He can't! Mayors in Spain do not have the authority to establish public transportation outside their municipality, as is the case of the villages you mention. That would fall under the authority of the Xunta de Galicia, which as you surely know, has done a terrible job with that in all Galician cities, not just Pontevedra. (I'm from A Coruña).
In my view it's a city with awesome quality of life. Indeed it's cloudy, rainy and windy but it's better than most Galician cities (cough, Santiago, cough) and not that bad in the grand scheme of things, depends on what you compare to. 20 or 30 years ago I used to very strongly prefer the climate in southern Spain to that in Galicia, but with climate change things have changed a lot. We now have an actual summer that lasts for 3-4 months (it used to be one month, with luck :)), winters are mild, and we don't have the sweltering summer heat that is common in other parts of Spain. If you really need a lot of sun you won't like it, but if you're OK with weather being somewhat unpredictable as long as temperatures are mild (to give you an idea, we use heating for around 5 months but only turn it on like ~1 hour a day, and we don't feel there is need for AC), I'd say it's fine.
In general, pros:
- Great surroundings with coast, beaches, cliffs, the port, etc.; everything easily reachable by foot or bike from the city center (there are beaches in the city center).
- A 12 km long seafront walk (also friendly for cycling and running) with nice surroundings and sights.
- Nice size, in my opinion: big enough to have plenty of things to do, but small enough to be manageable (in Madrid in theory you have more stuff to do, but in practice my friends who live there end up going to things in their district because moving around is cumbersome. In A Coruña it's easy to get to an event anywhere in the city).
- The city is extremely safe. I have been here for 20 years and I think in all that time I only got asked for money by a junkie at 3 AM once. Nothing more serious than that ever happened to me (and I used to go clubbing night a lot, and still often take walks at night).
- Punches above its weight when it comes to events. From St John's night (23rd June) to early September there are events literally every day - concerts, book/art/medieval/comic/science fairs, exhibitions, workshops, and so on. The rest of the year not so much but still more than in other cities I know of comparable size.
- Also lots of things to do with children, if you have them. Many events specifically for them, apart from not one but three science museums plus an aquarium. And of course the above mentioned beaches.
- Like many Spanish cities, it has plenty of lively walkable streets to go shopping, for some wine/tapas, dining, etc. A lot of street life, unless in very rainy days.
- Galician food is top notch.
- While we are far from northern European levels of bicycle usage, lately there has been quite a lot of progress, with bike lanes and a bike-sharing service that works quite well.
- The city is booming right now, the economy is going well, people have work, so there is a lot of activity in general. (This may change, though. A political change in Spain is incoming and IMO it's not going to be for the better).
- You can reach other interesting cities, like Santiago or Pontevedra, by highway or even better, by train. Santiago is less than half an hour away by train and they are frequent.
So-so:
- Public transport has room for improvement, but it works. Maybe with some wait but it'll take you anywhere.
Cons:
- Still too many cars and pollution for my taste (although we're making progress). Although of course, much less than in any US city, and the city is perfectly walkable.
- The amount of dogs is absolutely insane. Honestly, I travel a lot and I haven't seen a city even close to the amount of dogs you see here. I guess it's maybe not a con if you have one :) But to me it's very annoying, because there's always people that lets them loose near children or that doesn't pick up their excrements, so finding dog poo is very common. And it's difficult not to hear some neighbor with a dog that barks.
- Construction quality tends to be bad. Most buildings are from the 60s-70s boom, ugly blocks with poor insulation. Much of the housing prior to that has little natural light and much of the housing after that has little space.
- Also related to this, the city center, tourist areas and parts of the city by the sea, etc. are beautiful; but many neighborhoods are ugly as hell, full of soulless blocks that have little to envy from Soviet architecture.
- Housing prices are skyrocketing both for buying and renting.
- Since we are in a corner of Spain, traveling tends to be inconvenient. We do have high-speed rail to Madrid which works very well, but if you want to go further, you typically need to take a flight to Madrid or Barcelona and there are not many, so layovers tend to get long.
I'm in. :-)
But I'm not coming for five, maybe ten years, so at least I won't be the one crowding your city for a bit.
Thanks for taking the risk of overcrowding!
Where I live in Portugal, there’s nothing - no buses at all, no taxis, zero public transit of any kind. You drive, you walk, or you ride your donkey.
There are bus stops, from when there used to be buses, but there have been none in 20 years.
Looking at Google Maps, there's a bus (XG628007) every 20 minutes from Marin to Pontevedra that takes 18 minutes for 7 km, along with at least two other bus routes which are less frequent and less direct.
How much more public transport could you ask for? There are subway stops in Manhattan with less frequent service. It's not practical to build rail to every village. An express bus might save some commuters 10 minutes, but it looks like the population is spread out along the coast so this would not be a huge benefit.
Maybe the buses are always late or cancelled, but that seems like a cultural problem rather than the mayor "forgetting" to provide them.
Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.
Say the first €x /month,year is free, thereafter you pay as normal.
Use it or lose it.
It is not just increasing frequency, it is a matter of providing alternative routes to serve an important part of the population.
Alas, this is basically how it works in most of southern Europe, including my home country Italy. I don't know how much a small-town mayor can do to reverse years of bad political choices at the national level.
[1] population ~ 80k, but working population ~ 50k.
A "hospital" is a place with beds where patients stay overnight. All the countries where I have lived, including Spain, make this distinction.
having an factory literally only positive from there
a good cycle path would do wonders there. a flat 5km ride is doable for almost everyone, including seniors and children.
regarding jobs: that's got nothing to do with the carless center. to the contrary - for remote work, it'd be perfect.
There are a few cities of that size that are more dynamic, because they have managed to attract some IT/biomedical/etc. Santiago, which they mention, probably falls into that bucket, although it's still far from being a skilled jobs powerhouse. And anyway it's an exception rather than the rule, and I'd say it's mostly related to having a university with over five centuries of history and all the ecosystem that generates, not to anything a mayor could do.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
Having lost access to the city center during my teenage years certainly gave me a perspective on those that talk from above, without worries about everyone else.
Feeling lucky living into one of those matchbox sized flat up on the 15th floor, while community 4h per day, distributed between several buses, train and subway lines.
And around here people are moving out of the city because they cannot afford a flat in the city.
