To build the cities of the future, we must get out of our cars
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
I remember reading "Das neue Universum"² in the early 80s where they proposed large skyscrapers connected by tubes. No cars in sight.
Oh and don't miss "Das Neue Universum Volume 84 (1967)": http://klausbuergle.de/buergle_verkehr1.htm -
Click on the bottom left image - looks a lot like Hyperloop, doesn't it? The text even mentions that the tubes contain a vacuum!
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Given India’s population, landscape plus the stave vs central govt politics, its unlikely India will see major car-dependent urban sprawl like the US. Indians are preferring cars because the urban infrastructure is full. Delhi metro spans 100 km end to end and it is at near to full capacity.
https://m.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/capital-chaos-delhi-...
The closest number I can find is 31.8L daily ridership in the metro which seems reasonable. The metro had an annual ridership bordering on 1B in 2017-2018.
Given a population of 20M, the whole city doesn't travel at once.
Add on other factors like - * 30% people (kids, housewives, elders etc etc) do not have a significant commute.
* Then a significant portion of the population has a commute less than 5 kms for which taking metro makes less sense - this is evident in the gargantuan numbers of e-rickshaws, tuktuks, tempos seen on indian roads which primarily serve distances upto 5 kms and are nary unoccupied during peak times.
* Then another significant chunk has commutes smaller than 10kms. Only a small percent has any significant commute.
* Plus based on other factors I know, and which would be too tedious to link here, metro is the third most occupied transport behind buses (first) and small transport like e-rickshaws etc.
Delhi doesn't need to build more, in non-peak times you'll find plenty of space. Even in peak times, even though you'll be uncomfortable, you'll still reach your destination within 10-15 mins of what it would take in non-peak time. The current plan is well developed till 2021 and would probably serve the needs of the city with sufficient capacity, though not necessarily comfortable.
They may be sprawling out (as is inherently going to happen when you build single-level unplanned structures), but they're certainly not designed for a car any more than they are for transit.
US car manufacturers are doubling down on large trucks and SUVs and the current administration continues to thwart progress on tackling climate change and other societal concerns. I would say the US, at least on a macro level, is still on the "other extreme" path.
Manufacturers are building lots of SUVs because this is what people in the US prefer to buy. If manufacturers build tons of subcompacts instead they would have to drop prices and probably sell those subcompacts at a loss.
If you wanted to sell more small cars instead you should convince consumers to buy them (e.g., via end user incentives), which would make it profitable for car companies to build lots of them.
You'd need to substantially incentivize smaller vehicles to overcome these things, but we actually incentivize larger vehicles (through looser emissions standards).
I personally would prefer to just ban all combustion engines, but people seem to think I'm insane when I propose this.
Among people who are willing to restore old vehicles, some small trucks are becoming classics.
https://fee.org/articles/chicken-tax-makes-trucks-expensive-...
The cost of gas goes up, and people scramble to get more fuel efficient cars. Gas does down and they want larger utility vehicles.
Toyota made out like crazy when gas prices went through the roof in the early 2000's. They were already manufacturing the Prius and once gas prices went over $3-$4/gallon, people suddenly started buying motorcycles, started biking more and started buying Prius' in droves.
Now that gas has stabilized for the most part to around $2.20/gallon, you're seeing more people not really care either way and I have friends who have sold their Prius' to get more snow friendly vehicles like a Subaru or a Toyota AWD SUV.
Their decisions are based nothing on social concerns, it's all about how expensive it is to own the cars they currently have. Make fuel expensive and its painful to own a large SUV and they'll switch. When fuel is cheap and they're going to buy whatever suit their needs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47529562
Over the past decade, about 550,000 more Britons left London than moved to it.
This trend is not unique to London; it is seen in many big US cities, including New York, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles.
... People arrive in their 20s looking for jobs, then retreat in their 30s. Although it seems more likely they they only retreat to "commuter" distance -- in London that's about 40-60 minutes from a main rail terminal, which of course leads to increased pollution.
... The vibrancy and job opportunities offered by our biggest cities appeal to students and young professionals. This shapes these cities in terms of the shops, bars and other facilities they offer.
But among older residents, the desire for things like more space and a less urban environment grows, and many move out.
Atleast not from these pro high-density living and pro urban transit folks. I don't get how you pick and choose what you'd like to criticize and what you'd like to champion on one side and what you conveniently ignore when it suits you, on the other.
I'm sure we can all agree that the LA-SF corridor could badly use a high speed rail line to alleviate the traffic on the I-5, right?
[1]
Gov. Newsom Puts Brakes On California’s High-Speed Rail Plan
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/02/12/gavin-newsom-br...
[2]
California's Newsom Scales Back Plans for High-Speed Rail Line
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/californi...
What we really need to do is just hire the Japanese to build HSR for us, because we obviously can't do it ourselves.
People who live in cities don't need cars.
People who live outside cities still need cars. The manufacturers try to fill that need. The manufacturers, sellers, etc. make the economy go 'round.
It will all change if/when economic forces bring it about. Directly forcing it through politics probably isn't the right approach.
> I don't believe there is a nefarious scheme in play.
There's no defensible reason why work-home-school-retail structures rural places can't nucleate closer together into walkable "main street" towns.
Much of the design of fly-over states is dictated by developers. It starts when a farmer who wants to retires sells a huge tract of land to a development company. The land eventually gets populated with a mind-numbing matrix of boring mcmansions, without regard to utilities, tax base, schooling, or distance.
People then buy into to the facade of rural living but then end up driving 10's of miles for each and every errand and activity. They even take vacations in Europe and marvel at how delightful it is to sit in a town square and be able to walk to everything. When they get back to their ex-burban strip mall hellscapes in the USA, the vast majority just fail to make the connection that it doesn't have to be that way.
I love that my son and I went for an hour walk to a park (we passed a different park on the way because we played in that one yesterday) and back. I love that my work is only a few minutes drive away (now that the weather is warmer I need to get my bike working).
