Secrets of the world's happiest cities | Hacker News Reader

Secrets of the world's happiest cities

theguardian.com

104 pointswr147266 comments

Extra space, cleaner air, healthier and happier people, safer streets... Is there really any downside to banning personal cars from the city? Leave the roads for cyclists, public transportation, emergency vehicles and delivery vehicles. Suburbanites can park outside of the city can go the rest of the way via bus/train/bicycle.

http://ecooptimism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bike-bus-c...

The automobile-industrial complex that destroyed public transportation in the US would never let it happen here. Maybe in other countries it's a possibility. Or maybe in the future when the major car manufacturers FINALLY go under. I support visionary tech like the HyperLoop even if only because it shows that there are some smart people who can actually see the problem and that they are thinking of ways of solving it.

Autonomous taxis may help - it won't completely eliminate cars, but it can effectively eliminate the need to allocate parking in urban areas (cars will either be transporting people or parked outside of the city).

Throw in the safety wins and you have a recipe for massively improved urban spaces.

There are other problems that need to be solved before public transit can fully replace automobiles.

Consider groceries. I can't get two weeks of groceries for two people without a car. Wine bottles get heavy, and stacking bags on my arms risks crushing my eggs. I imagine it's even more complicated for those with larger families.

It's also generally cheaper to pick up furniture with Zipcar than it is to have furniture delivered by retailers.

I know there are some grocery delivery services cropping up, like Instacart, but they're concentrated in very urban areas. I remember using a grocery delivery service in the early 2000s, and it was a disaster: eggs were broken, liquids were spilled, boxes were crushed, etc. We need to see a lot of improvement in this space.

When you live in a walkable neighborhood, you quickly realize that you don't need to get groceries for two weeks in one trip. I go to the grocery store 4-5 times per week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes max each time.

Agreed. Having a store within walking distance makes it easy and fun to go several times a week. Fresh air and exercise is a nice bonus (I don't know why more people don't take advantage of it in my neighborhood).

Thats a solved problem in many places; it's far more efficient to have deliveries than everyone going in a car to a huge supermarket every week. Home delivery of groceries can be great, I've used it for years without problems, and you can buy your eggs and veg from a local walkable market if you have one (many large cities have weekly markets as well).

I agree with you here - there are tons of real world problems with almost all public transportation systems. And I can't speak from a lot of experience, but I've spent a lot of time in London and I found that regardless of where I was there was always a walkable market and a walkable supermarket nearby. But, the further you get from the city center then the more difficult it gets. Here we need open-air markets ,farmer's markets, and these sorts of things. Even then, there are issues with transportation. However, I think a bicycle-focused transportation system is a good idea.

Ever use a grocery cart? When the wife and I lived in New York we'd take the train to Costco and load up the baby's stroller (we have one of these: http://uppababy.com/vista/overview, lots of storage). It was way more convenient than where we live now, where we have to drive to the Costco and figure out how to shlep stuff from the parking garage to our apartment. Before, we literally strolled from the shelves at Costco straight up to our fridge.

It's hard to describe how inconvenient driving life is after living in a walkable city (and in New York, we lived in Westchester, in the burbs 20 miles from Manhattan!). Weekends are filled with strapping the baby into a car seat and driving to the mall to get basic essentials. Forget an ingredient you need for dinner? No running down to the grocery store a block over--30 minutes in the car for you!

Solving the problems you list goes hand in hand with public transit replacing automobiles.

Or walk 6 blocks to the corner store each day to fetch your dinner. Shopping only every two weeks seems like what your car forces you to do, not enables you to do. I don't even like buying food that won't spoil in two weeks.

because all people live within 6 blocks of a corner store. I do now but this is the first time in my live that I've lived with in 3 miles (at least usually more) of a shop able store. A lot of cars in the city centers are people who live out of the city but have to drive in to get supplies.

Then that's a horribly designed city. That's the whole point of this article.

