If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
It took me a couple awkward minutes to realize that I'm the only one standing on my feet and not sitting in a car wherever I was looking. I apologized (???) and told them I was heading to a museum, bc I'm a visitor here and that's what we do right? I added a colleague's address and assured them that I'm not "confused", and will take an Uber now.
This was simply unbelievable in my world; for the next week I observed my colleague, whenever they took me out, or went to somewhere: we never walked outside. From the building to the parking lot, from the destination parking lot to the resto and vice versa.
Today, of course, I know that there are walkable cities too, I enjoy walking from my Chicago hotel to the office building :-) every single time I enjoy my US visits, but after a couple weeks I can't wait to get back to my 98% car free European life.
A bicycle on flat asphalt is more efficient than a person despite person+bike moving more total mass; but still the cost of mining iron ore, making steel, making a bike for every customer, compared to just building the store and the homes close enough to walk and not doing any of that…
Energy.gov says “In 2021, 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile”, it’s daft either way that people want to use a car for such short distances or that urban spaces are designed so that things are relatively very close but juuuust too far for convenience.
Also I would love to see more covered bikeways.
85 and humid here is worse than -00 and dry in Phoenix. It’s so humid your sweat can’t evaporate because the air is already saturated. It’s beyond miserable, and actively unhealthy to many.
Los Angeles to SF is 381 miles. My town to the Cherokee, which is about where the rainforest zone starts, is 383. North Carolina is a much bigger state than most people realize.
Nobody has ever thought North Carolina was small, though. Where did that idea come from? In fact, it is not clear why the record needed a distance in the first place.
I assure you, as life long resident, I have blown the minds of many non-natives by stating I can drive for 8 hours west and still not quite be in Tennessee. In most places east of the Mississippi that gets you through 3-4 states.
Except for the very hottest of summer days, I see a lot of pedestrians in downtown Austin.
I don't know if this is true of Austin, but trying to convince people to get off the street in the afternoon can be part of the city's heat management plan in some parts of Texas.
I think either an older colleague (I was not old enough to rent a car, this is a long time ago) ferried me across or maybe the hotel took pity and sent me in their minibus ? There was no practical way to walk that short distance, the infrastructure is designed only for cars.
I mainly remember that mall because I found a (possibly mislabelled) copy of the version of Tori Amos' "Under The Pink" which is actually 2CDs, so "More Pink" is inside the case too but it was the same price as the regular album, and that was an amazing bargain for teenage me. But yeah, it was staggering to me that these Americans just expected to drive everywhere. I have grown up in an English village where I walked everywhere, to school, to the shops. to a friend's house, everywhere. I guess I was old enough to realise that most English villages aren't also served by the London Underground, but the choice to build only car infrastructure seemed very strange indeed.
Great city to ride around! Surprisingly good facilities.
they really do act like it whenever the USA plans a city or a neighborhood. why wouldn't everybody have a car? except we actually have plenty of reasons now that we didn't before
There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example. Tunnels can be an option as well. Grids can really help a city be more walkable since it becomes dead simple to navigate and you aren't wasting time on long winding roads or labyrinthine paths which increase the distance between two points and make it easier to get lost.
Infrastructure for pedestrians would be you cross as soon as you get there, cars wait. Bridges are not pedestrian infrastructure they’re “cars are the priority” infrastructure, “cars mustn’t be delayed or inconvenienced, pedestrians can be” infrastructure.
None of the world's great walking cities heavily uses bridge crossings like that.
What do work for pedestrians is a network of smaller roads that you can "just" cross safely without waiting or taking detours. Basically, a few big roads you cross once in a while and the rest being smaller roads where cars are forced to go slowly.
When you consider that drivers are generally wealthier (because they own cars) and the pedestrians are breathing car exhaust and tyre dust while working their lungs harder climbing to give cars the priority, listening to car noise while drivers pass in low effort comfort, the mild unfairness of it is more starkly contrasted.
Ideally good pedestrian design would tempt people out of their cars because walking is so quick, convenient, cheap, pleasant, interesting - with shade and shops and short distances and quiet clean surroundings. Big steel bridges don't contribute to that very much. [Have you seen how often Americans comment on the price of gas? Yet what people campaign for is the government to lower the price of gas, not for the government to make life without cars so pleasant that cars are not a necessity. What sense does that make? Most living Americans have never lived in a walkable place, and have no film, tv, or cultural reference for one to use for a basis for such a campaigh - maybe Disneyland (which visitors tend to love)? 120 years ago everywhere was walkable because there wasn't much other than walking. 70 years ago places were bulldozed for cars. Now multiple generations have grown up and lived their adult lives with car dependent urban design].
There were severe injuries or deaths every single year when students would cross the road late at night and a car would be speeding at 60+ mph. They eventually installed a puffin-style crossing, which was much better.
The solution, especially in built up areas, is to keep cars from causing problems for pedestrians rather than trying to stop pedestrians from causing problems for cars. Perhaps the cars should be relegated to a tunnel so people don't have to be near them instead.
To be walkable a city needs to be quick to walk between destinations and pleasant to do so.
Most US cities are too spaced out, require waiting at each block, or are not all that pleasant for walking.
Cars made more sense in the industrial age, when people needed to commute to a factory for work. But, in the age of knowledge work and especially remote work, we aren't commuting as much. So, walkable neighborhoods become far more important and impactful.
Strongly feel this acceptance will be difficult to actualize sans coercion.
I never drive to London because a train will get me there faster, and I can rely public transport to get me to almost anywhere I want to get to. It can definitely be useful to have a car in the suburbs but not enough to be worth the trouble of driving one there.
The difficulty of parking and driving around the city centre is a deterrent, but to me it is secondary to the positive factors.
I do like pedestrianised areas, because they feel safe and clean. The main danger remaining is the cyclists of the "get out of my say" type, especially couriers and the like.
I don't think anyone stopping to genuinely help is a "bad" thing, or robs one of their dignity. If you do, maybe that is a comment on your internal worldview instead of on that of the person stopping.
Dense cities where passersby ignore you wantonly are decried as impersonal, lacking community, etc and now we are saying we WANT MORE of that? That it brings DIGNITY?
Then mass suburbanization happened in the 60s/70s. American cities became high crime places. Everyone became anonymous. No one knew their neighbor.
Such is the paradox of modern urban life. Nowhere are you closer physically to your neighbor, but more distant socially. The 5 acre farms outside of town all know each other’s grandkids by name. Does a city dweller even know the name of the resident across the hall?
Here in Tokyo, it's still like this: kids play outside and roam around, taking the subway by themselves, etc. But people don't know their neighbors here either, since it's a city with tens of millions of people; it's just safe because it's built into the culture, just like petty theft almost never happens here and when you drop your wallet, it's almost certain to be turned into the nearest police box, with all the cash still inside.
There are many neighborhoods in cities and towns in the US where this is still true. I know because I live in one, and I've visited others. There are also a ton of US suburbs and exurbs where people barely know their neighbours.
Having a friendly neighborhood has much to do with the strength of community institutions and the existence of "third places". Those can be present (or not) in a variety of community layouts and densities.
My take is that it requires a sweet spot of economic security where people aren't struggling so much that they can't/don't trust in community, but also aren't so wealthy that they don't need/rely on their community. Beyond that, it also helps to have physical layouts that enable friendly unintentional encounters between residents.
The problem is that none of these places will be cheap to live in, because all else equal, the existence of that lifestyle will drive up demand (and therefore housing prices).
I didn't say that urban areas are less neighbourly.
I meant that the range of densities that are conducive to neighbourliness is a necessary, but insufficient condition.
People on average need to feel both economically secure enough and at the same time so wealthy as to not rely on anyone else.
They also need a third-place in which to congregate
This is why American suburbs outside the north east are so soul crushing - the "third place" is typically a church instead of a a pub.
Other places that come to mind include Ann Arbor MI, Burlington VT, Boulder CO.
Like I said, none of these are cheap places to live relative to nearby areas.
I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston.
The elementary school near my friend's house had a playground that was 100% shaded by just two massive trees. They tore the school down for a modern replacement. The new playground has no shade at all, not even those stretched fabric triangles you see all over the southern US.
Or Panama City, did not reach 1 mil until the 90s
And "designed with cars in mind" is part of the problem, is it not? Using that as a filter is like saying "there are no parking garages with good canoeing routes"
Those other cities have a population that is adjusted to the heat - they grew up with it, their ancestors grew up with it, they're genetically and culturally adjusted to the climate. By contrast, the U.S. South includes a large number of immigrants who are only there because air conditioning exists. It's a mystery why anyone would want to walk around in 100 degree heat with 90% humidity, because they certainly wouldn't.
The simple answer is, you adapt (homeostasis)
I am one of those annoyed people, I want bike lanes and I don’t understand why a place with so many riders is so anti-bike (aside from understanding the natural societal inclination to think that anything worth doing should be difficult, and made difficult if not).
I think the problem is just the politicians: they probably use cars and never bike or walk in these places.
I think the thing that makes it work the way it does is, as you say, people don't openly complain. They just get out of the way, or ignore the bikers (I prefer the latter as long as a bunch of them aren't blocking the whole sidewalk). In America, they'd be going full Karen and intentionally antagonizing the bikers, or trying to start fights with them, etc. Here, people seem to just recognize it's an imperfect situation, and put up with it instead of making a big deal out of it.
Meanwhile, had plenty of occasional bicycle/scooter riders in Seattle basically destroying the flow of pedestrians on sidewalks.
And at least here in Montevideo we're literally by the beach. I am two blocks away from being able to swim :)
I do complain a lot about the heat+humidity combination and I use A/C a lot.
We do have humidity and heat and I don't enjoy it and I use A/C several months a year.
There's a big push for more cycling-centric and more cycling lanes, and the bus infrastructure is obviously a lot better than the US. I don't have a car by choice.
I haven't been to Houston but I have been to Dallas and it was an extremely frustrating experience and it feels like an awful soulless city to me.
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~114655~27814~113829~...
> "I would love more walkable infra but I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to walk in Houston."
But the relevant part is people who do want to, but can't.
I could see the office across the road from the hotel, but there was no easy way to get there on foot because there were no sidewalks, or indeed any other concessions to pedestrians. I had to walk through the car park, push through a hedge, climb down the grassy bank, and the do the same in reverse on the other side of the road. Reception had seriously recommended that I took a cab about 100 yards.
