Barcelona-style “superblocks” could make cities greener and less car-centric
anthropocenemagazine.org
anthropocenemagazine.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble
And I thought 2nd paragraph from Wikipedia offers an interesting insight on cultural priorities:
> It was first used in Canada and the United States in the late 1940s, but it later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic. Its benefits for pedestrian amenity and safety have led to new examples being installed in many countries in recent years
Unless you are trying to cross perpendicularly, then you have to walk 10 meters less. Averages out to being similar (and isn't annoying to use in person).
Regardless, it shortens the crossing length, and puts crossing pedestrians at a perpendicular angle to turning drivers, both of which drastically increase pedestrian safety.
> Pedestrians are much more able to see or intervene in a crime than drivers are.
Pedestrians are easier to watch and carefully evaluate, also, and will not always be around; you can follow a target and wait until they are safe to rob. People in cars are a mystery, and near active streets a constant one.
Also I don't think pollution is specific to this type of construction. Any type of full scale construction in urban environments causes terrible pollution and pest issues for the adjacent blocks.
I don't at all doubt its also inflation at play. It seems perfectly reasonable tho that a place that generally has car-less renters would have higher prices as those without cars could afford that added price. To an extent of course.
If there's only 100 units in a car-less block and 500 ppl that want them, what could be done if you've reached the limit of what can be built?
I guess you could go up, making sky scrapers... but now I have to admit I'm out of my element. Not sure if that's viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
I wonder what can be the counter to this?
Forcing the approval of some type of permits and permitting high density development in some amount/type of area is much more reasonable and executable. (If a city were falling short of the originally proposed mandated housing, what entity would have to make up the shortfall and how would you force them to build a development they’re not asking to build?)
Another is to remove zoning laws preventing secondary suites / in-law apartments / granny flats / etc. These also force a certain type of development onto cities.
Another fix - not so much zoning though - is to move to 10' lanes instead of 12'. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-06/why-12-fo... , which again forces a certain type of development onto cities.
After decades of existing forced development, it too easily becomes the baseline of what is "normal."
I have no problem with cities imposing restrictions on cities, as that is amenable to democratic review by the voters in that city. Having a national imposition on a city would be objectionable to me on principle (and in the US, would very likely violate the 10th Amendment).
AHJ - authorities having jurisdiction, basically "whoever sets and enforces the codes"
That still leaves the problem in your original proposal of "how exactly do you plan to enforce the required level of high-density development if no one is asking to do it?"
The National 55 MPH speed limit shows the federal government, through the power of the purse, can have a strong influence on state traffic laws.
The history of zoning shows how the State Standard Zoning Enabling Act - a federal work - can influence the states to change.
There appear to be easy ways to tweak judge2020's proposal to make it better reflect demand, but I don't care to argue that issue.
> AHJs imposing restrictions on themselves
judge2020's point is that zoning laws support current residents, not future residents, so AHJs have a systemic bias against making these changes.
judge2020's proposal is to look towards the democratically elected bodies which have a wider scope.
As a concrete example, California recently made it easier to build mother-in-law units (ADUs in CA terms), by reducing the requirements cities and counties can enforce. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2020/03/12... . This law is why I mentioned mother-in-law units as an example.
That change in California law has no constitutional issues like what you are opposed to.
If CA voters can’t manage to do this for CA, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be any easier to get it to pass federally.
Just because it isn't easy doesn't mean judge2020 isn't right.
You said you staunchly oppose a state government forcing a certain type of development onto cities, without explaining why you oppose it, nor stating if you support the current forced state of development.
I do oppose states “[forcing] cities [to] have a certain minimum amount of high-density development every year” because it’s not at all obvious how to implement forcing development that is not supported or requested by developers.
I have no significant objections to the current level of state restrictions in my state of MA, in which no developers are forced to develop property against their wishes.
If you poll people if we should build more in their city, you get a majority in favor. Then you get community meetings in which a vocal minority that can actually afford (typically better off and older) to go to community meetings and create pressure shoot down projects or cripples them.
On a larger scope you have folks who are denied economic opportunity due to housing policy that gets set by people who are already in, but kick away the ladder for everyone else. As a concrete example, I know lots of people who'd love to live (again) in SF in part due to the job market, but cannot or it would be super hard for them.
You might probably be right but its nevertheless amusing the way statistics can render things banal in a weird way
Same in the UK, rent is up all over the country, breaking in, flytipping, private and public areas devastation is up. Local media don't even care to report on knife attacks in major cities.