There are places in the US that bikes are impractical. The more rural areas may have distances of over 10 miles to the nearest market, and the roads will be of poor quality and there may be large hills and/or mountains. That said, a public transportation system could help this problem as well.

I'm not fit, but I used to regularly cycle 15 miles, with some reasonable hills.

I think one of the problems with cycling is that people don't have good bikes, and don't know how to maintain them, and are worried about longer (more than 10 miles) distances.

In this context when I say "good bike" I just mean "in good working order" and "sensibly adjusted to size of rider", and "has baskets or panniers". Something like that is cheap and really easy to keep going. And once someone has actually got that bike and they start using it regularly for shorter distances they build up the distances they're comfortable with.

Having said all that, it's pretty hair-raising cycling on roads where traffic travels fast if that traffic isn't used to cycles and if there's not much room for passing.

+1. Most people have an old mountain bike in their garage, with double suspension, low tires, and a chain that's nearly totally fused together. They hop on that thing once and have a miserable time barely going faster than they would walk. That's enough to turn them off for another 5 years.

I get my groceries on my bike that has baskets on the back rack. Two reusable bags hold lots of stuff, and I bring a backpack for when I go over. I drive when I need larger things, like toilet paper every two months.

Palo Alto taught me that cycling was a viable mode of transportation five years ago, and that knowledge has added lots of happiness to my life since.

> Is there really any downside to banning personal cars from the city?

The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?

Oh sure, the city will prosper as a result, but when you start making rules solely for the sake of the majority, throwing basic principles into the garbage bin, you set a precedent.

A precedent where anything that's for the greater good passes muster, regardless of anything else.

Which seems fine at first. The majority, is the majority of people right? Why not act solely in their interest?

But the truth is that we're all part of some minority or other. In some way, everyone's interests contradict the majority in some way.

If my grandma lives in the suburbs and it takes 4 hours to see her using public transportation and 30 minutes using a car ... well, you just fucked me over, didn't you? And that's just a mild example.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not (60-40 that you aren't - that's not to belittle you, I think you raised points worth discussing either way) - so in the case that you aren't, a response:

You keep cars on the periphery of the city, and have good public transit to and from them. So your 30 minute trip turns into a 20 minute public transit ride to your car (or a 10 minute taxi ride), and then say a 25 minute drive - longer than before, but not 4 hours. So no, you are not "fucked over".

And presumably, this comes with an increase in public transit quality. Most cities now are built around cars, but they don't have to be. Also, something like this would have to happen gradually - make dedicated non-private vehicle lanes (buses, taxis, etc), build up public transit, disincentivize cars via taxes and zoning, etc.

A place that's perhaps in range of this is Manhattan - most people I know, quite successful, don't own cars - and the ones that do use them to get out of the city on weekends, not for daily transit. It's a place where owning a car is pretty much worse than not - expensive and rare parking, high insurance, congested roads, etc. No joke, I know at least one senior executive here who doesn't have a driver's license because he let it expire.

And why do this? Because we should be building safe, healthy, happy, sustainable and affordable cities - something which cars are not contributing too. So ban them outright? Of course not - but maybe phasing out private vehicles in cities over the next 20 years is something worth seriously considering.

Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.

I call the same false mentality as with gun regulation. There are things many Americans won't ever understand :'(

In most towns, bus economics only allows for one hour routes and a transfer for most trips. That means two hours in motion average for a round trip, and up to two more hours waiting if your business does not line up with scheduled stops. The grandparent comment is exactly right.

Shorter, more frequent routes are possible, but making the economics work does require a ban on cars to convert drivers to paying transit riders. But most of the drivers still need cars to get to outlying areas, so they have to pay bus operations and car capital outlay. People woth modest incomes cannot afford both, so they would have to give up the car and be trapped in the denser part of the city, indeed having their personal liberties stomped on.

Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules. Since they won't crash, the massive crumple zones and crush cage can be eliminated, dramatically reducing capital and operating costs. An autonomous taxi ride will likely cost less than driving your own beater.

Yours is the sole intelligent response, so I'll comment here.

> Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules.