There's sidewalks and crosswalks between The Cupertino Hotel and One Infinite Loop, but they are terrifying to use because of how wide and busy that intervening junction is.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/3erCVaBPq49A7bgL9?g_st=ic
Walking to that hotel from San Jose was a mistake, incredibly hot even in winter and no shade, but it was possible — though I did have to switch which side of the road I was on several times because the sidewalk just stopped.
But my point is that Houston is designed the way it is because very few people want to walk in 100 degree humid weather. It was mostly built after cars were invented so it reflects that.
I'm not saying I get why people would not want to walk. Only that it's common to do so anyway.
Here in Tokyo, it's also quite hot, and extremely humid during the summer. Rain is very common during the summer as well, and we have typhoons too. Even so, everyone walks here, and lots of people (including moms with little kids) ride bicycles too, rain or shine.
Here are two weatherspark links for Tokyo and Houston:
https://weatherspark.com/y/143809/Average-Weather-in-Tokyo-J...
https://weatherspark.com/y/9247/Average-Weather-in-Houston-T...
Scroll down to the "Humidity Comfort Levels" sections of those two pages.
Those are not the same things. Tokyo is very different from Houston. Having just gotten back from south Texas, I know this.
Do you know how dumb it sounds to compare two entirely different places as if they should relate?
You'd be crossing a couple highway on-ramps which aren't the most pedestrian friendly.
At one point it was the intersection of 3 sketchy neighborhoods, but it's been a while.
...It just waited to run out until after I got home to my "safe", car-centric suburb for the summer, and decided to walk to a nearby gym. "A lot of areas can look OK," for certain.
I visited London a long time ago and the public transportation is amazing and it I did want to walk to see the city, which I did. But I imagine even living there, I would want my own car to be in control of my life.
So, visiting a place is good for walking. But living in a place is not. At least that's my experience.
I’m 40+ years old now and have never needed or wanted to have a driving license. I simply hated America when I had to visit and use taxi or someone else’s help to get anywhere. In Berlin even with a child the need of a car is so rare — sometimes it’s even more pleasant to walk an hour to a museum or a club than use public transportation.
I don’t have any business in such countryside. What would I find there? A good beach on Baltic sea is 15 min walk door-to-water plus 2 hours on express train. The list of tourist attractions and vacation destinations accessible by train, plane and/or taxi within half a day or so is so big here that I cannot imagine going to such inaccessible place. Worst case I will pay a few hundred euro for taxi if such improbable situation occurs.
I lived in Germany for years without driving as well, because I could afford to live by the city center. But over half my colleagues drove because that's all they could afford to do, and you should try stepping out of your bubble and understand the pressures that force Germans to drive. They're not all just wanting to spend more time in their Audis.
Second, don’t tell me about my “bubble”: you have no idea who I am and what I have experienced in my life. I’m very well aware of many sides of it, maybe more than you are.
Third, do you seriously want to lecture a person who is both a landlord and a tenant in Berlin about local rent controls and price development? We do have some issues here, but it is nowhere close to neither London or NYC where prices are crazy nor Moscow where commuting can be truly exhausting.
Sadly, many are. This topic often does turn into one of lifestyle judgement and it isn't very productive when arguments go from practical to personal. As if any one car-goer or bus-goer determines the fate of a city's urban planning.
I myself believe that personal cars are mobility edge cases and the world will settle on vendor-managed rental fleets eventually, where most people will occasionally use rental cars with autopilot.
Nevertheless this is not going to happen for the next 50-80 years, so we just need at least to stop promoting car-centric lifestyle and find a real compromise between cars, bikers and pedestrians.
It is just not true that mass transit is only for those who pay high rents. It is other way round pretty much all round world and historically - rich people were buying cars more and poor used public transport.
Well yes, the US transportation system is utter trash, even in California
> but it also sounds terrible in the sense that you can't just get in your car, go some place, park in a parking lot, go shopping, and then head back home, all on your own terms.
In Europe I have three supermarkets in a 800m radius around my place, the closest shopping center/mall/whatever you call it is a 30min walk away (10min by public transport, 8min by bicycle). I can walk to the closest supermarket without even leaving the private ground of my block of buildings and its park, no street to cross, no cars in sight
> I would want my own car to be in control of my life.
Are you working for these fine gentlemen ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_lobby
When I finally did get a car, it was a massive QoL upgrade. I can go anywhere, at any time, usually considerably faster than PT, and carry an order of magnitude more than before. I didn't enjoy having to go to the supermarket multiple times a week, but I had to when I could only carry maybe 4 bags (fewer if heavy) in one trip. I still do use buses and trains where it makes sense, e.g. visiting other cities or the centre of mine
It's interesting that I've been downvoted to -3 for factually detailing how cars are in fact useful. Shooting the messenger won't change the facts
It isn’t? Even with EVs? Or your point is that only poor/non-rich people shouldn’t be allowed to own cars?
> you want and carry a lot of useless junk
Such as food and other groceries?
I mean, if we're talking about convenience, I started ordering my groceries online during the pandemic and I'd argue that's an even bigger QoL upgrade. You can still go for produce (or not) and the occasional thing you need immediately, but getting stuff delivered to you is generally cheaper and more convenient than owning a car. The gratification is a bit less instant, but I value my time more than that.
As for cars being faster than public transit, sure, but making cars fast often have the side effect of making other modes of transit slower, and vice versa. Buses need reserved lanes to be reliable, bikes need reserved lanes to be safe, which means less cars can go. As a pedestrian, I would get to places significantly faster if I could just jaywalk wherever I please, but naturally this would require very low speed limits. Cars also require parking lots, which make walking less efficient. Cars are only convenient for their own drivers, they are inconvenient for everybody else (including other drivers).
I also actually agree on prioritizing bus and cycle lanes over car lanes. Instead of being angry at them, which unfortunately many drivers are, I choose to appreciate them as intended - i.e. if I'm going into the town centre I usually go by bus. I'd also like to see more properly-separated bike lanes. I don't blame cyclists at all who choose to ignore the painted ones and take the lane as if they're a car
However the main reason why public transport is slower isn't usually due to traffic or physical constraints, but the longer routes you have to take. Usually the planners have done their job well, and the route is near-optimal in aggregate (and therefore often useful for myself if I'm commuting or visiting the centre), but if I want to visit a friend in another part of town, I've very often got to go in to the centre and change out again. Even if there's a direct route, it can be slow due to how many stops occur (off-board ticketing/proper BRT could help with that in major areas). If I'm visiting a business in a business park/industrial estate further out, it's often a taxi or nothing
The following doesn't change much, but just to nitpick:
> As a pedestrian, I would get to places significantly faster if I could just jaywalk wherever I please, but naturally this would require very low speed limits
That's legal where I currently live (UK). Motorways are essentially the only place you're not allowed to just cross, though drivers aren't generally required to break the traffic to give you passage if you're not at a zebra crossing (or a junction, as of recent code changes). Speed limits definitely do vary based on the likelihood of pedestrians in the area, but I don't think changing the law would change much there. I mean, they'd have to fairly compensate by adding more crossings anyway, and IME those are more likely to slow down traffic due to their poorly-timed and long stops (even with sensor-assisted intelligence), whereas pedestrians making ad-hoc crossings are usually sensible enough to wait for a natural gap instead of forcing one (and those who don't would probably "jaywalk" anyway), essentially making their effect on flow near zero. Even if you do have to slow for a pedestrian, it usually is just a slight slow for under two seconds. Much quicker than a red light. Zebra crossings of course don't have lights, but you do have a hard requirement to stop as soon as a pedestrian presents themselves at the side, and remain stopped until they've completely left the road, resulting in similar interruptions rather than turn-taking in existing gaps
no thanks
Walkable/bikeable places exist in some cities, but are reserved for the rich.
As for the costs of owning a car - these are real, but the cost of not owning a car is much greater. As electric cars filter down to the used market cost of car ownership will also drop a fair amount.
Adding a 2nd mechanical maintenacnce isn't as bad as dealing with the flesh skin version.
In fact all public transport there is pretty bad. Here in Barcelona the metros come every 3 minutes during the day on each line. In Amsterdam it's more like 15.
I haven't owned a car for more than 15 years now. I have city year bus pass but I also frequently just walk to wherever I'm going, there's lots of paths and shortcuts for pedestrians, but if the weather is a bit rubbish, there's bus stop outside my flat that runs every 5-10 mins.
I'm a member of the mobility car share for the rare times hen I do need a car, usually to pick up or move something heavy, or take a bunch of stuff to the decheterie.
Maybe sometimes after a night on the town, I might grab a taxi home, but I do not miss having a car.
https://events.humanitix.com/drinking-and-dragons-september-...
And actually make it back. Can't do that if I drive.
I used lime scooters considerably more than ubahn when I was in berlin
Edit: I stand corrected. There is a published schedule, I've literally never heard of anyone using it though and I wouldn't rely on it.
(Actually I tried both lives. I used to have a car in the past. Still prefer being car free)
This is a common Internet meme -- the American tourist that goes to Europe and loves their experience of walking around nice, dense cities designed at a human scale and functioning public transit. Then they return to their life of highways and parking lots and strip malls, which, to me, is dystopia.
They also said if I kept throwing a football in Central Park there would be trouble, and yelled at me for lying on a bench in a train station.
As a 22 year old kid I was a bit taker aback
I also did not own a car for years, commuting only by bicycle, and never had a problem.
Indeed, Austin's core is only about 5 square miles (the entirety of the East Side to the Greenbelt, Hyde Park down to far South Congress, say). Fairly compact.
It is no New York or London but it is walkable and bikeable.
Nor am I, but a constitutional test used to cost about $250,000 or so over a decade ago (does inflation affect these things?). For someone who can't afford a car, that's a tough bill to eat.
[Usually you can make two separate attacks on these kinds of constitutional cases since most states have their own constitutions that are practically identical to the federal one, so you can sue in both state and federal court separately if you want two tries at it -- this is good if you screw it up the first time and want to use the arguments the defendant fired at you in the first case to bolster your retry]
With representation though, I have a current case I finally settled today with the government and my legal counsel ran up a bill that was north of $500K for a very simple constitutional case. His firm swallowed it because it was part of their yearly pro bono requirements.
(And while I'm here 'manor' in GP was a typo for 'major', in case that's not clear to anyone.)
well, our living choices aren't necessarily choices these days. Nor comfortable. More like compromises for suvival. Already had more than a few friends priced out of California and needing to move out of the state in its entirety.
Using a bus in a ski resort is higher status than a car in a large city.
I confess that I have been one of those people (I didn't live quite there)--but when meeting with friends for a run. My preference was always to lace on the sneakers, walk to the end of the block, and run.