It worked so well that the city and the DPD started the Green Light program. They worked with gas stations putting up cameras and put together teams of dedicated officers for a quick response. The result was that it drastically reduced car jackings and gas station robberies. Now they've done the same thing at liquor stores and are talking about expanding it to other cooperating merchants. Cameras only work if they are being monitored and the police respond quickly.
Critical part isn't the monitoring, but availability of enforcement. Having enough units just walking around would probably have similar effect.
For example here in bum fuck eastern europe, after we joined Schengen, street crime dropped in no time. Lots of „street professionals“ went to much more wealthy Western europe. Some packed up and left. Others leave for tours and come back home to live on income from stolen stuff.
I have two questions:
Do emergency services count as cars?
Do people who have to take call to provide emergency medical care still get to use cars?
No
If you ask two, people answer the less interesting one to the exclusion of the other.
So emergency vehicles can drive in. Can emergency workers drive out?
That doesn't solve the problem, which is OK, in that I don't expect people here to understand how being on call works.
Basically, it's like a leash centered on the hospital: You can be anywhere, as long as you can get to the hospital in a certain amount of time when you get called in. This roughly correlates with distance, but not entirely: When my dad was on call in a town with a railroad track running through it, he had to stay on the right side of the tracks because a long coal train would blow his response time. (It was a small town.) The point is, though, they aren't fixed at home when they're on call, and being fixed at home would destroy their lives. My dad had to be on call fully 50% of the time when he lived in aforesaid small town, because he was 50% of that town's total anesthesia providers.
Therefore, unless you propose a chauffeur, they will be driving their own vehicles while they're on call.
On a deeper level, changing how being on call works would require changing how small of a town people are allowed to live in. This seems like a common problem: People come up with something that they might be able to make work in New York City, and think they've Solved The Problem, blissfully unaware of St. Louis, let alone Du Quoin.
It's 5pm Friday in NYC, you're 10 blocks from the hospital and get paged? You walk or ride a bike. Any city not built in the American car centric design, biking is faster
That is a good argument against shopping malls or high rise buildings, as they are bigger and vastly most inaccessible than superblocks. If shopping malls and similar structures are safe, superblocks are safer.
Some superblocks sometimes have parks or playgrounds, you never have to worry about your kids getting run over or thrown in the back of a van, more people hang out outside because it isn't sulfery or loud.
I lived in one super-like-block in Poland and noise was the reason I had to move out. About 200 flats facing each other, you need only one person to ruin day or night for everyone there. One party at night and you have 600 people who couldn't sleep. One specific neighbour was listening to music from loudspeakers literally all day causing echo in the block. She turned volume up when cleaning and vacuuming, she had to still hear the music WHILE vacuuming. Never want to live to such block ever again, not anywhere close.
That's just living in a city _shrug_
If rather hear kids playing at 3pm than youths on ATVs or random mopeds at 3am
Edit: I think you may be misinterpreting the definition of a superblock
> never going back to dense population
We have different interpretations of "living in a city".
As the parent of a young child, I wish very much for more car-free space around my house. Otherwise I need to pack her in the car to get some running-around space.
You might be interested in this "Not Just Bikes" video about raising kids in non car dependent places: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
or this one about kids who bike to school in a group for safety: https://bikeportland.org/2022/10/13/portlands-bike-bus-featu...
The coverage of the bike bus stuff made me cry because it just felt so special and gave me hope for the future.
I do feel you on the problems, but the idea of the construction job being complete in only a 9 month timeframe sounds like a luxury.
No offense but this sounds like a classic reactionary anti-bike cliché, so would you mind sharing some sources?
The OP is drawing some pretty common sense conclusions, they are essential turning busy streets into quiet alleyways.
Would you rather walk on a highway shoulder or a residential street?
Ears on the street is what matters, not cars on the road.
In fact, there will be more people on the streets. The lack of cars makes it possible to use the spare space for playgrounds, skate parks, outdoor restaurant seating, additional shops, et cetera. And the streets don't suddenly narrow: they are still 70 feet wide, they don't magically turn into tiny alleyways the second you remove car traffic.
I can tell you from experience that many well-designed parks are even very busy after nightfall. No reason to feel afraid when there are literally a hundred people within eyesight.
This happens whenever you improve anything in a city. The solution is to make the improvements everywhere if you can. We obviously can't stop making nice things just because it makes some areas more desirable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem
The remedy (at least according to Henry George) is to not only continue improving, but also to tax away the land rents, and most likely distribute them equally to all residents.