People in Spain live in the suburbs by choice.
There are of course also very nice houses around cities, and rural ones out from that, but they rarely characterise suburbs in Spain (Barcelona is an exception I've noticed, and Madrid has some satellite towns and cities North of city that are very plush, though not the suburbs).
Unless you mean those CEOs of construction companies, and offshore factories, with their villas and high powered sports cars.
I really would have liked my parents had such a "choice"!
Me myself living in a large city, try to avoid car as much as possible. But when the incompetence kicks in, the public transport fails at so many levels, I have to use my car, or I'd spend 2-3 times more on commuting (e.g. instead of 1hr - 3hrs daily)
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
But if a town is designed to be fully walkable so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), then I think the appeal of large one-stop-shop stores is greatly reduced.
That is funny to read that, because indoor malls were meant to replicate the experience of shopping in a commercial area in a city, not the opposite.
It actually failed though. I feel terrible, sleepy and only want to get out after more than half an hour in these indoor malls. Probably something that has to do with artificial light and aircons.
In my case it gives me the urge of leaving as soon as possible. I could see how it could create impulse buy but most of the time I go to a shopping mall, it is to be able to try out clothing before buying and I will just lose patience and go away if it doesn't fit well. I tend to avoid them as much as I can anyway.
That is the point here. And do you always need to do all your shopping at once?If things were more walkable you can defer some shopping to other days.
It's very common all over Europe, they are simply called "markets".
Some convenience stores get moderately close to being a grocery store.
It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry (and of course, only one of each type) and have people still willing to shop there.
Liquor store comes to mind. There are two cigar shops, two wine shops and a beer shop downtown. Just weird priorities I guess.
Basically, what is the minimum things you need for them to carry?
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc. It was great. You'd get the occasional guy that jumps on, makes a speech about how he's raising money for something or other, and walks around trying to sell chocolate bars. And there was the occasional dangerous person, insisting on getting up in your face.
So long as this sort of behavior remains at a very low level, something like maybe once every couple of weeks, that's probably okay. But public transit loses all appeal if it happens often. If it rises to the level of violence, everybody starts thinking about the suburbs.
Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced. If it is not, and other options present themselves, people will choose the other options.
This happened en masse many decades ago in America. Those that could decamped for other places where their social expectations were met.
I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
Yeah, let's talk about antisocial behaviors. I'm getting to the point where I think roads should be designed specifically to inconvenience drivers. And I am one, I like being able to drive across the state, or across town to places that can take a long time by transit. Cars can be great.
I would argue that drivers are worse. I've had motorists stop me while crossing a multilane street asking for directions. I'm thinking, "WTF, this isn't a safe place to stop and talk." I've also have had drivers pass by me while I was laying on the road. (One time after flipping on my bike because of street car tracks. The other time after being struck by another vehicle.) And these are normal people I'm talking about here, not some "big scary" stereotype.
This is the sort of vacuous moral posturing that loses elections and if it wins them, it makes cities unlivable.
Why should I be fine sitting next to someone who shit his pants several times and likely has lice and scabies? And yes, it occassionally happens even in Czech public transport.
If you not just tolerate this, but scold people for being disgusted, the public transport system will lose the middle class and with it, any benevolence of the tax payer.
Civilizations always have some minimum for public behavior. Not stinking to high heaven in closed spaces is one of them. If you fight against such bare minimums and tell people that they are bad people for requiring them, you are promoting pure, unadulterated barbarism.
(I’m riding the subway right now, and two people just changed cars because of weak A/C.)
People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.
You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.
>People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
I mean, as a first approximation, about twice as many people die in car crashes than are murdered in the US every year so...
If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.
Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.
In my experience (as an NYC resident) the people causing problems on the subway aren't just being assholes for the sake of it. They're homeless, have mental issues or frequently both. I suspect when you visit Germany or Japan you're seeing the effects of much more comprehensive social nets that actually care for these people rather than let them fall through the cracks and live on subway trains.
Expecting a police to be available to every transit disturbance, I agree, is not going to end with a functional outcome.
Private citizens generally can't trespass people on public property. You have to get a policeman and the policeman has to cite a specific policy or law they have violated.
The private system in this case is way more pragmatic since every driver that is already on the bus has bouncing rights.
> It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes
My response to was to say I do not believe that is true at all. Passengers on public transit do not have freedom of speech to be assholes.
Personally I'm not so sure police in NYC can kick people out for 1st amendment protected activity, which was what I specifically referenced the asshole activity being under the umbrella of. That was your assertion, that while I contested how pragmatic it might be, I never stated whether I believed it was true or not.
If I'm reading this correctly, you're talking about panhandling as an example of asshole activity that you believe is protected by the 1st amendment. Specifically, in NYC, it was ruled that panhandling is not protected speech on public transportation, see Young v New York City Transit Authority.
Of course, if the passenger refuses to leave or stop, the driver can't physically force them to and must escalate to a police force. Although, I imagine that's similar in many other countries as well.
American society doesn't understand collectivism in any level, your country has been built upon individualism without much care for collective living, you just reap what you've sown.
You can basically buy a small motorcycle or scooter or fast e-bike on credit for the cost of maintaining a bus pass. It's only a rational choice for elderly or people with such mental or physical disabilities they can't maintain or operate similarly cheap alternatives. The end result is public transit gets dominated by hood rats, mentally ill, homeless, and a few elderly and people with disabilities, and due to the first amendment you can't stop the first couple classes from harassing the rest so as soon as a normal person gets their 50cc scooter or whatever similarly cheap other option fixed they go right back on that.
The issue is not free speech, it's how your society educates people to be citizens.
The ones using public transit are generally the ones with functional issues to the point they can't even get to that point of having a functional e scooter to crash.
Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
It's fake niceness, it's the American way of being "polite", most times I interact with Americans it's pretty clear it's surface-level niceness, more like a theater than genuinely being it. To me it's quite grating and makes Americans feel untrustworthy.
> Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
I live in Sweden and usually tell people that it's the most individualistic collectivisc place I've been to, people are individualistic in the sense of self-sufficiency but care about the collective if you are acting against it. In that sense we are much more collectivisc than the USA, whenever I've been in the US it's very clear that most aren't caring for the collective aspect at all.