It's important to pace and hydrate oneself and people from hot climates know that because they deal with it all the time.
South Florida and the north suburbs of Detroit are #2 and #3 in my direct experience.
The south is very well suited to the e-bike. It will probably take the total die off of the boomers before anything really changed though
I looked around now on Google Street View, but can't recognize the slight hill I was walking on (it happened around 10y ago). Funnily enough, also street view shows streets with no pedestrians anywhere :-)
It's perfect that way. I hate driving.
I wouldn't let the cops bully me into taking an Uber though. Afaik it's still legal to walk in the US?
Also downtown austin is disgusting; maybe they were just stunned someone would be there on purpose before the sun goes down.
Hope you enjoyed the museum/trip though
But I note that you're saying "Near" downtown Austin so I guess it depends where you were maybe?
However, I do remember a night, when we went out with colleagues, and from one place we were to switch to another, it was less than a mile away. We stepped outside, and one of the colleagues were looking for a taxi / checking Lyft already; we, the visitors, didn't understand; are we really gonna wait and then squeeze in a car, instead of walking 10 minutes?!
We eventually walked, and it was perfectly safe (and lively) at that time of the night.
Your European life might be car free but, I was surprised when a friend who lives in Brussels, where I've been 4 times now and walked all over, told me he loved his time in Japan because it was the first time he could live car free. I was like WAT? You live in Brussels! It seems to have reasonably good public transportation. He was like, I live in the suburbs and have to drive to/from work every day.
I certainly love living in a walkable city, but I also realize that can be somewhat rare, even in Europe. Friends live in Solingen (home to Henckels knives and Haribo Gummies). AFAICT it's not walkable. Düsseldorf is though.
But yes most people I work with seem to drive into work for their commute with only the occasional person getting the train. The office in central Brussels even has a load of free parking spaces they can book on their day in the office (company is hybrid one day/week in the office).
And the idea of commuting more than 30 minutes is utterly horrifying to them, which as a Londoner I found an interesting perspective - a 30 minute commute to the financial district in London would still put me in an inner London suburb with incredibly high housing costs so my commute is way longer than that.
Now, back to my regressive tendencies...
Even at 3 AM, I'm not the only person out walking. I have never once been stopped by police. I go through "dangerous" neighborhood, through places near homeless encampments. I tweaked my groin while running a few weeks ago when I was 8 miles from my house and walked all the way back from Highland Park, though Uptown, Downtown, and the Cedars to get back to my house.
To be clear, walking in Dallas sucks. Sidewalks randomly end. There is construction everywhere. Oak Lawn this morning had both sidewalks closed, each with a sign saying to use the other sidewalk. Drivers pay absolutely no attention and never look for pedestrians. But it is nonetheless possible and feasible to walk around and no one has ever looked at me funny for doing it. Yes, it is also often triple digit fahrenheit heat in the afternoons, but that is well within the human survivable zone, and as long as you aren't going somewhere that you can't be covered in sweat, you'll be fine.
Also, I live about two miles from the main museum district in Dallas, and I walk whenever I go to a museum, and the streets there are completely filled with pedestrians. Even if you drive from out of the area, you're still not gonna park right next to the entrance. Some have their own parking lots. Some don't. The parks in the area do not. Plenty of drivers still park pretty far away. So it's particularly weird that someone would stop you on your way to a museum.
I've never been, but from what I understand Austin (esp downtown) is one of the more walkable cities in Texas.
I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. There's still a need for emergency vehicles and goods to be transported within the city, so we would still need some roads, but we could eliminate a considerable number of lanes.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pab...
Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA...
This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way).
People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.
A properly zoned SF would look like New York, with 5x more transit options than it currently has.
- Requiring a car for daily life drives up cost of living, pricing the bottom tier of earners into the streets
- Restricting housing unit supply by mandating single family zoning makes whole regions unaffordable
- Blocking effective public transit into the suburbs effectively geofences homelessness into urban centers
- Concentrating the overwhelming majority of homeless services downtown is a policy choice, not a natural outcome
I think a lot of people look at urban areas in the US and think "that looks awful, my area should make the opposite of those policy choices", and it leads us to subconsciously hold some weird beliefs. Tall buildings and public transit don't make people homeless. They do the opposite. But something about the American lifestyle (my own upbringing included) plants these negative associations with urban centers, and it wasn't until I saw other cities around the world that I realized it didn't make any sense at all.
Good example here is Salt Lake City - the streets were designed intentionally to be very wide everywhere.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/da...
I get the total area to be 131351 m2 and the area inside the "Infinite loop" road to be 58029 m2, i.e. only 44% of the total area.
So cars waste half of the area. https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculat...
Just look at Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/dat...
Half the city is parking
Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?
Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good?
Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project?
I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.
Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?
But even without, it’s crazy that you can afford the mortgage with the parking fees.
Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.
Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.
In arglinton, Texas, often called one of the least walkable cities on Earth, there's a requirement that each building has a parking lot proportional to it's occupancy. So if you build a 200 person building, you need a parking lot to handle 200 people. I can't remember the exact ratio, I doubt it was 1:1 like that.
So the parking lots are there by force, not convenience or cost.
Developers effectively can't 'outsource' parking. If you want to build anything, you get to build parking. For a long time, building a parking garage cost more than just buying a bigger plot to develop. Now that's not the case, but the rules haven't changed, so it would take a developer with deep pockets to build a parking garage, and it would have to be associated with a massive development project.
As someone who lived in Houston for a long time, there are lots of parking garages.
https://downtownhouston.org/navigate/parking/garages
But there are still lots of incentives to have a surface level parking lot. $$ per spot, it is stupid cheap for a surface lot in construction costs. Why pay $25 to park in a garage for the day when the surface lot around the corner costs $5?
Along a similar vein, I'd be interested in the correlation between car use and economic growth is between similarly developed territories is. I know that the US and EU were roughly equal in economic size when I was in school and now it's more like a 3:2 ratio. China has also aggressively adopted cars over the past 3 decades while passing many other countries in per capita GDP.
I'm afraid I don't have a source for this. The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes might have said this.
But yeah, "tiny roads and tightly packed buildings" summarizes Tokyo's layout to a good degree. If you look at Tokyo from a satellite view and compare with typical American cities, the biggest thing you'll probably notice is just how little space is wasted on things like wide multi-lane roads (or stroads), parking lots, and lawns. That's what makes it so walkable, and why public transit works so well here. A 5-minute walk can take you to a very large number of buildings, which equates to a huge number of apartments or businesses. A 5-minute walk in a typical American city like Houston will probably only get you across the street.
If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would.
And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.
Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.
x7 days a week. But it's not just the time in the store, it's also whatever detour there is to get to it. At walking speed. Whatever the wait time is at checkout.
> less if you know exactly what you want.
So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.
And if there is another pandemic like event, I'm also constrained to the one day's supply of food that I have in my house at any given moment (maybe less than that, realistically). And it's still a fucking pain if I'm anything other than single. There was a point in my life not so many years ago, when we were going through about 4 gallons of milk per week. Hell, some of the things that we like to eat, that we should be eating for health reasons... you can't even buy those in single meal sizes. We'll probably have 3 (plastic) bags of vegetables home for salad.
Oh, the horror. Usually I would just go in an see what looks good and decide then what I wanted for dinner.
Search "supermarket" in Copenhagen — not the city centre — and see how many results there are: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@55.703748,12... . You may well need to zoom in and refresh the search to see everything.
> I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so?
Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.
> Pandemic
You can easily build up some reserves.
> Milk
You clearly have a large family, so you might consider that your situation is not universal. I think many Danes with a large family would mix the two options — shopping by car (or online for delivery) every week or two, and supplementing it with additional trips for fresh food.
Two adults is also two people to share the shopping.
For you. That one time. Honestly, I always seem to be on the wrong end of the curve when it comes to salaries... betcha I end up in the ghetto apartment in the food desert.
> Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.
Nah. You just get the things you usually get, and you make whatever of that you feel like that evening. No need to plan, you figure it out when you open the fridge.
> You clearly have a large family, s
Just the two children. Even with just two children, this quickly becomes absurdly impossible. For any more than that, the walkable city people just sound like stooges. Well, they sound like that long before we start talking about large families.
Around 15-30% of urban Copenhagen households own at least one car, depending on the neighborhood.
A nice thing about electric bikes is that it seems to be making bikes more common. It really needs to be normalized that a person doesn't have to be in a car to use or cross the road.
If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.
Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.
The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.
Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.
It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.
So in practice it's worse than 10x.
Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.
The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.
For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.
Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.
That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.
However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.
If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?
> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.
The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.
This is such a weird line of inquiry.
Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.
Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.
If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.
I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.
Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.
Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.
Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.
It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.
They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.
Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.
I simply gave my 2c on your question.
> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
Yes. I would. And honestly there really isn't much in it. In the US, basically everyone drives. In the UK, pretty much everyone who pays taxes drives.
At least in my situation, I think that if the costs were moved from general taxation to directly falling on car owners, I'd end up net positive!
You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.
If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.
And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?
Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.
Those are the negatives.
But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.
The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.
There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).
The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.
A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.
A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.
The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.
They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)
> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e; and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.
which makes a lot of sense. great reading: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/resear...
How can this be true?
The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.
While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.
The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.
If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.
But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.
I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.
But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.
I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.
If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.
Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.
As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.
Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.
If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.
I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.
The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.
There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .
Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.
I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.
And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.
When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns.
I mean sth like this - from before commie blocks were adapted to cars: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8
These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride.
The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.
- ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable".
- now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need.
- And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk)
Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown.
>I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres.
If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.
Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything.
Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses.
About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.
I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.
My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.
If you don't realize just how horribly racist most Americans throughout most of the 20th century, you must not be very old. I still remember how commonplace it was in the 1980s even.
Just making the paths nice and other stuff mentioned in this article isn't enough if there's nowhere to go. A lot of the time, this effort only worsens traffic.
Even if we somehow managed to eliminate roads, I'm still not sure I get what you're imagining. Are we going to tear down all of the existing buildings and replace them with buildings that have 7 meter wider bases? That would take decades and render the city mostly unusable while it was happening. There would also need to be room for trucks to bring in construction material and remove waste.
Any talk about walking or cycling that doesn't talk about cars is completely missing the main reason people don't want to do those things. The video talks about "motonormativity", a phenomenon where even people who don't drive will defend and justify car usage.
