We need to reclaim our cities and revert the damage done by big auto. GM and others have screwed American city inhabitants for decades by actively destroying public transport projects through lobbyism and blackmail.
A more constructive/less destructive model would be for SF to actually built decent public transport and get cars off the street by offering better alternatives.
Of course, SF long ago lost its ability to build things. So only banning remains in the toolbox.
Cars are deadly and inefficient. Electric cars are still cars.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/10/the-geography...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/28/as-deaths-rise-on-bay...
It would make a real difference in NYC, so why wouldn't we do it. I'm always a little bit on edge when crossing intersections on foot, and especially when biking, because so many drivers are so erratic and dangerous. We don't need to put up with it.
Also, every transportation method includes accidents. From [1] describing NYC subway safety, "There were nearly 900 incidents last year [2017] in which someone was on the tracks or was hit by a train after getting too close while on the platform." Should we also ban subways because people die as a result of them?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/nyregion/nyc-subway-track...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/nyregion/nyc-biking-death...
As for the subway, that's a separate topic. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your whataboutism. Yes, of course it can and should be made safer. One obvious way to do so would be to add platform gates as many other subway systems worldwide have. But the subway is already a lot safer than on-street vehicle traffic, and no, of course we shouldn't ban it.
And I'm pointing out the issues with transportation safety in general because people such as yourself demonize cars specifically when it's not at all clear that cars are the real problem, let alone the biggest one. Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
Why is this relevant? If the city has a 60mph highway running through a dense neighborhood, and a toddler walks into the street, and is killed by a driver (not the driver's fault), that hardly absolves the city of addressing this problem.
I suspect this kind of thinking is what adds to a lot of the friction. Nobody is demonizing drivers. What many of us are upset with is our cities' planning, giving far too much leeway to vehicles and too little to human beings living there.
> Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
Tokyo has a lower car ownership rate than every city in the U.S. So... although cars may be "all over the city", they're still relatively uncommon.
And what problems do you think we're focused on here? It's not just about safety from car accidents. It's also:
- Is cheaper to not build / maintain roads/streets/bridges/parking lots that would otherwise be unnecessary.
- More pleasant for city residents (fewer honking horns, less sitting in traffic, more space for parks and greenery, more walking -> healthier residents, etc.)
- More environmentally friendly from both a localized air pollution standpoint and a global climate one.
And I don't know what to tell you, but I've been to Tokyo, and it's nothing like what you're describing. You sure you went to the right place? The most busy pedestrian crossing in the world, the Shibuya scramble, is in Tokyo, and it's an at-grade intersection. You know why it's safe? Because pedestrians are prioritized over vehicles, and the longest part of the light cycle stops all the car traffic entirely and lets people walk everywhere. And also, the Japanese are simply more communally-minded than Americans. Simply put, their drivers are better-behaved. They generally won't park in marked bike lanes (same as in Amsterdam) because of the social stigma of doing so. Meanwhile, in the US, drivers don't give a shit, and so we need a solution that isn't social stigma -- building more physical protection and removing cars entirely from many spaces, since people can't and won't operate them safely.
And the discussion of "fault" is entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter who's at fault in any given fatal crash. What matters is that we have 40k deaths per year in the United States caused by vehicles, more than almost any other cause, and we need to fix it. The fault if anything is a systems problem; we have way too many cars, not enough alternatives to them, and the built city environment prioritizes cars too much and doesn't do enough to separate vulnerable people who aren't in cars from them entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Mosc...
Usually a better alternative will make the old thing obsolete without any disincentives.
For instance if you want a good cable car system or dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, it will go through reducing or removing private car lanes.
In general it’s both effects in one go: transform/reduce the existing infra into the new one, automatically making the new one better when it lands (and inconveniencing everyone until it lands)
https://thefrisc.com/the-ballad-of-geary-brt-b70ac45d0a4e
Functioning major cities build subways, a much bigger undertaking.
Our roads are fairly wide for a city, I think busses are ok. They're way cheaper too.
Cities have a responsibility that extends beyond their own defined borders. Cities act as the cultural, legal, and commercial nexus for the surrounding rural and suburban area – sometimes that can include the entire state.
