Brake dust is such nasty stuff, yet we place schools and homes right next to the rivers of pollution that we call highways. I'm hopeful that we will legalize the building of less car-dependent housing, but until then at least EVs will help.
It's really not even complicated to do the bare minimum: whenever there are 2 or more lanes, fence one off with concrete dividers to make a bike lane. Whenever there's just 1, pave it with stones and add bumps, and cars and bikes can co-exist.
Bang, I just made your city safer, healthier, and the car traffic quicker. You're welcome.
And EVs are from the 21-st century. They are here to fix the utter inhumanity of dense cities, and eventually throw them into a dustbin of history.
Dense cities exist because there's value in living close by to other amenities provided by dense cities.
There's no way out of denser cities, amenities will pool around where more people live just by sheer economies of scale (serving more people with less infrastructure). You still have the choice to opt out of that, live far away and have more space, the trade-offs with or without EVs will be the exact same.
> There's no way out of denser cities
There is: tax dense office space. There are no magically unique "amenities" in dense cities that make life worth living there, for the vast majority of people. Theaters and museum visits are at most a monthly occurrence (if that). And specialty ethnic restaurants are usually not a deal-breaker.
Everything else is now available online: specialty stores, interesting classes, art-house movie clubs, etc.
> There is: tax dense office space. There are no magically unique "amenities" in dense cities that make life worth living there, for the vast majority of people. Theaters and museum visits are at most a monthly occurrence (if that). And specialty ethnic restaurants are usually not a deal-breaker.
> Everything else is now available online: specialty stores, interesting classes, art-house movie clubs, etc.
You live online, that's fine if you are happy, many other people actually prefer social interactions, meeting for shared activities, and cities provide these amenities and the population to find your groups around. There's no way around that, living like a hermit in the woods with your own workshops, watching films by yourself (or with your family), etc. is a lifestyle choice and you can do it either way if dense cities exist or not. People will still congregate around the same spots that provide access to the activities they want, they will live in cities that have cultural events (theatres, concerts, museums, art, clubs), that provide gathering places for like-minded individuals: sports, ceramic classes, painting workshops, musicians gathering for jams.
You are wishful thinking that technology will somehow replace a deep social need for many, self-driving is bollocks, distance to activities is what matters, trains already exist in many developed countries and they bring people from far away into cities and still there's a big demand for people to live closer to the cities. I'm not judging you for wanting to live like that but you are extrapolating a very narrow view of how people live into the broader picture which simply doesn't work.
Early 19th century thing.
And you think anything has changed about that? A lot of factory companies hire buses specifically to shuttle their workers back-and-forth.
Let's make things better, rather than convince people they should settle for worse.
I don't advocate for the extinction of cars, you can have it, just don't expect whole cities to be catered for your individualistic choice of mode of transportation and we are fine.
So then that kind of development can't get built, and the bulk of the housing consists of low density suburbs where you need a car, and then everybody drives everywhere. But instead of solving the actual problem, people start trying to come up with ways to make driving worse because they don't like all the cars. Then it's actually the drivers who object, because you're trying to suppress the thing they're forced to do without letting them do the thing that allows them to avoid it.
You can't win if you're fighting the wrong fight.
And I absolutely think that paths for walkers and paths for cars should not intersect; either cars should be underground or walking paths should be raised (which, if built densely enough, is roughly equivalent).
Might have something to do with that, no? Americans usually bring up these obstacles that don't materialise in the reality lived by the Dutch, Danes, Belgians, etc., while not even having the means to try it out in reality to verify if those obstacles are actually real. It's a fantasy of fear.
Meanwhile in the real world, you need to make compromises. Having everyone use a 3000kg vehicle to carry their 70kg selves, spends 95% of its time parked, and is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the developed world, is a terrible compromise, so instead: Bikes for moving in dense cities, trains for intercity travel, cars for rural areas, and bridges between these modes: transport bikes in trains or rent them at station, park+ride at the edges of cities, etc.
Transportation is complicated.
Once cities are 100% road, cars can drive unimpeded.
The existing model is already that everybody is driving everywhere, and then you need a parking space at every place for the number of people patronizing it during its peak hours. Building more housing doesn't inherently increase or decrease the number of parking spaces you need. You still need one for each car.
What it does is reduce the distance you have to drive, because then you don't have to drive through miles of low density suburbs to get anywhere. Moreover, with mixed use zoning, it puts more of the places you might want to go within walking distance, which does reduce the number of parking spaces you need at the destination.
> The inevitable conclusion to such a model is cities like Houston, TX where everything is twice as far away because 50% of the city is just parking lot and another 25% just roads/intersections.
The "problem" in Houston is that it's in Texas, which is big and susceptible to sprawl. Houston Metro has a population density of ~700/sq mi, compared to ~3200/sq mi for New York Metro. Then land is cheaper and therefore parking is cheaper and taller buildings are less economical. That's what causes everything to be more spread out.
But the problem in higher population density areas isn't parking -- when land is more expensive then you can justify building taller buildings and parking beneath the building or even multi-level parking garages to conserve space. The problem in higher population density areas is that building more of those things is now prohibited. You have a plot of land and you want to put a parking garage with 50 spaces on the ground floor, two shops on the second floor and eight condos on the third floor. You can't, because it's only zoned for a single-family home.
Not true where I live.