Cars need to get out of town centres. Roads need to be redesigned to put pedestrians first and motorists last. Unfortunately you can't just make big changes these days so any attempts use the boiling the frog approach. Tiny changes that will take decades to get anywhere. For example, in the UK now pedestrians have priority at T junctions. This is the law. Good luck exercising that priority, though. It would be much easier without the type of junction shown in that video.
This article is just making one argument that aligns with the broader idea of urbanism. It's not meant as a general introduction to the movement like the video.
Then you need to take the mental step of thinking about all the people who require a car for mobility. People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped.
> cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars
A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities?
No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed.
There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals.
Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...
> Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city?
To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.
The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals".
You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.)
> To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport
That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".)
It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it
You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.
I agree, which is why I personally prefer the solution of burying the roads and keeping the pedestrian walkways at what is currently "street" level. That's a major challenge for existing infrastructure, but I've seen more than a few public transportation proposals that have similar "much easier when one from scratch" problems, and I think it's worth designing the ideal before settling for something worse.
> Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting.
No, I'm thinking about ideal public transport versus ideal car transportation. It's not reasonable to compare the best case of public transport to deliberately worsened car transportation and declare public transport the victor. I would love to have public transport that's actually better than the common case of car transportation, but proposals like what you're describing don't go far enough to get there.
I would love to have a world where we have 300km/s trains between every city (major or minor), and automated point-to-point no-transfer underground transportation within cities. And I'd love to see incremental steps in a direction like that.
What I don't want to see is "if we make cars much worse, we can have public transit that sucks less but is still worse than cars used to be".
You don't need to make cars much worse, just make pub transport and bike/pedestrian infra as good as possible and give what's left to cars
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/07/ambulances-arent-slowed...
Cars and their supporting infrastructure often take up a vast amount of space, which makes walking less attractive as all distances are greater as a result.
Of course, the other thing people in this community may look over is that suburbs are often a fallback when you can't afford a dense urban area. I'm in an LA suburb and renting in LA would be over twice as expensive if I moved down there. Even if downtown LA became walkable, most of the LA county wouldn't be able to afford that living.
It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. Did you actually watch the GCN video? Have a look again at the bit about the corners that allow cars to go faster but take away space from pedestrians.
I'm in California. We have a massive amount of space. If civilization collapsed, we could make a walkable state that can probably suit billions if need be. Being more compact isn't a huge priority here. On the contrary, we're trying to develop other suburbs out in the desertous regions.
I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical.
The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future.
Get a bike losers -- and use it.
If that’s the necessary tradeoff, of course you’re seeing failure of adoption.
Also, would they need to move every time they change jobs (or husband & wife can no longer work on opposite sides of town to continue their careers from before marriage)? Logistics need thought through to be feasible policy.
Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.
99% of cars I see are occupied by a single person. If you get them out of the road (or car sharing at least) you can easily accommodate for the rest with a much smaller footprint
Related to car speed- at some point you have intersections of pedestrian and car infra and if the priority is to have a safer area, cars must drive slower, that's why lots of cities are implementing 30km areas+traffic calming like curbs, bollards and bumps and it works and heavily reduces the accidenta while avg speed remains paradoxically almost unchanged because less accidens/dangerous driving means less road blocks. Also, not all areas are wide enough to have everything separated, that's why the shared road concept exists- cars drive super slow and pedestrians and bikes have priority there, ppl can walk in the middle just like cars and cars will need to wait
> than disabled ppl in nl again due to
> car oriented infra.
Car-centered road and sidewalk design is hostile to wheelchair users, people with sight impairments, children, old people on so many fronts:
- noise from vehicular traffic
- the right to progess impeded at every block by having to wait until someone drives their horseless carriage
- the danger of crossing because the licensing process for the self-propelled horseless buggies does not select only for the reasonable and sane
Motonormativity is a loss for everyone except car manufacturers and oil companies.
Even the suckers driving them are cheating themselves out of exercise and experiencing the world.
Perhaps you do believe cars are sentient and capable of receiving punishment. But if not, you might have been using “cars” as a de-personifying shorthand for “drivers”. In which case, yes, drivers should be punished — not for merely existing, no, but for the harm they have caused to non-drivers. From traffic fatalities to car-only infrastructure, drivers and their insistence on cars have been to the detriment of the rest of us.
I'd start with making sure tests are actually tests and not formalities. Then I'd also expand that to needing to re-test every X years, so old people who can barely see or have poor motor control aren't still driving.
>not to mention all the harms that driving itself causes (CO2, particulate matter, other pollution, noise, ...),
I fail to see how humans don't do any of these harms on foot. The move towards electric cars should put each other on rough parity.
Barcelona takes it a step further than just being high density with wide pedestrian streets lined with trees and outdoor seating at the expense of roads used for cars/trucks. At the end of every block on a rambla is a roundabout where people sit and hang out, with more trees. It really feels like cars are 2nd class citizens here.
The mental tax of having to get into a car, navigate bad traffic and other drivers, finding parking, etc is hugely underrated. When I describe the above to people, it's easy to brush off as "not that big of a deal", but it is a big deal on general mood and wellbeing compared to what it could be if you remove those 'micro' stresses from your life.
And finally, if you need to get somewhere quick, there are taxis everywhere, and the underground metro is pretty decent.
It changed my life to realize how much better life is when you can accomplish everything within walking distance. It impacts absolutely everything.
You even lose weight when you can walk to the store to buy a can of beans and one avocado for lunch instead of having to drive to the grocer once a week and store tens of thousands of calories in your house at all times for you to graze on.
It also impacted my social life because I would run into friends while walking around. Or I'd see friends in a bar while walking home and go join them.
I refuse to settle down somewhere where I can't walk to live. Unfortunately this rules out almost all of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Minnesota
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northfield,_Minnesota
None of those are rural, they're suburban.
And frankly, even your rural non-homestead areas could use some redesigning. Now you make it unsafe walk in what are basically villages, the quintessential walkable settlements that we've invented back in prehistory.
And this isn't like a chicken or egg thing where people aren't walking because it's not nice to walk. The car came first, and then the suburb (as we know them) came second. These places were designed for cars. We're talking about 20-30+ min walks each way to get from most homes to the nearest "commercial area". Even if it was the walkable utopian dream of tree lined sidewalks and pedestrian-centric intersections, it won't change the fact that the vast majority of people would not choose to walk, and so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around.
This is part of a larger frustration where it feels like a very common thing that people in cities want to enforce their expectations and cultures onto rural places that already have their own way of being.
A sign of confidence, you know, the typical American fashion, would be to allow mixed zoning for compatible uses and see what happens, "invisible hand" and all.
Just because the majority are fat doesn't mean it's healthy
I'm not sure why you're shoe horning body weight into this - that's a whole separate can of worms that tenuously related, but not relevant to the fact that these places are so spread out in such a way that walking isn't feasible for a myriad of other very practical and immediately relevant reasons (weather, ability to organize child care/education, ability to run errands before/after work, time spent "commuting", etc.)
In a lot of places it's close to impossible to do what you're saying. There are no side walks. Many suburban streets and especially those bigger roads (stroads) are horrible. No shade because no trees because HUGE ADS SHALL BE VISIBLE FROM CARS, lots of dangerous driveway exists every 5 minutes that you can't even walk in peace lest you are run over by a huge truck, etc.
Streets are dangerous for cyclists (and I mean the regular cyclists, commuter/grocery shopping style, not the lycra-clad racers).
There are modern ways to design infrastructure, it isn't even a lot more expensive than the old fashioned way, and it makes for a lot more pleasant environment for everyone. Even drivers get to enjoy it because... people start walking (under 1km) and cycling (under about 5-7km), so a lot of car traffic just vanishes. So the remaining car drivers get to vroom-vroom a lot more :-)
- removing lanes of traffic to make more space for pedestrians
- reducing speed limits
- increasing gas taxes
You're reacting like advocating for a better pedestrian experience is somehow an attack on drivers, but that's totally not what this post is. Instead, the author points out places where they're already creating affordances for pedestrians (sidewalks, crossings with refuge medians, new curb ramps) but are doing it in a way that is not impactful.
You can make it a more comfortable for people to walk on the sidewalks that they're actually paying for, so the option of walking 20 min to the grocery store is more feasible, normal, appealing, without expecting that people in car-dependent neighborhoods are going to give up on car ownership.
> so it makes sense that these places are optimized for the way people actually get around
This is a misleading framing for two reasons:
- high car ownership does not imply that people don't want to also feel comfortable walking in their own neighborhoods. You can own a car, but walking your dog or walking with your family to a park or walking to the nearest store can still be a welcome option. People can get around in multiple ways, choosing different options at different times for different purposes.
- to the extent that a high proportion of trips are in a car, part of that is because the other options are crappy because of the argument you're making
We can have pleasant walkable neighborhoods and cars, and your kids can walk home from school and you can drive them to costco on the weekends. End this nonsensical pretend conflict between the two.
Further, much of Northfield is very rural, big corn fields, etc.
Could there be improvements in transit and workability? Certainly… especially between the historic downtown and the two colleges…
… but Northfield is actually a good example of a town where car (truck ?) oriented transit and stroads, etc., are well suited.
Cars and driving are awful
The total land area is also irrelevant: Spain has a pretty low total population density, but that's because most of it is empty. The people live close to each other anyway. You can have a house 20 minutes by car anyway, and thus live 20 minutes away from the hospital instead of 3 minutes if you really like yards that much, but barely anyone does, because the car life is expensive and a hassle
Still very walkable and nice for kids.
Price for these houses is ca. $100_000 (some little over, some little less).
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&cbll=55.7224384,8.533...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
A big part of this is long term cultural: medieval towns (and even much older) were all clustered very tightly into blocks with city walls against attacks, those slowly evolved into the vast majority of the towns & villages in Spain today, and have left a culture where flats and dense city centers are the expected norm and the primary model, even for towns surrounded by empty space. You can easily find small towns of apartment blocks and tight wall to wall houses in windy city centers, of just 1000 people, surrounded by fields for miles.
The Spanish would argue that surburanism is generally less enjoyable (walkability, community, socialability) and less secure (houses are easier to rob than non-ground floor flats) while dense apartment/etc living is better value (less land cost, shared maintainence in apartment blocks) and provides better airflow/heat management & opportunity for balcony views (attic flats etc).
It's not like the land was wasted with parking lots. It's just as generic a desert setting as you can expect. Hot, tumbleweeds everywhere, Sand as far as the eye can see in any direction, etc. It's all single home housing so it could be denser, but that's pretty much the only benefit of living there; I grew up with a half acre yard (full of sand and an awkward tree in the middle, but actual land) and it gave my grandparents some piece of mind when we went out to play.