I miss other things about my rural lot though. There is no space to drive my tractor collection around. I can't see anywhere near as many stars at night.
It is about trade offs, I was happy in the rural area. I'm happy in town. Some think I like to do are better/easier, some things are worse/harder.
Most of Europe hasn't been built like this for many decades, and have been going the other way as well. You won't find many new developments in this spirit, and what already exists often isn't accessible. Being able to sit in a town square is vacation for a lot of people in Europe as well, especially if you haven't been grandfathered in.
Unnecessary bullshit. The entire part of the South Bay and nearly all of Los Angeles suffers from the same driving dependency. It has nothing to do with ignorant armchair analysis of how “the flyover states” work.
Get involved in politics if you want to bring about change in the world because companies whose job it is to sell more cars certainly aren't going to be helping improve the environment.
I agree, but I also think political policy decisions created the rules of the market, which in the case of the US, incentivized individual car ownsership. For example, creating a highway or creating a bus only lane, are political decisions that directly affect the market forces.
Sometimes I wonder if it has to be that way- how much more does a light rail or bus line cost than a highway does to connect smaller towns?
Even those who do live in town are likely to have friends and relatives who don't, and they're unlikely to want to rent a vehicle every time they leave town to visit them.
* source: Living in Copenhagen for five years.
And for anyone paying attention, that same pattern is repeating in the Software Architecture today.
not exactly a challenge now is it. the dynamics for cities with 6 million inhabitants are on a whole different scale because while building can pack people in three dimension transit has relatively few 2d planes to be built upon.
Vatican City with population 1000 should be Eden then.
Rocket science seems straight forward in comparison to creating attractive, rather than combative, societies. The Nordic countries had insane possibilities the 'win' the information age, but have all to a large extent been going the other way (at least in terms of outlook).
> To me it seems that the US went to the other extreme and is only slowly turning around.
I don't think the US has been going the other way, so much that it has always been combative and the way to not get exponentially exploited in such a society is to build the easiest house anywhere. (You are still paying the price of course). Now as people are moving to cities again, they are rediscovering the dysfunctional society spanning both capitalism and government.
> I remember reading "Das neue Universum"² in the early 80s where they proposed large skyscrapers connected by tubes. No cars in sight.
As I heard someone say recently most of the futuristic ideas of that era is based on the idea of free energy, but what we got instead is free information. So what we have to deal with is a lot closer to Gibson than Asimov.
I really loved them. Especially these futuristic panels like in http://klausbuergle.de/buergle_verkehr1.htm .
This reminds me of the pedway scheme they tried to do in London, even going so far as to require buildings in the city to prepare for these bridge walkways between buildings. Here's a nice little documentary about it: https://vimeo.com/80787092
For anyone interested in architecture visiting the city of London, I highly recommend a visit to the barbican as well.
"Millions of soldiers had come home from World War II to overcrowded, run-down cities; their new families needed a place to live."
"Overcrowded, run-down": who all of a sudden "overcrowded" these cities? What's a "run-down" area? We can win WWII but not fix a broken roof? The issue was not so much lack of affordability or too many people, what meant was cities / neighborhoods with more black people. Those highways were not built immediately post WWII, but later, to separate black neighborhoods from wealthier areas of the city, in the post-civil rights era.
Suburbanization accelerated not directly after WWII but with government-mandated busing of school-children. If you didn't want your daughter to go to school with black boys, you went to the suburbs.
Architects & urban planners played handmaiden to white flight, destroying the fabric of cities, and generally harming the environment in the process. Precisely due to their active participation in this cluster- they tend to whitewash the history, move the timelines a bit etc. hoping no one will notice.
Those same tools have been used to the same effect, and strengthened, for generations. Yet for all the calls for social justice in society now, I almost never hear people calling for the end of zoning, when it may be the greatest perpetrator and enforcer of inequality today. In the Bay Area, zoning is the saw that has cut the bottom off the economic ladder. It’s surprising to me that more people don’t understand that intuitively, but alas.
It’s also not clear how one is supposed to reverse the effects of white flight; when middle-class whites move into a majority-nonwhite urban area, this is usually condemned as “gentrification”.
Also, rewinding only a couple of decades from civil rights legislation; denying blacks the vote, school entrance and outright lynchings in the hundreds qualifies as pretty strong racial animus. It's naive to argue that the same society & people "had no racial animus in mind" when choosing where and how to live.
I've always thought of gentrification as more of an economic class issue (which so often corresponds to minority status). In Boston, a lot of poor and middle class white neighborhoods get gentrified as well - nonetheless I take your wider point that gentrification is often a positive force for urban renewal; and I agree. One counter-example: Hudson Yards is the 1% being gentrified with the 0.1%, hard to argue helps the urban fabric with its non-human scale.
I’m not trying to dismiss racism as a causative factor. I guess I’m just saying it’s like living in a sawmill, and racism is the sawdust. The sawdust causes lots of problems by itself, but it also gets all over everything else. Suburbanization was something mid-century Americans of all races desired; it just happened in a racist way.
I don't know how to solve this.
You can imagine if someone doesn't want black people in their neighborhood how they might feel about their children marrying one.
I don't know how to read people's minds, so I tend to gravitate towards a functional definition of racism which measures it based on someone's action - i.e. if someone being treated in an unfair manner based on their skin color.
To the typical mid-century white homeowner, "a black family moved into the neighborhood" wasn't the beginning and end of it. There were only two equilibria: either you live in a segregated white neighborhood or you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. (I openly admit there's nothing wrong with living in a predominantly black neighborhood, but this was probably not the most common opinion among mid-century white homeowners.)