This also means that whenever there's an improvement to, say, transit that is actually beneficial to the community, it can be more than self-funding by taxing land rents.
NYC is obviously walkable but walkable within boroughs. Nobody is walking from Midtown to LIC or Chinatown to BK?
In NYC, there are plenty of places exactly like Chicago. Not everywhere is a walker's paradise, and even in areas that are, car traffic is a dominating part of your life. NYC is great, but I am very jealous of Barcelona and even Paris. Very excited about congestion charging.
When people hear "Barcelona superblock", I think they're thinking of the individual city blocks which to be fair, are already huge and modular. (this is at least the confusion I originally had)
The idea with superblocks, is to take a cluster of city blocks and not allow through traffic in that block, instead guiding that traffic to flow around the perimeter of that cluster. Nothing here requires the city blocks to be built or look the way Barcelona's city blocks are built and look. All that's required is changes to the roads, and to try and encourage each cluster of blocks to have a mostly self sufficient set of amenities like a grocery store, cafe, etc.
In unicode art, if □ is a city Block surrounded by roads (-- and |) being used by traffic,
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So yeah, that's not exactly what a "superblock" is - because very few of them exist without parking. Doing both parking + easily walkable gets expensive.
Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks.
All that to say: if the superblocks don't solve the need-for-a-car problem, they aren't gonna do much for the traffic or car-centric problem. And a mall surrounded by parking garages isn't exactly the walkable old European city people are wanting. So we're back to needing transit first. And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.
You seem to be stretching really hard here to try and conflate "no driving through them middle of the superblock" and "people in the superblock aren't allowed to have cars", but those aren't the same thing at all. You just put the parking in centralized places at the edge of the superblock, where economy of scale can apply.
If everyone still needs cars, you gotta put them somewhere. And the roads have to be big enough to accomodate the commuting and the inter-block traffic. If you put them on the perimeter and route the cars around the perimeter, you don't have a walkable city, you have a car-centric city of high-traffic roads people drive on to walk around little walkable islands. *Same even if you put them under the superblock.* Tons of these sorts of mini-downtown walkable areas in LA, for instance, but nobody's calling LA walkable.
Transit, transit, transit. You can't superblock your way around the need for it. "Walking to a car to drive to another part of town" instead of "Walking to a train to get to another part of town" is going to give you a dramatically different experience, since one of those is far, far more friendly to low-density SFH surrounding development than the other.
You really need to spend some significant time in a walkable city outside of the US to see the difference it makes.
It's somewhat obvious how to go from village, to hamlet, to town, to city with horses, to city with trams, to cities with a modern multi-facted public transit system. It's also pretty obvious how to go from horses to car dependent hellscape. It's not quite so obvious how to go from an extremely car-dependent hellscape like Houston or Atlanta or LA, to a walkable and bikable city with a modern public transit system like Amsterdam or London or Berlin.
I'm kind of overselling the thesis here some, because from one perspective, the Netherlands did go from quite car dependent to its current state in the past 50 years...on the other, the Atlanta and Houston metros each have 1/3 the population of the entire Netherlands and LA has 2/3.
Anyway, point being, the disbelief is in refactoring from Houston/Atlanta/LA to non-car designed cities, not so much in understanding how they can exist in the first place.
Note that you don't have to replace car commuting to reduce car use on the margins. Most car journeys are short, e.g. going to the nearest shop, or taking children to/from school, and a superblock with parking on the edge can mean people don't drive for those journeys even if they still commute by car. Getting a household to go from 2 cars to 1 is just as much of a win as getting a 1-car household to eliminate it completely.
> And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.
Such as? Where I live (Tokyo) most streets are "open" to cars in that a car can drive down them, but they're narrow with low speed limits and cars are expected to give way to pedestrians, which is much the same as on the inside of a superblock. You can't make a walkable city without putting walkers first.
Furthermore, the increased walkability reduces the number of bus stops needed and makes it way easier to construct bus lanes - which can get absolute priority at crossings.
Walkable cities which are open to cars are a contradiction. Cars are absolutely massive and need a disproportionate amount of space. As long as you need to sacrifice half your neighborhood to cars, it is not going to become walkable.
This problem is solved by public transit.
You're misunderstanding what a superblock is.
The blocks in Barcelona that look the same predate superblocks. The idea of a superblock -- making an NxN grid of blocks impermeable to through car traffic, basically -- could still be done in other cities with more irregular block patterns. It would be a little more complicated, of course, but it'd still be doable.