Definitely not in NYC, everywhere you see the disdain with which NYCers treat their communal environment
My boys (one with ASD and the other with ADHD) are often extremely loud. When they are, you can hear them clearly from a surprising distance away from my suburban USA home even when they're still in the house.
But walkable cities can be both 1M population or 10k population. What applies to a footpath in a city of 1M applies to a footpath in a city of 10k too.
Truly rural areas usually aren’t the topic of these discussions nor sites like strongtowns. For obvious reasons.
The population density of America is 33.6/square km according to Wikipedia. For comparison: Sweden up to the north is 25/square km.
There is a large difference in this regard.
EDIT: I added the part I was replying to out of concern of the downvoter’s who didn’t manage to catch that.
But I think the point you make about Sweden also applies to anywhere. How much land a country has that isn’t a city isn’t very relevant to how its cities look. If the US had 10 more alaskas or the EU had 10 more Swedens wouldn’t matter for how cities are built.
In the debate about Covid there was a trope about Sweden being so sparsely populated that no lessons could be drawn from there. Yet looking more closely it’s obvious that this is merely because most areas of Sweden have almost no people, and it’s rather Urbanized. I.e it’s actually locally dense but mostly empty.
“Mean distance between humans” is a much better measure of population density, both for city design and epedemics. Australia is a prime example where on average, 3ppl per square kilometer live. A figure that says nothing about actual population density.
It's not a utopia. It's about prioritizing people over traffic. Prioritizing the experience of being in the city over the convenience of getting there or driving through.
And it doesn't even have to be a city. The same idea also applies to suburbs. You can have good transit connections to the city, apartment buildings and local services in the core, single-family homes a bit further away, and large parks and forests within walking distance. Suburbs like this are typically more sparsely built but more densely populated than American suburbs. They also tend to be nicer once you leave your home.
So yeah, I understand your argument.
Further, a bunch of these examples seem like cases where the resources for the better design would not have been out of reach. The case where there are only crosswalks on 3 sides of an intersection so pedestrians need to walk the long way around (and wait for the light to change multiple times) would be straight-forward to have done right. The example in the "convenience" section where the path forces pedestrians to take a longer path, would have taken only a modest amount of additional concrete to address. Examples where there's too little demarcation between the sidewalk and street often have a green strip on the other side of the sidewalk. The same amount of space could have been used with the sidewalk shifted over and a green strip with trees placed between the street and sidewalk. None of these are "idealism run afoul".
I grew up in a commie block in a region of Europe where cities are fairly sparsely populated (approximately half the density of Amsterdam and close to 1/8th that of Paris proper).
I see it as a good middle ground that while still walkable, doesn't have the aforementioned downsides of dense city living, like:
-Noise, or actually the contortions you have to go through to keep it at acceptable levels. The inverse square law really does a number on people who live in a densely populated area with a night life or renovations going on (there's always renovations going on).
-Garbage disposal. I remember spending a mostly sleepless night in Bilbao because guess when is the only time a garbage truck can actually pass and collect refuse in a timely manner? Modern humans produce way more garbage than their 19th century counterparts.
-General tidyness. I want to see Tokyo one day because it appears to be the only large, densely populated area in the world which isn't filthy. I'm not even talking about trash. It's the puddles of animal (and human) urine scattered here and there.
-Lack of green spaces. Land is precious in densely populated cities, so you can't have this sort of stuff. Meanwhile when a dog has to go, they have to go, hence the previously mentioned puddles.
-Cost. Did I mention land is precious? The other day my friend showed me the sort of palace he can buy by selling his two bedroom in a commie block. Especially in recent years cost alone has pushed many people out of cities.
-Cost (of living). My car-oriented hellhole of a suburban mall where I sometimes do shopping has more stuff and at prices 30% lower than all those neat corner shops. The reason is that everything, from rent to logistics is expensive in a densely-populated area.
I could go on, but this is the gist. You couldn't pay me to live in a place with more than 5000 inhabitants per square kilometre.
At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that are fundamentally anti-progress. If it makes things better, they don't want it. Doesn't matter what it is past that. Their solutions to our problems are either that the problems don't exist, or if they do, we should do nothing and they'll solve themselves.
Look, nobody is looking for a utopia. Nobody expects that. But making small steps in a better direction is a good thing.
Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get? Do you truly believe this is the apex of human society? I know you don't. Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change? I just don't get it.
Having grown up in both rural and urban areas, and having seen many articles like this one, they tend to (more often then not) read like this: "I know what's best for everyone, and if only these rural hicks would just let us do what's best for them everything would be perfect". That's mostly where my frustration lies - not with weather or not some town has a sidewalk or not.
> Look around you at your cities. Is this the best it could possibly get?
As someone who has spent significant time in parts of Minnesota very near to Northfield... yes. I genuinely think these places are as close to the "best it could possibly get" as is realistic to achieve. This is based on my experiences and my preferences having lived in these places. Your opinion seems to differ from that, which is why you seem to think that these places are in need of being changed - but do you even live in a place like the one in question?
> Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically opposed to making some amount of change?
Because it is not at all obvious that these are actually improvements for the people who actually live there. As I tried (and maybe failed) to convey, places like Northfield, MN were designed for cars - nearly everyone (~98%) who lives in Minneapolis has a car [1] and would use their car to get to the Allina clinic in question. Even if this was an excessively pedestrian friendly intersection, it would still be true that an overwhelming majority of people going to this clinic would drive.
Look around on google maps at this clinic and intersection [2] - there aren't even many residential places within walking distance in the first place. So in this case the suggested "improvement" would only even be relevant to a small number of people. And I'm not against making changes that only benefit a few people, but there needs to be a real case for people needing (or even wanting) it. And that needs to be to stand up against...
The fact that there are tradeoffs to rebuilding infrastructure to be more walkable. If there was some magic wand that just made this intersection walkable with absolutely zero tradeoff, then sure, wave your wand. But the truth is that there are real factors that matter: cost (both up front and mantainence), restricted access (during construction), and the not insignificant cost of having people idle in their cars at this intersection (which crosses a pretty significant thoroughfare for people in the Northfield to get to commercial areas from their homes - which are not a walkable distance away) to name a few.
Again, my frustration here is not that people are trying to make "progress". My frustration is that this "progress" is often defined by people who don't have to deal with the consequences, and that articles like this do not ever seem to actually account for the actual experience of the people who live in these places.
I would turn the question around to you: Why, then, do you (and others) feel so ideologically compelled to push changes onto others and expect them to share your definition of "progress" even when they tell you otherwise?
[1] http://www.newgeography.com/files/job-access_03.png
[2] https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...
> people who actually live there
See, again, nobody is saying this should be a thing for everyone. Nobody is really going to target rural areas with any infrastructure changes because, well, nobody cares. And that's the draw of rural areas - you don't have that infrastructure. People don't live in towns of 2,000 people they want rich public accommodations, lol.
> don't have to deal with the consequences
Au contraire, you have it backwards. The Suburbs are the ones who do not have to deal with the consequences of urban sprawl. They're subsidized, on welfare, by the dense, walkable parts of the city. Because dense areas are simply more efficient and produce MUCH more taxes. That money is then taken and given to the suburbs, who cannot exist on their own.
> are tradeoffs
Sure there are. But this position of "we've tried nothing ever and we're all out of ideas" is lame. Sorry. There are trade-offs in our current status quo but because it's status-quo you refuse to acknowledge them as tradeoffs.
Again, nobody is claiming magic wand or Utopia. You have the expectation that we can make things better for pedestrians with absolutely no friction. And when the solutions don't meet the absurd expectations, YOU set for yourself, you deem the whoooole idea bad.
That, to me, is a mindset problem. In order to justify your need to maintain the status-quo you have to construct a logical framework where change can never be good, ever.
> push changes
Simple, we're not. These things are decided democratically and you're seeing more and more people talk about it because, well, they want it. Sorry if that makes you feel as though you're becoming a minority. I don't know what the future holds and maybe in 10 years everyone will be drooling over motor vehicles and concrete again. In which case, good for you.
The reality is these ARE being talked about by the people they affect. These aren't random outside forces. These are me, and others, living in our communities who want change in our communities. We don't want change in your community. Nobody cares about the boonies and that's the entire draw of the boonies. If you want people to start caring about you move out of the boonies. Then, I'm sure, you'd be very upset.
Everyone in Yukons and F150s are already using, at least in their minds, what they think is a dignified mode of transportation. Excluding cities for the wealthy (there's no dignity for the poor anyway), most cities in the US are not livable without a car. Affording a car, particularly a new one, earns one some degree of dignity. Furthermore, drivers living in poorly planned-cities spend lots of time in their cars and have chosen larger cars where they feel comfortable and safe.
Larger cars do have a higher chance of roll-over and are much more dangerous to pedestrians (especially children due to a enormous blind spot near the front of the car) and drivers in smaller cars.
Driving what is essentially a consumer tank and calling it comfortable and safe is a dangerous line of thinking, and the casualty numbers show it.
Honestly, no.
I live in a medium sized city in southern Ontario, about a 3 1/2 - 4 hour drive from Toronto. I just came back from spending a week in Toronto and although everything was walking distance, and we did walk everywhere, the week-long stay was not at all enjoyable.
There are people who love big cities. They love being able to walk everywhere, they love the "excitement" and the ability to experience a wide and diverse range of activities and food etc.
And then there are us introverts who find it extremely uncomfortable to be in places that are so crowded.
I enjoy walking as a solitary activity. I'm not lazy, I'm not averse to doing physical activity. But I really really really dislike walking anywhere that has a sizeable population density. I've heard that in the USA / Canada, the average "personal space bubble" that people find comfortable is around 1.5 feet. For me it's closer to 6 feet. I find that trying to navigate busy sidewalks is overwhelming and anxiety-inducing.
I've heard a lot of city-loving younger people talk about the pains of owning a vehicle. I didn't get my driver's license until my early to mid 20s. At the time I had a young family of 4 (my wife and I plus two small children) and, although I might be biased because I live in a built-for-cars North American city, getting our first vehicle gave us so much freedom and independence that it was life-changing in a positive way. I realize that if all amenities had been within walking distance then maybe not having a car wouldn't have been such a hindrance, but when I think back to being in downtown Toronto recently, I couldn't imagine navigating that population density nightmare while also pushing a double-stroller.
To me, and maybe this is more psychological / emotional than logical ... but a car is my personal isolation bubble that gives me much needed personal space while travelling. Though I also must admit that leaving the house is a special occasion for me. So yeah, I'm not typical and city-life is just not for me.
