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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)

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Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.

It also took them the better part of several decades.

Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.

The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.

You don't need outward collective action, really.

We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)

It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.

These US vs EU cities discussions appear a lot on HN and when I see people lamenting that their European city is too car-centric I always wonder if they mean

a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is

b) their city is completely unlivable without a car

Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).

Depends which city but it’s A for decent sized cities in central/north/Western Europe (less so for eastern and Southern Europe although major cities there will also be like that).

Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece.

But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.

Public transport is not utopia, yes you can go everywhere but you'll be squeezed in with 50 other people (or worse) in a can.

I regularly go "in a can" (tram) with more than 50 other people and it's really quite comfortable and pleasant.

In the case of Stockholm,

public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between.

livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)

Genuinely curious: what do you find "hilariously bad" about public transport in Stockholm? I've never lived there, but as a casual visitor the T-bana, trams, ferries etc seem to work just fine.

Often, trains and subways will straight up not run because "there were leaves or snow on the tracks" or whatever. Like, OK? No other city I've ever lived has had that problem, lol? (let alone that often! it happens all the time)

Punctuality is pretty bad, which wouldn't be a problem if frequency was good, but it's not, so...

It can be pretty unsafe and unpleasant.

Basically, it's "OK" in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get.

Dublin’s light and intercity rail is affected by leaves too. It’s a major problem for rail adhesion in autumn.

London's the same. Here is more info from Transport for London: https://madeby.tfl.gov.uk/2019/10/07/leaves-on-the-track/

Almost every big city has problems with trains running late or being cancelled, I think it's more common than you might think. I live in Stockholm and before the pandemic (when I commuted daily on the pendeltåg and before that, with the roslagsbana) I agree with you it could be pretty bad (there were several days where they simply closed off the trains and everyone had to squeeze into much smaller replacement buses, and a few times when even the replacement buses didn't run - you had to find a cab to get home... and good luck finding one.. but at least the government covered the fee if you could show there was no other alternative at the time) but having lived in a few other countries, I've seen all sorts of crap like that as well, and other things that nearly never happen in Stockholm are quite routine at other places, like stations and trains where passengers squeeze like sardines, buses so full some people go hanging outside the doors (the bus driver is supposed to close the door, ofc, but the situation is so precarious they try to let in as many as they can as they know how terrible it is to be just left behind because there's no space), robberies on night buses (which to my knowledge can happen in Stockholm but are extremely rare)...

There are almost certainly very few cities in the world (if any) where residents who need to use public transit day in and day out think it's a consistently great experience.

The leaves+water and pressure forms an extremely low friction surface that risks derailing the trains and happens all over the world.

Some trains have special brushes or water jets to clean the tracks

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2860418/End-...

Stockholm's inner city is about as walkable as any other European city I've visited, and much nicer as you're much less likely to get into dilapidated areas (there's almost no graffiti or dirt on the streets, unlike places like Milan, Lisbon or Bruxels) except for a couple of places where, unfortunately, the beggers from south-east Europe congregate, making the place look like a gipsy camp. But the suburbs outside the central area are much more like American or, more closely, Australian cities, with a huge sprawling area where having a car becomes more important the farther you go, but still with decent public transport at least for peak hours... that's just due to the low population density in those areas... Stockholm attracts a lot of young people and families because that's where the jobs are, mostly, so this situation seems unavoidable to me... Adelaide is in the top 3 livable cities, and the situation there is very similar (actually it has a much smaller central area and a perhaps even bigger and less dense suburban sprawling), the differences in ranking between them seems to me mostly artificial unless you're taking into consideration Adelaide's beautiful beaches and mostly great weather compared to most of Europe.

Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose).

Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D

Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.

I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts.

For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.

>>>For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.

But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available.....

Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well!

POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.

Making cars electric doesn't solve any of the problems with cars though. Cars, no matter the technology, are the problem. I'd much rather get rid of more or less all cars, permanently, period.

Cars create opportunities for working class people that wouldn't exist otherwise. You're advocating for removing mid to long range personal transportation entirely? what's the basis for this? I'm all for city neighbourhoods being less car centric.