Why? Fundamentally because there was a structural shortage of good housing for black people. If most neighborhoods don't allow black residents, having a neighborhood that does allow them causes a surge of demand. Even if you're not racist enough to move out just because a single black family moved into your neighborhood, some of your neighbors are, and many of their homes will be bought by black families, which will trigger your slightly-less racist neighbors to move out, and so forth. This was deliberately encouraged by "blockbusters", who would buy homes from white families at a discount and then price-gouge the black families who ended up moving in for a massive profit. But blockbusting only works if you have the pre-existing shortage of unsegregated housing in the first place.
You end up in a feedback loop:
(a) Moderately racist white homeowners want to keep their neighborhoods segregated because otherwise they'll live in black neighborhoods. This causes:
(b) Most neighborhoods are segregated white neighborhoods, causing a housing shortage for black families. This causes:
(c) Overwhelming surges in black demand to move into any individual neighborhood that desegregates. This causes (a).
The "solution" was to immediately, globally, across-the-board, outlaw housing discrimination so the pent up housing demand can disperse. I put "solution" in quotes because most American metro areas are still extremely segregated. They might be statistically segregated by 90/10 ratios instead of the 100/0 ratios that existed before, but people have to go significantly out of their way to completely reverse it, unless there's some other economic incentive. For example, gentrification has "desegregated" lots of majority-nonwhite urban neighborhoods through the sheer force of white hipsters wanting to move into them.
In fact, most racism gets expressed as racial separatism. Segregation was literally racial separatism.
One problem is that this literally turns into a question of ethnic territorialism, and can easily be extended from neighborhoods to entire states (Oregon was founded as a whites-only state) to entire countries (eg the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa, which is how Liberia was founded).
It’s also just not that hard to express even the worst racism in mere separatist terms. In fact, that’s where most racism starts.
> also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods
Yeah, from what else I've read, that is one of the saddest parts of the story. Economic diversity is a hugely important part of a healthy community, and it's pretty uncommon in America.
Though I guess there is likely more than one cause.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnera...
The vast majority of proposals are from before 1956 -- i.e. before the Soviets demonstrated their own high-yield thermonuclear weapons. The degree of decentralization required to mitigate against the multi-megaton bombs of the later 1950s would have been truly staggering.
On a tangential note, I'd be curious to know whether you have any links to back up the claim that urban environments are often less noisy. I don't disbelieve the claim outright, but it sure doesn't match my personal experience.
I'm writing this from the 11th floor apartment in an apartment town suburb 30 minutes by subway from Seoul. It is dead silent. Very little traffic, and everything is walking distance. From above ground you don't hear the subway at all. Sound insulation in this apartment is pretty good so I never hear my neighbors (actually there's only 2 apartment units on each floor).
I've never really understood this explanation of suburbanization.
Suppose you're a bunch of racist white folk wanting not to live near black folk. How do suburbs get you that any better than cities? What can you do to keep a black person from moving to your neighborhood in the suburbs that you can't do to keep them from moving to your neighborhood in the city?
It seems more like two phenomena that happened to occur at the same time rather than one causing the other.
Especially when at the same time the government had an explicit policy of encouraging people to move out of the cities, to reduce the damage that would be caused by a nuclear weapon.
Levittown was a quintessential model of the suburbs, one of the first examples of the suburbs we have now. Towns like this openly segregated against blacks and minorities, a dream away from the crowded city into your all white, picket fence house.
Now suburbs were being built because in 1946, suddenly there were millions of young men with a huge government subsidy to buy a house. Banks would not approve mortgages for black people in these areas, so they became predominantly white. And as a white person you are happy to be in the suburbs where you are free of all the perceived fears from decades of racially charged propaganda, and surrounded by people who also have a white boy and a white girl, a new ford, a dog and a cat, and who go to the same protestant church. It was sold as a utopia, and in the case of Detroit, white people bought that narrative so hard the city lost 1.5m from its tax base and collapsed in fewer decades than it took to grow as a metropolis in the first place. To date, Detroit has lost over 60% of is population from its all time high in 1950.
What are the primary obstacles towards improving the cycling infrastructure here?
By the way - biking here is quite different from the US. Unlike the US, I can taste the pollution. It’s a much heavier thing. Perhaps I’m not used to it, but I often find myself holding my breath to get through fumes.
After spending a lot of time in
clean mountain air
Is it for economic mobility? If that's the case shouldn't you consider taking a hit in that lone aspect, for a better quality of living? I'm sure you will be gainfully employed breathing clean, crisp mountain air provided your skills are in demand. You'll just make a little less.
First of all, my house in the clean mountain air is also at the very edge of the electric grid. I have utility-provided power and telephone, but I'm so far out that the phone company won't offer me DSL at any speed. So I'm stuck with satellite internet, which really isn't suitable for remote work.
Second, almost no one offers a flat pay-scale that ignores your home address. Incredibly, this has meant that so far renting an expensive one bedroom apartment in the bay in addition to my mortgage is a much better economic decision than finding a remote job that would let me leave the bay behind.
And EVs? It will be very hard to convince anyone to get out of their cars when those cars are, potentially, less polluting than the available public transport options.
This also isn't just about commuting and pollution. There are a multitude of cultural reasons people use cars. Security is at the top of the list, the ability to be in your own locked box. You won't get people out of their cars until they are confidant in their physical security. Those parents driving their kids to work are constantly told that their kids are in danger and it is their duty as parents to maximize their children's individualized safety over all other concerns. Breaking that mindset requires far more than explaining to them why buses might be slightly faster than cars.
If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.
Infact if anything, despite the very very recent free-range kids movement to liberate kids from the dependence on parents, its the opposite - kids get ferried everywhere, from high school sports practice sessions to neighborhood store visits.
We have a toddler and a large dog. We own two electric cargo bikes and get around perfectly well without owning a car. There's car/truck sharing and rental if I really need to transport something large and heavy (> 100kg).
> Just design a better one.
I'd very much prefer if all that parking space and all that space used by 4-lane roads would be used to make the city more dense and walkable. If I can walk to the kindergarden or school, there's no need to even take a bike, if close enough a kid can even walk on their own. The only things that makes such a thing infeasible are cars.
