've ever spent a lot of time around
| people who can't afford a car, "affording a car" is one of
| the main reasons they'll tell you they want more money. And
| if they do come into money, a car will be the first thing
| they purchase.
|
| Obviously, you can't divorce people's individual choices from
| the environment in which they're made (and ours is a
| particularly car-dependent society), but given the
| constraints as they actually exist, the fact is that people
| like owning a car.
| oblio wrote:
| A car is social status and a car is freedom.
|
| The same car is not a liability to the extent it should be,
| considering it's reducing our life expectancy through
| emissions and tire and road wear particulates, it's burning
| our planet through inefficient resource usage and it's
| literally killing people.
|
| People should be able to do whatever they need without a
| car, within reasonable time frames and reliably (taking 3
| buses for 2 hours for a 15 minute car ride is not
| reasonable) and in parallel to that cars should be taxed
| like in Norway, they should be a luxury item. Any time you
| need a car you should first think: do I really? Can I rent
| one? Etc.
| dionidium wrote:
| Make no mistake: I think we should properly price the
| externalities, we should mostly get cars out of the
| densest urban centers, we should require speed governors
| and geofencing in all new vehicles, and we should
| drastically increase the costs on drivers of injuring
| pedestrians and cyclists (coupled almost certainly with
| entirely new (and much more expensive) insurance
| products).
|
| I'm not a huge fan of cars. (More accurately, I'm not a
| big fan of _drivers_. Cars are very useful. The 25th
| percentile driver is a loud, dangerous menace.)
| californical wrote:
| But, do they only like owning a car because existing
| without one *sucks*? I don't know that I buy the idea that
| people inherently want to own cars, just that our urban
| design makes life really hard to go without one
| dionidium wrote:
| You can make an urban design in which the tradeoffs of
| car ownership tip toward non-ownership, but it is _very
| difficult_ to make a modern city in which car ownership
| confers no benefit. Even in a place like NYC, where I 've
| lived, you really cannot beat point-to-point for
| convenience and speed. That doesn't mean _every_ route in
| NYC is best served by driving. The subway is great! But
| there will _always_ be situations in which the easiest
| thing _by far_ would be to drive point-to-point, if you
| have access to a car.
|
| Urbanists who tell people there is no benefit to car
| ownership in dense urban areas are performing a sort of
| gaslighting. Everybody basically knows that's not true.
| The argument, instead, is that you can create a city in
| which the cost/benefit analysis changes. This is subtle,
| but I think the difference matters. You can adjust how
| people think of the tradeoffs, but you cannot really make
| them believe cars aren't still useful in those
| environments.
| jeltz wrote:
| While I would not say there are no benefits from owning a
| car point-to-point speed is pretty bad for cars in many
| European cities due to having too find parking. On many
| trips I would say the fastest mode of travel is electric
| scooter.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > The originally bought cars due to marketing.
|
| That's exactly the sort of wishful delusion that the comment
| you are replying to was warning about!
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > Just keep talking about the benefits of walkable carefree
| cities
|
| If you don't worry about what people think, you're never
| going to understand and address the actual reasons people buy
| cars.
|
| When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to get
| 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going to talk
| them into not being miserable! They are making choices
| informed based on their own life experiences that it would be
| smart to understand and emphasize with, if you want to drive
| meaningful change.
| epistasis wrote:
| > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to
| get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going
| to talk them into not being miserable!
|
| This is because we plan for the only possible route by car.
| We prioritize making car access fast in every single aspect
| of planning, and never once even consider public transit
| during the planning process, and hope that underfunded
| transit systems can somehow work around the cars.
|
| A far better system would be to have children be able to
| walk to school rather than hop in a vehicle. Or school
| buses, which used to be common in the US to get around the
| car dependency.
| jeltz wrote:
| Where I live almost everyone walks their kids to school.
| Many people having to drive their kids to school or use
| public transport is a sign of bad urban planning.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| > When someone buys a car because it's miserable trying to
| get 2+ kids to school on public transit, you're not going
| to talk them into not being miserable!
|
| I saw a case recently where a woman crashed her car outside
| her child's school in London, injuring some children. All
| very sad and especially compounded by the school only
| accepting enrolments within 1km of the school due to
| demand.
|
| 1km! And she still drove to pick up the kids!
| 88913527 wrote:
| > The sad reality is that most people want cars
|
| Why is it sad? I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in
| under 30 minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic,
| but that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself, or compared to
| alternatives like mass transit that don't go to all of these
| places in comparable amounts of time or even have service to
| all these areas). The only viable successor that meets our
| standard of living will be something like autonomous rideshare,
| and since that's always 5 years away, and we enjoy the standard
| of living we have, nothing will change. It is that simple. The
| point of human progress is to raise our standard of living over
| time, and convincing people to roll back to inferior
| alternatives is a fool's errand. The successor to cars needs a
| similar to superior convenience factor.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Traffic is absolutely not orthogonal to the vehicle itself.
| Almost everything wrong with cars as a mode of transportation
| can be boiled down to: they take up too much space for the
| number of people they transport.
| asdff wrote:
| Chances are if you can drive to those things in under 30
| minutes, you can probably ebike to them in just over 30
| minutes. I bike a lot in my city. For a given 10 minute car
| ride, the bike trip works out to 12 minutes. In traffic, the
| bike is faster than the car, because of lanesplitting
| ensuring you never wait for a light cycle. The car wins out
| when you have an open freeway, but thats only in the late
| evenings really in socal. Personally though I generally stick
| to the parallel running residential roads that hardly see
| cars at all, even here in busy LA, since I can practically
| take the entire road and just bike down the middle and avoid
| people potentially backing out of driveways.
| acdha wrote:
| > I can go the mountains, the beach, work all in under 30
| minutes. The user experience is great (minus traffic, but
| that is orthogonal to the vehicle itself).
|
| That last part is the logical flaw: you're acting like
| traffic is some random coincidence when it's actually
| inherent to the design. Cars are inherently inefficient
| because you're using over a hundred square feet of space and
| 2-3 tons of metal to move on average 1-2 people but because
| they're familiar people who drive a lot tend to make excuses
| or simply not recognize those drawbacks - it's always someone
| else making traffic, adding another lane will fix it even
| though that's never been true anywhere in the world, it's
| "under 30 minutes" because they're thinking the best-case
| travel times from where they parked to the general vicinity
| of where they're going rather than realistic door to door
| times including traffic, parking, etc.
|
| Similarly, it's not rolling back the standard of living to
| acknowledge that this lifestyle is expensive ($11+k
| USD/driver/year), unhealthy, and soaks up a lot of time. Yes,
| it's nice to get in and go and that even works okay in a
| rural setting but in practice an awful lot of people are
| spending large fractions of their non-work time sitting in
| traffic and paying a large quantity of money to do so, all of
| which lowers the standard of living even before you consider
| the annual death and life-altering injury rates, effects of
| pollution (not just fuel but also tire and brake
| particulates), and the social cost of reserving so much
| public space for vehicle motion and storage.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Sounds like a drug addict TBH. Smoking is great! You get to
| socialize, have a fidget toy, it's calming, fun, looks cool,
| etc. (Seriously, it is great! That's why it is addictive)
|
| What if your work was a walkable distance? What if light rail
| and buses were dense and frequent enough where that was the
| fastest way to get to work. What if there was a train to go
| out to the coast? What if you did a rideshare to go junk the
| mountains?
|
| Pinning it all on self driving at this point imo is
| continuation of the corrupt car culture that lobbies
| government and social appeal with absurd efficacy. I don't
| believe self driving will really ever happen (the complexity
| is too high), and that solution means that we can maintain
| the car-centtic status quo and even double down on it. I'm
| not sure if there were a more comforting idea than that -
| that we don't have to change anything, just wait for
| technology and everything we are doing suddenly is good and
| sustainable. Yet, there are all of the tools available to not
| require a personal car and have a better travel experience.
|
| *downsides to cars: - super loud - pollution - you are
| traffic, and by travelling in practically the least space
| efficient, you are creating traffic - unsustainable, highway
| funds are often federally granted for new construction, yet
| the zoning connected by those funds do not generate enough
| revenue to sustain the upkeep. Each mile of road costs about
| 10 mil to build and the same to maintain over 50 years. Strip
| malls and suburbs simply do not generate enough tax revenue
| to support dozens of miles if roads to connect them. Given we
| had such a big glut of road building in the 50s, should not
| be a surprise that America's road system is falling apart. If
| our infrastructure were sustainable, would we even need
| "infrastructure week" or a "build back better" (my
| understanding is both of those were to focus mostly on car-
| based infrastructure). Point being, if that were sustainable
| infrastructure, we wouldn't need these one time surges and
| the roads wouldn't be crumbling like they are today.
|
| Could go on, self driving is not an answer to many of the
| intrinsic problems to car-centric society.
| sxg wrote:
| > What if your work was a walkable distance?
|
| It is a walkable distance, and it's unsustainably expensive
| for how little space I get. Not to mention the fact that
| there aren't any ownable properties in walking distance to
| work--renting an apartment is the only option.
|
| Sure, huge investments in creating an amazing mass transit
| system would be awesome! But that's nowhere near happening
| in the next couple decades. So why should I (or anyone) be
| asked to pay more to rent a tiny apartment near work where
| I can barely escape the city using existing public transit
| options?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| In Hong Kong, you can go to all of those places in 20 minutes
| from most populated areas, and you don't need a car to do it.
| The trains are shielded from rain and are usually well air-
| conditioned. You don't have to deal with parking and it's
| much safer.
|
| There are downsides of course, it can be crowded and you have
| to be around other people. I think those are things people
| adapt to culturally, while things like dying in a car
| accident and sitting in traffic are less culturally plastic.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| America has Stockholm Syndrome but for car-based
| infrastructure.
|
| It's obvious to outsiders and even to Americans who live
| abroad.
| 8note wrote:
| I dunno about your interpretation. When did jaywalking become a
| thing? When did people get kicked off the road so cars to use
| them, before or after everyone had cars?
| hnhg wrote:
| You're looking at on car usage after all the rules were
| changed, and all those drivers know no better, or worse, have
| no choice. But imagine a city designed for no car usage! How
| would all those car driver vote then?
|
| SF has terrible public transport by international standards.
| You have to rebalance your baseline, I'm afraid.
| dionidium wrote:
| Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all
| Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people
| will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't
| want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly
| backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and
| difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me
| is that people _really like owning cars_ , even in places
| where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically
| everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one.
| Those are _very high_ rates of car ownership in those places,
| given the costs and availability of good alternatives.
|
| The lesson here is that you can create environments with
| enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly
| choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out),
| but what you _cannot_ do is create a place where most people
| don 't _want_ one.
|
| _Even in NYC_ , a car is an incredibly useful tool. People
| aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Cars are useful tools of course. If people used them only
| for the odd errand or a long distance trip, we wouldn't
| have a problem.
|
| Public transit for all our regular trips to work,
| restaurants, dentist, etc. and private or rented cars for
| the rest is the way to go towards a prosperous future.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New
| York _want_ a car? Given they don 't have one, there is
| oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical
| to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but
| do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them
| might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them
| (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously
| owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..)
|
| I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those
| same numbers.