Edited to correct typo
All of SoMA is dominated by huge, high-speed pedestrian hostile thoroughfares; trains only go through one corridor so most of the city is excluded from connectivity (Muni is horribly slow and unreliable so you can't actually depend on it in daily life), not to mention the slow frequency, ear-splitting volume and noxious odors; affordability is downright awful so anyone middle-class couldn't experience it; and the whole city is filthy and dangerous so if you aren't a 20-something able-bodied large male walking in the middle of the day who ideally isn't a minority, you can't really make use of the freedom anyway (and even if you are crazy people will still try to pick fights with you for no reason... yeah never again). In SF's defense the bike-share more or less works given how tiny the city is. But don't ride your own bike or it'll be stolen in a week...
I believe that for a modern society to function a point to point family sized vehicle is required somewhere there in the mix.
Because they’ll all have moved out.
It's not a binary thing "cars" vs. "not cars at all". Inside the "superblocks" is possible to use the car. Is just that you can't go anywhere except around the super-block and you have to drive in a slow pace.
Parking is also restricted to neighbors and short times for loading and unloading goods or people.
All that, disincentive cars going there except for specific needs. Also a lot of space is take away from cars for common pedestrian spaces and cycling.
Is just that, if you have to drive slowly, you can't park and you have to exit in the same place you entered, what's the point?
It's not designed for stop traffic totally, just to disincentivize some (most maybe?) kind of traffic. The idea is also make those areas kind of "independent". In the sense that they should have most of all necessary services. Places for buying your groceries, medical services, small business..
Of course, in practice it's not ideal, they are still learning.
Superblocks to my knowledge do not, you can exit anywhere on foot or by bike. Basically it makes getting around outside a car the more convenient option.
I do agree this is far from the norm though.
Additionally it felt like they were often far away from public transit that you needed. (The train stop may be 3 blocks away or better)
The superblocks concept is that they'd be grouped together into 3x3 grids, by changing traffic rules and building urban furniture to block off streets, creating new squares and one-way systems. The goal being that everything would be far more walkable and you'd see far more local community - i.e. less of the cookie cutter shops you describe.
Superblocks just means that within a grid of NxN regular blocks, you limit car traffic and instead prioritize walking and biking. It's true that the blocks of Barcelona tend to be same-y looking, but that issue predates superblocks.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/9/lets-infill-a-t...
An entire block gets leveled and filled with cookie cutter 5-over-1s. The neighboring block also gets leveled to provide a giant parking lot for the residents. This happens even in city centers and near universities.
Cookie-cutter isn't necessarily a problem. Though they can look quaint, even most old walkable neighborhoods contain nearly identical assortments of businesses. Most of those businesses require only very small spaces, and could never generate the revenues to pay for larger spaces while competing with big box retailers. You need many small, cheap spaces. Over time you'll eventually start to see a handful of quirky establishments pop up. But if your aim is just for the quirky establishments, setting aside only one or a handful of cheap spaces, with most targeted at chains or otherwise too large and expecting too much rent, what you'll likely end up with is a bunch of vacant commercial spaces and low foot traffic.
Nothing wrong with 5 over 1 buildings, IMO. What's wrong is that the first floor invariably will have N commercial units, all too large, when they could provide 3N or 5N, all significantly cheaper and capable of supporting small proprietors. Moreover, with a larger number and assortment of businesses, that ground floor will begin to look and feel much less cookie-cutter.
But I guess it's probably difficult to raise money using a pitch that features comic book stores and flower shops, rather than one that imagines a CVS or Walgreens as a tenant.
Downtown San Jose is a lot more vibrant whenever they shutdown streets for special events.
If a couple times a year I don't have car access to my home, I'll be just fine. If you did that permanently I'd be pretty unhappy.
Shutting down (a small section of) Memorial Drive on Sundays in the summer also seems like a win. There's a parallel road on the other side of the river that can pretty much substitute at a lower traffic time, but you almost certainly wouldn't want to cut that capacity at rush hour on a weekday when both sides of the river are already horrible in terms of traffic capacity.
In a way, getting rid of cars is the special event: increased foot traffic, food vendors, outdoor seating, and other events like markets and live music tend to follow on naturally.
Apart from pedestrian streets, you also see this in well-integrated urban parks and plazas like Union Square, Washington Square, or Bryant Park in NYC.
You can make these roofs a proper public space rather than just being unused as they are today, and you don't have to worry about crosswalks / mixed pedestrian + car usage for roads.