Or is there more you want to quibble about on this topic?
OP is right. The demand is huge and supply is tiny. Even with those scary panhandlers people are jamming onto public transport (when it actually exists) and going far far out of their way to experience walkable areas.
> zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional
Crime in NYC is exceedingly low and the schools are great. Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?
Because I'm not in the top 0.1%.
"Why don't you just move into a $2-5 million dollar home?" is an astonishing take.
Rich people have been enjoying a different standard of life even in the midst of abject poverty since forever, but I guess this is news to some.
Had an experience where a store sent tailors, stylists, a manager, and a ton of inventory so that they could clothes shop while still in their home. Apparently, this was "normal". My shock was a source of great amusement to them.
They did the same thing with restaurants, movies, concerts, even a play... the staff, etc. came to them.
I have no idea just how wealthy they were (Brazilian who owned many businesses in oil and gas production) but I had never seen (or even heard of) such service.
I’ve lived in NYC my entire life, and I know plenty of wealthy people. Most take the subway; a small but not insignificant minority drive or are driven everywhere.
(Clearly I am referring to the life experience, rather than how much money they have and how they spend it.)
At no point did I suggest that walkable cities were not in demand, only that the current state is less than ideal for a large number of people, to which your solution was "be rich".
We have completely different definitions for affordable, unless $250K+/yr jobs are just falling out of the sky.
Not everyone can "simply move to" Upper West Side.
These are not issues with public transit. These are issues with municipalities that don't invest in their citizens.
For one example, public transit connects people to jobs. Some people in nicer areas with good jobs fight against public transit because they don't want the working class to have easy access to their neighborhood. So, again, the issue isn't public transit, it's people who don't want to share their municipality's resources. New York today has free kindergarten, universal school lunches and the excelsior scholarship program. Thanks to investments like this, we see crime in NY today is lower than even Giuliani's tenure as mayor...
It was fine. You would get some people trying to sell stuff or in some kind of distress, but it was not all the time and it was easy to manage.
Americans who don't live in dense cities (and use transit) seem to be obsessed with the idea that these are some intolerable dystopias that must be dismantled.
It was the best place I have ever lived, except for the weather...
I ended up buying a house in an internal suburb (a former suburb from the 1930s that had been swallowed by the city) that is also a historic neighborhood (so it's character cannot be destroyed by developers).
What bother me is a loud minority of anti-urbanists complaining about cities they don’t live in and pushing for policies that hurt them. All while economic data clearly shows cities are more productive and subsidize they rest of society.
Pierogis, coffee, and cute little shops. That and great music.
It was rather eventful let's say. I just didn't really know what I was getting into being new to the city. It's pretty amazing what you grow accustom to.
That literally all of society.
The American idea that you live in suburban home that is a quasi gated community, drive into a parking garage, then go up to an office, only interact with workmates and then driving back out with no social interaction other then work is just not how most society worked for all of history. And its not how the US worked until the 1960.
The reality is, violence and death on the roads, is far more common then on public transport. There are tons road rage incidents, an absurdly high number. Those lead to all kinds of problems and quite often shootings. You are in more danger then on public transport generally. And yet I almost never hear about that when Americans talk about transport policy.
But yes, there does need to be rules enforcement. But on the other hand its also true that the US often has very user-hostile design principles in pretty much every aspect of their city design and policing policy. And that often invites or re-enforces bad behavior.
Such people exist in every country, yes, but fewer in most places.
As a european I read this comment, its sort of implications, and reckon US must be hell in some areas. TBH London has seen a big drop in health, pan handlers have "lightly" started appearing on public transport, I think I only began noticing it since 2020.
My point is even with the occasionaly pan handler in London, that statement wouldn't make sense, as it is not "obviosuly bad" in that regard.
But it does depend on the nature of the panhandling, doesn't it? Passive panhandling is one thing, and aggressive panhandling is something else, right?
The point is that people will accept some level of anti-social behavior, however they define that, and above that level they do not. No amount of bluster or "why I just never" or incredulity doesn't change that. If you want walkable cities with good public transit you make it attractive and hospitable to a wide majority of people.
Or don't, no skin off my nose, but acting shocked that there are people who think and react differently than you do is silly IMO.
EDIT> I reread your comment what on earth are you talking about? Im not acting shocked, and nothing about my reply is anything to do with other people having differing opinions.
A cousin was visiting us in our nice suburb. We had a slow, not-busy road we walked on when we lived there, and we'd wave to anyone; neighbors, vehicles, etc. Our cousin was sort of uncomfortable, and asked "do you know all these people?" I explained that we knew some of them but were just being polite and friendly. She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't think this occurred to her at the time, but that means she lives in a pretty awful place. Why exactly would it be _dangerous_ to wave at someone in a friendly way? There's only one answer to that question; because you live around violent or unstable people.
Before anyone says I'm just privileged, I've lived in rough areas before, and I can't fathom why anyone would put up with that sort of daily violence, noise and general degradation of quality of life if they otherwise didn't have to. We ultimately ended up moving out of the city just like you said because the crime was getting worse year by year. Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less) And if you go and try to get him to turn it down there's a significant chance you'll be met with violence? Or people harassing your wife if she's ever "foolish" enough to walk down the street without you? Or to need to explain to your wife "hey, we can't walk through that group of kids, I can't really defend you against more than two attackers." All of these were regular issues for us. Home invasions on our block started ramping up, we knew people who were attacked, shot, killed, just while walking home.
To your point, this wasn't academic. It can be quite the 3rd rail to try to explain _why_ the violence in the city is bad, what is the cause and what is the solution. But when we're talking about my family's safety, I just don't care. I'm not going to live like that, and would have done almost anything to get my family out of that sort of situation. I really can't even fathom people who would write these things off. "Sure, my wife might be murdered and abused in a home invasion, but there are really cool walk-able restaurants!" It's pathological.
I was born and raised in urban environments.
Let me translate this for rural (or fake rural aka suburbia) minded folks:
In cities people don't wave except to people they actually know/have seen several times because...
It's gauche, awkward, weird.
There are just too many people in cities and nobody can pretend their city is just one big village. People just go on with their lives and don't wave 1 million times per day. Waving is reserved to actual acquaintances.