| dionidium wrote:
| > Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in
| New York want a car?
|
| The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or
| even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC
| than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a
| selection effect (people who fit that description move
| there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up
| there may not be interested in something they have little
| exposure to).
|
| What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is
| nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely
| doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so
| good there's no possible need for a car" than there are
| people who simply can't afford the additional costs or
| are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car
| ownership in the city.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no
| car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents
| history and misrepresents the current situation.
|
| Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car
| ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is
| an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit
| in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were
| a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority
| of people. Today we have technology to build better transit
| that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but
| we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can
| do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces
| hurt us".
| opportune wrote:
| I am also a car-hater in SF and live here specifically because
| it's one of the 4-5 cities in the US where you can not own a
| car without it being an immense inconvenience/making yourself
| into a pariah.
|
| Most people want cars sure, but not the drawbacks. Many people
| would like to listen to loud music or practice target shooting
| outside their home, but if everybody did that it'd make for
| really shitty city living.
|
| I think a lot of people in the US simply don't realize or
| consciously acknowledge how inconvenient car-centrism is, so
| they only think of the personal convenience their car gives
| them, rather than how inconvenient things become when everybody
| uses cars (ie the conveniences cars afford are in many cases
| only because we've developed around cars). Most people probably
| hate not being able to walk a few hundred feet to the store to
| get some milk, or don't realize how nice it would be (because
| in a lot of the US it's such a bizarrely foreign concept) to
| have that as an option. They probably hate that the only way to
| get to work is to commute during rush hour with tons of
| traffic, or that their friend in the same urban area is
| actually 80 miles away, or that everything is covered in
| asphalt and the air sucks.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery.
| When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do
| that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son,
| and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after...
| it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry
| who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily.
|
| I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for
| 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually
| more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick
| me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then
| drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a
| lot better.
|
| Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more
| of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for
| this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk
| from work to home so I just ate out all the time.
|
| Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in
| downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the
| year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy
| grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing
| clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat
| (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95
| weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.
| opportune wrote:
| I agree that once kids are in the mix "walk everywhere"
| gets more challenging.
|
| There are more savvy ways to do it though, like getting
| stuff delivered - it's not a dichotomy between carrying
| stuff everywhere and hauling it in a car. It is a bit
| painful at first to get used to paying an extra $5-10 here
| and there for delivery, but it's nothing in comparison to
| the cost of a car, not to mention the time it saves. Any
| time something is heavy enough that I dread carrying it I
| just get it delivered (which for groceries, I generally do
| once every 1-2 weeks).
|
| Of course there are a lot of caveats, like using specific
| delivery services which don't create headaches or charge
| exorbitant prices. I hate hate hate substitutions/when
| something is out of stock, but it essentially never happens
| with Amazon Fresh or Food Rocket (a startup in SF), is rare
| for Whole Foods, and mildly infrequent with Safeway - none
| of which have extra markup for delivered goods beyond a
| transparent delivery fee. I've heard too many horror
| stories about Instacart or other services to even bother
| though.
|
| As an aside, that is something I've noticed about car
| ownership, that people treat all the costs as its own thing
| without looking at the marginal cost it adds to the various
| things they do. When deciding to go carless, that was one
| of the strongest arguments tipping me over. Just what I was
| paying in insurance and gas was enough to cover all my
| delivery fees and public transit costs.
| bitwize wrote:
| Delivery is to carless as AWS Lambda is to serverless.
| There is no delivery, there is only someone else's car.
| Arainach wrote:
| People got cars in large part because new development was done
| in car-specific ways rather than dense ways that support
| alternatives. I recommend Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which
| goes into how new development was shaped by roads without
| planning for rail or mass transit, and how even as this was
| being built in the 1950s people understood induced demand and
| how roads couldn't scale and advocated for the inclusion of
| planning for mass transit but were overruled. This led to
| sparse suburban development that required cars, but didn't have
| to be the case. Once it was in place it was prohibitively
| expensive (and in many cases impossible) to change.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > because most people had cars.
|
| That's mostly an American/European thing though, world wide
| there are only about 1.5 billion cars, 275 million of these in
| the United States, another 250 million in Europe. Together
| those account for ~ 1/3 of the cars but only for about 12% of
| the world population.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| For sure, and some economies were "lucky" enough to wait
| until the late 20th century to develop. The public transit
| systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, the entire Pearl River
| Delta, etc are all IMO far better ways to get around than
| driving a car in most US cities.
| 88913527 wrote:
| Lucky might be subjective. Standard of living in the
| suburbs of American might be deemed superior to living in
| an efficiency apartment in Hong Kong, but that's much less
| an option for people who live in areas that developed later
| on, as these areas leaned into true urban levels of density
| since it's infrastructurally far cheaper per capita. Given
| the choice, many would prefer to not live in New York
| levels of density.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| For sure, and I want people to have that choice! But I
| also want the amount paid by people living in the suburbs
| to more accurately reflect the cost, and I want people
| who prefer living in denser urban environments to be able
| to improve their surroundings by removing cars.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > As I look out my apartment window on a Sunday morning, with
| pleasant weather and a walkable green neighborhood, I still
| count far more cars going by than people on foot or bicycle.
|
| And how much dedicated infrastructure is there, in terms of
| space and money, for walking vs biking vs driving?
|
| People always ignore this, that driving even in "walkable"
| neighborhoods generally still has ENORMOUSLY more money and
| more land dedicated to it. If you look at how much space the
| road takes up, vs sidewalks and protected bike lanes, and how
| much money those things cost to build -- it's not even close.
|
| That, plus in the US there's usually a lack of mixed use
| zoning, so there's hardly anywhere to walk to (though I don't
| know whether this is the case for your neighborhood in
| particular).
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Yup. I walk everywhere and hate walking on streets shared
| with cars.
| arealaccount wrote:
| It's a lot harder to collect taxes from walkers and cyclists
| to build that infrastructure. Drivers in theory pay for the
| roads and everything else. Maybe not paying enough but still.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Actually it's a lot easier. You get more rates and land tax
| from the denser housing you can have.
|
| Drivers don't pay for roads. They get subsidised by
| everyone else paying property taxes. The money out of the
| fuel taxes is insufficient to cover the costs that cars
| cause.
| voz_ wrote:
| They don't come close to paying for everything else when
| you take into account things like quality of life, safety,
| and more. Not everything has a price.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| Living in cities with high crime and police that won't
| stop it with self-defense bans/punishments on those that
| try to defend themselves seem to be a safety hazard too.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| not at prices that people are willing to pay. Suburban-
| style roads are cheap to build, because developers
| generally pay the upfront costs and price it into the
| initial sale price of the development, but taxes in the
| period that follows aren't nearly high enough to cover the
| price of resurfacing, repair, and improvements that the
| city has to cover 20-30 years down the line. Suburbs that
| have gone through several such cycles are increasingly
| taking on debt to pay the costs of that maintenance, and
| older ones are now going bankrupt.
| jackvalentine wrote:
| > Drivers in theory pay for the roads and everything else.
|
| What theory? Roads are paid for from everyday taxes/debt
| issue.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Indeed. You are debunking a commonly repeated myth.
|
| https://uspirg.org/reports/usp/who-pays-roads
|
| > Gas taxes and other fees paid by drivers now cover less
| than half of road construction and maintenance costs
| nationally - down from more than 70 percent in the 1960s
| - with the balance coming chiefly from income, sales and
| property taxes and other levies on general taxpayers.
|
| * General taxpayers at all levels of government now
| subsidize highway construction and maintenance to the
| tune of $69 billion per year - an amount exceeding the
| expenditure of general tax funds to support transit,
| bicycling, walking and passenger rail combined.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| At the intersection I'm looking at, it's around 2/3 for cars,
| 1/3 for peds, 0 dedicated for biking. However, SF is actually
| pretty good about this. There are two "slow streets" within 1
| block of me that are mostly car-free. There are also 2
| streets within 3 blocks of me that have dedicated bike lanes
| with raised barriers.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Sounds like what I'd expect in SF, as someone from the bay
| area. Much better than average for the US, but still a long
| ways to go.
| sagarm wrote:
| It's not just land. Walking paths cost far less than and
| require less maintenance and drainage than smooth
| impermeable asphalt roads with curbs. "Intersections" for
| pedestrians are simply paths, with no signage or expensive
| signals required.
|
| Drivers rushing about at 20-30mph pose a danger to people
| on foot, on bikes, on scooters, in strollers, etc.
| c22 wrote:
| Why does the amount of money and land spent influence the
| behavior of individuals? Cars are larger than bicycles, so I
| would expect their infrastructure to take up more space.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| People are less likely to bike if there aren't protected
| bike lanes. People are less likely to walk if there are no
| sidewalks, etc
| rainsford wrote:
| This is really noticeable in places in the US where
| things _are_ close enough together to walk or bike but
| nearly every trip is still made by car because there 's
| no safe way to do anything else. There's actually quite a
| bit of stuff within easy biking distance of where I live,
| but up until recently there was no safe way to actually
| bike there because all the infrastructure was high-speed,
| multi-lane streets without even a shoulder. Recently the
| city has been investing more in wide, separated paths for
| biking and walking places and it's starting to make a
| difference.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Unfortunately having a safe path is not enough - there's
| a significant cultural component.
|
| I'm currently residing in a house on the outskirts of a
| small (population 50k) town.
|
| The other day we were visited by a friend from around
| here - she drove to our place.
|
| The way to her home is 1,5km - half of which goes through
| the main district, with sidewalks and exclusively single-
| lane streets, and the other along a 30km/h street with
| detached houses and very little traffic.
| californical wrote:
| It's also worth keeping in mind that most of her trips
| are likely not as easy or safe as that one. I wouldn't
| expect her to get used to riding a bike when 95% of the
| time it's infeasible or unsafe.
|
| It's not worth the mental effort for most to say "is this
| specific trip a bike trip?" and "which are the safe
| routes to get there, which are probably different than my
| driving routes?" Most people just never try at all
| because there aren't enough opportunities to make it
| worthwhile, and not enough safe roads to know how to
| navigate.
|
| If it was possible for more of her daily needs to be met
| by bike, with comfortable and safe infrastructure, I'd
| bet she'd be more open to the idea.
| supertrope wrote:
| In Seattle non-single occupancy vehicle transportation is
| encouraged by the government. The bus system is good
| (relative to the United States as a whole). The city
| controls sprawl by refusing to extend I think water or
| sewer outside a line drawn in the 90s. Even with this
| official backing, they have maxed out the proportion of
| alternative commuters at 50%. This is similar to Stanford
| University's experience of alternative commuters reaching
| a maximum of 50%.