From a weather perspective, they're pretty nice in the winter, but they suffer from a number of problems such as weird hours, lack of step free access, and fundamentally removing you from the urban fabric of the city. Oh, and they meander everywhere so it often takes a lot longer to use them. You end up with odd liminal spaces that can sometimes feel quite dangerous.
The only way this works is by separating out the cars - like highways are doing. Due to the lack of physical space to exist and the huge speed difference they are completely incompatible with non-car traffic.
These days, I have become enlightened and actually prefer car-centric living - in North America, but also in Western Europe from my impressions as a tourist, dense car-free areas only have any advantages whatsoever for drunk people and kids; but if I were to live in a dense place I feel like some variation of this design, with "local" space that is intentionally separated, is far superior to the kind you get in e.g. London/Munich where "local" space seems to simply be a path to get to the subway, or e.g. Vancouver (where I did live) where there simply isn't any.
You can find them in the old areas of Cancun (downtown) on Google Maps.
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A better approach, if we could muster the political will, would be to raise the large amounts of capital needed to transform large swaths of low-density suburbia into a comprehensively planned neighborhood. Otherwise, short of bombing the US back to the stone age and starting again, we will be trapped by the layouts of the 20th century.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development
Build bus rapid transit and train lines and remove height restrictions 500m in every direction of each station
No, they're not new. They've been tried many times. Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan has "superblocks".[1] That might be the first large development like this. The units near roads, not the ones facing the green spaces, are considered more desirable.
And that's in Manhattan, which has really good public transportation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...
Peter Cooper Village in a collection of near-100% residential highrises. It is completely lacking in shops, restaurants, or bars at street level. When it comes to amenities, it is a virtual desert. Despite the lack of cars, you still can't really walk anywhere you want to go to.
Due to the large number of highrises the access streets are still very car-focused and hostile to pedestrians.
Additionally, the remaining space is filled with small closed-off snippets of high-density greenery. The large amount of trees block any kind of visibility from the residencies, greatly reducing safety.
It reminds me a lot of the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood in Amsterdam. Constructed in the 1970s it is best-known for being unsafe and undesirable - until a massive reconstruction starting around 2000.
By all means tho, if people enjoy them and they 'work' then keep building them.
- playing guitar with amp (yea, you can w/o but less fun haha)
- loading up all our bikes to go to a scenic trail (getting cold, so also packing heavier clothes takes up space)
- transported a ridiculously heavy side table, picked it up from friends house.
- 3D printing. I suppose could be done but the fumes get unpleasant after awhile, best in a shed or garage.
- bulk buying groceries to save money (technically my wife handles this but I've done it before)
I'm sure I could think of a few more and I do have "edge cases" that come about because I just like to build things (usually involving PVC pipes, lol). I guess my point is that I just couldn't do many of these things in an apartment, I certainly tried ahah.
Rather interesting (disingenuous) take away from my comment, ahah.
That aside... is that not what I mostly said in my first comment? I totally agree. I don't enjoy bars. If you do and want to pay the premium for that, totally fine by me.
When our family of three was living on the outskirts of Munich, our local transportation costs were low, since we used transit + bikes (including an electric cargo bike) to get around. It was much cheaper than even having one car like we did/do in the states.
In my searching for a place, you're looking at a 1.5-2k premium for a comparable place _in_ the city vs 20-30 minutes out of it. That's roughly $20k a year in just rent alone, which is the price of a decent car.
Much in the same way, it's not reasonable to compare suburban and rural costs of living by assuming similar homes. For example, beachfront properties tend to be quite expensive in the suburbia, and private lakes even more so.
I can agree with this. I mean like you say though, its a location premium. All things being equal, a beach house will cost more than a normal house. All things being equal, 1000sqft in the city will be more than 1000sqft out of the city. To some, being able to walk to a restaurant is priceless. Other's could care less. At the end of the day, there's a premium for proximity.
This is like looking at potential living costs in Tokyo by calculating how much it would cost for 2+ cars and a big single family home with two large yards while eating peanut butter and drinking root beer every day.
This is a common fallacy that people engage in when comparing urban vs suburban areas. The suburban advantages can be had in urban areas for a large price (e.g. big house, multiple cars to the extent that this is an advantage), whereas urban advantages are more often things that you can't buy in the suburbs for any price, like walkability or decent transit or cooler local events/stores/restaurants. Thus, you end up comparing an urban area with suburban advantages versus a suburban area without urban advantages. That's obviously not fair, so the logical thing to do is to look at how people actually behave, how they actually spend.