In this specific case, it was most likely a bad neighborhood or someone with a heightened sense of fear due to reasons that cannot be clarified without knowing the person directly.
I'm glad you chose the experience of taking a walk as your original example because it was instrumental in helping me to decide that I wanted to raise my family in the city.
COVID offered an opportunity for my young family to spend a month in the suburbs and the thing that sticks with me now after all these years later is how much I hated taking our then 1 year-old for a walk as compared to the city. In the suburbs we walked past the same houses on the same sidewalk-lacking streets barely seeing anyone else. If we wanted anything beyond that it required loading our toddler into the car.
Compare this to a nice area of the city where the density allows for a vast array of possible destinations and plenty of folks to smile or wave at on the way. Walks these days could be to the local park on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, or to the local Italian Ice spot because the weather hasn't gotten too cold yet. While it's still possible to have those experiences in the suburbs, it's hard to be as spontaneous when you've got to consider things like car seats and parking.
It's not dangerous at all to do this. It's just considered odd & borderline impolite to do that. It's hard to explain to an outsider, but you see it brought up a ton on places like r/boston. The stereotype is that people in the northeast are "kind but not nice". By and large we don't engage in frivolity like greeting random people when walking around.
What's funny is where I live now in Italy (outside of the big tourists areas) is the exact opposite. Any line or idle time you have with random people will become a conversation. It's almost weird to not have a conversation.
Like if you waved at someone they'd give you the bird but if you dropped your groceries someone would help you pick them up.
I live in a rough area. The kind of problems it brings are far, far, far more manageable than the kind of problems that trying to exist in a "nice" area where some large fraction of people will hate me for how I live and have no real problems so they'll focus on me. Nobody gives a shit what you do in the hood. If you don't make part of your living doing some sort of business outside the law the violence will probably never visit you. That said, despite violence being not great, property crime generally is quite low here compared to even much nicer areas in other corners of the country so that takes a lot of the inconvenience off IMO.
This is the most hilarious thing I've read on this site. Your cousin might get some weird looks waving to random people, but why would they feel unsafe? I have never known more of my neighbors than in Boston, and I've lived all over the U.S.
> She explained that that were she lived (Boston) you just couldn't safely wave at just anybody you passed.
I don't really understand this. It's well known people in the NE don't simply wave at everyone. I grew up in the south so it's odd to me to not ask any person I interact with how their day is going, but I've never seen it as some safety issue. Just different culturally.
> Do you want some drunk kid blasting his bass right outside your house at 11pm on a weeknight? (for hours, no less)
I'm not sure if this is alluding to race, so I'll ignore that part, but kids are going to be kids. Suburbs, city, doesn't matter - if you have teenagers around you'll have things like this. When we lived in a suburb my wife always complained about the kids doing this and I would always chuckle because at one point I was one of those kids ;)
How do you *know* this?
And the difference in crime rates in urban and rural areas is grossly overblown. Looking at California numbers, a city-slicker has about a .9% chance of becoming a victim of violent crime, and hick has about a .6% chance. That's a small reduction to a small probability. For context, if your risk tolerance hasn't forced you to cut out meat and alcohol from your diet to avoid cancer, you're miscalculating risk if you think you should flee the cities to avoid violence.
It’s emotionally taxing when you need to keep your guard up all the time. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be on someone if they had kids to tow around as well.
I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.
Driving is exhausting.
Something like this is a lot more rare than harassment on public transit. And not exactly avoidable. So it isn’t worth thinking about. But on public transit you have to maintain constant vigilance just to avoid the many bad situations that could come your way. You’re very exposed and vulnerable. The crime rates on transit are after everyone puts in the effort to avoid being a victim.
Is it actually true that car accidents are far more rare than harassment on the subway? I don't take public transit enough to comment (there is none here).
Car accidents have a much higher likelihood of maiming or killing me. Even if they're more rare, I would posit (but don't have numbers) that the total cost to society (including property damage) is MUCH higher.
And I've been driving a hell of a lot more than the years I rode the subway....
Were you an active participant in the fights?
If not, wouldn't the fair comparison be a count of how many car crashes you have driven past?
I wasn't an "active participant" in the accidents either. Both were minor rear endings.
Oh, and my God, the mind numbing boredom.
Maybe try going whatever speed the rest of the traffic is going. Less ire will be directed at you if you're not everyone's problem point.
"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 60 times higher than for buses, 20 times higher than for passenger trains, and 1,200 times higher than for scheduled airlines. Other comparisons are possible based on passenger trips, vehicle miles, or vehicle trips, but passenger miles is the most commonly used basis for comparing the safety of various modes of travel."
>Your safety is at least somewhat in your control Have you ever driven on roads? What control do I have that someone reading their phone instead of looking where their giant SUV is going while speeding
I just think that, considering the number of miles driven in the US and the poor quality of your average driver, the number of deaths is surprisingly low. This is probably at least partially due to the safety regulations that have made cars a helluva lot less of a killbox than they used to be.
If you don't recognize that while driving you have at least some control over your own safety I don't know what to say. Total control? Of course not. Can you not speed, not read HN while eating a burger, not blow through traffic lights without looking? Of course you can.
It would be like arguing against buses because a bus driver can wig out and drive through a cliffside guardrail and there's nothing you can do about it.
Seems like a lot of people in here would do those things and then when it goes poorly blame the car. It's basically the "stick in spokes" meme.
>It would be like arguing against buses because a bus driver can wig out and drive through a cliffside guardrail and there's nothing you can do about it.
Now that you mention it I'm pretty sure a Peter Pan bus did exactly that around here a few years back (I'm gonna go google it, find out that it was in like 2003 and feel old). Driver got confused which overpass ramp he was on and full sent it thinking there was a merge at the top he needed to be up to speed for when instead there was a sharp curve. But yeah, that behavior is def not the norm.
compared to driving, riding a bicycle is very healthy so the net effect for bicycling is still positive.
People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.
I don't drive as often but I've run into far more potentially dangerous situations driving on the highway with my kids than I have on the subway.
Haven't seen any of that in 30 years of using public transport in several countries. Are you ok in US?
The closest to anarchy I have been in public transport was withnessin a hobo refusing to pay for the ride to trigger the police response and be booked.