When I think about walkable vacation spots, I don't only think of cities either. I think of small beach towns where even though it isn't populous, things are close enough together to explore on foot.
So I guess one question I'd pose is: if you could have that personal space without the car, would you still prefer the car and why? And given the negative externalities of the car, are there other ways those needs could be solved?
That depends on context. I would say that I would prefer to always have the ability to drive a car even if I were to choose to walk more often than not. Reasons for this: bad weather, needing to get somewhere while ill, feeling anti-social and not wanting to risk running into anyone, needing to get around with a minor injury, needing to transport a large or heavy items.
I know that we're talking about walking vs driving, but public transportation will inevitably enter the picture when it comes to physical or mobility issues. I would like to travel to Europe one day because what I hear from Europeans is that their cities are night and day compared to North American cities when it comes to not only walkability but public transport. Here in North America, I would rather walk on a crowded sidewalk than use public transportation for no other reason than being in what feels like a "tin can" full of strangers is nightmare fuel for me. At least on a crowded sidewalk I am outdoors.
> And given the negative externalities of the car, are there other ways those needs could be solved?
Sure. To the extent that "negative externalities" are something that we need to care about, let's use technology to reduce those negative externalities without having to give up the things that make our lives better.
And rest assured, you won't see much action or social interactions on the way
Though you mentioned banks as something that is still pretty far away. A few years ago I was self-employed, collecting old-fashioned checks (it was slow moving to digital) and I had to frequent a bank once every week, two weeks at most since I had to deposit checks that were in USD and my bank in here Canada couldn't yet do that via an ATM. My nearest branch was walking distance but I still chose to drive because it was a 20m walk, 5 - 10m bike ride or 1 - 2m drive. Since it was such a big chore to have to go there in person, I opted for a car more often than walking or biking.
I think that at least some of what drives these discussions is congestion and parking in major cities. I can't stand driving in downtown Toronto. But in my mid-sized city I really don't mind driving 5 - 10 minutes vs having to double or triple that to walk or bike there. Add the benefit of personal space and a trunk to carry groceries in and I can't see any benefit (beyond maybe environmental impact) to a "15 minute" city in a medium-sized city where traffic congestion is not really a thing and a short car ride will halve your 20 - 30m round trip.
City advocates claim that North American suburb existence requires you to plan your grocery trips and buy lots at a time, vs the "benefit" of city life where you can run to the store to grab milk if you're out of it. The idea of going to a crowded grocery store is such a chore that I welcome any strategy that gets me going there once a month or even less if at all possible. The idea of running to a grocery store, even if it were a block away, for a single item or two is nightmare fuel given that the trip could be avoided all together with the smallest bit of planning, whether walking or driving. So how do I accomplish buying a month's worth of groceries if I have to walk there? Whereas, if I have the choice to drive or walk, I can decide how much to buy at a time and how often I want to go. Big win for cars.
Another drawback to the "15 minute city", from an extreme introvert's perspective, is that the closer things are to your home, the closer PEOPLE are to your home. It actually bothers me if I'm sitting on my couch reading a book and I can hear people walking by on the sidewalk. When everything is close by, so are people. I really like living as far away from people as I reasonably can. A vehicle becomes a necessity with remote living.
And still, you can't find yourself anywhere in downtown Toronto where you're not trying to dodge people or get one second to yourself without having people constantly around you anywhere that you look. Though my definition of "crowded" likely differs from people who don't mind being around people as much I as do. Our friends told us that we would despise New York given how bothered we were by the amount of people in Toronto.
So I'm skeptical that there is some high-population-density major urban centre where crowds would not exist on a level that makes me feel uncomfortable. At the same time, I'm happy to say that cities, in general, just aren't for me. Fine to visit from time to time when there's some special occasion (comic-con, concert, trip to Vegas or what-have-you). But not a place that I would want to live no matter how "walkable" they are. For my preferred, secluded & remote lifestyle, a vehicle is a necessity.
"comfortable" is a stretch. But yes, I won't think much of an unassuming person 2 feet away from me. School desks are about that much spaced out when reaching behind or in front of you (close enough to tap the back of the person in front of you), so I suppose that's how we form our bubbles.
I envy you. Unless there is an obvious reason that more space is impractical / impossible, my thought in such a situation is "Why do you need to stand so close? Please get away from me."
How does one move to Europe? Or how does one begin the process? I’m an average engineer and only speak English. Clearly I’m not the type of immigrant counties would love to welcome in. Where does one start?
For clarity, countries like Spain, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Estonia highly appeal to me.
right now you only speak english, but you can surely allocate some time to start learning the local language. it's long-term marathon, not a sprint.
That gives you a visa linked to your job. But keep unbroken employment in that country for 4-5 years and you will get permanent residence (pre citizenship), which frees you up immensely but requires you to not spent more than 1-2 years at a time outside that country.
If you get that far, you’ve done the hard work and citizenship is yours if you want it just by settling there longer.
It’s a ton of paperwork for employers. If you have EU citizenship I guess it’s easy.
I’d be open to taking a 50% pay cut to get a job in Europe. I really wanted to do this in my 20s.
> I’m an average engineer and only speak English. Clearly I’m not the type of immigrant counties would love to welcome in.
This helps way less than one would hope. Bureaucracy trumps common sense unfortunately.
English is the primary language in Ireland, and I think as a developer you’d qualify for a “critical skills” visa. Can read more here https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/moving-country/working...
I imagine most countries have similarly helpful “moving to x” websites.
Amsterdam has way better infrastructure, more bike and pedestrian friendly (by a long, long way) and you can get by with just English to start.
But first maybe visit some places!
You will likely be limited to working only with the largest banks, as they're the only ones that are usually willing to file the FinCEN reports back to the US.
I still recommend doing it. Yes, you'll likely take a hit financially (lower salaries, certain consumer items being a lot pricier, a big PITA tax situation), but I think it's worth it to see how it is to live in a place that is much better designed. It's also great to be able to experience how it is to trade off the "grindset mentality" in the US for much better WLB. I literally had colleagues whose OOF messages that said "I'm bikepacking through Norway and will be offline for all of August" meanwhile back in the US, I've had colleagues join conference calls on their phone while recovering from surgery (not because of a lack of PTO, but because unfortunately industry research labs are highly competitive).
Also, it's a good idea to make great efforts to learn the local language or you'll end up in an Anglo bubble and you'll end up feeling like an alien on a foreign planet.
You can also be a digital nomad while living in those places. Japan has a special visa IIRC, with HK you can just use the 3 months tourist visa and do hops to other countries (I know quite a few people who have done that for years)
You start on the foreign country's website and supplement with community groups eg on Facebook. Average engineer might be fine but you need above average drive to navigate the process.
Ofc, salary comparisons are hard to make vs. the US, but you can live comfortably on an engineer's salary in Sweden.
Some of the biggest "modern" companies include DICE, Klarna and Spotify. More traditional ones are Ericsson, Scania and Volvo.
Hiring is a bit slow right now though, so that has to be kept in mind.
https://www.simplegermany.com/opportunity-card-germany/
Good luck!
The easiest way is finding a job, moving here wasn't hard at all with a job, the bureaucracy was taken care by the company, when I moved you'd get a 2 years work visa attached to the job you got, the visa renewal after 2 years frees you to move jobs without the new company having to sponsor you. After 4 years I got a permanent residency and after 5 I got my citizenship.
In Sweden at least practically everyone speaks English and it should be common among engineers to mainly speak English (at least that's the case for software engineers).
In Western Europe at least, English-only in day to day life will be a moderate challenge but not a critical one (many people speak at least basic English, you get good at pointing effectively, you learn essentials much faster than you think), you'll find people & services targeted at expats to solve exactly this problem, you meet many many other foreigners in the same situation, and with a little time you really can learn a language even if you've never done it before (and doing so is genuinely an interesting and meaningful project that many people enjoy).
I moved to Spain with no Spanish. First year or so is tricky but manageable and definitely not boring, and then from there on it's relatively smooth sailing. Quite a few years later now, worked out great, best decision I ever made.
It shouldn't matter but it does.
Now I live in a very walkable neighbourhood in Vancouver, and constantly see older people going throughout their days. And I would want the same for myself when I reach their age, rather than live in a suburban zone with no ability to see life outside of my 500m radius.
I would never give up my car, but I use it only for stuff where walking is not practical (visiting countryside, buying lots of groceries from a big market located in less dense area). Suburbs that have apartments with enough parking slots AND adequate public transport / cycling roads to city centre work perfectly for me.
A police car stopped to ask me what was going on. They were surprised I went for a walk (despite the fact that there was a sidewalk, although empty).
It was a semi industrial (company buildings), semi hotel, semi mall, semi houses kind of place.
And, suddenly, the pavement stopped without any reason.
In a city, the space between buildings can be auctioned, and the owner of that space is responsible for cleaning and policing a section of elevated plaza. The second story of each building can then be used as a storefront and events can be held in between buildings.
If even a few blocks in the center of a city can be walkable above the traffic, I think it could create a popular tourist hub where people can explore the city, see events and spend money.
Who foots the bill for construction, maintenance, and inspections which ought to be thorough and frequent, that’s another question I hope somebody who knows politics can answer.
In my adult life I have always lived in dense urban centers (precisely because I like to walk for coffee, quart of milk, etc., and have a choice of restaurants)
When I return from travel after renting a car, I gush about how cool it was that I got to shop at a mall and stop at two other strip malls on my way home and load the car up with bags of supplies I never could have carried :)
if people on holiday bought mayo and all they need to go with it at Costco, they might have a different memory of their walking tour. grass. greener.
In Europe they had no choice basically.
Suburbs with large plots are the most profitable possible mode for a land developer -- construction costs are cheap, all they have to worry about is drainage. Suburbs will never go away; they happen by default. That's why the parent comment mentioned tax benefits for mixed-use development.
In (most of) EU on the other hand zoning is much more relaxed and you can live either in a big dense city or a village, it's up to you
Also, safety is usually conditioned by public/social monitoring which happens in well developed areas (neighbors watching, ppl hanging out and as result ppl tend to commit less crimes since they are watched). If it doesn't exist, that area is designed poorly.
Lets handwave that concern away though; if everyone walked around that much normally it wouldn't be an issue right?
There are still roads, but they're mostly divided from pedestrian movement ways. Mass transit systems connect between the pedestrian optimized blocks. In at least that respect I think Disney World DID become the 'city of the future' example. That's the logical direction to move things.