I guess that's why I say "all things the same" because well, for us at least, we spend a lot of time at home. I wasn't even factoring a yard and garage etc. Just normal square footage and general "quality" of the place.
All things not being equal tho, I totally agree with you :)
Maybe if we were more "adventurous" haha.
- playing guitar with amp - I do it just fine, i just use headphones during the night, during the day I dont turn it to 11
- loading up all our bikes to go to a scenic trail - not a issue, have multiple bikes stored and fits into a rental just fine. Done it many times to go upstate and do 30+ mile bike rides to NJ
- transported a ridiculously heavy side table - Simple. get a truck and a buddy.
- 3D printing own 3+ 3D printers. Not an issue printing.
- bulk buying groceries - Cart + bag. Eat 2 weeks at a time with one trip. Takes 20 minutes
I dont think you tried very hard to actually make things work
Why should I have to try harder to make things work, when they work just fine as they are?
All of your proposed changes involve spending either more money (renting a place w/o paper walls, renting a car, renting storage) or rely on luck/circumstance (if everyone followed your advice, there would be no "buddy with a truck" - lol).
>Not an issue printing.
Are they resin printers? You _could_ do that printing in an apartment but you're looking at having to run a ton of fans and hope you have good circulation. I took mine to a friend's house and it unfortunately smelled like plastic for longer than we wanted and just not nearly as easy as having a table/bench in a shed or garage.
>bulk buying groceries - Cart + bag. Eat 2 weeks at a time with one trip. Takes 20 minutes
Wym? You mean you take a cart to the store, from the apartment? Or a cart's worth of groceries?
2. Biking in Barcelona is pretty cool actually and theres mountains right outside. Ideally you wouldn't need to drive your bikes to start biking.
3. sure but most people don't need a ridiculously heavy table
4. yeah this one makes sense, it does require space and is unique and cool. Maybe shared spaces for the community ?
5. You are mostly bottlenecked by the size of your fridge not by the size of your apartment
Traversing multiple blocks straight requires diagonal zig-zags eating 10% of time and you could easily lose orientation, especially if you jump into a shop on the corner. Also it’s simply annoying to see your straight path ahead and having to wave around it and then wait on a traffic light.
I doubt that it would work in a modern Capitalist society unless we all work from home.
Japan has many highly mixed neighorhoods, but unlike in the Soviet example, they emerge organically, because zoning restrictions are lax.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/28/world/big-soviet-budget-d...
If you scale them up a bit, add infrastructure, add workplaces and make it 10-15 walking distance and add public transit links to other such places that will do it.
Press [X] to doubt
Do you have any source that the USSR had superblocks like this?
Examples: https://imgur.com/a/lxgdEpM
Edit: well, in some sense yeah it's a huge block and thus a super block, but in terms of Barcelona-style super blocks with similar aims...
Why do designers do this?
No thanks.
> "restrict vehicle traffic to the streets on the perimeter" (keyword restrict, not solve)
> Thread is full of opinionated people who probably never lived there.
> ...used a computer algorithm to analyze data from the...
So many red flags. I hate this kind of thing. Go ask the people if they like to live long term over there. I mean real people not some politicized whacko that happens to agree with you.
I live in a post communist country near one of such similar places. In fact there are only 2 places in the world that have been designed with such planning and attention to detail. The aerial pic on that article actually resembles a lot the area I'm talking about. I've sent the picture to my brother who lives in the other side of the pond and he said it looks like a presidium. That area also has a really bad reputation.
In my city in Romania, public transport is about the same speed as walking. So I'd say Barcelona has great public transport, based on this limited analysis.
Hence, citations neede. What exactly was bad? Did you only try driving?
From El Prat to where, do you think would be a fair analysis?
The idea that public transport has been designed for tourists is preposterous. The network of public transport extend far away from the touristic places.
Most tourist, and most expats in my experience (I'm thinking in those that don't bother to learn any local language), stay in three or four neighborhoods and think that that's the city and get their impressions from those few areas.
That's the reason you always hear the same histories: pickpockets (stealing from tourists), dirty (drunk tourist peeing in the streets), etc
That doesn't sound all that great to me. Here in Tokyo, driving is generally not significantly faster than public transit, though of course it can vary a lot depending on your two endpoints. And of course, if you add in time to find parking, that usually makes driving very unattractive (though this doesn't affect taxis of course, so those can be attractive for some routes if you have tons of money you want to waste because they're not cheap).