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| Seattle has mediocre transit. The buses are fine, but
| they're inherently limited in how fast their average
| speeds can be.
|
| Seattle could greatly increase transit usage by:
|
| - expanding the subway/light rail network.
|
| - provide more than two commuter rail lines (right now
| you can only commute by rail North-South, from Lakewood
| to Everett).
|
| - run more than 4 daily trains to/from Everett (at least
| one per hour for 16 hours is needed for consistent
| commutes).
|
| - electrify the Sounder corridor to improve acceleration.
| I suspect the tracks are shared with freight, in which
| case create dedicated electrified passenger tracks so you
| can have smaller trains that run more often and at higher
| speeds.
|
| - through run trains so they don't have to dwell at a
| Seattle terminus (which means you could run all 16 of the
| daily Lakewood trains to Everett as well).
|
| - add 2-4 more Seattle city stops so people getting off
| the train are closer to where they need to be (this
| should be done in combination with through running the
| trains, so the sum of the dwell times at all 5 Seattle
| stations is no more than the total dwell time at the
| terminus now).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It is in no way "maxed out".
|
| Seattle has better non-car options than average for the
| US, but it still has a looooong way to go before one
| could say that the transit or biking options are good;
| they're still quite bad on average.
|
| Only one subway line, a handful of bus-only lanes, and a
| handful of protected bike lanes, maybe one or two
| protected intersections? Seattle has a lot of passable
| design, but very little that's good.
| supertrope wrote:
| Trillions of dollars and the majority of our urban land
| have been dedicated to making driving easy and biking hard.
| The government built toll-free highways, and mandates
| builders of housing, retail, and offices to include
| excessive amounts of parking (parking minimums). Once all
| of this subsidized infrastructure is built each
| individual's rational choice is to drive in 30 min instead
| of risking death by biking or ride a bus for two hours.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The point is whether it's a fair comparison or not. If you
| allocate enormously more land and money to one mode of
| transport, no shit it'll probably end up more attractive.
|
| If there were as few dedicated, reasonably safe car lanes
| as there are bike lanes in the US, hardly anyone would
| drive, either, unless they really had to.
|
| > Cars are larger than bicycles, so I would expect their
| infrastructure to take up more space.
|
| That's just an inherent disadvantage for cars, just like
| being slower is an inherent disadvantage for bikes or
| walking.
|
| You're basically suggesting that we should forcibly remove
| the car disadvantage, while of course the disadvantage for
| walking and biking has to stay. It should be obvious why
| this makes for an unfair comparison.
| bequanna wrote:
| > hardly anyone would drive, either, unless they really
| had to.
|
| What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super
| dense areas where this is even possible?
|
| 1-2%?
|
| Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild weather
| like California and has to contend with conditions that
| make bicycle travel a "fair weather", novelty activity.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > What percentage of the US lives in these urban, super
| dense areas where this is even possible?
|
| > 1-2%?
|
| >100M people live in the top 10 metropolitan areas in the
| US (all over 4M people) [1]. Rural people in the US
| vastly overestimate their own importance.
|
| [1]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/183600/population-of-
| met...
|
| > Also, weather. Most of the US does not have mild
| weather like California and has to contend with
| conditions that make bicycle travel a "fair weather",
| novelty activity.
|
| You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting
| by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell
| you it is easily possible to bike all year round even
| here.
| bequanna wrote:
| Metro area != urban
|
| Good luck without a car in pretty much any suburb. Your
| time has to be worth nothing to make biking or public
| transit work for your needs.
|
| You essentially need to be in a hyper dense, urban area
| to live without a car. Most Americans have no interest in
| living like that.
|
| > You have sen the videos of people in Finnland commuting
| by bike in winter? Living in a nordic country I can tell
| you it is easily possible to bike all year round even
| here.
|
| And I live in MN where biking in the snow would be
| possible (and fun!), but again, only as a novelty. The
| percentage of people who would be willing to commute in
| the manner this is so low you could round it to 0.
| woodruffw wrote:
| A little bit over 6% of the US's population lives in the
| NY metro area _alone_ , so it's significantly more than
| that.
|
| Nobody (reasonable) is talking about making cycling the
| sole form of travel. It's one of many modes, including
| all forms of mass transit.
| bequanna wrote:
| It's just a ridiculous conversation.
|
| Cars are popular because they solve a real problem for
| the overwhelming majority of people in the US.
|
| Biking is a novelty in most climates and public transit
| is only an option if your time is worth very little.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Cars are popular because they solve a real problem for
| the overwhelming majority of people in the US.
|
| To be clear: that "real problem" is a manufactured one.
| The overwhelming majority of people in the US live near
| urban centers, and could be served _not just adequately
| but well_ by mass transit. That 's how they were served a
| century ago, when we were a _far less_ urbanized country;
| the numbers are even further in our favor now.
|
| Where I live, public transit is faster than driving 90%
| of the time, the same speed 5% of the time, and slower
| the rest. Cycling is also generally faster than driving,
| and is perfectly comfortable with the right clothes
| throughout the year. And that's before we even consider
| the "fringe" benefits (like being able to read wherever I
| go, not having to find short- or long-term parking, and
| not polluting the neighborhood I live in).
| vallassy wrote:
| Because the infrastructure spend and land allocation is not
| evenly spread. In most places, there is a dedicated lane
| for cars heading each way, possibly with parking or at
| least a decent shoulder on either side of the road.
|
| The same cannot be said for sidewalks and bike lanes, which
| may be non-existent or poorly maintained, and certainly
| never take precedence over the almighty asphalt.
| [deleted]
| kory wrote:
| It's good thing we moved from these old urban walkable designs to
| a car centric lifestyle, which the vast majority of Americans
| enjoy. The tradeoff of owning a single family home with a good
| plot of land is well worth the loss in walkability.
|
| This isn't sarcasm.
|
| Edit: I understand HN really doesn't like pro car and pro sprawl
| viewpoints, but downvotes don't feel well placed.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Your comment history is fascinating.
|
| You posted yourself about the ridiculous subsidies that US
| suburbia gets so you clearly understand that the way Americans
| live in the suburbs is completely out of touch with how much it
| really costs, and very few people if any would actually choose
| suburbia if they had to bear those costs.
|
| Yet here and elsewhere you also say it's all a "good thing",
| and that Americans are "choosing this". They really aren't.
| Zoning laws are preventing better alternatives from being
| created, and the subsidies basically force an unnatural amount
| of people to go that route even if they hate it.
|
| And honestly, most of y'all don't know any better. Whenever I
| have Americans over visiting Brussels, it ends in "holy shit I
| want to move here".
|
| Last guy I had over was from Alabama. I walked with him from
| one end of the city to the other in less than a couple hours,
| stopping everywhere interesting. His mind was blown: it's the
| same distance he would have to take his car to go to the
| nearest pub to his house.
| kory wrote:
| > Your comment history is fascinating.
|
| Can we refrain from the reddit-esque creepy "gotcha" of
| digging through post history of another user instead of
| addressing the argument at hand?
|
| > You posted yourself about the ridiculous subsidies that US
| suburbia gets so you clearly understand that the way
| Americans live in the suburbs is completely out of touch with
| how much it really costs
|
| Yep.
|
| > and very few people if any would actually choose suburbia
| if they had to bear those costs.
|
| I don't agree. It's arguable we do already bear much of these
| costs, as a lot of infrastructure is paid for through
| development fees (higher housing prices) or through federal &
| state grants (which we all pay for). I understand cities
| subsidize suburban areas to some extent, but that's largely
| from business tax that, again, we all pay for in higher
| prices.
|
| > Americans are "choosing this"
|
| Look at the pandemic trends, that haven't really reversed
| since. People left cities and suburban / rural property
| values shot up compared to big city real estate.
|
| > oning laws are preventing better alternatives from being
| created
|
| No, they're keeping nice neighborhoods nice low density
| neighborhoods. Like the inhabitants of those neighborhoods
| want them to be.
|
| > Whenever I have Americans over visiting Brussels
|
| Something tells me "Americans who want to visit Brussels" has
| a strong pro-density sampling bias. You're also seeing the
| initial reaction and not the long term reaction.
|
| > His mind was blown
|
| But would he really live there, or was he just surprised by
| the different infrastructure?
|
| For clarity, I live right in the middle in one of the most
| walkable places in the US. In the past, I've lived in
| suburban and rural areas. I understand the pro's of
| walkability, but I also understand suburbanites and rural
| folks don't want those pros because of the cons that come
| with them.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _Can we refrain from_
|
| _No_ , own your opinions. You posted something where you
| literally had to give the disclaimer "This isn't sarcasm",
| because it reeked of sarcasm. I went through your post
| history to understand you and your point better. This isn't
| a fucking gotcha, it's a show of faith and compassion.
|
| > _No, they 're keeping nice neighborhoods nice low density
| neighborhoods_
|
| Not just zoning laws in your suburbia, zoning laws in the
| city itself. And no they're not; I'm starting to get the
| feeling you're not arguing in good faith.
|
| > _But would he really live there_
|
| I'm helping him organize his move later this year. Does
| that answer your question?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > You posted something where you literally had to give
| the disclaimer "This isn't sarcasm", because it reeked of
| sarcasm.
|
| It only "reeked of sarcasm" here because it's the
| opposite of the HN groupthink.
| kory wrote:
| > This isn't a fucking gotcha, it's a show of faith and
| compassion.
|
| It certainly comes across that way, from the tone of your
| comments.
|
| > Not just zoning laws in your suburbia, zoning laws in
| the city itself.
|
| Yeah, I live in one of those single family walkable city
| neighborhoods. It's a nice low density neighborhood. We
| don't want it changed, but density advocates that don't
| live here have "selected" us for an up-zone campaign.
| This isn't a bad faith argument at all... This seems to
| be the serious lapse in understanding between pro density
| and pro single family zoning folks.
|
| I'm super glad you were able to help someone move to a
| walkable area as well! I'm very happy someone discovered
| they wanted such a lifestyle over sprawl. That said, the
| vast majority in NA still prefer SF zoning and sprawl.
| I'm not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl
| becomes unimaginably expensive.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _I'm not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl
| becomes unimaginably expensive._
|
| Right, but that's the core of my point: It _is_
| unimaginably expensive, it 's just getting subsidized to
| ridiculous extents. (For the readers unaware of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI)
|
| And saying the "vast majority" prefer it is wrong. They
| prefer it over the alternatives they have _within the
| United States_ , not over the alternative
| _possibilities_. I 'm absolutely not dismissing that some
| people prefer the suburbian lifestyle over EU-style
| walkable cities, but saying the majority of Americans do
| when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the
| best possible read of it.
|
| The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if
| you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices
| are due to the high demand and low offer. Another
| example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWDFgzAjr1k
|
| This song-and-dance of "Everyone likes suburbia because
| everyone wants to move there, it's illegal to build
| anything else because it would then be something else
| than suburbia, nobody wants the alternative anyway
| because it's too expensive, it's too expensive because
| it's in high demand, and it's in high demand because it's
| illegal to build something else" is like the definition
| of catch-22.
| kory wrote:
| > It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting
| subsidized to ridiculous extents.
|
| Yep, that's totally true. But we as a society have chosen
| to subsidize it. We would not continue to subsidize it if
| society as a whole didn't find that lifestyle worth the
| immense weight on government finances.
|
| > but saying the majority of Americans do when so few
| even know what's possible is misplaced in the best
| possible read of it.
|
| Perhaps you're correct, but we're getting into conjecture
| at this point. The single family home on a quarter acre
| plot is ingrained into the physche of Americans at birth.
| It's the American dream. Cultural memes like that don't
| die without a herculean amount of effort. And when this
| dream is so well built into our urban design, uniformity
| across the country, the likelihood of it really changing
| is fairly small. Online spaces are really the first time
| I've seen anything different from the mainstream
| viewpoint here--never heard anything like this offline.