That responsibility includes the ability for outsiders to be able to access it.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...
I didn't see any mention of blackmail in that article? Which bit were you referring to?
I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up. We didn't make the world the way it is. It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
a) it's annoying due to overloaded traffic
b) it's annoying due to parking
c) my job provides me with year-long public transport ticket and taking a car and paying for all certain and possible costs is economically disadvantageous
d) public transport is amazing, taxis work and ride sharing and car sharing exist on top of it for cases when public transport shuts down (during major incidents usually, e.g. finding yet another WW2 bomb at some construction site)
Just cut it down to business/public traffic and reinvigorate inner city life with more sensible things. It actually already happens from now and then for festivities and other events and people start using ALL of the space that cars uselessly take up.
> I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up.
Understand that it is a frustrating topic. Cars are one of the top killers in the U.S. both directly and indirectly. They make our places of living less safe and less pleasant. It's especially frustrating when people who live in the suburbs commute in to where we live, then complain about how unpleasant city living is—in large part because they're making it unpleasant.
> It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
And this is another piece of frustration. Yes, given current government incentives, it can be more affordable to live in the suburbs than in cities. But this is artificial. Urban dwellers ultimately subsidize those living in suburban/rural areas, thanks to government policy carried over from the cold war era. It's so bizarre that we live in a time/place where driving a personal automobile to work is seen as "lower class" than riding bicycles or taking the bus/train to work. Something's broken.
While it's a decently well-known anecdote, most experts nowadays believe that the very real attempt to monopolize the selling of buses to city transit did not contribute in any significant way to the dismantling of the streetcars--the streetcars were already in rude health and dying, and their rapid dismantling happened even in cities where the bus transit companies were not involved.
You can't be both in rude health and dying at the same time! They mean the opposite thing!
What lobbying are you talking about? The most common story, regarding GM and street cars, has largely been debunked: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...
> Eventually, argues Slater, the operating costs could not be ignored. Just before World War II the operating costs for buses were 20 percent less per seat than for streetcars. After the war even a trolley-friendly city like San Francisco found buses cost 37 percent less to operate per hour. This wasn't just the case in the land where General Motors was king; in England, too, passenger costs had leveled out or started to favor buses by the 1930s.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
More generally, you're overlooking the utter failure of public transport systems in the U.S. What lobbying was responsible for DC's and New York's subway systems literally falling apart, despite ample funding? Is GM lobbying responsible for it costing 5-7x as much to build a mile of subway in New York as compared to London or Paris? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
What killed transit in the U.S. is a combination of cheap gas prices and ample land making car-dependent sprawl economical, and government incompetence making transit uneconomical. Here in Maryland, the State is building a 26 km light rail line through the suburbs for $7 billion. The Swedish city of Uppsala is building 17 km of light rail through their downtown for 340 million Euro. That cost differential is utterly fatal. For transit to be useful it needs to go where people are. If it costs 10 times as much to build a kilometer of rail, you simply can't build enough transit to make it a viable competitor to driving.
The cost disease likewise makes it impossible to quickly fix problems that make people not want to ride transit. DC's Metro ridership is declining due to low quality of service. We need a new rail station at Roslyn because that is causing a bottleneck. The estimated cost in 2012 was $1 billion for a new underground station on an existing line. By contrast, Stockholm is planning to extend its underground system by 11 km, including 11 new stations for $3.3 billion. A similar new underground line in DC (which is desperately needed to relieve congestion on the Orange/Blue/Silver tunnel) would be a $20 billion project.
At the end of the day, Americans are voting totally rationally, and "lobbying" has nothing to do with it. They see $10 billion projects that provide transit to a handful of people, and quite rationally say "fuck it, let's build more highways." I can guarantee you that if the Uppsala light rail project was going to cost $3.4 billion Euro and take 15+ years to build, like it would here in the U.S., the Swedes wouldn't vote for it either.
How do prices get that high in the US? Are private contractors too intent on pocketing fat profits? Or is it related to health, tort, or other insurances, or a privately funded pension system?