Most people that live on those areas are pretty happy with the changes, and people that is just passing around those areas are pretty happy too.
By the way, you don't need a car if you live and work in Barcelona. In fact, most people that own a car don't use it if they are moving inside the city.
I think things like this are a funny marriage of utopian and tyrannical daydreams.
Really evokes some stupid philosophical thoughts I have about "reproducability", free will, and the human experience. But you clearly have it thought through. Lucky kids.
The only thing they've managed is to make car transport worse, and then public transport seems better by comparison.
Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
If even in NYC people still want a car, even with all the trouble, what does that tell you about public transport?
And I'm speaking from experience here - I have a ton of friends in NYC who all started without a car "who needs it", and over time every single one bought a car because it's simply too hard without it.
NYC is simply too dense, people need space, there's no reason to jam them all in small homes with little space. Although I suppose some people like that.
What exactly is "too hard" without a car in NYC?
Check out this sweet map: https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars
What is the number of car owners compared to all NYC residents? Of course, there will always be car owners and starting with a population in the millions is going to make that number appear large.
(I don't own a car in either city)
No one is spending any effort to make anyone unhappy. This is about giving a slightly less enormous amount of consideration to people who want to drive everywhere, so that more consideration can be given to those who are willing to use other modes of transport.
Even people from right outside those cities have such a wildly skewed perspective
“Traffic and parking is so bad!”
Have you consider moving to the city
“Traffic and parking would be worse!”
You don’t drive if you are already inside it
cue confused worldview shaking look
People occasionally want to go to places other than the city where they live.
NYC, absolutely. When I lived near NYC I would drive in, park the car in a garage for the whole weekend and never had any need or desire to use it.
SF, not really. Public transport is too fragmented and limited. Most of the time there's no convenient way from point A to B other than to go get the car and re-park elsewhere nearby.
No more. Public transport is horrible, and I'll never again agree to live in a place without private transport. It doesn't have to be a car - but it needs to be exclusively under my control, and it needs to be close to my front door.
And I don't care that I'm getting non-stop downvotes for my posts in this thread, someone needs to speak to reality rather than utopian dreams. I don't care about the votes, but it's prettyu uncool that downvoted posts are greyed out and hard to read - aren't downvotes meant for offtopic messages? Or is the goal to have a uniform hivemind?
I think in theory I agree with you. I would _prefer_ private transportation, but if I was stuck between private car and public transit, I would pick public transit because the alternative of sitting in a car commuting every day is dreadful compared to the few thousand steps I could get from walking to/from public transit.
Doesn't literally every city permit non-car modes of transport?
Sounds like you should give bicycles a try.
Or unironically, any last-mile foldable vehicle that you can bring with you on public transportation. Will solve most of your issues.
Maybe something like an enclosed golf-cart with a 30 miles range and space for 2 with cargo, (or 4 without)? But it would not be street legal today.
I'm really looking forward to superblocks being established in my district in Munich. It would be so nice if my kids and their friends could play in front of my appartment house without parked and moving cars everywhere.
In cities where public transport sucks less, there's more circumstances where it is better, and so more people use them.
If you're going to compare random mostly unused point to point, that's not what public transit is for.(That is something a car or taxi is needed for)
Public transit is better than a car in a pretty large chunk of NYC.
Few things in life make me less happy than the externalities of car culture. It fosters among other things: 1) Disconnection from one's community and the natural environment 2) Noise and air pollution imposed on one's neighbors without their consent 3) Worse collective physical health due to replacing walking trips with car trips 4) Excess consumption of all goods, including fossil fuels 5) Risk of serious injury or death for both drivers and pedestrians 6) High stress due to the inevitable presence of traffic 7) Environmental degradation and expansion of the urban/wilderness frontier 8) Repressive political regimes propped up by oil exports
Of course there are positives to cars too but many of the positives only exist due to the problems that the widespread deployment of private cars caused in the first place. We need cars to visit our friends and family or go to work because we constructed a society in which we don't actually live in the same communities as our friends, families and employers because the car allowed us to. We buy things that we don't need because the car allows us. Consumerism fills the void of meaning in our lives that is in no small part due to the disconnection that the car created in the first place.
Personally, although driving a car can be great fun under the right circumstance, I find most of the time it is either tedious or stressful. I would almost always rather be walking, which engages my body and allows my mind to wander without fear that I might seriously injure, or even kill, someone in a moment of inattention. At the same time, whatever mode of transportation I am using: car, biking or walking, I know that I am at risk of being hurt by an inattentive or reckless motorist, of which there are many.