| Even San Francisco won't upzone. If that isn't a clear
| indication of preference, I don't know what is.
|
| > The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious
| if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices
| are due to the high demand and low offer.
|
| Definitely, we need more of these neighborhoods to
| satisfy demand. Again, I live in one, and I experience
| the price increases first hand. I just don't agree with
| the position folks take of changing existing
| neighborhoods into "urban, walkable" ones when the
| residents don't want that. There is a lot of space to try
| building these communities, especially since many people
| (even not in tech!) don't need to go to downtown offices
| anymore.
|
| Streetcar suburbs are pretty awesome, because they allow
| single family home-style living while maintaining
| walkability. But density advocates want to see those
| neighborhoods built up into apartments and townhomes.
| That's tough for residents to swallow, since they have
| heavily invested in making their neighborhood the exact
| low-ish density but walkable, manicured living space they
| want to be in. And it's part of the appeal of unwalkable
| / HOA subdivisions, because such up zone conversions are
| difficult to impossible, or make little financial sense.
|
| Vegetation, old architecture, etc. takes a long time to
| grow and "settle in". Destruction of backyards and old
| homes for large buildings that don't fit in with anything
| else in the neighborhood is not a fun time for existing
| residents. I don't really care about the property value
| (well, I would care if my neighborhood completely changed
| by a forced zoning change and I needed to move). It's
| about keeping the small town neighborhood vibes I chose
| to move here for.
| scrollaway wrote:
| OK but this is a completely different beast to what you
| posted earlier, which is:
|
| > _It's good thing we moved from these old urban walkable
| designs to a car centric lifestyle, which the vast
| majority of Americans enjoy._
|
| Your (non-)argument that american lifestyle being car-
| centric is a "good thing" is VERY different to "I enjoy
| suburbia and I'd like it not to be destroyed".
|
| Your corner of the earth can remain. If some people are
| trying to destroy or change it, those people aren't me,
| nor anyone else in this thread, and they may or may not
| be "walkability advocates" or what have you that's pretty
| irrelevant.
|
| The majority of walkability advocates argue for the
| following:
|
| - US suburbia should not be subsidized as much as it is,
| it's putting cities in dangerous debt.
|
| - Zoning laws preventing the construction of denser
| neighbourhoods that _aren 't_ skyscrapers should be
| relaxed.
|
| - City centers should become more walkable and livable,
| less car-centric
|
| - New constructions and renovations should focus on being
| human scale, instead of giving massive amounts of land
| and priority to cars.
| kory wrote:
| > Your (non-)argument that american lifestyle being car-
| centric is a "good thing"
|
| It's a good thing because it allows (or, rather, allowed)
| the supermajority of people to have the "countryside-
| style" living (while being able to work) that was
| available only to the wealthy a century ago. At the time
| suburbia was "invented", people moved out of the crowded
| cities to these new subdivisions in masses.
|
| > is VERY different to "I enjoy suburbia and I'd like it
| not to be destroyed". > The majority of walkability
| advocates argue for the following:
|
| In a vacuum I would agree with you wholeheartedly.
| However, in practice, urbanists and walkability advocates
| almost always push increased density on neighborhoods
| whose residents don't want those changes. I very rarely
| see advocacy for building new walkable subdivisions, the
| only advocacy group that's even remotely close to this
| that I could think of is Strong Towns.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _It certainly comes across that way, from the tone of
| your comments._
|
| There's no ill intent in my comments, you might be
| choosing to read them as hostile. I'm just giving you
| some perspective and examples of real life experience.
| Also you wanted to understand the downvotes, which is
| also why I chose to reply.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| >" There's no ill intent in my comments, you might be
| choosing to read them as hostile."
|
| I'm not the person you're arguing with and I sensed
| hostility. At the very least contentiousness.
| kory wrote:
| > I'm just giving you some perspective and examples of
| real life experience
|
| Frankly, this comes across as a little bit condescending.
| Another example, a phrase like this from your first
| response:
|
| > And honestly, most of y'all don't know any better
|
| Who are "y'all"? Why don't we know any better? This comes
| across as hostile, like you're coming at this from the
| perspective of "I'm definitely right and this guy is full
| of it." I don't believe that's true, but that's how it
| read to me. Perhaps it's just the challenge of no
| discernible tone in text.
|
| > Also you wanted to understand the downvotes, which is
| also why I chose to reply
|
| I still don't quite understand. Downvote != agree, and my
| comment wasn't rude or disrespectful. It's just not the
| majority opinion here.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > Can we refrain from the reddit-esque creepy "gotcha" of
| digging through post history of another user instead of
| addressing the argument at hand?
|
| That's not against etiquette here, it's totally reasonable
| due diligence
| kodah wrote:
| Looking through your comment history, it's filled with snide
| remarks and nothing of any real informational value. Maybe
| looking through peoples comments on isolated threads doesn't
| do what you think it does? Unless you think snide remarks and
| vapid posts got you to 26k karma.
| matchbok wrote:
| Certainly many people enjoy that type of life. The frustrating
| part is the one-size-fits-all zoning that has made it difficult
| to build anything _but_ that type of community. It 's illegal
| to build car-free apartments in many places because car owners
| think they should be able to drive and park everywhere.
| kory wrote:
| Existing residents don't want apartments because they block
| sunlight, they cause overcrowding, they don't fit with the
| neighborhood's style. Frankly, as well, renters & especially
| landlords don't tend to take care of property or invest in
| the community as much as owner occupiers do, because the
| incentives aren't there for either of them to do so. It's not
| the renter's property and they can be kicked / priced out of
| the neighborhood at any time, so why bother to invest in it?
| Any investment in making your space nice means the landlord
| can hike your rent. On the landlord side, they know they're
| going to find another tenant as long as the unit is habitable
| enough, so in comes the "landlord special". I know this isn't
| universally true by any means, but the incentive structure is
| there.
|
| In apartment buildings that are "transit-enabled", every
| apartment usually has 1 car, maybe 2, and those cars flood
| the local street, making quality of life worse for all
| existing residents. Those apartments are more likely to own
| cars as we look at places that are more car-centric. In
| suburbia, an apartment building usually comes with a huge
| parking lot for all the cars, which isn't great, but it's a
| little more palpable for people living in the area already.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Imagine the amount of free time you gain when each kid can go
| to practice, school, friends, etc, all by themself by either
| walking or biking. Safety is also no issue because so many
| other people are walking or cycling.
|
| I could not imagine my childhood when I had to ask my parents
| to go anywhere.
|
| The price you pay is bigger than you think.
| rainsford wrote:
| Do people actually _enjoy_ car-centric living, or are
| alternatives just not available or something the average
| American has much exposure to? If you want to live somewhere in
| America that 's walkable/bikeable/good public transit, your
| choices are a lot more limited than if you're willing to live
| somewhere where you need to drive everywhere. And those limited
| choices tend to be more expensive, which I think says something
| about their popularity.
|
| Interestingly though, it seems like there is a trend to expand
| car alternative options, at least in some areas of the country.
| There's not much you can do about an exurban bedroom community
| because density is so low and nothing besides other houses is
| remotely within a convenient non-car distance. But in places
| that _could_ be less car-centric, you 're starting to see
| expanded public transit and bicycle infrastructure. And even in
| what would normally be a suburban area, I've started to see
| more mixed use development with higher density housing options.
| And of course more high-end condo type housing in large cities
| themselves. The fact these all tend to be relatively expensive
| places to rent or buy a home suggests to me that demand is
| fairly high, so clearly not everyone loves the car-centric
| choice.
|
| I also think there is a segment of Americans who love the idea
| of low-density, car-centric, single family development in
| theory, but they're running into the reality that trying to
| build that for everyone means that people are going to have to
| live increasingly far away from anywhere they want to go. Even
| if you don't mind driving everywhere, car-centric becomes a lot
| less fun when everything is a 30+ minute drive away and gas is
| becoming more expensive.
| kory wrote:
| > car-centric becomes a lot less fun when everything is a 30+
| minute drive away and gas is becoming more expensive.
|
| The funny thing is I live in a city, in transit-oriented, mid
| density, walkable area, and it takes 30 mins for me to get
| anywhere interesting outside of my neighborhood. My friends
| in the 'burbs can hop over to similar amenities in half the
| time I can.
| Clubber wrote:
| >With their traditional mission of defending custom and seeking
| equity, police were unwilling to abridge pedestrians' rights to
| the free use of city streets.
|
| How times have changed. In regards to police/government
| respecting citizen's rights. I've always wondered what a person
| from the past, say pre-WWI era would think if they were to time
| travel to the present. They would probably think we live in an
| authoritarian police state. They'd probably be right.
| kodah wrote:
| I like being able to walk my city (I live in San Jose) but I
| can't imagine _not_ having a car. Being able to take road trips
| to things like festivals where I don 't have to pay incredible
| baggage fees or sit on a train without wifi for days at a time is
| fairly nice. I would like a world that balances being able to
| walk with being able to own a car, especially as I get older and
| move out of the city.
|
| I do think it's a little odd that so many HNers _hate_ cars (an
| example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297081). I'm not
| quite sure what to make of those attitudes, even after reading
| some of their text.
| opportune wrote:
| How much of that is because you live in one of the sprawliest
| cities in the US?
|
| Of course living in San Jose would be terrible without a car.
| But that's because the city was designed around cars. In places
| like Hong Kong it's the exact opposite, you would not even want
| a car because the city was not designed around them - you can
| easily get to places without one, and things like
| parking/dealing with pedestrians/the cost would make it an
| overall terrible UX.
|
| Also, you are not exactly not paying baggage fees or saving
| money on wifi. The car itself still has a lot of costs (the
| upfront cost or payments, insurance, gas, various bureaucratic
| costs, parking, potentially tolls) - it may very well be that
| in your situation you're still effectively saving money with
| the car, but it's not exactly clear-cut.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Cities in California can't keep up with the volume of human
| manure deposited on sidewalks, so why not add to the problem and
| bring back horses instead of cars!
| lamontcg wrote:
| It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways are
| the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you restored
| the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians taking
| precedence over cars.
|
| The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely
| around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has
| failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
| rayiner wrote:
| > It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways
| are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you
| restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians
| taking precedence over cars.
|
| "Conservatives" also don't want to abandon our "radical
| experiment" with settled agricultural society to go back to a
| hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I think maybe you don't have a
| workable definition of "conservative" in your head.
|
| And given that it was progressives of the time who radically
| reshaped the American landscape around what they then viewed as
| an egalitarian and liberating technology, it's pretty rich for
| their intellectual descendants to blame "conservatives" for
| their mistake.
| coding123 wrote:
| The car industry was back then - well, moving fast and
| breaking things. Maybe progressives today should be a little
| more conservative.
|
| I bet that in 45 years the conservatives are going to be the
| ones arguing to keep some social networks alive and the
| progressives will be pursuing closing them down because they
| ruined society. (or something like that just as comical)
| kshacker wrote:
| [deleted]
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Conservative is better described as resistant to quick changes
| rather than an affinity for some historical point in time.
| Though "funny, isn't it :D" political quips are kind of boring
| anyways.