Where I am, in another part of western Europe, a single-region ticket is normally ~30-50% more expensive than the all-of-Germany ticket.
Cars are far and away the biggest threat to my safety, and the source of all the harrassment I receive while out in public. I mean, every now and then some guttersnipe blurts out incoherencies at me, but that's not something to be afraid of.
I regard driving, in cities, to be an inherently anti-social activity. If you want a healthy community with safe and lively streets you got to be out in it, not sealed off in a protective cage.
I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.
Do you have a wife?
Of course, motor vehicle crashes are the second biggest killer of kids after guns. I don't know where homeless people sit on the threat scale but it's a negligibly small amount.
In any event, homeless people are low on the threat scale because people generally avoid riding a Schwinn through homeless encampments, which should be perfectly obvious but I guess not.
Here's a fun fact for you: statistically cyclists live longer than non-cyclists, and that's in spite of all the hazards they have to deal with while out riding.
I have lived in and around more than one area known to have a high density of people experiencing homelessness. It seems a lot, lot scarier than it really is. Once you get used to just tuning them out it's fine. The vast, vast majority of the crime in that community happens amongst themselves. Are there exceptions to that? Of course. But the numbers are low, just like most crime.
I watch Cyclists pull shit that's illegal on the road all day, and they refuse to simply USE THE SIDEWALK (infinitely safer for all involved). That way, when the cyclists inevitably do some dumbshit the only people at risk are pedestrians and the usual damage is at most a broken bone rather than roadkill.
Localities that ban cycling on sidewalks are spiritually and ontologically evil.
> You want to be on the road (outside of a bike line)? Act like you hold a drivers license then. Oh you don't? Get the hell off the road. A driver's license is not required to use a road. It's required to operate a car. Cyclists explicitly have the right to use the road, including outside of bike lanes. When cyclists act unpredictably it is very, very frequently a response to motor vehicle traffic and pressure, because drivers are seemingly incapable of understanding that their tons of metal can hurt people.
Cyclists would love separated infrastructure, but the vast majority of transportation dollars go towards car infrastructure in the US.
> [the sidewalk is] infinitely safer for all involved
no, it isn't. This creates a lot more points of conflict with both drivers (who do not expect fast traffic on the sidewalk) and with pedestrians. Sidewalks are also often not appropriate for wheeled vehicles moving with any speed; terrain is uneven and turns are too sharp.
You're driving? Act like you have a driver's license, which requires you to respond safely to other road users including cyclists. Can't do that? Get the hell off the road.
How do you get to a sidewalk on a different block without going on the road?
Everyone loves driving until they have to:
* Pay through the nose for parking.
* Pay through the nose for tolls.
* Pay through the nose for gas, maintenance, insurance.
* Replace a car that they can't afford to keep running.
* Are stuck in endless traffic hell that them and all the other drivers on the road have created.
* Are seriously injured or killed by a reckless/drunk/idiot/inattentive/unlucky driver.
----
The first bullet point in particular drives people into a frothing rage. Drivers, as a group, are incredibly and irrationally entitled to free storage of their cars on public/private space.
The last bullet point is far more likely to happen to you in a car, than you are to be assaulted on a bus or train. Across my immediate family, I can count three serious crashes (Only one of which the family member in question was at fault for). None of us have ever been assaulted on public transit, and we've taken a lot of it.
If my direct connection bus came back - or at least bus frequency were increased - (Thanks, budget cuts, for adding a 10-25 minute transfer to my downtown to downtown commute), my car would once again be collecting dust in the garage.
People take transit when its relatively fast and gets them to where they need to go. That's the primary driver for ridership.
I've taken public transport my whole life, in numerous countries, and only bought a car for the first time 7 years ago when moving back to the US. Never had any incident on public transport or felt unsafe. Was it always as comfortable and convenient as my car? No, but that's a separate issue.
I'm a weekend road cyclist and I've had a number of very close calls with cars -- invariably big pick up trucks, sometimes flying an American flag (you know the type) -- purposely rev up and buzz by me as close as possible on small country roads, sometimes honking as well or flipping the bird out the window. Any little stumble or twitch at that point and there were a couple of times I would have been in the hospital or dead.
Yeah, there are sometimes strange people on public transport, as well as homeless, etc. But I've encountered more *holes driving cars than on the bus or subway.
All of society requires this, not just public transit.
Tokyo got this solved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KMYAEIXVzA
In a big American city. School issues as well American due to funding structure. I'm not saying there aren't problems at school in other countries, but not like that: schools in cheap US districts are extremely underfunded.
New York is great and the subway is amazing. I remain mystified by what I see people say on cable news or podcasts.
Or maybe everyone secretly just really loves strip malls, who knows.
> Mountain Life
> I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night sky and here coyote's screeching in the background. I respect the fact I grew up in an environment that was NOT surrounded by pavement and was NOT surrounded by buildings. There was endless landscapes and forests of exploration. I could find any tree and build my fort. I could spend hours hiking with my dog and find no end. I could take a nap in a field of grass and not worry someone would cross my path. The Santa Cruz Mountains have so much to offer and I feel like there is so much to learn about them.
I've spent a bunch of time in Manhattan. Cumulatively, many months of my life. It's a fun experience, but I'm not interested in raising my kids there.
It kind of is. Where'd you buy your charcoal? Did it have a parking lot out front and two stores on either side of it sharing the same overall building?
Of course there are exceptions, maybe you're one of them. But they are so small numerically as to be irrelevant. The vast majority of the country is living nearly all their personal life in tract housing and their commercial and social life in a strip mall. I've travelled a lot, just calling it like I see it.
Regardless of all that though, if you like it then great for you!
My comment above was just noting that city living is fine. I keep seeing in the media that NYC is scary or dangerous or something and that's fucking ridiculous, it's not.
Maybe this is just another "American version" of something - in Czechia, public transportation is truly safe (incidents happen, of course, but it's like one per year that makes it to the news), even at night.
Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.
Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.
It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.
There was a name for this trend - White flight.
I grew up in southern suburbia and in walkable southern towns - they do exist, in pockets.
I learned two things from my experiences. First is that anywhere there is foot traffic, you will get homelessness, panhandling, crime, and just generally people you don't recognize. It's not because big cities aren't being policed adequately or anything policymakers are doing, it's just something that naturally comes with the territory.