Cities like Oslo and Copenhagen aren’t exactly known for good weather either, but have substantial policies around clearing bikeways from snow first, before all other roads. It’s more of an infrastructure problem than anything else: good cycling infrastructure begets cyclists. Walkable cities conjur pedestrians. Look at the Dutch, living in the land of eternal sunshine and mild temperatures.
I would gladly live somewhere like Denver, Seattle, or San Francisco if money and family ties to the East coast weren’t an issue. Many of the cities with comfortable climates in the US are very expensive. The remaining, affordable cities have undesirable climates.
But of course we do have a car, so can have the best of both worlds.
I imagine that if we didn't have a car we would be using delivery a lot more often. Hard to do a Costco run without one.
I can imagine life with kids but without a car. But of course that life would heavily rely on Lyft & taxis, so is that really car free?
A good example of change in behavior to ensure survival, is that major powers used to go much more openly to war for territory and resources right up until those powers got the ability to utterly destroy humanity. While there are still countries who are enemies of each other, and who fight small proxy wars and the like, nobody in their right mind would stage an invasion of another major power, likely ever again.
...until you have a world leader who wonders why we can't use them if we have them.
Please don't be a credibility problem for tomorrow's environmental causes.
But if we hadn't banned CFCs we would have been doomed. The ozone layer actually is really important.
Now the danger is climate change and what we need is to stop burning carbon. The lesson from past experience is not that everything will be fine if we don't do anything, it's that everything will be fine if we do what is necessary. Everything will not be fine if we don't do what is necessary.
My high school science teacher telling me that we were running out of oil and that gas would be $10 a gallon by the time I entered the workforce did not build credibility.
This is an iterated game. The takeaway is that it's important to be right, important to not be wrong, and important to make sure people know it, not that it's important to lie your ass off (sorry, overstate your cause) in a misguided attempt to help.
So families even in Europe are opting more and more for SUVs and larger vehicles in general -- which was a total surprise to me and caught me unawares, I have to admit.
Hygiene, safety - from both the riff naff & new developing security threats, peace of mind, convenience, dependability [1][2][3] and more rider options are all major pain points.
Unless cities opt for a class-tiered approach to public transit -- the likes of first class carriages and premium waiting rooms at transit terminals, of yore -- and make public transit safe and even enjoyable to regular people I don't see this trend reversing.
[1]
BART announces what caused massive morning power outage last weekend
https://abc7news.com/traffic/bart-announces-what-caused-mass...
[2]
Single Computer Switch Failure Triggered Saturday’s BART Shut Down
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/11/computer-switch...
[3]
BART still unclear on cause of service outage, waiting to hear from tech support
http://www.sfexaminer.com/bart-still-unclear-cause-service-o...
That said we do have a car and also use it a lot. I think it has a lot to do with the time sensitivity. If you want to go some place and it’s not a quick walk or a straight shot on transit, or if you are going to get groceries or other bulky stuff, then yeah the car is easier.
I think, though, the idea is if you design a place such that you don’t HAVE to have a car, then cars would be driven vastly less. For us that’s true, combined my family of five drives about 7000 miles per year, much of that on road trips from the Bay Area to Tahoe or Yosemite etc.
Yeah. A lot of people fear that a transit centered city means we're gonna take ALL the cars. Realistically I think most transit/urbanist advocates are aiming for a world with 1 practical car per family rather than 1 car per driving age member of the household.
Modern car seats and LATCH anchors actually make it fairly easy to bring a child car seat with you. I agree with you though, all this stuff is bulky and adds up to a lot of baggage. It makes sense to have a car for your child. But those cars create enormous problems, and car owners should be required to pay to fix them.
See also: food deserts
I find the opposite to be true. If there are lots of people walking, there will be lots of walkable services and businesses, so you tend to have a lot of choice.
Ownership of houses is usually diverse in dense walkable cities so it's really easy to just rent space at the ground floor to start a business. If you don't like it, move across the street.
Compare this to car cities. People drive their cars to malls. Malls are very much rent seeking. I've heard that they constantly increase rents of the shops so there would be churn - new shops to "keep it interesting" for the visitors.
We have a problem in Los Angeles. And that problem is that it's almost impossible to live close to where you work. Most white collar jobs here require an hour or longer of commuting time. Sure, it's possible to find jobs closer to your home, but when you are a professional in a specific field, your choices are restricted.
I live in North Hollywood, which is just West of Burbank in the San Fernando Valley. It's actually miles from Hollywood despite what the name may suggest.
I work in El Segundo. Before that, I worked in Culver city.
It would take me 4 or more hours and several metro -> bus -> metro transfers to get to work without driving.
The city is working on several new Metro lines and Bus only lanes, but it doesn't solve the problem of everyone being so spread out.
Today I have a nice government job at a fixed location (military) but still need my car. A couple times a month I get called in at strange hours (3am) and my boss doesn't want to hear "the buses aren't running yet".
Moving is also, for many people, a gigantic pain that they'd rather avoid, even if it means suffering through traffic every day.
I'm considering protesting for more environmentally friendly city designs and transportation decisions. I could find an extremely congested intersection and protest by just pressing the walk sign and marching back and forth. Annoying, but probably effective at getting my message seen. I imagine that's the kind of protest that would get me arrested for being a nuisance.
I don't know how to make it happen, and my local region has its own struggles with AQI we haven't yet solved, but it seems to me like you have reason to hope.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2019/02/27/lawmakers...
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900057070/guest-opinion-...
The geography does trap the pollution, but having refineries and mining operations just north of the city doesn't help. There are also loads of 18 wheel trucks coming through, since SLC is a bit of a hub area in terms of highways.
Despite the city being pretty walk-able with decent (by US standards) transit, lots of people have at least one large 4x4 vehicle to get up into the canyons. It hurts to see since I understand the appeal of outdoors activities, but this way of approaching them will degrade and ruin the outdoors long term.