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| dalbasal wrote:
| Idk if that's a _better_ definition. It 's better if what you
| are describing by "conservative" is a fairly narrow Anglo-
| American Conservative Ideology. Influential, sure. But not
| most of conservativeism, even within America or the UK.
|
| I dont think "resistance to (specifically) quick change"
| accurately describes how most conservatives or non
| conservatives use that term, not the political/social groups
| generally see as conservative.
|
| Affinity for "old ways" is absolutely part of what
| "conservative" is. Conservative movements aren't about a
| gradual move towards atheism or whatnot. They're about
| maintaining such traditional beliefs forever, as a rule.
| k__ wrote:
| To me, conservativism is just cherry picking.
| olalonde wrote:
| > It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways
| are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you
| restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians
| taking precedence over cars.
|
| Let's leave partisan politics out of HN, shall we? Plus, the
| "conservatives" you are referring to have never believed that
| "old ways are the best ways" in relation to technology. They're
| not making some kind of exception for cars.
|
| > The radical experiment of constructing our society entirely
| around single occupancy internal combustion engine vehicles has
| failed. Lets go back to the old ways.
|
| What does that even mean? Ban non-electric cars? Ban all cars?
| What old ways?
| ycombinete wrote:
| _"I 've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions
| to technologies:
|
| 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and
| ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
|
| 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and
| thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can
| probably get a career in it.
|
| 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the
| natural order of things."_
|
| -- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
| actionablefiber wrote:
| I'm not sure this applies here. Urbanism seems to be taking
| strong root in the popular imagination today, especially
| among young people, who are increasingly saying "screw cars,
| give us trains and buses and bikes and let us walk around
| town."
|
| And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones who
| want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development and
| transportation that became dominant during their lives,
| possibly arguing to hot-swap the ICEs with EVs while keeping
| all the new highways and sprawling developments, and young
| people want to revert to the patterns of development from
| over a century ago with car-free infrastructure.
| rayiner wrote:
| > And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones
| who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development
| and transportation that became dominant during their lives
|
| Even in 1960 80% of households had a car:
| https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-
| trans.... Even in 1925 it was over half. There isn't a
| generation in American history where most people lived in a
| city and took public transit. In the 1920s and 1930s when
| that was common for people living in cities, half the
| country lived in rural places.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| You say this as if the only places that can be walkable
| are metropolitan downtowns. Small towns and villages used
| to be pleasant and walkable too. Many had single-line
| streetcars.
|
| There has never been a time in US history where the
| majority of people living in rural counties were farmers.
| The USDA estimates that the population of rural counties
| who actually work in agriculture peaked at around 40% in
| 1950, it's now more like 14%. Most people in rural areas
| live in towns, and they shouldn't be forced to own cars
| either.
| b3morales wrote:
| I always liked the idea of
|
| - live in a town
|
| - keep car in a garage in the town
|
| - retrieve car only when you need to go somewhere
| _outside_ the town
| rayiner wrote:
| This is totally impractical at scale. In most small
| towns, you need to go outside town routinely, and
| possibly daily. Even if you live and work in town, your
| kid may go to a high school or your spouse may work one
| town over. And once everyone is already paying for a car,
| it doesn't make much sense to ask them to also pay extra
| taxes for public transport within town.
| rainsford wrote:
| Cars cost money to drive, so there is value in not making
| every trip a car trip even if you needed to buy a car
| anyways. And that's ignoring the costs of building your
| town exclusively around car travel. Even in places where
| you regularly need to use a car, there is value in
| balancing things so you don't have to use a car every
| single time you leave your house.
| rayiner wrote:
| And public transit also costs money to operate and ride.
| The point is that your proposal doubles up on capital
| costs.
| rainsford wrote:
| I don't think there is any free lunch here. The more
| trips that are made by car, and the longer those trips
| are, the more the community also needs to invest in
| capital costs like road and parking infrastructure (which
| also comes with a non-trivial opportunity cost in
| downtown areas). And the more you drive the sooner you'll
| have to replace your car, incurring more frequent capital
| costs.
|
| Of course alternatives aren't free either and sometimes
| they may not be worth it. But I disagree with the idea
| that it obviously doesn't make economic sense to invest
| in any alternatives once you've purchased a car.
| rayiner wrote:
| This is pretty ignorant about what "towns" in rural
| America are like. My wife went to high school in a "city"
| in Iowa that's big enough to be classified as an "urban
| area" by the census bureau.
|
| The town is still tiny and walkable, but having a car is
| essential because you can't feasibly organize your life
| around staying in town. My wife didn't live on any of the
| surrounding farms, but her best friend did, so without a
| car she couldn't visit her friend. Half the kids at her
| high school were from the neighboring town (neither town
| was big enough to have a high school for themselves), so
| without cars those kids couldn't visit each other. And
| kids in the other town couldn't visit the Pizza Ranch or
| the movie theater, which were in my wife's town. There
| was no mall or major retailer in town, so on the weekends
| the kids would cajole some adult or older teenager into
| driving them to Sioux Falls South Dakota, which is about
| an hour away. That is also where the nearest Costco is.
| Back before cars, people in those rural towns were cut
| off from modern amenities. They made their clothes at
| home, didn't buy mass market consumer products, etc. Most
| of them don't want to go back to living like that.
|
| And in reality, it wasn't practical to organize life
| around the town alone even back then. Before cars--even
| in 1920 more than half of American households had a car--
| they rode horses to access stores and amenities in
| neighboring towns.
| kipchak wrote:
| I don't quite follow, is everyone who is rural but not a
| farmer live in a town?
| drstewart wrote:
| >Urbanism seems to be taking strong root in the popular
| imagination today, especially among young people,
|
| That's #2
|
| >And in this matter, the "old fuddy-duddies" are the ones
| who want to keep the new, aberrant patterns of development
| and transportation that became dominant during their lives,
|
| That's #3
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Aren't you rather confirming that Adams quote? Young people
| want change, old people want to keep it the way it's always
| been (in their lifetime).
| prpl wrote:
| FWIW there's not a whole lot of people old enough to remember
| 1920.
| lettergram wrote:
| > It is funny how it is the "conservative" supposedly "old ways
| are the best ways" people who would absolutely riot if you
| restored the order that we had before 1920 with pedestrians
| taking precedence over cars.
|
| It's not funny at all how condescending almost hateful people
| this comment is to "conservative" viewpoints. Quite an
| assumption you make.
|
| Rural (>80% conservative) populations cannot function without
| cars. So yes, they get concerned when government makes it more
| difficult / expensive to have cars. That said, I don't think
| most have an opinion on city transportation. They take trains
| and buses like everyone else from what I've seen.
|
| That said, this article is a fluff piece. For context, these
| cities had a massive amount of pollution from the horse poop.
| The argument to allow vehicles was literally to solve the horse
| issues. More than that, it was also argued in a free society
| everyone should be free to move as they wish. Horses weren't
| even mentioned in this article...
| periphrasis wrote:
| Rural areas account for 14% of the US population. Why should
| they have veto power over the urban planning and
| transportation policy in metro areas?
|
| And I'm sorry you feel that the pro-coup, pro-Dobbs, pro-
| demonizing-gay-people party isn't as well liked as you feel
| they're entitled to be.
| tpmoney wrote:
| >Rural areas account for 14% of the US population. Why
| should they have veto power over the urban planning and
| transportation policy in metro areas?
|
| They shouldn't. And neither should the urban planners have
| veto power of the planning and transportation policy of
| rural areas. Yet in my experience, these conversations
| never stop at "I want my urban area to be less car
| focused". It always seems to extend to "I can't wait until
| we ban cars everywhere"
| lettergram wrote:
| > And I'm sorry you feel that the pro-coup, pro-Dobbs, pro-
| demonizing-gay-people party isn't as well liked as you feel
| they're entitled to be.
|
| Lol wtf?
|
| I'm saying I think it's wrong to assume rural folk care
| what people in the city want to do. Most rural people are
| pro public transit that I've met. They just need cars where
| they are at, so they don't like the idea of regulating it
| heavily such that they MUST move to a city.
|
| > Rural areas account for 14% of the US population
|
| Well over 70% of people need cars to transport themselves
| and others. Public transit is not practical in the suburbs
| either. Electric cars might and busses work to a degree,
| but the overwhelming majority of people need vehicles. At
| least based on the current suburban layout.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Rural (>80% conservative) populations cannot function
| without cars.
|
| Why do you believe that? Nothing prevents small towns to have
| good public transport, especially between closely related
| towns. In my country, which still has a good proportion of
| the population living in villages, it is very common for the
| villages to have small "buses" (10-20-seat or so) driving
| around between common destinations between different parts of
| the village or neighboring villages. These often have
| somewhat informal routes, since people who use them typically
| know each other and the driver. Of course, getting kids to
| school and back can be achieved by similar means.
|
| Then, even relatively small villages often have a train
| station, which even if offering infrequent service, is
| typically enough to transport people to a nearby town or city
| and back - especially for work.
|
| Also, people in these communities are often working in
| agriculture, so they do have access to larger vehicles that
| they control or own for the more infrequent situations where
| they need to transport larger payloads that would be
| impossible or too hard to transport in buses/trains.
| lettergram wrote:
| I'm surprised this doesn't mention that part of the reason cities
| supported the adoption of cars was the fact city streets were
| covered in horse poop... you also had to feed, house, and care
| for the horses.
|
| Frankly, this article feels like a puff piece.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| In the 70s and 80s urban planners looked to the US for
| inspiration. Let's turn this medieval square into a giant parking
| lot! Pave over the canals and turn them into roads! Giant 10 lane
| highways cutting straight through the city!
|
| They've now spent billions undoing the future of the past.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Not Just Bikes made an interesting video on the thankfully-
| avoided plan to build a US-style highway system in Amsterdam:
| https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI
| codefreeordie wrote:
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I suggest watching Not Just Bikes' other video on the topic
| of walkability. https://youtu.be/F4kmDxcfR48
| _dain_ wrote:
| that "freedom of movement" was exclusively for people in
| cars, and came at the expense of the freedom of movement of
| everyone else (not to mention safety).
|
| besides, it's not like you can't still drive in the
| netherlands.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| The goal of the destruction of the efficient road network
| is to make travel of more than 100 miles or so away from
| one's home too time-consuming, difficult, or expensive to
| be undertaken frequently or easily.
|
| Just like the effort to eliminate air travel for the non-
| ruling classes is designed to make travel more than about
| 500-1000 miles from home too difficult, time-consuming,
| and expensive for the average person to do so more than
| once or twice in a lifetime.
| _dain_ wrote:
| what are you basing this on? the netherlands has a system
| of high speed motorways, along with rapid inter-city rail
| and a dense network of cycle routes. cars, trains, bikes,
| buses, are all viable ways of getting around, both within
| cities and between them.
|
| why do you think the only worthwhile part of the
| transport network is the road network? and why do you
| think the only worthwhile road users are motorists?
|
| it seems like you think nobody should have any choice
| except to travel by motor car. lack of choice doesn't
| seem like freedom to me.
| BB5E7E990A84 wrote:
| The parent poster is a devotee of, let's say,
| _hypotheses_ about small secretive groups with outsized
| influence on societal decisionmaking. Best to disengage.