Oh can we also ban all the noisy cars to underground passages except between 10am and 10pm and emergency use?
It's spot-on.
However, I submit that, as software/hardware/tech engineers, it behooves us to add User Dignity as a fairly important axis; just as important as Security and Usability. Lot more difficult to define, though.
For me, and the software that I write, it's absolutely crucial, and I will spend many hours, refining what appears to be perfectly functional UI, to enhance the Dignity of those using it; especially technophobes.
In my case, I write software for my Community, and I deal with the users of my software on a daily basis. Very few of them have the slightest inkling of what I do. It's "Some stuff with iPhones. I dunno."
To be fair, they often don't offer me, or my work, too much Dignity, but that's not their job. It is mine.
A perfect example is error handling.
Microsoft Windows is notorious for its obscure, jargonistic error messages. Many users quake in fear at triggering one of them.
I have found that the best way to give the users some Dignity, when an error occurs, is to make sure that the error doesn't occur, in the first place.
That can be a tough ask, but good affordance design, doing things like disabling UI paths that won't result in success, smoothly failing (as opposed to crashing, or triggering an error alert that isn't actually necessary to anyone but the IT HelpDesk person), and avoiding the use of jargon, in our displays, are a good way to get this.
I just went through a year and a half of wrestling with a designer, on an app that has been shipping since January. A lot of the stuff that I wanted, wrt to usability, affordances, etc., didn't make the cut.
Some of my concerns were probably overblown, but a number were not. The users are having difficulty in exactly the places I thought they would. They are also surprising me.
Help screens and whatnot, are pretty much worthless. I have a feature in the app, where, if you long-press on any element, a popover appears, with the accessibility label as the title, and the accessibility hint, as the text. You basically get focused, directly-relevant help, for any element of the screen, and it also helps us to make sure that vision-impaired accessibility is handled.
No one uses it.
Ah, well...
I actually have a great deal of love and Respect for the users of my software. I do my best to make sure that the software I write helps them to solve their problems, achieve their goals, and not impact their self-respect and Dignity.
Some of this is direct from land use regulations. Some of this is from political influence of Fire depts.
It's only recently that people are waking up to how the regulatory requirements of staircase design in multi-family buildings for the ostensible purpose of evacuation impact the look and feel of US cities.
Same for street widths. You will rarely find support from fire depts. for compact and connected streets.
I will always take any opportunity to shit on buy america and how it hamstrings infrastructure projects for the sake of running a jobs program for flyover towns
What surprised me is that you literally cannot walk away from the airport without (probably) breaking some law by the highway.
I guess this night sound strange to some but it felt a bit oppressive.
If SUVs are speeding along at 54 MPH right next to the sidewalk, their wind hits you, their noise hits you, and some asshole drivers intentionally drive over puddles in an attempt to splash pedestrians.
- everyone lives close to their ideal, well-paid job.
- everyone lives close to an excellent school for their kids.
- everyone lives close to inexpensive, well-stocked organic produce store.
- everyone lives close to acres of green park space.
- everyone lives close to amenities for all imaginable interests.
Otherwise, some people are just gonna hop in their cars and collect their pieces of the puzzle from here and there.
So yes, if we want a shift, we need to reorganize the environment. And the traffic options will follow. Returning to the article, this would mean to bring back walking, biking and mass transit as priority options. Because it's clear from the infrastructure design that everything else besides cars are an afterthought.
People will agree to reorganizing the environment only if they are not the ones you have to do anything or are negatively impacted in any way.
Also, massive reorganization of the living environment is really only an option for a totalitarian communist government, which decides where people going to live and everything else and they just have to take it.
Ghost communities in China showed that even that doesn't always work.
I also see six lane roads through residential neighbourhoods.
As much as transportation experts talk about dignity, EDI, engineering safe environments, if we build it they will come. I think what's missing is land use planning.
We can provide the safest space, build the best sidewalks, bike lanes, or whatever, but if it faster to drive, and it's more comfortable. That's exactly what people are going to do.
I use to be naive, judging people, for not cycling or walking more. Heck I use to bike through industrial parks against transport trucks, rain, wind, and snow thinking I was doing the world good. And I'm doing my part to show people this way of moving around is possible. You know what I missed, I was time rich during that period in my life. Those others weren't and they want to be comfortable.
If you want people to walk, bike, or not take a car, make the travel time on parity with taking the car, and you'll probably get a better result. Dignity - EDI, ugh.
Which works until people from opposite sides of town get married.
I just went back for a week to the city in which I was born (in the EU) and I was shocked to see that, in many neighborhoods, there was nobody walking on the streets anymore. The reason is not that they're taking the car more: the reason is safety.
But not safety as in "I fear for my life due to the risk of a car hitting me" (btw speed has been lowered to 30 km/h aka 18 mph in the city). No. Safety as in: "My city has become a hellhole and I feel I risk getting robbed or raped if I get out at night".
There are many who state dense 15'-cities are eco-friendly because people move without polluting, but no considerations seems to exists about how many others pollute much to supply anything needed by the eco-friendly pedestrians and IMVHO and experience (as a former big city resident now living on mountains) the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.
Strong Towns should start to consider that their model is not those of the modern cities but the one of the older villages, witch due to tech changes is now the model of spread areas. There is no strong-walkable-town possible in the modern world, only polluting monsters, modern Fordlandias doomed to fails like the original, take Neom, Arkadag, Innopolis, Prospera, Telosa, ... as good examples.
Than start to ask who profit from them, and you'll see the big financial capitalism behind the (dollar/stereotypical toxic waste leaking from rusty barrels) green fog.
This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.
Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.
Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.
For example, a neighborhood in which most sidewalks are simply impassable for a wheelchair, even though it gets a high "walkability" score for Realtors to claim.
(And that tree cover "dignity" the article mentions? Someone tries to do that by taking a sidewalk just wide enough for two wheelchairs to pass each other, and puts in a tree well that won't even let one wheelchair scrape by. And often the roots eventually tip up the sidewalk into a tripping hazard. And extremely frequent parking-related sign posts along that stretch as additional obstacles. With overgrown landscaping on the other side, jutting into the sidewalk already too narrow. Occasionally with surprise poison ivy/oak, scraping across your hand, arm, leg, or face. And on the bigger streets, some street work gets done, and there's briefly enough space, then, bam, bike-sharing station, with garish advertising. Then winter comes, and if you walk heavily, even with traction aids and diligence, eventually you're going to get injured by a hazard that someone else managed to create beyond normal snow and ice.)
Suggestions:
1. Make the sidewalks passable. Including by wheelchairs.
2. Make traffic signals greatly increase the priority given to pedestrians. (Even consider a near-immediate Walk signal from button/sensor, with half-minute cooldown so cars can't be entirely DoS'd. If that will make traffic worse, then let traffic be worse.)
3. Eliminate dangerous noise pollution. (Like the "loud pipes save lives" modified motorcycles, one of which surprise blasted my eardrum a couple hours ago. Or a subset of the ambulance sirens, some of which I'm pretty sure are well into hearing damage decibel territory for people on the sidewalk, when the siren tries a little too hard to be heard by people sealed into cars and blasting music from their infotainment systems half a block away.)
4. Improve snow/ice management. (Don't plow streets up onto the sidewalk. If punting to property owners, actually enforce that. Also educate and enforce about not actively making surprise ice slicks on the sidewalk. Maybe, a bit like the city plows streets, also have city units go clear the numerous sidewalk stretches that property owners neglected, protecting pedestrians from crippling injury, and then later figure out the delicate politics of whether to fine/bill property owners.)
5. And only then -- after those basics of being able to move around, and not be maimed casually -- think about dignity like pleasing views, and sidewalk feng shui.
Hit me. You won't.
For me, it's more about the cumulative mental energy required to get somewhere. If I walked maximally defensively, that would put me in a certain state of mind. It would expend some of the limited focus that I have in a day. Much in the same way that I don't always read all of the EULA before clicking "I Agree". It's easy to blame someone for skipping through after it goes bad. But the amount of energy and discipline it takes to maintain that when the environment is stacked against you is impractical.
So whatever. Just hit me if you have to. I have no illusion that I'm making a noble point. I just don't have the energy.
Because I actually make it to where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time.
Because it's the law. I have the right of way in the crosswalk [1].
Because I'm in the middle of a pleasant morning stroll and I'd rather not have it interrupted by some jackass whose day will somehow be ruined if they arrive at work 4 seconds later than they expected.
[1]: https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/when-do-pedestrians-ha...
You might think this is a joke, but simply giving some idiots a middle finger is enough to lead to them shooting you (or your kid - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-man-killed-6...). Trying to be mr.tough guy with idiot drivers is a quick way to make yourself road kill.
One freak incident that made the news isn't going to convince me. And, I'm sorry, but following basic traffic laws isn't being "Mr Tough Guy."
The dumb-fucks with their emotional support trucks have won. We've paved over the whole fucking country and all of the road construction and automobile businesses are laughing their way to the bank.
Every time we try to fix something, the chuds start crying about "but muh traffic" and it gets canned. They don't want to actually pay their own fucking way, through tolls or gas taxes or taxes on their asinine vehicles. They want to take our money and use it on roads.
It's dead. The middle class is dead. The country is dead. Progress is dead. Try to enjoy yourself for the next 30 years before the Great American Desert reaches Chicago.
Unfortunately there aren’t generational meetings where your plan can be voted on. Also, plenty of millennials and Gen z own property and would gladly buy more once prices drop from you refusing to buy.
Yet so many people on forums like this live in metropolitan bubbles and have no idea why cars might be necessary. There’s a lot of ideological opposition to motorists at the moment and it needs to stop, because the proposed “solutions” to motoring are zero-sum and in some cases downright hostile
Agree with the sentiment but IMO suburbs and car-centric cities are basically mutually defining. Suburbanites didn't change the city to suit their preferences, the city changing is what enables the existance of the suburbs.
Suburbs can't sustain themselves alone, they lack the density and zoning to allow their citizens to productively work. The whole design concept is to give you place to live outside the city (away from the poor or minorities) while simultaneously making it as convenient as possible for you to commute into it with your personal vehicle. The end result is a system which generates wealth in a diverse urban area, and then exports much of it to the wealthy and exclusive suburbs. To make a city difficult to commute into by car breaks the whole system, since it deprives the outer suburbs of their revenue source; the people who live there (which typically includes the elite political class in charge of planning) will fight tooth and nail to prevent that.
> To make a city difficult to commute into by car breaks ...