The second lesson I took away is that we as a society often can't tell the difference between "This place makes me feel uncomfortable" and "This place isn't safe." Despite all of those issues I outlined above, I felt very safe and comfortable living day to day in urbanist spaces.
Dense cities and lack of urban sprawl reults in awesome places to live and you don't need to even use public transport in those as everything is just close by.
Also - IMHO the problem with the USA is more focus on competition (you have to "win") instead of cooperation hence more fracutred society that yields more povery and "not-nice" public spaces...
> The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
I live in a rather smallish city/town (~45k).
When I lived in Berlin I could get anywhere in the city within 15-30 mins, it was insane.
I ride my bike or e-bike everywhere I can. Cars are the worst.
Plazas do exist in the US, but they're rare. Very rare, especially outside of New England. That's what OP is talking about, public transit is a 'solution' to a different problem, and one that I don't like either. See, my biggest problem with urbanism is that it's overwhelmingly focused on building huge megacities, which are inherently unwalkable nonsense. Instead, walkability becomes rhetoric for any mode of transit that isn't a car. I hate that. I want walkable living spaces that are actually walkable, not urban environments where I walk to the train station because the city is too large for its own good.
I don't want to replace the personal car with public transit. It misses the point entirely. I don't want to have to use anything more intensive than an e-scooter to get around the place I live at all. Walking to the train station and riding that for 10-20 minutes to get to the other side of the city sucks. The social problems endemic to public transit in the US are just icing on the cake. Tokyo is a hellish nightmare compared to an Italian commune.
I don't think the NL government is remotely perfect, and they definitely are struggling to build enough housing, but their 'housing first' strategy towards homelessness seems to mostly work?
Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.
Well, it leads to the behavior that you mentioned. It's unavoidable and it'll keep getting worse as the price of housing in dense cities continues to soar.
Your only choice? Move to suburbs and wait for self-driving cars. I get downvoted every time I say this, but that's the simple truth.
I've spent a lot of time in Singapore, with literally the worlds lowest crime rates, highest trust in society, and best mass transit in the world.
It costs 100K USD to get a SHITTY car, like a Toyota Prius.
Everyone in Singapore is desperate to make lots of money, is desperate to buy a cool car, and is desperate to never step one foot onto the transit system again.
Mass Transit is a cope for being poor, even in a society with no crime and the highest trust in society. Using it is admitting that "I failed to make enough money to get out of here"
We have car culture because everyone wants it. Americans can literally buy a C8 corvette factory order at 20% off MSRP right now. The world salivates at such deals and is extremely jealous of our way of life.
Liberals who try to kill car culture are exactly why Trump got elected and why he's so popular right now.
The post-Giuliani years were great until we started implementing an approach maybe described as "property crime enforcement leads to injustice because it's due to inequality, and moreover should be treated as a societal issue" justice system adjustment. There, spikes of menacing and assaults on public transit occurred, to the point where a disconnect became quite obvious to commuters.
The problem with this narrative is that wealthy people take black cars to drive them around, leave the city on the weekends, and ultimately don't have the day to day concerns around safety.
Add to that an interesting fact that the most progressive neighborhoods are generally the safest (with an anti-police and criminal justice reform bent) while the poorest have a pro police attitude. Here's an interactive map that lets you compare votes across neighborhoods of the different Democratic candidates in the 2021 election where we had Adams making his pro-police rhetoric center to his campaign. Look where his support trends highest: https://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nycrcv2021/?office=mayor&c...
Few people enjoy being outside in a tropical swamp with a double-digit UV index. Same with the extreme cold that you get in the central US far from the ocean.
I live in Seattle, where many people walk everywhere all year (myself included), no car needed. But that is because the weather is perfect for that kind of thing, being 5-25°C with limited precipitation virtually the entire year. If I lived in Houston, for example, I would be driving in the summer regardless of how walkable the city is.
I am from Spain, where 40ºC in summer is normal but winters are mild. I have friends and colleagues from Finland and Latvia, which are pretty much the opposite. And yet all our countries are walkable.
There is plenty of accommodation for vehicles in Seattle, that is true. Even people that walk everywhere often own one in order to take advantage of the prodigious outdoor activities for which the region is famous.
I now live in rural Japan, a country that outside of the big cities also suffers from awful American-style urban sprawl, and holy guacamole, how can people live like this? The area where I live is just big box stores and houses scattered everywhere, and you need a car to do anything. It has made me really appreciate my homeland...
Maybe most but there's plenty of public space that doesn't. People choose to live around the public spaces that do. Some even try to change that instead of moving somewhere that doesn't. The great thing about America is that there's plenty of everything for everyone, but it's not just going to come to you.
Even if you don't want to live in a detached home deep in suburbia, there often isn't an affordable alternative.
Paris may not yet be at Amsterdam’s scale, but only 5 % of daily trips in the city are made by car. It’s staggering that roughly 50 % of public space is allocated to cars [1], despite their minimal share of actual mobility. And I'm all in favor in further reducing car lanes, parking spots...
[0] in french - https://www.airparif.fr/actualite/2025/comment-la-qualite-de... [1] https://www.transportshaker-wavestone.com/urban-transports-s...
It also really depends on where you went in the city. Were you just hanging around ile de city and the marais?
It's the same everywhere, as most European cities are dominated by 20-35yo people. They vote for green parties and then move out when they have children, as they realize that the policies they supported are not child- or family-friendly at all. The extreme example is Seoul, with its zones where kids are forbidden. It's a shame, as families require more public services and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and so on), but they are being pushed away by childless youngsters who hate cars. Unfortunately, no middle ground seems acceptable for this crowd, so I'm unconvinced that it will change.
Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation, so they lead municipalities to decrease investment in this sector, which is, however, the most inclusive, safe and efficient way to move people around. This is also seen in Paris, where the bus speed has never been so slow, the fleet is aging,, while the city hall spends like a teenager on a weekend trip with daddy's credit card on new bike lanes.
In the EU at least, the next nail in the coffin will be the low-emissions zones that will make it prohibitively expensive to enter/leave the center, forcing families to leave metropolises altogether.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/09/06/why-the-mi...
And I think Paris and Barcelona share a lot in that respect (the mayors - Hidalgo and Colau - met a lot to discuss exactly those topics and share experiences).