| [deleted]
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Oh look it's Sunday so we need another escapee from /r/fuckcars
| on HN.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember in Sixth Grade (in Maryland), our teacher telling us
| that there was still a law on the state books, that said (I can't
| remember what he said, precisely, but this is the gist):
|
| If a car is going in one direction on a road, and there is a
| horse (I don't think he specified whether or not it was
| harnessed, but I'll bet it needed to be in harness) coming the
| opposite direction, the car needed to pull over, and yield to the
| horse.
|
| If the horse refused to pass the car, then it was incumbent upon
| the car owner to (in escalating order):
|
| 1) Turn off the engine.
|
| 2) Cover the car in a blanket.
|
| 3) Dismantle the car, piece by piece, until the horse passes.
|
| I could see a cranky old farmer having fun with that law.
| woweoe wrote:
| I usually say that walking is the most simple/easy form of
| transportation. Why is walking to another room of your house
| simple, but walking anyway in the outside world hard? Driving is
| basically a second level of complexity that means your focusing
| on driving rather than sleeping, working or playing. You walk in
| a mall and a park for example.
|
| I grew up and prefer a lifestyle where the car exists but you
| have multiple options of public transport. It's easier to be able
| to take a metro train under traffic jams and buildings to where
| you need to go, or a bus after a night out drinking. Driving is
| just a lot of stress and work.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Why is walking to another room simple but walking in the
| outside world hard?
|
| I'm pretty sure if houses were so big it took 2 hours to walk
| from one side to the other people would drive in them. Best not
| to ask rhetorical questions with obvious answers.
|
| "Why are people happy to cycle to the shops but not to cycle to
| Australia for holidays?"
|
| "Why are electric toothbrushes so affordable but electric cars
| are still the domain of the wealthy?"
| asdff wrote:
| Most people aren't going to australia with their car, they
| are actually only going under 3 miles with their car:
| https://insideevs.com/news/585399/majority-daily-car-
| trips-l...
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean people don't put up with those costs and complexity for
| no reason.
|
| Carrying stuff and long distances are the big ones for me day
| to day. My nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, my friends
| 19 miles away, the nearest Costco is 5 miles away, IKEA is 11
| miles away.
|
| Just last weekend I rented a small venue for a birthday party
| and had to transport about 100 lbs of food, drinks, serveware,
| decorations, and alcohol 18 miles of highway.
|
| The weekend before I was camping at a festival and again the
| car was packed with coolers, tents, and clothes. That was a 56
| mile trip.
|
| Getting to my airport is 2.5 hours by public transport or 20
| minutes by car.
| woweoe wrote:
| I currently live in Japan but I have lived in major cities of
| the West as well.
|
| For big items the locals will usually do home delivery, and
| for groceries the norm in most of Europe and Asia is to buy
| them every few days in smaller amounts when you need them
| (since centuries ago) and therefore you do not need the car.
|
| For the camping you would rent a car. I said that the car was
| still something I expected to be able to use. Switzerland for
| example is famous for its car journey holidays but most
| people use public transport.
| rainsford wrote:
| I don't think most people are arguing that you as an
| individual should switch to walking or public transit without
| anything else changing. The situations you describe are the
| way they are because we've spent decades heavily investing in
| making cars the most convenient or often only option. The
| suggestion is that we should consider making different
| choices going forward so people have other options.
| Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like
| public transit don't have to suck.
|
| I also think there's a misinterpretation that alternatives to
| cars means nobody should drive _anywhere_. For something like
| going camping, it 's hard to argue that a car doesn't make
| the most sense. But the point is to make it so you don't have
| to drive everywhere for everything and can save the driving
| for when it really is the best option.
| kipchak wrote:
| >Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like
| public transit don't have to suck.
|
| I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people
| who want to live in a rural area to do so. Towns and cities
| are great candidates for centralization, but when you have
| a low population over a large area you can only justify for
| example one grocery store, and spreading public transport
| over a large (and likely low income) area is prohibitively
| expensive. having everyone live closer together effectively
| solves both problems, but most people in these areas either
| don't want to live in cities or can't afford them, so
| having a inexpensive car and driving is the cheaper option.
| rainsford wrote:
| > I think this is hard to do while also allowing for
| people who want to live in a rural area to do so.
|
| There's no reason it has to be some one size fits all
| solution. Investing in transit options other than cars in
| cities and towns where it makes sense doesn't mean trying
| to force light rail to work in rural areas or whatever.
| The problem is actually the opposite, where we've set
| things up such that the transit option that makes sense
| for rural areas is the norm everywhere.
| ZekeSulastin wrote:
| "I also think there's a misinterpretation that alternatives
| to cars means nobody should drive anywhere"
|
| From reading the comments on this thread and the other
| regularly posted ones, I don't think that's a
| misinterpretation at all.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > I mean people don't put up with those costs and complexity
| for no reason.
|
| Consider the cause and effect here. You live far from
| everything _because_ cars make that possible. The world after
| cars became designed for cars. There are advantages and
| disadvantages to car society but to participate at all as a
| baseline member of society you need a car. Part of owning a
| car is just recovering what functionality you would have in a
| world that wasn 't designed for cars.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| The area you live in was built to force you to own a car. It
| is not an accident, or a naturally occurring phenomenon, that
| it is intolerably inconvenient and dangerous for you to get
| around any other way.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| > "The pedestrian," explained a Brooklyn man, "as an American
| citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior
| constitutional rights." Custom and the Anglo-American legal
| tradition confirmed pedestrians' inalienable right to the street.
|
| > In 1913 the New York Court of Appeals observed that it was
| "common knowledge" that the "great size and weight" of
| automobiles could make them "a most serious danger," and so the
| responsibility for preserving the safety of the streets lay
| overwhelmingly with motorists.
|
| Any legal researchers or history buffs out there know of any
| other precedents at appeal (or higher) siding with the rights of
| pedestrians over motorists? Did the issue ever make the US
| Supreme Court?
|
| Its always intrigued me that arbitrary rules (like driving on the
| right) have such enforceable weight of law behind them (thank
| goodness), while other rules are more lax. For example, is the
| customary tradition for the US (along with Liberia and Myanmar)
| to use imperial (rather than metric) measurements set in legal
| stone somewhere? I know that NASA and their contractors all use
| metric [0]. What requires a custom or tradition to be legally
| defined?
|
| [0] https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
| nasa/2007/0...
| foreigner wrote:
| I love this amazing illustration showing streets in our society
| from a pedestrian's perspective:
| https://i.insider.com/59036a187dea725c008b50b2?width=1400&fo...
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| if it means we get back the all the other features and attitudes
| from that era, sure, I'd love to go back to that.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| politelemon wrote:
| Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards
| walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
|
| But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this
| privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become
| the norm.
|
| But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was
| it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of
| a problem? I've been to towns with trams in the middle of roads
| and it's normal for people to just walk around it or near the
| tracks without problem. But I am a stupid tourist so I kept my
| distance.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Indeed it wasn't always this way. And this mindset plagued more
| countries. The Netherlands narrowly avoided it:
| https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI
| masklinn wrote:
| > Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards
| walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was
| wrong.
|
| Couldn't have been since US cities (at least on the east coast)
| predate the very existence of cars.
|
| > But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have
| this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has
| become the norm.
|
| Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the
| convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians
| were alienated from the street surface.
|
| > But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess,
| was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose
| much of a problem?
|
| Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked
| (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of
| a car, especially as mass increases). And streetcars generally
| keep to pretty low speed (bike range) in pedestrian areas.
|
| You can see what it looks like in low-speed / pedestrian
| streets of europe, where streetcars are pretty common e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the
| convenience of car owners and the car industry, and
| pedestrians were alienated from the street surface.
|
| In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be
| nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups
| with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
|
| America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car
| companies or other special interests, it got to be car-
| centric because cars work very well for our use case.
| Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have
| expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be
| nearly a perfect circle.
|
| In the 10s and 20s where the phrase was popularized by
| automobile interests in the US the car ownership rate was
| ~8%.
| masklinn wrote:
| > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be
| nearly a perfect circle.
|
| Nonsense. The ability to walk doesn't a pedestrian make" in
| the context of the discussion, and having to walk from the
| parking lot to the store and back isn't a pedestrian
| activity.
|
| > Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting
| interests isn't helpful.
|
| I didn't decide of the historical events of a hundred years
| ago mate.
|
| > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious
| car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-
| centric because cars work very well for our use case.
| Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle)
| have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a
| century.
|
| Even worse, completely ahistorical, nonsense. Long-term
| infrastructural decisions are rarely decided directly by
| voters (as Robert Moses knew and leveraged), and
| furthermore can often be swayed by short terms concerns.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be
| nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing
| groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
|
| Only in an environment where public infrastructure is
| designed to require a car for social participation. The
| venn-diagram is substantially less circular when public
| infrastructure accommodates and encourages other modes of
| transport, like walking and metros.
|
| > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious
| car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-
| centric because cars work very well for our use case.
| Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle)
| have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a
| century.
|
| Again, only true if you ignore the wider context. US
| infrastructure policy for the past 50 years has basically
| made car ownership an absolute necessity. It doesn't matter
| what one's personal preference is, if you wish to
| participate in US society, you must own a car.
|
| For concrete examples of these policies, look at US zoning
| policy. It basically requires that only single family homes
| are built, and makes it almost impossible to build new
| dense housing. Despite the fact that historical sense
| housing in walkable areas is currently some of the most
| expensive real estate in the US, showing clear and strong
| demand for such housing.
|
| Further US road policy prioritises automotive speed above
| all other factors. Pedestrian accessibility, or
| accessibility in general, pedestrian safety, is given
| little to no thought at all. An approach that is now
| rearing its ugly head in the US pedestrian fatality rate,
| which is far high than almost any other developed nation.
| vel0city wrote:
| It's crazy how all the zoning policies were hand crafted
| by the General Motors board of directors. Oh wait, they
| weren't, they were decided by the municipalities.
|
| US zoning policies are the way they are because that's
| the way the people in those cities wanted to live. Have
| you been to a city council meeting in a US city where
| they've discussed zoning changes? Tons of local people
| will come out _against_ denser housing and _against_
| public transit and _against_ protected bike lanes, and
| then there 's usually only the builder from out of town
| or the transit authority arguing for it. Single family
| housing in far flung suburbs is built out so much because
| that's what a lot of voters want.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| No, it's what established land-owners want.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious
| car companies or other special interests
|
| Why make up a history when there's a real one? There were
| real people that did real things to push a reluctant
| culture in a particular way. I think you're using
| Panglossian reasoning here.
| acdha wrote:
| > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be
| nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing
| groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
|
| I live in a city where almost 40% of households do not own
| cars but our public space has been massively reconfigured
| to prioritize car owners, not just with traffic lanes and
| signal priority but also huge subsidies for car storage at
| the expense of other potential use of public space.
|
| Despite this, any time someone tries to make something
| better the public planning process will inevitably have car
| owners loudly complaining about being discriminated against
| if something will remove even a single parking space or
| suggest that they pay market rates.
| otikik wrote:
| > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious
| car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-
| centric because cars work very well for our use case
|
| Orr it could actually be that they paid for advertisements
| and politicians just to do that. If you don't want to read
| about it, here's a video that explains it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo
| mattmcknight wrote:
| > Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the
| convenience of car owners and the car industry
|
| Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians? It's not a good
| idea to walk on the train tracks either. It seems like the
| "entire concept" of not walking in front of heavy, fast
| moving objects may predate automobiles.
| ska wrote:
| > Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians?
|
| The pedestrians were there first though, and it's not clear
| how to balance the needs. After all we do have the concept
| of isolated car travel for safety, it's called a freeway.
| Much like a rail system, they are useful and pretty safe
| for point-to-point travel mostly outside densely populate
| areas.
|
| The contentious bit is that all other surface level
| infrastructure should be primarily shaped to fit the needs
| of cars at the expense of everything else. For a not-so-
| practical example, if city traffic was strictly limited to
| 10mph or less, vehicle pedestrian interactions would be
| much more safe...