You're absolutely right.

However, that technology isn't here yet and there is no guarantee that it will arrive. Mind you, most of the barriers to adoption aren't even technical, although those exist too. I prefer not to count my chickens until they hatch.

Right now, public transportation means one thing: unions. And unions, in turn, mean: strikes, price hikes, inconsistent schedules and performance, etc.

On top of that, subway and other rail systems reach relatively few places. That means buses. And buses exacerbate the above issues to an even greater extent.

Self-driving vehicles work today and are legal in several states. Elementary pieces of self-driving tech are selling in production cars. I take it as a foregone conclusion that everything will be self-driving in 50 years—probably much sooner.

How about just a good and reasonably fast commuter-rail network? It's faster to get to many suburbs of Copenhagen by public transit than to drive, because we have: 1) extensive commuter rail; and 2) not many freeways.

I don't think it's only that American cities aren't actively discouraging driving (e.g. by banning cars from city centers), but that they are spending huge piles of money actively encouraging it, by building 10-lane freeways and the like. If you build rail and not freeways to all the suburbs, most people take rail for routine trips.

America is big. The population is very spread out. It is normal for an American city to have 1/20th the population density of Copenhagen. Commuter rail would just dump you in a sprawling suburn with no economically viable public transportation. Autonomous taxis will make it workable, but that is a decade or two in the future.

>Since they won't crash

Yeah, software never has bugs.

> The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?

Nobody is restricting your right to use your property as you wish. You may drive your car on private property all you want: your own property, or that of anyone else who gives you permission. That's what private property rights guarantee.

What you seem to want is to drive your car on property you don't own, which is not some kind of human right. Nobody is required to facilitate your desire to drive around by building you roads and granting you access to them.

The downside is that you will kill the city. I am not sure about larger cities, but smaller cities (i.e. 200k- people) this sure applies. Banning personal cars makes the very majority of people, who lives just outside the city, to go shopping in the large centers (read: Walmart and siblings) placed outside the city. This does not only kill all the stores in the city, but also all coffee shops and what-else that goes with having shoppers running around. But sure, you will indeed have space, clean air, and safety in a ghost-town.

Nobody who lives outside of the city would ever be expected to give up their vehicle.

The corollary, is, however, that this means that people need to live IN the city, and the city needs to NOT be sprawling, and have good transit networks (paths, bike lanes, p. transit)

The point is that there are always going to be people that live outside the city. Period.

Banning cars from the city means anyone not living in the city simply won't visit, which for most cities will result in too few people spending money inside the city to sustain the businesses that make living in the city attractive.

I've lived in at least two cities where, despite cars being allowed, a significant number of people choose to park outside the city at mass transit depots. This is fairly parking-limited, but the wider you cast the mass transit systems the more space you can create for parking while simultaneously reducing the need for it.

Surely they could still visit by train? Why would you want to drive into a city, and deal with the traffic and parking? Copenhagen has deliberately reduced parking in the city center, slimmed roads, and pedestrianized a bit of the core, and people still come, mostly by S-train [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-train

Note that one doesn't actually need to "live in the city" to have good transit access, if appropriate development patterns are followed, with development and population generally clustered around transit nodes and routes.

This is the pattern used by traditional streetcar suburbs. See e.g. Tokyo and environs for a modern example.

Transit is generally practical because of density, but density can take many more forms than just a single dense city core.

The more general point is that development patterns and transit networks are intimately intertwined. Modern American development is often predicated on personal automobile usage, and so it's not surprising it works pretty badly when you take than away. But there are other combinations of transit and development patterns which may be much better overall.

Many countries have usable public transport (buses, trains, metro, trams, taxis). London already imposes a punitive levy on private cars within the city, the result is a slight reduction in car traffic and no appreciable effect on shopping or pedestrian traffic. It would be very interesting to find out what a complete ban, or a much higher levy, would do to the city, but I doubt very much it would kill it. Do you have an example not in the us where this has been tried?

As long as there are other ways to get around, a city does not need cars, in fact cars are a negative for most denizens.