I think 90% of this is a mental fear. What we are really talking about in most US cities is just measures to overall calm car traffic; bike lanes, bump outs, some bollards, ... Small fiddly things which make city life meaningfully more agreeable for pedestrians, but the effect on drivers is all in all pretty marginal. Some slower top-speeds in the core, maybe parking a little further, ... It's incredibly frustrating to me that these small changes cannot even happen because suburbanites - at least, where I am - will not tolerate even the smallest material intervention. It's all gut feel. If miraculously one of these traffic calming measures does go through, it barely registers as a nuisance.
I do think that that same infrastructure doesn't need to be mirrored inside my high density "metropolitan bubble".
Do you realize that the current car infrastructure is zero-sum and not "downright hostile" but "literally hostile" to walking and biking?
We need a BALANCE.
This should be seared on the forehead of every driver, especially SUV and truck drivers.
Plenty of people can't drive for medical reasons. My wife, for example. If she needs to be driven somewhere, I have to do it. That's a pain in the ass for both of us.
It might take longer to get somewhere by bus/train/etc in the absolute sense, but you know what I'm not doing while riding the bus? Driving! I can read a book, take a nap, daydream, catch up on work or social matters, watch a movie, or countless other things that you simply can't do while driving.
As a result, I actually have more time in the day to go about my life because I opt out of driving when possible. And I live in a mid-sized midwestern city with the middling public transit options you'd expect of such a place.
Then there's money. Insurance, gas, tires, brakes, oil, and routine maintenance add up to several thousands of dollars in yearly expenses if you drive regularly. Public transit is flat-out cheaper, even if you don't have a monthly car payment.
The point of all of this is that car ownership should be thought of as optional. The versatility is nice, and that's why I own a car. But, I don't use it much, because it's cheaper and more pleasant to walk or use public transit.
Something I've realized after moving to a walkable neighborhood is that you interact with your neighbors more because you run into them as you go about. Cars are isolating. Walking about builds community.
No car maintenance. No insurance. No gas.
You don't have to deal with traffic or parking
I still keep a car because it's the status quo but if I had to replace it I wouldn't
That’s what I want when I am trying to go somewhere.
> Walking about builds community.
I sure hope not. I walk my dog once or twice a day and avoid anyone who tries to talk to me. I’ve got enough community in other aspects of my life.
In a lot of these discussions, people do often comment denigrating people who drive and acting as if they must walk/bike/etc and there's something wrong with them if they don't want to, without considering whether the tradeoffs make sense for them or not. Those kinds of comments alienate people.
Giving people options would be great. Making a balance would be great. Separating car and pedestrian infrastructure would be great. Massively reducing pedestrian fatalities is incredibly important. All of those things would be much easier to advocate for and enact without those kinds of comments.
The amount of in-real life hostility from the car driver community is 1000x but car drivers don't realize it. Hostility on the roads themselves, hostility to ANY proposal that would reduce the number of lanes (to dedicate to buses, cycling, sidewalks, etc).
So it's kind of understandable why there's so much pent-up anger.
These kinds of policy discussions would go far better with a lot more empathy across the board for perspectives other than ones' own.
I hear these types of arguments all the time for all different things.
There are certainly low-cost ways of changing things and not-doing-dumb-stuff, but the list does contain some things like extra-streetlamps and maintained sidewalk trees and buildings with natural stone exteriors etc., which adds up.
Every new cookie cutter suburban subdivision requires tons of asphalt, miles of pipes for water and sewage, and the cost in most cases gets [subsided by the denser parts of the city]<https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...>.
Suburbia is not only unhealthy, it's also insolvent.
So it sounds like the author believes those measures are practical/possible in existing areas.
Fortunately, small parts of the world, mostly centralised around anglophone North America and a few other "developing/developed rapidly in an age where cars seemed like the best thing since sliced bread, so everyone else was left behind" countries. And for the latter category, countries like Sri Lanka or Taiwan, it's still usually not as egregious as in anglophone North America because sometimes there are leftovers from before when everyone used to have to walk; not everything was bulldozed like it was in US and Canada. (Probably just because they had less time at destroying everything to remake it for cars).
But in a lot of the world, pedestrians are taken into account, and often even prioritised for.
The infrastructure alone to support sewer, gas and electric makes absolutely no sense with such low density residential.
Of course, there are car obsessed rich people who enjoy driving. I know some Swedish entrepreneurs who are like that, but I also know similarly successful people who never decided to get a driver's license and who lived in Gothenburg and take the tram everywhere.
I think the car is a middle class thing, but then peasants were upper middle class, but I assume that's not what you meant.
Maybe in a modern context. In the terminology of the time peasants were lower class. The middle class was merchants, and "middle" referred to their social status, not their economic status - it would be unsurprising for members of the middle class to be much richer than members of the upper class.
Farmers were respectable landowners who had employees themselves. They were seen as the foundation society stood on and contrasted with the landless and the rich.
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: non-free slaves, semi-free serfs, and free tenants.
a poor smallholder or agricultural labourer of low social status (chiefly in historical use or with reference to subsistence farming in poorer countries).
So .. limited land ownership (if any) and almost always a rent paying tenant.
Here in Sweden the peasant class was rich and influential, but I they, since they weren't rent paying, were more properly a farmer class.
It's always worth checking for cultural differences in word usage when such things arise on internet forums.
What is amazing about walking I have no idea. That sounds utterly horrible - to be in a place where everything is so close together that you can walk to everything?
Space, humans need space.
Ugh, I'm getting nauseated just thinking about it. And yes, I've been in places like that, I've tried them out, and they were as unpleasant as I expected.
I tested it, I went to NY using only public transportation, and it was the most horrible time I've ever had being away from home. Never again! Never!
My feet hurt, my back hurt, without a car I had nowhere to leave my stuff, so I had to carry everything with me, or make the long trek to my hotel (NY banned AirBNB, so hotels are far away from where I wanted to be).
It was truly an absolutely miserable experience, and sitting in traffic, or hunting for a parking space is a billion times better.
I've tried NY with a car before then, but I was told you don't need a car in NY - so I tried it! And they are wrong. Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower, it's less convenient because they only run during popular hours, it's more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber.
I don't know why I keep trying this no-car stuff, but I did, I tried Washington DC with and without a car. (I went for 2 days, one without a car, the second day with.) A car is better. MUCH MUCH better, and cheaper too, even paying for parking.
Also walking is the most natural thing to us humans, it shouldn't hurt and it won't if you do it regularly. I don't mean no offense, but have you considered that you drive too much or don't get exercise otherwise if walking hurts so bad?
Well here's something odd. Just yesterday I was in a city crossing it from one side to the other, and it was so much faster by underground train than it would have been in a car. Yet your statement suggests that that real experience couldn't be true.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that public transport is SOMETIMES worse than a car. What do you think? Might that be more accurate?
Humans need to move, more than they need space.
> My feet hurt, my back hurt
see above
> I was told you don't need a car in NY - so I tried it! And they are wrong. Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower, it's less convenient because they only run during popular hours, it's more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber.
Some town in NY state designed for cars? of course? In NYC everything about this sentence is provably false.
It might just not be for you, and that's okay. Your actual experience is more useful to you than anything I say below.
My personal point-of-view is that I live in lower Manhattan, commute by electric bike, and regularly take the subway, buses, ferries, and commuter rail. I very rarely rent a car for trips outside the city.
> I had nowhere to leave my stuff, so I had to carry everything with me
There's definitely a learning curve there. It's usually possible too get by with less then you think if you plan in advance, but I don't know your situation. I have a little mini backpack where I carry my water bottle, charger bank, sunglasses, hat, and a reusable grocery bag.
> or make the long trek to my hotel
If you don't mind me asking, which neighborhood did you stay in? Was this in Manhattan? I would expect an average of a 5 minute walk to the subway, plus a 5 minute wait time for the train to arrive, and you shouldn't need to return to the hotel during the day.
> I've tried NY with a car before then
I think a lot of people don't realize how well a car works in NYC, even in Manhattan. In the outer boroughs it's probably the most convenient option. The main issues are 1) parking, which you don't seem to mind, and 2) rush hour traffic. Cars work very well here late at night and early in the morning, and pretty well during the day. Robert Moses built quite a lot of highways here.
> Public transport is ... slower
This is often true even in NYC, unless there is traffic. My rule of thumb is that the subway has a higher average time but a much lower variance. An electric bike is faster than both options, which is why delivery drivers here use electric bikes.
In the tourist areas, there's usually traffic, so the subway is usually the better choice for visitors.
The subway is also usually the better choice for commuters, because they commute during rush hour.
> Public transport is ... less convenient because they only run during popular hours
The NYC subway and buses are 24 hours and work well even in the middle of the night, although I would not recommend taking them to the outer boroughs in the middle of the night for safety reasons.
> Public transport is ... more expensive than renting a car because you have to supplement with Uber
This may be true depending on your personal tolerance for walking and the kinds of trips that you make. You really have to be okay walking up to 10 minutes on each end for public transit to make sense. This is also why New Yorkers walk so quickly!
Isn't America the land of the free? Free market, land of opportunity, options galore?
Just remove enforced single family zoning for 70%+ of your built up areas and let the free market decide, right?
In most of the US right now you can decide to:
1. live in a single family home
2. live in a single family home
3. live in a single family home
...
98. live in a single family home
99. rent/buy a condo (if there are any in the area and you can afford it, because those areas are super expensive)
100. rent/buy a townhouse (if there are any in the area and you can afford it, because those areas are super expensive)
As for making the healthcare industry blush; the healthcare industry in the US is brutally uncommunist.
Did you really mean communist? If so, in what way is land planning in the US operated under principles of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Super regulated, super indoctrinated, no freedom, basically.
Also, walking doesn't need to be the only alternative. For medium distances, a bike is better in every single way, both health-wise and otherwise. It's fast, cheap, good exercise, you can store it literally anywhere and even bring it onto the trains for the long-distance travels.
But then again I suppose being pedestrian or cyclist in those areas would not help that one...
I haven't experienced almost any problem with smelly streets while walking or biking in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Munich, Cologne, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague, and the list goes on. The worst I can think of is some smelly alley or higher traffic road in Berlin, or when I was in Milan when garbage collectors were on strike.
The worst cities I've ever smelled were São Paulo, Los Angeles, NYC, and San Francisco. Guess what these cities have lots and lots of? Cars.
You want to be in a car to avoid smelling cars? That problem would go away if there weren't cars in the places people walk, see also the article and prioritising dignity rather than (say) breathing car exhaust.