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| The difference is that train tracks are designed primarily
| for trains. Before cars existed, streets were primarily for
| people and horses. Cars were, as the title of the article
| suggests, intruders into this space. The push to popularize
| the term jaywalking was an effort to reframe streets as a
| space for cars first, where it's the responsibility of
| pedestrians to stay out of their way rather than the other
| way around.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Yet sidewalks have existed for much longer than cars.
| watwut wrote:
| No. If primary goal is safety, you draw crossings and
| traffic lights. You create laws that give priority to
| pedestrians attempting to cross where is no sidewalk. You
| lower the speed inside cities.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians?
|
| No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the
| pedestrians. It made collisions between cars and
| pedestrians the fault of the pedestrian by default, and
| excluded them from the road surface.
|
| > It's not a good idea to walk on the train tracks either.
|
| "High speed" train tracks take very little space compared
| to the road network criss-crossing cities, and thus the
| exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
|
| Pedestrians are not excluded from tram tracks.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| >> Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians?
|
| >No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the
| pedestrians.
|
| This does not mean that it is not for their safety.
|
| >"High speed" train tracks take very little space
| compared to the road network criss-crossing cities, and
| thus the exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
|
| Train tracks don't take you to as many places as roads.
|
| > Pedestrians are not excluded from tram tracks
|
| Yet, they are expected to avoid them and the tram has
| priority, and many tram routes are protected from
| pedestrian crossing by barriers. Pedestrians aren't
| excluded from roads either, it is just that safe crossing
| points have been established. I know in many places, such
| as Wien, trams are not obligated to stop at crosswalks if
| people are waiting.
|
| It's not that important, but the idea that "entire
| concept of jaywalking is for the convenience of car
| owners" is really not accurate. No need to overstate that
| to make your other points.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| >> No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the
| pedestrians. > This does not mean that it is not for
| their safety.
|
| Imagine a car entering a shopping mall: it will go at a
| very slow pace as it's in a place primarily for
| pedestrians, and hitting kids running around will be 100%
| the car's fault it was going any faster.
|
| Putting the burden on the car gives more safety to
| pedestrian. The reverse (putting the blame on the people
| for entering car's way) doesn't help in that respect.
|
| PS: for instance entering train tracks is not
| "jaywalking", and I think you're focusing on a similar
| aspect, but for freeways and car dedicated roads ?
| tpmoney wrote:
| Most right of way systems specify that the smaller more
| nimble participant is required to yield in conflicting
| right of way scenarios. Pedestrians yield to bikes, bikes
| yield to cars, cars yield to trains. On the water too, a
| swimmer yields to a row boat, which yields to a jet ski
| which yields to a motor boat which yields to a yacht
| which yields to a cargo ship which yields to a carrier.
| It's more a recognition of the laws of physics than it is
| a exclusionary practice.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The point is to flip those rules in areas like cities.
|
| In the centres of many European cities, cars must yield
| to pedestrians, or are excluded completely.
| avianlyric wrote:
| One would think the deterrent of being hit by a fast moving
| object would be enough. I'm not sure how arresting or
| fining people improves their safety or welfare.
| kfarr wrote:
| It doesn't improve a pedestrians welfare, instead it
| removes responsibility and legal liability from the
| driver.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Apparently it isn't. We have to build barriers to prevent
| people from running into traffic because not even the law
| is enough to discourage it.
| b3morales wrote:
| I believe the argument is that it may create danger for
| other people as well. For example, an oncoming car may
| swerve to avoid striking the pedestrian and hit something
| else. I'm not sure that's a very likely scenario,
| however.
| scrollaway wrote:
| It's a bit less straightforward than that.
|
| "Jaywalking" as a term is derogatory; you can look up the
| etymology, if it were invented today it would be called
| "stupidwalking" or some such.
|
| It was pushed hard by car companies, and they lobbied to
| make cars the primary user of the road within cities. So a
| pedestrian choosing to cross would by default be in the
| wrong, unless in the "correct place", instead of the
| opposite.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| Perhaps the specific term, but not the "entire concept".
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The difference with train tracks is that they have been
| specifically constructed for the purpose of transporting
| heavy machinery. By not being allowed to access them by
| foot you are not losing any right that you previously
| enjoyed. Roads and streets, on the other hand, predate
| automobiles by millennia.
|
| Hence the philosophy that is followed in the UK, where
| there is no such thing as a "jaywalking" infraction. People
| have had a right of free passage along public highways
| (English law definition [0]) and general rights of way
| (Scotland [1]) for centuries, and this right cannot simply
| be taken away just because now there happen to be heavy
| fast moving objects that are allowed to use some of them.
| You are free to walk on and across the road at any point
| and time whatsoever, as long as you do not cause a danger
| to other users.
|
| Note that this doesn't apply to motorways ([?]freeways)
| though, as these were expressly constructed to carry
| automobile vehicles and are therefore legitimately of
| limited access.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_in_England_and_Wales
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_way#Scotland
| tzs wrote:
| >> But the roads would have been used for something, at a
| guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these
| didn't pose much of a problem?
|
| > Much less so, horses would not trample people unless
| spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration
| or speed of a car, especially as mass increases).
|
| That's what one would expect, but surprisingly that might not
| be the case.
|
| I haven't been able to find a lot of articles about
| pedestrian deaths from horses but those I did find tell of
| rates comparable to cars.
|
| 1900 pedestrian horse fatality rate in NYC for example were
| higher than the 2003 car rate [1]. In England and Wales cars
| are more deadly than horses were but not by much [2].
|
| The BMJ article notes that direct fatality rate comparisons
| might not be appropriate because treatments have greatly
| improved since the horse and buggy days. Horse rates would
| likely be lower if current treatments had been available back
| then, and car rates would likely be higher if we only had
| 1900s medical systems.
|
| [1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-
| deaths-p...
|
| [2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-
| horse...
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Ouch, so US towns and cities didn 't always be hostile towards
| walking._
|
| Well, the article is more saying the average person in cities
| was car hostile but it notes that authorities starting trying
| to force people to adapt to cars quite early by enforcing "jay-
| walking" ordinances and similar things.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I was in Birmingham for a couple of weeks, the squares and
| streets with trams (not busses, taxis, and other nonsense like
| oxford street in London) are great -- the tram is only every
| few minutes, you can easily hear it, you know exactly where
| it's going and where it stops, and through the pedestrian area
| it travels slowly.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Surely it would have been difficult to be hostile towards
| walking at a time when walking was the only mode of transport
| readily available to most people?
| aqme28 wrote:
| > My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
|
| On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful
| walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up
| until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking
| through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just
| despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be
| this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been
| doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes
| first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems
| undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a
| decade.
|
| For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely
| separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and
| tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that
| are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads
| dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner
| Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your
| destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive
| _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city.
| And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids
| incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's
| far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The
| bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get
| preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have
| double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to
| switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if
| you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the
| light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light.
| That's not a coincidence.
|
| Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and
| requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you
| smear it out over 50 years.
|
| However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just
| as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in
| The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and
| biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great,
| Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more
| doable.
|
| Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no
| major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has
| giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city
| center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen
| does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to
| bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical
| divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if
| you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all.
| Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a
| painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum
| necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see
| elsewhere.
|
| A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra.
| Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.
|
| And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is
| enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that
| Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on
| an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming
| non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you
| may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_,
| by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.
|
| Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They
| tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room
| for this:
|
| 1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn
| right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing
| 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road
| congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular
| destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to
| exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up
| with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic
| traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic).
| That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely
| make a dent.
|
| 2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane
| roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an
| 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the
| access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A
| ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have
| to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks
| will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you
| wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place
| look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch
| from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one
| from the major intersections which are now miles apart.
| Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the
| main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection
| that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it
| from there.
|
| 3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the
| divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now
| be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between
| the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees :
| You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the
| exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters.
| You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started
| with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to
| play with.
|
| It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally
| multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways
| (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight
| traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if
| you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do
| that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike
| traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't,
| replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of
| the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these
| bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is
| an order of magnitude cheaper.
|
| Note that the primary problem is that the popular target
| exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the
| traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even:
| It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option
| (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address
| the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra
| to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of
| the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic'
| will easily do that. So, this WILL work.
|
| And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
| ska wrote:
| >Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while,
|
| "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second
| best time in today"
|
| Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did,
| honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in
| city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes
| quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just
| prioritizing differently.
|
| The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do
| this without making car use less convenient, because for
| many decades the majority of planning and builds have been
| dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least,
| not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam
| had a head start to begin with because the old city always
| was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
| msrenee wrote:
| If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the
| next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going
| to have them backed up past the exit on the main road.
|
| The reason no one has implemented this system is that it
| wouldn't work.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam
| made?
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-
| car-loving-city-in...
|
| There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht
| as well:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-
| the-d...