The Purple Line in Maryland was tied up in years of litigation:
> n August 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon found that the Maryland Transit Administration and the Federal Transit Administration did not study whether Metro's maintenance issues and ridership decline would affect the Purple Line.[53] Judge Leon decided to vacate the Purple Line's federal approval.[53] A federal funding agreement cannot be signed without the reinstatement of the environmental approval, and Maryland has said it cannot afford to build the Purple Line without sufficient federal funding.[53][54] On August 21, 2017, despite the ongoing court case over the environmental analysis, $900 million of federal funding was granted for the light rail project.[55] On December 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of the Purple Line, specifically stating that declining ridership on the Washington Metro system does not require Maryland to complete a new environmental study for the Purple Line.[13] This federal appeals court ruling allowed for construction to continue and effectively ended the three-year legal battle surrounding the 16-mile light-rail line project.[12]
This not only adds to the cost--contractors must build in tons of padding because projects can be litigated even after construction starts. But it makes it impossible to build sustained public support for transit projects. People get worked up about a project, vote for funding, and then literally nothing visible happens for half a decade or more while paperwork gets done. It kills momentum completely.
Who subsidized your electrical company's build-out of the long-haul transmission lines to get electricity out to you? Do the payers of those subsidies see an ROI from long-haul transmission lines to economically minimal areas?
Ditto telco?
Where do you buy groceries? Who disproportionately paid for all of the utilities and transportation necessary to make that work?
How about delivery? Mail is hugely subsidized, particularly for rural routes, and commercial carriers use all those roads-'n-stuff to get to you. Your last mile, or even last miles, might be dirt--y'all certainly aren't paying proportionally for the highways to get even close enough.
I grew up in rural areas. Lots of people sneered a lot about The Gubmint. And even in that weird epistemic closure not a one paid out what they took. Which is fine; that's how it's supposed to work, and there's an argument for some subsidy of rural living for a number of both moral and practical reasons. But leaving the disingenuity in the closet where it belongs and showing some basic respect for the process that allows it is at least polite.
My comment wasn't a reply to why we should do away with cities, it was a reply to why rural areas should "be subsidized" (I'm assuming road construction here, and maybe social welfare for impoverished).
Almost everything else in your home; your car; the technology they depend on; the road, telecom, hospital, etc infrastructure and the technology they depend on come almost entirely from cities and suburbs.
HN? The device you use to access it? Almost all the tech news on it? The network infrastructure you use to lower its comment quality? The language its written? The computers it runs on? Not from rural areas.
Again, I'm not saying cities aren't important, only replying to a comment asking for justification for rural living.
I love cars as well, it doesn't mean they should dominate areas where other alternatives make more sense in all aspects but subjective preference.
Edit: would the downvoters care to explain why their prime delivery or their coffee beans are necessary traffic while, e.g., a mother driving their kids is not?
Why should the city build public transport, if mothers with children won't use it?
If cities cannot offer something better, they will never convince. So they must restrict. Then at least they should forbid the better for everyone not just for people their voters do not care about. It is quite revealing that the myriad of small, cheap, and flexible transporters that provide all these services inside cities are nearly always exempt from traffic policies.
It's all about utilization: An uber cab will probably see 10%-90% utilization (passenger count / time in transport), while a privately owned car is utilized only a few minutes of the day, by only 1/5th of the passanger capacity. Most of the time it collects rust on a parking spot that could be utilized for a better purpose. Parks, street food stands, benches.
Same for delivery: If the alternative is that everyone oes out and pollutes supermarkets, streets and public transport to get their freshly ground coffee, don't you think that having a vehicle that delivers on the last mile to the customer is much more efficient?
In cities that invest into bike lanes, obviously cargo bikes are becoming a real alternative for delivery services.
Yes, public transport has to be improved, too, nobody argued otherwise.
In a city, everything that needs space is scarce. You can ask for a "fair" price for a parking space, but then don't complain about a "fair" rent and a "fair" premium on every service that also utilizes space. The thing is that "fair" can look very different to different people.
I'd argue that requiring your employees to play an archaic game of dress-up is the real problem, but if I'm being honest, it can be pretty uncomfortable to walk around a sweltering city even in street clothes. (That being said I don't think the tradeoff is worth destroying your city with car-centric design)