[1] https://kutv.com/news/local/salt-lake-city-has-the-worst-air...
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/02/27/how-to-create-real...
Much of the rest of the world has already figured it out. I'm in a "suburb" of Seoul right now. I can get to Gangnam in 30 minutes door to door via the subway (subway ticket is ~$2 each way). I'm a short walk (< 5 mins) to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. It's all apartments here, which is why everything is so walkable. Of course this means less space than a house, but it's quiet and there are plenty of parks/green and a big lake nearby (5-10 minute walk).
Meanwhile back at my parents' house in the suburbs of Washington DC, the closest commercial business I can walk to is a gas station 20 minutes away, next to an ugly car-ridden highway. The nearest grocery store would require crossing that wide road and walking an additional 10-15 minutes through a massive parking lot. There is no viable public transport - if I want to take the subway into DC I need to drive 15 minutes to the nearest subway station (subway ticket is ~$5-8 I believe). Although my immediate neighborhood is very nice in the sense that there are a lot of trees, there actually aren't any parks (unless you count the local elementary school) or businesses of any form, including simple convenience stores (something I noticed is commonplace in most of the rest of the world).
Everytime I'm at my parents' house I'm completely dependent on having a vehicle to do anything, and bored out of my mind within about a week because it's extraordinarily isolating. I get very little exercise because I end up just staying in my house all day because there's little to do. On the other hand I can be in "city"-like suburbs like the one I'm in now and not feel lonely even if I don't talk to anyone because I can just step outside and there are people everywhere, or go walk to one of the million coffee shops nearby that are always packed with people hanging out.
I despise American suburbs. Who decided that the "American Dream" is owning a single-family home in the suburbs? I guess I'm just not enough of a hermit to enjoy that lifestyle.
For me to use Public Transport here would increase my commute time to work by order of magnitude, not to mention all the places I go weekly that is not on a public transit stop or would require multiple line hops and be many times more time consuming than if I just drove directly their in my own personal vehicle
Public transport only works in area with High Population Density
It's true public transit will never really be valuable for extremely rural areas, but we should be working to ensure that in anywhere there's a significant quantity of people, that public transit is the cheapest and most convenient way to travel. Public transit isn't going to win by banning cars, it's going to need to win by improving lives.
I'm not sure what kind of population density you need to make public transport workable, but it's a blessing when you have it available. There's some sample math at the end of this article(https://www.ptua.org.au/myths/density/ - technical appendix) which concludes that you don't really need that high a density(it focuses on Melbourne), as long as people actually prefer to use the public transport service over their own cars.
Looking at my own home in the South Bay.
My 10 mile commute takes 15 minutes driving.
By public transit, it's walk five minutes to light rail, wait ten minutes, ride 50 minutes, transfer, wait ten minutes for the next bus, ride 15 minutes, walk 10 minutes.
Admittedly, 7x isn't quite an order of magnitude, but close enough.
I really don't see anyway to get busses economical down here unless you had much more traffic and higher density.
For me to go to work on the bus route I have to go pretty far away from my home to then work my way back due to the way the bus route flows.
or I can get in my car, drive to 10 mins traffic free, and be a work
Around here people use Public Transport because they have no other means of travel, not because on congestion or anything else
I don't feel buses are nearly as productive because of traffic. There are some nifty routes around Chicago where buses are allowed to drive the shoulder in traffic jams, and hence, do better than cars on travel time, but the north-south suburban expressway doesn't have that arrangement.
What's really wasteful is using point-to-point transit for a task better suited for mass transit—or vice-versa.
Exposure to human feces is a legitimate factor in transportation mode choice right up there with cost and door to door time. We are all worse off for transit advocates’ side dismissals of its role.
Edit: It’d also be interesting to see the environmental impact of mega cities. And what about cities like Portland where they have put in a lot effort to plan around growth? Is it working?
My parents live in a beautiful part of the rural UK and have super-fast fibre to the premises internet, next day Amazon prime available, online food shopping from 4 or so supermarkets locally, etc.
Basically everything you'd think you'd need to live away from the city, but still the area is depopulating rapidly.
Younger people don't want a life of car dependancy and social isolation.
When I moved from my families acreage that was 10 minutes out of town it wasn't because of social isolation or car dependence - it was because I couldn't get an post-secondary education in my community. Even if I hadn't gone for an education, there was a ton more employment opportunities in the urban centre. I stayed in the city because "junior software developer" is a super hard sell in a town of 2,500. Now that I've more experience I could probably swing the "work remote" thing, but it just wasn't an option starting my career.
But small town life (ours has pop. around 5000-ish) is pretty good! We have the high street (and a modest-sized supermarket) within 10 minutes walk, a variety of community activities to be involved in, and nature (including protected reserves) pretty much on our doorstep.
And most days, the car doesn't leave the driveway. The area isn't "depopulating rapidly", like many more remote rural areas; the challenge, rather, is to manage growth such that the community is not overwhelmed by it.
Take a look at a typical suburb. Where do you even walk? Sometimes the complexes wind and wind a mile or two before you hit the exit of the suburb, a 45 mph road with no sidewalks. Then it's another 2-3 miles until you hit the strip mall, then 500yds of parking lot before you hit the door of the apple bees. There's not even any greenery to enjoy, all the woods have been clear cut for housing or agriculture; living at low density like that scars the environment for miles. I'd take dial up and packages available in 40 days to ensure I'm at a safe arms length from suburban bleakness.
It is not like whole cities have decided to leave overnight, but there is a noticeable shift going on.
I honestly would be shocked if rural regions were growing in Canada, and the stats you were looking at were more a story of urbanization taking over formerly exurban or rural small towns in a metro region. I guess the oil and gas regions might be an exception there.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271208/urbanization-in-c...