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I love this optimism. I've long held that I would move to a
| bike only city if it was in my current country (USA).
| Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive
| but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but
| much more political. I'm not sure which is harder of the two.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Start local. Your local city counselors are generally
| receptive to feedback from their community (in my
| experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not
| to get as much feedback about local issues that people care
| about. Write a letter, even email, and you'll be surprised.
| Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same.
|
| You then can live in a bike friendly city.
| jcpst wrote:
| I second this. And here's proof it's possible. It took a
| while, but we now have a part of the city that is
| designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/gover
| nment/departments___divisions/co...
| eropple wrote:
| Biking's not my thing, but it's telling that surveys in
| the local MA area sometimes now say " _aside from
| protected bike lanes_ , what would you most like to
| see?".
|
| It is an indication that walk-and-bike interests are
| making good progress, and I'm glad to see it.
| kqr wrote:
| On the other hand, that's exactly how I would phrase the
| question if I wanted to prime the survey respondent to
| get a result biased toward freedoms for unprotected road
| users.
|
| There's no good reason to phrase the question like that
| instead of filter the answers after the fact. The only
| reason is to get people thinking in a certain direction.
| eropple wrote:
| ...they do that because if they don't, "protected bike
| lanes" will be the only thing they hear, and in Cambridge
| etc. the plans are in the works (slowly, but in the
| works) to implement them. They're looking for additional
| things, not the thing that's already in the works but
| takes time and the progress is non-obvious 'til it's
| done.
| kqr wrote:
| Then the item should say something to the effect of "You
| can make more than one suggestion." or even more
| concretely, "Please suggest your top five, or fewer if
| you can't think of that many."
| nivenkos wrote:
| Aren't there some student cities, etc. like that there?
|
| Even Seattle and NYC had parts that were very walkable,
| especially compared to LA.
| aqme28 wrote:
| NYC fully meets the definition of walkable.
| woweoe wrote:
| In Tokyo it is possible to just randomly walk out onto
| most streets and expect cars to work around you. There
| are obviously a number of busy roads that would be
| dangerous but cars will still stop (for example if you
| were to misjudge crossing a street) and of course the
| highways are off limits (but there was a case recently of
| a man standing in the middle of a highway redirecting
| traffic who was hit by autopilot telsa).
| petre wrote:
| > there was a case recently of a man standing in the
| middle of a highway redirecting traffic who was hit by
| autopilot telsa
|
| Slef driving would probably make the car problem worse.
| de_keyboard wrote:
| It's nowhere near Amsterdam I'm afraid. Biking in NYC is
| pretty scary and vast amounts of public space are given
| over to car parking.
|
| (BTW, I am lumping in biking with "walkable". A better
| term is "active travel")
| petre wrote:
| Yup. Except for some dedicated cycleways, not bike
| friendly at all. Unless you have a deathwish, like this
| guy:
|
| https://youtu.be/WyV894c8oqI
| chitowneats wrote:
| As a pedestrian and cyclist in NYC, "fully" is not
| accurate.
| paulgb wrote:
| I'd like to see less permanent scaffolding, and a better
| trash management system so that it doesn't take room from
| pedestrians (not to mention the hygienic benefits). And
| the city could crack down more on the drivers who blow
| through red lights or stop across crosswalks.
|
| But it's hard for me to think of a city I'd rather walk
| between to random points in.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > And the city could crack down more on the drivers who
| blow through red lights or stop across crosswalks.
|
| Based on my recent visit to New York, the main traffic
| issue I saw was really bad light timing. This trains both
| pedestrians and drivers to ignore the traffic signals.
| chitowneats wrote:
| > But it's hard for me to think of a city I'd rather walk
| between to random points in.
|
| In the US? Sure. Now imagine a place where there are
| hundreds, thousands of cities that walkable or better,
| and you don't have to be a gazillionaire to live in one.
| pibechorro wrote:
| So does the majority of South Florida, every street has a
| sidewalk, you can walk across bridges, highways, etc. One
| of the best in the US.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Florida is the deadliest state, and South Florida is
| actually home to some of the highest pedestrian per
| capita death rates in the country.
| https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-
| design/#custom-t...
| chitowneats wrote:
| Only Americans would consider South Florida "walkable".
| bluedino wrote:
| The 90 degrees and humidity make it very unwalkable
| bobthepanda wrote:
| That and all the pedestrian deaths. Florida is the second
| most dangerous state for pedestrians.
| https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-
| design/#custom-t...
| amrocha wrote:
| If one of the best in the US means you have to walk
| across highways that sucks
| watwut wrote:
| I assumed it means there are either frequent bridges or
| tunnels that gets you to ither side of highway.
| amrocha wrote:
| Why is there a highway in the middle of an area people
| are supposedly walking in
| watwut wrote:
| Cause there are houses on both sides.
| emsixteen wrote:
| You don't see the issue here?
| whateveracct wrote:
| Seattle proper is very walkable. I lived in Belltown for
| years and it was great how I could walk to pretty much
| anywhere in the city I wanted. Queen Anne and downtown
| were very accessible. I suppose I was never a big Capital
| Hill-goer so the longer walk there wasn't relevant.
|
| And that wasn't even the student part.
| Rediscover wrote:
| Belltown resident for decades chiming in. It really is
| extremely walkable, including to Pioneer Square and Pike
| Place Market as well as locations the previous post
| mentioned.
|
| Bell St. is a park (albeit paved for vehicles), and it
| finally received signage about local-only car access:
|
| https://mcusercontent.com/b6749cc9930b55a313056721e/image
| s/2...
|
| That image is from the latest Belltown United newsletter
| - https://www.belltownunited.org/
|
| I'm a proud Belltown Community Council
| supporter/participant.
| teucris wrote:
| Pedestrians play second fiddle to cars in Seattle as a
| whole. The walkable areas of Seattle are great, but they
| are a small portion of the city and are poorly connected.
| Some very active parts of the city have 4 or 5 lane
| arterials cutting through them with cars completely
| ignoring cross signals and pedestrians. Other areas lack
| sidewalks altogether.
| Rediscover wrote:
| See the "Lake to Bay" project, connecting a decent
| walking path from Lake Union to Elliot Bay. It will
| involve crossing streets. It will feature additional
| benches/seating and improved lighting. The initial
| proposal by a local resident was extremely well done.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| That's the very small walkable part.
|
| Go to SoDo, or parts of South Seattle, or North Seattle,
| and it's much worse, and that's just "Seattle proper."
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yeah, in the US (from a distance), the political hurdle
| seems to be the hardest. In terms of actual effort, it's
| definitely possible to make big strides: https://twitter.co
| m/z_a_c_h_k_a_t_z/status/14646977114422067...
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any
| expense, especially here in America where the car-centric
| attitude is so deeply embedded.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would
| cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly.
| Those two things determine what information Americans get
| exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets
| regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half
| t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a
| place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not
| love them?
|
| Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-
| quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles
| between us and a lot of better things.
| nerdponx wrote:
| On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally
| disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable
| than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to
| worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Where do you get your data from?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Anecdotal but firsthand.
| mancerayder wrote:
| I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of
| a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and
| disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases
| further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
| ska wrote:
| I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just
| doesn't match my experience at all.
|
| Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is,
| I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of
| the metro area.
| woile wrote:
| Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by
| every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think
| they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a
| problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
| xg15 wrote:
| True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more
| interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws
| and culture in the US so radically that we got from the
| pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation.
|
| Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a
| sense.
| abirch wrote:
| I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs
| to the cities, but then people can use public transportation
| and bikes in the cities.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Self driving cars will remove barriers (ie. licensing, age,
| ability, cost(if they're taxis)) that prevent people from
| driving and so it'll result in MORE cars on the road.
|
| If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars
| is one of the worst developments that could occur.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train
| stations that take them to the city.
| trothamel wrote:
| Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving
| a car.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0
| https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-
| times....
| [deleted]
| seadan83 wrote:
| In the US because roads are built to maximize vehicle
| throughput rather than throughput of people. The former
| would have 2 lanes with cars and buses using all the road
| space. The latter would have a massive traffic jam in one
| lane and a clear land for buses. The buses carrying 30x
| the capacity moving freely is more efficient for moving
| people.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to
| go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the
| point of the entire thread, I think.
| abirch wrote:
| With more self driving cars there should be fewer
| accidents which translates to even faster driving times.
| jeremyjacob wrote:
| That's the problem, and why people choose cars over
| public transportation. It's a solvable problem however,
| and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just
| that.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| In Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam.
|
| None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public
| transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong
| Kong, Paris and Tokyo?
|
| The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip:
| finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as
| long as the trip.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Public transit could be faster if we adopted Japanese
| style bullet trains and gave the buses their own
| dedicated lane. Running more frequent transit service and
| offering trains that skip some less popular stops also
| reduces travel time.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| 1 - traffic jams slow down public transit too if the road
| space is shared (buses, trams) or they increase the time
| needed to reach a train/subway station if you don't
| happen to live at walking distance from one.
|
| 2 - driving time is only half of the time you spend in a
| car. in Milan I could drive to work in 15-20 minutes,
| compared to 25-30 using the subway. good luck finding a
| parking spot though. they're either forbidden, very
| expensive or non existent. Not counting that many areas,
| like where my office is, are restricted traffic zones,
| getting a permit is really hard for non residents and
| fines are very high (very common in many medium to large
| cities in Italy). I gladly use the subway and read the
| news while commuting, so I don't even need to drive
| myself.
|
| I'm really sorry for those that drive to work everyday,
| it must be hell, I don't understand how they can
| withstand it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Cars are faster in car first environment, hmmm.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm hoping self driving cars will not happen for another
| two decades because they will cause _more_ traffic, not
| less. The limiting factor for a lot of possible car trips
| right now is that a driver is required. When that
| limitation disappears you 'll see an explosion in car trips
| without an occupant.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more
| automobile-centric days of the 1970s?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.
| asdff wrote:
| It was trams and horses and people and early cars. It was pure
| chaos, almost like images you see from countries without strong
| traffic laws. Here was downtown LA:
|
| https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/image...
|
| As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this
| situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested,
| and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where
| no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure
| congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl.
| This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these
| streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to
| navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot
| easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by
| other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus
| and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car
| traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so
| much in these early congested regions. They were also used to
| permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers
| (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate
| municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).
| jt2190 wrote:
| > ... trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose
| much of a problem?
|
| Horse manure was a _huge_ problem on city streets. (Trams we're
| originally horse-drawn.)
|
| > According to the 89th Annual Report of the Board of Health,
| nearly 500 tones of horse manure were collected from the
| streets of New York every day, produced by 62,208 horses living
| in 1,307 stables.
|
| https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure
|
| Edit: A more in-depth article
| https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-...
| Voline wrote:
| Take a look: Rare film of Market Street in San Francisco in
| 1906.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9XXbKuYfA
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Philadelphia used to have extensive electric trolley systems
| that went down pretty much every street[1].
|
| [1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png
| soneil wrote:
| I've never had a problem walking around trams, they're
| incredibly predictable. And horses (as vehicles) are the level
| of intelligence we're hoping to get self-driving vehicles back
| to - they don't actually want to run you over.
| nextstep wrote:
| It's hard to monetize walking, so unfortunately pedestrians have
| undersized representation in the political process.
| supertrope wrote:
| More pedestrian friendly Main Streets are an opportunity for
| more local stores to open and thrive. Towns that want to
| collect sales tax, income tax, and property tax will do road
| diets, widen sidewalks, enhance trash pickup, and move parking
| to the periphery of the commercial zone to cultivate growth.
| While citizens pick their local government leaders, governments
| also pick their residents by setting zoning laws that
| effectively determine who can move in or open up shop. Local
| governments are incentivized to pick what use yields the most
| votes or tax dollars.
|
| People driving through in their car are only contributing a
| danger to pedestrians, parking demand, air pollution, and
| noise. People driving to downtown can be accommodated with
| parking off to the side (but not taking up prime real estate).
| Pedestrians are much more likely to stop and participate in the
| economy.
| trhway wrote:
| The same story these days with drones and VTOLs. We know how it
| will end (and the drones and VTOLs will liberate our streets from
| cars (except for some small golf-cart likes) and our Earth
| surface from asphalt), yet it is still a long way to go for the
| population mentality which right now has even hardly reached the
| stage of the Red Flag laws
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts (or in grief stages
| - somewhere between Denial and Anger)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Cities should be redesigned from the ground up. We have good
| technology for much better design collaboration.
|
| There should be very small self driving vehicles and generally
| there is no reason for roadways to intersect directly with
| pedestrian paths.
|
| The roadways should be multilevel in areas of high density.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| We can redesign them easily but reconstructing them would be
| monumentally expensive.
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