Don't know about Germany, but in Netherlands it's solved with having proper cycling infrastructure. It's the right approach, but it is still more of an exception. Where I am at they just painted cycle paths on existing roads and then tried to make it safer by cutting speed limit in half and eliminating lots of street parking. And now it's a mess that doesn't work well for anyone. Next elections are in a year, will be interesting to see how that will go.
An obstacle isn't going to magically pop into existence the moment you mount a bicycle. Car-centric road design can indeed be dangerous to cyclists, but that says more about the road design than it does about the concept of cycling. Build better roads and cycling isn't dangerous!
And the problem with removing cars from the city center is that many users still need cars, either because they have families, or because they work and need a motorized vehicle (e.g a plumber).
> 35% des cyclistes tués, 63% des cyclistes blessés gravement le sont dans un accident sans autre véhicule impliqué.
35% of cyclist deaths, and 63% of cyclist seriously injured occur in an accident with no other party involved.
Another graph in that report shows that a vast majority of cyclist deaths occur while cycling for leisure. I would hazard that most cycling in cities is utilitarian.
OK, cycling at 50km/h in a city is dangerous and stupid (if you're even physically capable of doing so, which few are?). 30km/h in suburbs / 20km/h in the centre is mostly fine, and 10 for busy complicated spaces.
30km/h is slow enough to prevent the vast majority of crashes being fatal, and 20km/h will avoid most serious injuries.
I broke my wrist by falling from my bike when I was younger, almost while stopped (my wheel got blocked in a tram rail).
(Before we even consider that - at population level and in developed Western countries - lack of physical activity, and an environment which actively suppresses it through sheer indifference if not outright hostility - is likely inflicting a far greater burden on childrens' health and wellbeing than trauma).
Source: me, who commutes by bike daily through a capital city.
I'm a huge supporter of public transit, but cyclists are a common enemy for everyone: cars, pedestrians, public transit-takers, other cyclists.
Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.
Completely agree that the presence of bikes and scooters on the sidewalk is annoying and dangerous. The city changed the rules a few months ago and now there is a 500€ fine if you use them on the sidewalk. That fixed the problem. They have to use the street or one of the many bike lanes.
No idea how it is in Paris, but there are places where living happily in a city without owning a car is perfectly possible, even if you have small kids.
You should stop and have coffee in a street shared only by pedestrians and cyclists, and observe the behaviour of cyclists. I have observed it to be mostly slow, controlled, courteous and respectful of pedestrians.
No, I don't feel safe at all, and my son can't walk freely either. In Paris it's the same (my wife, who was pregnant then, got hit at a crosswalk by a cyclist who seemed to believe that red lights were for cars only). Even Le Monde published an piece about it!
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/our-times/article/2024/11/17/anti-...
> mostly built out
Look at rent in Asia. They actually build towers over there and they build large apartments for families as well as small apartments for couples. There's enough building that the housing market is diverse.
How much does parking for that cost the rest of the week? How much is your car payment + insurance + fuel? Presumably you did the math and it's cheaper to have bought one, including a nominal amount for your time to rent one on Friday and return it Sunday night. So I'm just curious.
I live in Amsterdam and have a young family. We own an electric cargo bike that we use for groceries and to cart around our daughter. You can use it with an infant car seat and for larger kids.
When we need a car we use a car sharing app. There are around 10 cars within walking distance of our flat.
Many people in cities _want_ a car but don’t need one.
You can bet all those car users also ride bikes though. It's just very common in the NL to live in one city and work in another, things like that. I know people who have cars they use to go to work and back and then take all other journies via foot, bike or public transport.
In short it's not an either/or thing.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/10574383_Safety_in_...
But being car centric or not doesn't even matter here. The argument that car owners don't think like cyclists doesn't apply to car owners who spend a significant portion of their week on bicycles.
It doesn’t really freeze in Paris anymore so it's a moot point, but you can ride bikes when it does (you need different tires, just like cars, and a city that clears the roads, just like for cars).
I personally love it when my kids have freedom of movement. Every family we know is the same way. Carting them around all day and then sitting and waiting at various activities just plain sucks.
"Her war on motorists, who last year were hit with a double whammy of speed cuts on the capital’s ring road and the tripling of parking fees for heavy vehicles, such as SUVs, has also sparked fury among families."
Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.
This is simply false. I just mapped it from place des Fêtes to place de la Catalogne and selected only wheelchair-accessible options (note that this trip is _not_ easy to do because it goes from one end of Paris to the other). Driving it's 15 km, 45 minutes, using the ring road; public transportation takes 47 minutes (48, RER B, 59/88). You’ll notice the same pattern for, e.g. Parc Monceau to Place d’Italie, a 9 km trip (30 minute drive at 11:47am on a weekday, 45 minutes on public transportation).
Buses are slow _because of cars_. Fewer cars means faster buses. The subway is inaccessible except for line 14, but RER A and B, all tramways, and of course buses are all accessible. You can also use a baby carrier.
And I don't know why you need an SUV in Paris. Seems like an unnecessary luxury that most people wouldn't care for.
Because they target heavy vehicles, SUVs have no proper definition. But many decent family-friendly cars for 3 children with a large boot are in this category. In general, the city has greatly reduced surface parking, which creates a lot of problems for trade workers who need to intervene in the city and need a car.
> Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation,
For short trips maybe, but as a cyclist myself, I'd say cyclists are among those most likely to use public transportation for any trips that are beyond their cycling radius, or where cycling isn't feasible, instead of a car.
All the parents of 3+ children that I know live in the suburbs or even in the middle of nowhere in the case of one family totalling 7 at the moment, as their firstborn already moved out.
Personally I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so I moved to one that's half the size and live on the outskirts with my family, but in the 13 apartments connected to our staircase we're one of three families and the only ones not renting.
No one is arguing you should take your sick kid on a bike for one hour ride.
- Buses are crowded, very slow, and being blocked for >1h because of protests or roadworks with a sick newborn is a rather unpleasant experience. I did it already. And in general, public transportation in Paris has degraded a lot. Who wants to explain to his 3-year-old son what this fine gentleman is doing while heating crack in the back of the train car?
Buses can be slow during peak hours because of traffic congestion, but during the day they’re fairly reliable and have plenty of space for strollers.