Sure, but they are still deadly. Self driving isn't ready yet despite the low bar of needing to be better than humans

Of course you can't stop at simply getting rid of cars and calling it a day, there's countless other things that would have to come with that. Obvious ones include improving public and active transport, but really, fundamental transformation of entire cities to be less like Houston and more like Tokyo and Amsterdam is what's needed.

People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc, and that there are now a bunch of previously car centric cities that have been deliberately and fundamentally changed very successfully.

But that's silly. Everyone agrees with you but what if you need to go to your grandparents in the country side village of 200 farmers ? You could build a once-a-day bus line or you could just let people take a non polluting car from a lot outside the city.

Cars are not the problem: it's their aggregation in dense city + their pollution. Remove the pollution, people stop dying, we can then discuss your dream of perfect public transport for optimization's sake.

>>>People love to respond that that's too expensive or unworkable or unrealistic or whatever, ignoring that it's actually the status quo that is too expensive, unworkable and unrealisitc

I'd want to see some numbers to support that. What does it cost to provide round-the-clock availability of secure, climate-controlled public transport to every possible location, urban or rural? Bullet trains on standby at 0100hrs to take 1 guy from Osaka to Kanagawa would cost a fortune. In comparison, while PARKING and roads definitely have costs associated with them, the hardware/infrastructure is largely concrete, and inexpensive to maintain when operating below capacity. So 1-2 people can hop in a car and take a road trip at a far lower net/civilization-wide resource expenditure.

Japan has great public transport. Japan also has great cars and a very healthy car community. What part of Japan's transportation approach classifies it as "unworkable and unrealistic" to such an extent that completely banning cars is the optimal solution?

I don't get that one. Cars are mostly fine if they don't pollute. They'd just be large bicycles. Why do you think the concept of automated personal transport is "the problem" ?

I think for instance we can't possibly build enough railway and bus network to serve every inch of the territory and it's simply to allow fast speed individual transport to distribute the load. It can be even automated with no pilot control, but it's impossible to schedule-base every location in a city without displacing people, rebuilding cities entirely around specific common transport etc. In Europe and Asia, where we build a lot of cities organically, it seems silly. In the US, where cars are even MORE prevalent to the point cities are built for them rather than humans, it will never disappear.

> I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better...

I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London.

Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout.

Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.

Add it to the long list of popular misconceptions about Sweden in general, most of which are held by the Swedes themselves, lol.

It’s not all of Sweden though. I live in Malmo and I haven’t felt the need to drive at all.

There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward.

I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.

The city council in Stockholm in the 60s had a plan to empty what they saw was the slum-center of the town, the residents of which they felt were morally degenerate, and move them out to the suburbs.

The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since.

Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.

Having 2-3 major automobile (cars, trucks, busses, etc) manufacturers in a country half (or less) the population of NYC probably explains why.

Overwhelmingly, it's the Social Democrat party, not evil capitalists or car manufacturers, who are responsible for aggressively promoting cars and car centric policy and infrastructure in Sweden. This fact will grind the gears of both Swedes and misinformed Americans alike, lol.

Interesting, what sort of aggressive promotion of cars have the SD party being doing?

Just to note. The abbreviation for the Social Democrats in Sweden is "S". The "SD" party is the Sweden Democrats, a socially conservative right wing nationalist party.

The history of "folkhemmet" is a topic about which entire books are written, but I'm not sure there are any that focus specifically on the car, I've appended some stuff from a quick google below.

As a result of this history, today, the social democrats (just like all other parties) pay lip service to environmentalism, curbing emissions, fighting climate change etc etc, but the truth is they rely heavily on the utterly car dependent rural, small town and suburban voters they themselves have created, and are thus constrained in how much they can really push policies that meaningfully reduce car dependency.

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https://mhrf.se/broschyr/hjulspar

När väl vågorna efter andra världs- kriget började lägga sig blev vår in- ställning till bilen och bilismen oåterhållsamt positiv och Sverige blev det land i Europa som hade det snabbast växande antalet bilar per in- vånare. Det blev snarare det övriga samhället som fick anpassa sig efter bilen än tvärtom. Dessa hjulspår kan vi idag se lite varstans, inte minst i våra städer och tätorter som så småningom fick genomgå genomgripande förändrin- gar och i många fall till stora delar byggas om för att biltrafiken skulle fungera rationellt. I samband med det stora genom- brottet under 1950-talet förändrades synen på bilen. Man såg den inte längre som en lyxartikel, bilen kom till och med att bli en byggsten i folkhemsbygget. I skriften ”Har vi råd med bilen?” slog socialdemokraterna inför valet 1956 fast att bilen både var leksak och nyt- tosak och att den inte längre enbart var en angelägenhet för överklas- sen. Bilen kallades till och med för en demokratisk kraft...