From my perspective, the Golden Horseshoe from Toronto to the Niagara region has been intensifying non-stop for decades and is unrecognizable from 30 years ago. Skyscrapers and condos in former low density suburbs inside the greenbelt, and townhouses and plazas in former farm communities outside it. It's now almost continuously developed down to Niagara Falls. You might have called them rural two decades ago but at this point they're solidly in the GTA.
Population data is provided by the Census conducted by Statistics Canada. Housing data is from the Housing Market Stats provided by CREA.
> I honestly would be shocked if rural regions were growing in Canada
For some perspective, Canada defines urban as 1,000 or more population with a population density of 400. Everything else is rural. This may be surprising as many consider a small farming village with 1,000 people to be rural, but officially such a community can be considered urban.
All regions, including large cities and rural areas, are growing in absolute numbers. My above comment was speaking in relative terms, where population centres with more than 100,000 people now represent a smaller portion of the population than in years past.
Were we have seen the most growth is in communities with 1,000 to 29,999 people. Technically urban, but probably rural from the perspective of the comments above. Such communities are certainly not what most would call cities.
> From my perspective, the Golden Horseshoe from Toronto to the Niagara region has been intensifying non-stop for decades and is unrecognizable from 30 years ago.
I see the same thing, but I would argue that the "Rural Renaissance", as CBC put it in a recent article about this shift, is relatively recent. The early signs were only starting to become visible in 2016 data, and I would suggest that only in the last year or so that the housing data has flipped. Much of that build-out you speak of happened over the last 30 years when cities were growing by leaps and bounds.
I will reiterate that all communities types are gaining population in absolute numbers as Canada's population grows. What has changed is people are more likely to take an interest in communities that are not large cities, which is a change in behaviour to previous decades.
I live in London and have pants for Internet (oversubscribed FTTC).
The problem with your prediction is that it will also become easier to live in cities. AV's will reduce the need in cities for land allocated to parking. I can see this first hand in my neighborhood in Queens. It's becoming far easier to live without a car and population density is increasing at a rapid rate.
> People still need to go to work during the day and eat around the same time, etc.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few ways this problem is currently being solved:
1. Many restaurants are changing their business model to cater for entire companies.
2. Seamless and Square have enabled restaurants to operate with smaller storefronts or no storefronts at all. They prepare as much as possible in warehouses outside of manhattan and use their storefronts for the final assembly.
3. I recently signed up for a startup, Mealpal, which allows you to buy a preset number of meals per month and pick them up at any number of restaurants. No lines, no waiting, just walk into the restaurant and pick up your meal.
Startups have been addressing urban needs faster than rural and I don't see why that is likely to change anytime soon.
That's not happening in the next 20 years. My country is still going down the protectionism route when it comes to the taxi industry.
The child seats is the problem though -- as an adult in a city I can easily hail an uber or whatever to get me where I want to go. With kids in tow I'm limited to mass transit, as I can't rely on getting a cab with 2 car seats that will fit. This itself limits the amount of stuff I can take and places I can go.
Perhaps if I had no need for local trips (like yesterday when we went to a canal-side pub 4 miles away for dinner) I could live with simply renting a car for the larger trips -- but to rent a car it involves a walk to the station, an hourly train into the large town, then walk to the car rental place -- all between 8AM and 6PM, then do the reverse on monday morning to drop it off.
At UrbanFootprint, we provide data and tools for urban planners to assess and compare the impacts of land use and transportation decisions. A basic use case is a city updating its General Plan, which would start with a forecast of how much population growth is anticipated / needs to be accommodated. A planner then needs to assess where new residents will live, work, shop, and play. Perhaps even more essential, how are people going to travel between all of these activities? Will the new growth be auto-dependent, transit-focused, walkable? Is any of the existing or planned development in hazard areas such as flood of wildfire? What are the energy and water use impacts of the plans?
We’re using Python and Postgres/PostGIS on the backend to answer these questions and a React SPA to serve it up and make it interactive in a browser. It's a lot of fun getting our hands dirty with data describing the physical world in which we live in now, in addition to modeling the future of cities.
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when every new building requires effectively bring special interest groups, politicians, regulatory boards, and unions, their due is it a surprise cities are not getting better.
they are serving a politically connected elite, not the people who live there or want to live there.
Los Angeles is low-density partly because it spends lots of land on roads and parking lots. It needs lots of roads and parking lots because everyone drives. And everyone drives because the city is low density.
Cars, also, not really that big of a problem in themselves. Commuting is the problem. This is a symptom of depressed wages; people are willing to spend extra time (commute) in place of extra money (rent).
It is a self reinforcing vicious cycle. You can break it anywhere. I recommend started with breaking zoning because it is least painful. If you eliminate cars people who currently depend on cars will be in trouble since they cannot live their life. Eliminate the need far cars is a much slower thing that won't have any noticeable affect for 20 years, but it is a much less painful transition.
First step is to eliminate eminent domain. More infrastructure only begets more people using said infrastructure. When the many can't take from the few, they might actually have to give up some of their luxuries to have what they want (eg, a place to work).
As someone who has, in the past, been a neighbor to an unofficial junkyard (unzoned land), and as a person who currently only has houses for neighbors (zoned) thank god people can't do whatever they want.
A better method is what they have in Japan, where local government has almost no power at all to control how land is used.
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
Suburban layouts were actually the new thing that came after cities. The reason why we need cars is because of suburbia. For suburbia to function you have to live very far away from work and in very very low density neighborhoods where public transportation is virtually impossible to build. See Los Angeles.
They are doubling down on stupid.
People need examples of good public transportation in the US beyond NYC or Chicago because those cities come with a lot of other baggage (high taxes, high rent, high CoL in general). Without an example, it looks to a suburbanite like the trade off is they lose their yard and 75% of the square footage of their home for less flexibility and a dirty transportation experience.
These people do not marvel at the efficiency of the Yamamote line as people are shoved in by train operators during rush hour. They hug the steering wheels of their luxurious personal space SUVs.