I wish Google (or anyone else) can find a way to get land to build and experiment alternative lifestyles. Having test-beds like this may help diffuse knowledge in more efficient way.

Bogotanian here. This is one of the most unlivable cities there is. As soon as you step out the door you're aggravated in a thousands ways through your day. Bogotá and Colombia usually score high in the "happiness" rankings because of a servitude mentality that dates back to the colony. Inequality is very high even for Latin American standards and people are taught to accept and embrace it. You'll rarely see protests in this country despite the rampant corruption and nepotistic governments. People don't have the notion that democracy is supposed to empower them, and don't know things can and should be better. And of course blind catholic fanaticism only helps to keep them contained. So they think they're "happy".

I don't think the article has any intention to depict Bogotá as a happy city in absolute terms (although yeah, the author calls Peñalosa the "Mayor of Happiness"), but rather that the changes brought by its mayor in recent years have made it happiER.

I would be curious about your opinion in this sense: despite the rampant corruption and all other problems, has the city's quality of life actually improved over the past years?

Indeed, Peñalosa was an extraordinary mayor ans his transportation system improved the standard of living. But as the article hints at the end, the follow up has been terrible (e.g. one mayor indicted) and the city has gotten out of hands.

> they think they're "happy"

Not to discount the rest of your comment, but ‘happiness’ is a state of mind. You can live in squalor and be happier than someone living in a mansion.

I think that good living conditions, privacy, and civil rights make for happier people. However, in a community that’s homogenous, sharing the same values and needs, it only takes for their needs to be met to be pretty darn happy.

People here is not really happy, just drunk.

About half the people I know without a degree drink all their wage the very day they get it.

It is very usual for them to be very drunk the next day (if the payday is Monday, they will be drunk Tuesday). Also, their wives will fight with them for that very reason.

It is not luck that the most powerful private company from Colombia is Bavaria.

I spent two days in Copenhagen over the summer for some training and I loved it. The people seemed so much more relaxed than in London or here in the US. And the bikes! They were everywhere! It was so nice :)

Meanwhile my mayor declared "the war on cars is over" when he was elected. Toronto, ugh.

Is that the crack-smoking mayor? Or is that elsewhere in Canada?

yup, Mayor McCrack in Toronto. Seems like he got confused between the war on Drugs and the war on Cars...

The article mentions something along the lines of people who walk to work are happier than if they drove to work.

I wonder how remote working from home compares in happiness to walking to a separate but nearby place of work?

When I've worked from home for sustained periods, I've felt happier when taking regular walks than if I stay indoors all day. I've found walking before the work day starts to be the most beneficial (just around the block for 5-15 mins). I tried this after a remote working friend recommended it (and his remote working neighbour had recommended it to him IIRC).

I wonder if any of you who home work have found the same or otherwise?

I work from home 100% of the time (I live in the US and have a client here and a client in Norway). I absolutely love it and I don't think I could ever go back to working in an office.

I have time to spend with my dogs, take them out and keep them exercised. I have time to spend with my wife and we only have to keep up one car.

I work just as efficiently, if not more so, than when I worked in an office setting through tech like Skype, Screenhero, email, and just basic phone calls. And we use task management apps like Zendesk to help coordinate between our team and other teams. It's really very smooth and efficient.

I do get a little cabin-feverish sometimes, but then I just spend an hour outside with my dogs, or my wife and I go on a day trip to and catch some theater or something, and I'm ready to get back to it.

oh - and I primarily use a standing desk! That, I think, is a huge advantage over a sitting desk. But there's also a lot of personal preference there, so YMMV

I spent a bit over a year working from home in my past. At first, I loved it. Then I found myself "at work" for longer every day. I reduced the amount I was getting out and socializing, until it got to the point I was plain miserable. Finally I made a change and got a job at an office, where I was MUCH happier (until the office was reduced to 2 people, myself included, and I found I missed the social interaction once again).