I am making a distinction between private vehicles and vehicles in general. Obviously we need some vehicles to move crucial goods and people with limited mobility. And to occasionally make long journeys. Since the pandemic began, I have been only been in a car about a half a dozen times and I have experienced no material deprivation whatsoever. Of course I have been reliant on trucks delivering groceries to my local stores and the occasional home delivery (which again does not require a private vehicle).
Your fear does make me optimistic though. It suggests that people are waking up to the catastrophe that widespread deployment of private cars has had on human life.
* If by great you mean second worst in the country https://www.lamag.com/article/los-angeles-traffic/
There's definitely some short term pain from all the construction works, but they're making steady progress, the city has already become noticeably more walkable & cycleable in many places, and I'm quite convinced that moving away from cars within the city is the right direction in the long term.
They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things better?
I also have zero interest in walking 2 blocks to my car when I need it, nor do I want to carry my items that far from my car.
I especially like: "or reducing the number of parking spaces or the number of traffic lanes, for example—actions that might catalyze bigger, more permanent changes in the future."
Yes, let's make people miserable now, because it might possibly make some change later.
The concept of first make things better seems to have escaped them.
I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars.
Making people miserable is not a viable strategy.
Making things worse for car owners isn't the right strategy.
And BTW, public transport is not good enough, not even in places like NY, you need something better.
I'd guess you've lived in NY for a long time and have forgotten (or never had to suffer through) how bad public transit is in most US cities.
Walking is also nice for shorter distances. Or bikes.
It's called walking, biking, transit. These things all work. If you don't wanna walk a couple blocks to your car, sorry but that's not worth killing the planet and your neighbors. Cars have SO many externalities: air pollution that affects climate change, pollution that makes the air less breathable, noise, danger to others, takes up far more space leaving less room for other modes, etc.
Not just emergency services - more mundane things like, getting food and care to the elderly, getting workers and tools where they need to be to maintain infrastructure, produce food, and much more.
Yes, many city-dwellers can live without a car. But not everyone lives in a city, or has any desire to live in a city (especially during a time of decline and perpetual crisis of one form or another)
Those who wage such vitriolic war on the car rarely consider small towns and rural areas, where public transport isn't efficient/practical, where no car often means no job.
But while we're on the topic of rural areas having terrible public transportation, I think that's a really important one. Switzerland has a smaller rural-urban divide (which is really where this whole "war on cars" thing comes in), in part because it is actually practical to move between rural and urban spaces on a regular basis. That isn't because the cities are more driveable, or because they build a highway through Bern: it's because they invested in public transit that actually works. This kind of talk benefits everyone.
Very few people in Barcelona own cars. Residents will have access to drop off things, but not parking.
> I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars
European cities tend to be pretty miserable places for cars by default, for the anti-car advocates it would generally be enough to stop subsidising cars.
Europeans have cars hidden somewhere. I’ll find where eventually.
It's worth remembering that this two block walk is much more pleasant in a superblock: you're not fighting cars along the way.
I can't help but form a terrible impression of anyone not willing to walk two goddamn blocks to their car. Even carrying bags or whatever. It's a short walk!
Wow. Two blocks is nothing. To me this reads as someone complaining they cannot drive a car from their kitchen to their bedroom.
I've transported bulky cargo further than two blocks, by the way. I'd rather suffer in those cases, but keep the streets relatively free of cars for the more common cases, like pedestrian quality of life.
Many people in BCN do not own a car. If they do own one, it is used almost exclusively for getting out of the city at weekends. For journeys within the city, the public transport system is excellent, and the climate lends itself to walking, cycling, and scooters. As such, parking two blocks away is not much of an issue.
Finally, as a resident you are still allowed to drive within the superillas to access your building’s car park, if it has one, and also for loading/unloading.
The superillas were controversial at first but now they are very popular the people who live within them.
No thank you indeed; I normally stay far away from the cores of cities precisely because of that atmosphere, and if stuff like this keeps happening to them, it looks like I'll remain so for the forseeable future.
Agreed. Trying to drive change by making others miserable is hardly ever a winning strategy.
Instead, we need to make it easy, convenient and fun to both get around without a car and to reduce how far one needs to go in day to day situations (i.e. have lots of small shops near housing).
That will make many people prefer to not use cars (most people don't actually love driving) and those who want to drive can still do whatever they like but it'll be a much smaller population.