What makes it worse is that prominent politicians in the US on the side promoting public transport don’t bother to use it when slightly inconvenient (e.g. the “scandal” of AOC using a minivan when she could have taken a subway). Even people on the “left” aren’t leading by example.
Regarding realistic trade-offs: I live in Seattle in a 1200 sq ft townhome. I commute 20-25 mins on public transit (where I read or otherwise zone out). For what I pay in rent, I could move to the suburbs and get a 2000 sq ft house. But that comes with a stressful 60 min commute in traffic and $15 a day for parking.
I walked or cycled miles to school my whole life in one of the wettest areas of Europe. Parents need to toughen up, wrap their kids up, refuse to give them lifts and kick them out the door.
Admittedly it can be good for a child to be self-sufficient and do their own planning.
Over the weekend I found myself looking for a place in Europe in satellite view, outside of an urban core, and I was struck by how many single-family houses there were, complete with driveways and cars. Here on HN I have been led to believe that Europe is a utopia of forward-thinking people too concerned about the environment to pollute it with a car that might also kill innocent pedestrians who just want to walk to their local grocery store.
HN readers have created a lovely bubble for themselves.
Building off our background as urban planners, the UrbanFootprint software platform helps communities, cities, and regions deal with the challenges that they face. We bring data, analytics, and most importantly, actionable insight to problems such as congestion, pollution, accessibility, and risks like flooding, sea level rise, and fires.
The software is used by public jurisdictions across the country, the private consultants who consult for those jurisdictions, and by others in real estate, finance, and new mobility modes.
We need to demolish our mistakes not just build new non-mistakes. We need fractal density so everyone gets both green space and high density very close, and reclaimed nature and super density not far away either.
Go to inwood Manhattan to feel what reclaimed natue is like.
If a city of the future must abandon cars then the way I'd like it is if there were equal or less walking compared to driving. Futurama tubes would be great.
Side note: "No walking is a prescription for obesity" - exercising for weight loss has been thoroughly debunked. [1]
1: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-you-shouldn-t-exercis...
Living in suburban America (it's hard to call Houston a city in the same sense as the ones I mentioned above) is emotionally draining. Yes, there are positives: good food, good beer, cheap cost of living. However, I don't feel like I'm part of a community. I feel like I live on a small island in an archipelago of disconnected islands. It feels like everybody here who hasn't lived in a walkable dense urban city doesn't know what they're missing, there are intangible psychological benefits. Of course, these are just the thoughts of an east-coaster.
In comparison to my experience walking 10 minutes to my farthest class some days, I much prefer driving for 10 or even 15 minutes. I just really prefer living in a setting like the house being surrounded by forest on at least 3 sides and having enjoyable countryside drives to stores. Can't speak for everyone but I'd only tolerate living in a city for a job ot something if I didn't have to do a lot of walking/NYC-style transit (I've used the MTA subways a few times and they are efficient, but too crowded/jerky/it's stressful running around between connections)
I love walking. I get groceries every week. It feels good to move my body, one day I will not be able to walk, either through death or disability. I would like to enjoy it while I can. When I walk places, I have less to worry about than when I am driving. There is significantly less chance of me accidentally murdering someone or being accidentally murdered.
A 2 minute drive feels so lazy to me.
I still enjoy going out to eat. I take the dog with me, on a leash, we both get moving. Grab the food, sit outside and enjoy the people watching.
It isn't easy if you don't walk a lot but eventually you feel a sense a pride in your walking gains. Feeling comfortable enough to go on long walks is a pretty basic human desire I feel. Even if exercise for weight loss is ineffective, it is not ineffective for mood change.
moderation in all things, including moderation.
Medium-intensity exercise (e.g., jogging) for weight loss has been debunked. Long-duration, low-intensity exercise (e.g., walking) or high-intensity exercise (e.g., interval sprints) will both lead to weight loss. Most people don't have time for the former (unless it's part of their lives, i.e. they walk a lot in a city), so if your goal is weight loss, skip the jogging and look at HIIT.
Personally, I live a 3 min walk from a grocery store and it's great. I stop by on my 8 min walk back from the train station (after a 17 min ride to work) a couple times a week. Many things I buy wouldn't last 2 weeks (though for things that do, I still take the occasional trip to Costco). If I lived in an area not designed for walking (like 95% of America), I'm sure I'd feel similarly to you, but I much prefer living here in Seattle (and walking) than I did living in a car-oriented city.
I don't mind walking my dog for a while or going on trails, but walking all the time for practical reasons doesn't register as fun for me. Additionally it seems like walking on concrete/asphalt strains my feet a lot faster than dirt/grass.
A lot of it comes down to how the cities and grocery stores are designed.
In the US you drive to a shopping mall, navigate through a sea of parking, walk maybe 1000ft of aisles, then spend 5 minutes in the checkout process waiting, scanning, bagging, and paying.
In the European cities I've lived in and visited, mixed zoning means you're likely to have a supermarket near your house or work so doesn't take any extra time to travel to, there's no parking so you just walk in of the street, the stores are about the size of a 7-Eleven so it's fast to find what you want, then the whole checkout process is crazy efficient.
Mr Calthorpe is playing simcity in Real Life, ENVY!
The alternative is the status quo of the past half century where we pay lip service to city livability then expand our automobile-dependent suburban sprawl outward while adding one bus line that runs once an hour until it's cut for low ridership
Defeating the status quo always takes a motivated group, and hatred of cars is a good motivator as any. Cars shouldn't be outright banned, but they should be the most expensive and inconvenient option for commuters (which implies building transit infrastructure)
There are many alternatives. You can even go live in car-free areas right now and have been able to do so for decades, e.g. the island Hydra in Greece.
> Defeating the status quo always takes a motivated group, and hatred of cars is a good motivator as any.
I happen to like the status quo and don't want a loud minority to "defeat" it based on their hatred.