Now I work at a company of about 80, with some 30-35 working from the office, and I love it. The commute is very short (<10 minutes most days), and I bike in summer. The little conversations every day keep me sane and enjoying work far more than when I'm on my own.

Definitely. I find that walking outside, daily, is very important, and easy to forget to do when you're working from home really intensely.

Downtown Bogota at night was one of the scariest places I've ever been.

On the flip-side, Bogota itself is awesome, made more awesome by Colombians, who are also double awesome!

I love Colombia and the Colombians but Bogota is one of my least favourite places in the world. Most Colombians would agree, I think. Traffic is horrible.

I spent a lot of time on omegle speaking to south-americans, colombians felt wonderful from the first sentence. They have a joyful warming way of speaking that cross the screen. That said, one of them quickly had to leave because someone stabbed his car tires for no apparent reasons. Weird.

This was a very interesting article but the evidence presented was especially weak.

I was particularly unimpressed by "Bogotá's fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public transport needs sustained public investment." It seems like any outcome is evidence for the authors views.

Oddly enough, I opened this up expecting an article on Thimphu.

The car is a textbook case of catastrophically bad scaling. For sporadic use (errands, long trips, leisure) it's amazing. For daily commuting (60 miles per day, plus parking) it's horrible. Space-consuming, polluting, expensive (except cheap relative to, e.g., Amtrak because no one uses the latter) and unsafe when abused to the point that cars are (operated while drunk, while seriously ill, or at unreasonable speeds given congestion).

The problem is that people, individually, don't want to give up the freedom. It's "other drivers" that are the problem. Add to this the fact that so few people can use other means of transportation-- those have fallen into ruin.

This is why I love zipcar. I use it just for the odd times when I need a car. Which is rare.

Don't forget the perverse incentives of mandated "free" parking, resulting in every pedestrian, cyclist, and transit user subsidizing everyone who parks somewhere (in addition to the horrible sprawl effects).

Exactly. Even in places that are generally enamoured with free markets, you never see this. It would be fun to see market-priced parking in places like Manhattan - what would happen?

A sudden interest in reforming the taxi medallion system.

Parking is not market-priced in Manhattan? Are there any major cities where it is free?

When I lived in Chicago it certainly wasn't. Parking in the Loop was $10-$20/day (this was 15 years ago) if you just did it ad-hoc, you could buy monthly passes and save a bit, but it certainly wasn't free and as far as I know it wasn't subsidized.

All the extra taxes, costs, and inconvenience of owning a car in an major urban area is one of the big reasons why I will never live in such a place again.

Here in Munich, Germany you pay something like 6-10 EUR to park in the city centre for the time you're working, that is 8-10h. There are still some free spots, the more you leave the center, the more easily you find them. Less than 10 years ago it was much easier to find a free one in the center as well.

I generally agree, but would add that if someone's daily commute is 60 miles a day, regardless of how they get to work, there's something catastrophic about that as well. I don't know what to attribute it to, but for any metropolitan area where 60 miles of commuting is the norm, there are problems which go way beyond the means by which the residents get to work.

You can attribute it to property prices.

People like their freedom but possibly a bigger problem is the cost of commuter rail. The car is by far the cheapest way to commute to the city from the suburbs.

For example, a peak hours train ticket on the busiest commuter train in the U.S., the Long Island Railroad, is between $8 and $17.50 each way [1]. From the more distant suburbs (1.25 hours on the train) where the housing is cheaper, it costs $35 round trip. That's enough for about 9 gallons of gas which would suffice for at least 2-3 round trips.

There are monthly tickets which save significant amounts, but then we're asking people to spend $350 a month up front which is no fun for someone whose take home pay is a little more than that per week. They prefer the small payments for a tank of gas.

If we want rail to be the choice people make, it needs to be financially easier to make that choice.

[1] http://web.mta.info/lirr/about/TicketInfo/Fares03-13.htm

I wrote a related article about a year ago that discusses a major threat to Canada's identity: A Big Reason Canadians are so Happy (and Why it's at Risk): http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are...

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