...Man drömde om att komplettera folkhemsidyllen med en lagom stor bil – kanske en Volvo PV 444 eller en Saab 92.

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https://www.tekniskamuseet.se/lar-dig-mer/100-innovationer/b...

Med det utbyggda vägnätet och det stadigt ökande antalet bilar började samhällsplanerarna övergå från att anpassa bilismen till det gamla samhället till att istället bygga ett bilsamhälle enligt förebilder från USA. Bilen ingick nu i ett gigantiskt tekniskt system där motorvägar och bilanpassade köpcentra med väldiga parkeringsplatser ingår. För att nå fram till bilsamhället började också Sveriges städer omvandlas — stadskvarter revs, vägar breddades, parkeringshus byggdes och städernas förorter utvidgades allt längre från stadskärnorna. Resultatet blev ett kulturellt och ekonomiskt bilberoende.

You have to remember that after the self-imposed devastation of WW2 all European countries wanted to catch up with the US. Fridges, televisions comfortable houses and yes cars- these things were available to every worker in America. Living standards equal to the US were finally reached in the 1970s.

I thought that the social democrats have been having close ties to the industry for a very long time? Maybe not capitalists in a strict sense, but industrialists? To me it seems like it's the social democrats, the industrialists and the unions who for long time worked quite a lot together and aligned?

New York City proper (five boroughs) has a population of 8.4 million. Sweden has a population of 10.35 million. But yes, I agree with your sentiment about having high density of manufacturing in a particular segment will probably skew your policies towards it. This might explain why Munich is so rich, but has such poor mass transit compared to Berlin.

What surprises me more is that big Japanese cities like Tokyo and Osaka chose to build enormous rail networks (above and below ground) instead of wide, fast boulevards and raised expressways.

Tokyo has an extensive network of raised expressways. They're just so extortionately priced (roughly $1/km) that nobody uses them unless they really have to, but since Tokyo is so crowded, they're jam-packed all the time anyway.

https://www.japanistry.com/shuto-expressway-explained/

I was thinking of NYC metropolitan area w/ 20 million in population :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

I lived in Stockholm for sometime before moving to London. There are a lot of parts in London where it's very easy to live without a car. I think the main reason is because it's essentially made of small towns that eventually all merged together. One is never too far from a fully functional high street and etc. Stockholm is built differently and having a car there makes life much easier even though the public transport is very good.

I have lived in london for the last 10 years (and counting). I don't own a car and I wouldn't want one to drive in London.

I live in zone 2 though. Probably things would be different if I lived further away.

we left London last year after spending there 10 or so years. We spent the last 5 in a leafy part of South London. Commuting to work( before covid) was pretty easy with trains but also time consuming. Arrival of our child did change things and not having a car was putting limits on certain things by quite a lot. If I'd turn the time back, I'd definitely buy a car.

I think Stockholm's greatest problem is the geography. Everything going north or south in the entire region has to pass through the same few islands in central Stockholm, all options are awful. Therefore we end up with the horrific traffic on for example Hornsgatan or Sveavägen used for essentially thoroughfare when they instead should be calmed nice livable streets.

The way to solve it is by finishing the bypass (Förbifart) Stockholm and an eastern ring connection and then start greatly limiting traffic going through the center.

Completely agree outside the inner city. You can feel that it was designed in the 60s and 70s and then never touched again.

There are many boroughs in London with a majority of households not owning a car - more than 60% in Islington, Hackey, Tower Hamlets, Camden, Westminster, City, with Haringey, Hammersmith/Fulham, Kensington/Chelsea, Newham, Southwark, Lambeth, Newham, being over 50% without a car.

Oddly the Isles of Scilly, which are tiny, and lack a proper vehicle ferry to the mainland, has about 50% of the population with a car or van. The furthest you could actually go would be able 2 miles.

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