This is certainly a valid opinion. I'm simply saying, some of us really like having viable transit options, which is opposing the status quo. To oppose the status quo we must be motivated. One motivation is to hate all the externalities of a car-dependent society.
Right now I take a bus to a transit centre, then another bus to work. This works well for me.
There is a new LRT (Light Rail Transit) line under construction with a station in walking distance from my house. The LRT line will go to downtown, but not to my work. So I will take a train downtown, then a bus or another train to work.
This all sounds good, except for three problems:
1. Based on information from the City, the train will actually be slower than the express buses that it is replacing. It also doesn't go to the same places which means that some trips that can be done by one bus will require transfers. I expect that with the slower train and worse transfers, it will take about 15 minutes longer to get to work.
2. The city is revamping all the bus routes to fit in with the new train line. Unfortunately the revamp is scheduled to go in "mid-2020" whereas the train is scheduled to start operating in "December 2020". Everything they've shown about the new bus schedule shows no routes from my transit centre to downtown and they haven't said that they will keep the current routes until the train is operating.
3. The city has a very poor track record when it comes to LRT projects. The last line they built was supposed to open in spring 2014, but didn't open until September 2015 and even then was operating in a degraded capacity. Problems with the signalling system are so bad that the city is STILL trying to get it working today. The latest news out of the new LRT project is that they are delayed - nobody is saying by how long but one city Councillor is estimating that they are at least a year behind.
If the new bus routes go in and they don't maintain service between my area and downtown, it's quite likely that I will need to start driving again. I don't want to do this, but I'm not going to spend two hours for a trip that was previously 45 minutes either.
Once the new LRT line is up and running I'll adapt to the differences. Yes, it will be worse than what's currently here, but adapting to it won't present nearly the same hardship that moving would.
It's the unknown time between the bus routes changing and the LRT line opening that I'm most concerned about. If this is just a three-month gap, I can deal with driving for that period. If, like other LRT projects, this three-month gap turns into a year and a half then I'll have to think about other options.
Hopefully the city will do a phased implementation where they implement the new bus routes but keep the express routes that are being replaced by the LRT until the LRT is ready. This seems like the obvious solution, but for some reason the city is keeping quiet on what they're doing for that interim period.
It's rather bad for the user to have such big routes changes with no visibility though... And makes moving a gamble
All those things you cited are all exacerbated by the car. Electric cars will solve the pollution issue, but they are still cars, with all the issues they bring.
They are entrenched for a reason: because they are extremely useful. Without cars and the individual transport methods they superseded, many of our cities wouldn't even exist.
What this and many other articles do, is to decide first what the problem should be and then build a case around it to show it in a bad light. That's not how you improve life in cities, it's just how you get rid of cars and with them all the benefits you've overlooked. Proof: you can get all the benefits of cars without the drawbacks by putting all the infrastructure for cars underground and using EV. None of these "visionaries" consider that, because they hate cars.
Cars are useful yes, doesn't mean we shouldn't question them. Just like we should question trains, bikes etc.
Re putting cars underground. Yes you could, are you going to support the taxes to pay for it?
"What this and many other articles do, is to decide first what the problem should be and then build a case around it to show it in a bad light."
Why don't you decide on the merits of the argument rather than perceived motivation?
You can make other options less bad in this regard though. And do things to reduce the problems.
You assertion on public transport costs is heavily dependent on unstated assumptions though.
"but one can just relocate near the new job!" - yes, if you are a single income family, otherwise the partner has to change job too (and even then changing school to children mid year isn't optimal)
and the dual applies: want to grow your family? you cannot switch home freely, you're limited to pick those on some transit to both the couple existing jobs.
I did say "Its just cars are so entrenched in western cultures that its easy to overlook all the problems" Eg in a society dominated by cars, there are going to be people without cars that can't easily get to work. You didn't have that problem pre car, and no one complains about not being able to get to work easily because they don't have a helicopter. Cars create sprawl, and create a situation where you need a car.
"pre car" people would walk or ride horses/bicycles for hours to work. You can still do that now, or go faster by bus.
> Cars create sprawl,
Growing cities create sprawl. Necessary infrastructure for large cities (yes, you need fire trucks, garbage trucks, buses) as well as parking space for convenient door-to-door transport slightly increases it.
Poor policies and the car create sprawl, not growth. Visit a city that developed pre car, no sprawl. New York was designed with massively wide streets, space for all the things you cite and didn't suffer from sprawl.
"parking space for convenient door-to-door transport slightly increases it." Slightly? I can't think of any shop with dedicated parking where the shop is bigger than the car park. Then think of all the houses with a driveway that you pass on the way to work. Each drive is an extra 8ft of frontage, that's an extra 8ft road to be built, and that you need to drive back and forth every day, and that's just the ones you can see.
I live in a fairly walkable city but it still seems odd to me that people hold such a personal connection to their cars.
Should people who want to spend more on housing be automatically labeled “rich”?
Not segrating people improves the world. Segragating them introduces division, self-evidentially. Something to be avoided, then, and worked against.
Planners will try to mix properties in a new development, if the local politics is to provide for everyone fairly.
Answering your question: yes, I believe not being able to afford housing categorizes a person as poor.
“Provide everyone fairly” is a touchy subject and depends on how limited do you want your goverment to be. I’d rather choose where to live myself, based on my own means.
What planners need to do it make sure that when the rich vacate the neighborhood they left behind is good. Part of that is making sure that some of the rich decide to rebuild their current house instead of leaving thus mixing the neighborhood a bit.
Cities are a long games. The "ideal" state you plan today to build tomorrow is not the end state. That means your plans need to account for change. New development will be old in 20 years, what then?
Possibly your statement: "You cannot mix a new development like that. Building a house is expensive, so only the rich and upper middle class can afford it. The poor always have and always will live in the houses the above lived in some years back and left for something newer." could be a bit of an absolute.
Will one give up himself to go on as husk.