The Paris Metro is extensive, but I think you’re making very broad generalizations. It’s extremely rare (though unpleasant) to come across a drug addict, and I’ve never seen one during the day.
(Disclaimer: I live in central Paris with a newborn.)
Bus are slow because of cars.
I’ve never seen a drug addict on the subway (you do see homeless people though certainly).
The article doesn’t even call out bike centric policies:
> “It is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have made life harder for families and the middle class. Construction work, difficult access to nurseries, skyrocketing rents, and social housing shortages have pushed Parisians to the suburbs or provinces.”
The “worst” callout in the article is triple parking fees for SUVs.
Oh.
Anyway.
It looks like there are loads of factors at play and I wouldn’t trust assigning blame to just one, especially when your supporting article only kinda sorta touches on that factor.
And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.
An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.
First chart shows that average speed for cars have decreased steadily. For surface parking a simple google search will help you find it.
for the kindergarden commute we've used the car two or three times in almost 5 years, when we had to transport birthday party stuff (i.e. cake), but then we stopped even doing because using it was too much of a hassle.
"The West" is a rather large part of the world.
Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.
[0] https://www.amsterdamsights.com/about/neighborhoods.html
Also, those "suburban" areas in Amsterdam aren't suburban: they are still built with a bicycle-, pedestrian-, and transit-first mindset. Those office buildings in Zuid are built right next to one of the busiest railway stations in the country, and the highly-paid lawyers will arrive at the office by bike from their nearby homes.
If you want Amsterdam's suburbs, you'll have to go to Almere: it was literally built as a commuter city for Amsterdam. And even there you'll have trouble finding areas which don't meet the definition of a 15-minute city.
Even European subburbs are generally better, smaller roads, more mixed use, more trees, more dynamics, more commercial and building times mixed in. The extreme separation between building types that became the standard in US zoning-codes simple never happened to the same extent in Europe.
The nicest places for humans to exist in have a mixed-use basis. Yes some areas are purely industrial and some areas are dominated by retail or offices, that's fine. But fully segregated residential zones are depressing and nonsensical.
The suburbs purely for residential space where you have to go somewhere else for activities do exist, but usually over time they grow their own infrastructure for shopping and hanging out without needing to go far.
I'd say both. We do have the history on show both because we have more of it, and sometimes the stuff from eras when the US as we think of it¹ existed tends to be better preserved despite the effects of WWI and WWII. But we also have it easy to get to, often safely on foot, in our cities².
> This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions.
Not wishing to put us down, but I'd say a fair chunk of that is historical accident. A lot of cities started out as smaller settlements that grew and merged, meaning there is a spread of housing, shows, workplaces, etc around the whole city because it used to be in each individual part before they merged over time. America's cities on average started at, or at least very quickly gained, a larger scale, and grew from the inside out rather than by several insides growing until their outsides merged.
Some European cities made the mistake of doing away with some of that and converting to a state closer to that of US cities, and many current efforts are more about returning to their roots than being newly person friendly.
--------
[1] essentially from the point the founding fathers went to find somewhere they could be prescriptivist about people's, lives because they weren't getting away with that as they wanted to over here, and perhaps a little before that
[2] though there is a fair amount of it that isn't as easy to get to unless you drive
The Founding Fathers also did a lot of controlling of some people’s lives (in that they enslaved a lot of people), but they didn’t have to go anywhere to do that.
Anyway, if you want to walk around some history in the US, you can do that in Boston. As you mentioned, a huge factor in the walkability of a city is just having the right population density before cars were invented. The oldest European areas in the mainland US (Spanish areas, in Florida) aren’t super walkable as far as I know.
But, as a fun notice, Stuttgart could be somewhat of a "Detroit of Europe", being the home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, so there's added incentive, and pride, to be a car city.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/aQCEYkc3oWsKpD9F7
[2] https://www.travelstuttgart.com/transport-in-stuttgart.html
The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.
https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateTown
https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity
https://www.youtube.com/@CityBeautiful
more bike oriented, but that often overlaps with city planning and design:
But similar to any other "product" the evaluation depends on the user's needs. As a single guy I loved that NYC was dense and walkable - because that meant (among other things) literally millions of date-able women within a 30 minute walk radius of my house. Great! Now as a dad of 3 I don't care about that at all - and the lower density suburb let's me have a backyard for my kids and makes shopping easy, or taking the kids to activities (yes you can do all those things without a car but people chose not to when they have choice)
There should be some sort of mom-friendliness factor in these conversations. If my whole town is old people, terminally single younger people and migrants (as seems to be the case for the city in question) then high density walk ability is perfect. What's the density and transportation situation in places people actually have kids?
Note that most dense cities have within the same city limits less dense areas that look like suburbs. These are often called "inner city" they are generally affordable but because the schools are bad are not places I'd want to live. For this discussion I'm going to count them as suburbs...
It doesn't have to be like the above. I've seen dense cities around the world that are very family friendly. However not in the US.
Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated communities up and down a 4-lane 45mph highway and where the line of cars picking up kids from school each day backs out onto the road and blocks traffic.
Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.
In places like Pontevedra, the kids can walk on their own to all the activities, once they are old enough. And nobody really needs a car. I didn't learn to drive until I was 23.
- I can walk to a gigantic park with many playgrounds in 5 minutes - I can walk to a small little park with a few swings and a slide in 1 minute - I can walk to a pool in 15 minutes - I can walk to my son’s future kindergarten and elementary school in 2 minutes - I can take public transportation to a gigantic zoo in a bit over 30 minutes (also a gigantic aquarium, playgrounds, etc. in the same area) - I can take public transportation to a world-class kid science museum in under 30 minutes (also a kid-centered movie theater, indoor skydiving, bowling, many more play areas, etc. in the same spot) - I can take public transportation to an amusement park in 45 minutes (1h to a second one, Disneyland Paris) - There are tons of indoor play areas for days it rains I can walk to or take public transportation - I have pediatrician and world-class pediatric hospitals walking distance, or a 5 minute wait away for EMS
And all of that much more safely than if I had to drive my kid everywhere (leading cause of death from 4 year onward IIRC. Once my son is old enough, he'll also be able to independently go to all that (say when he’s 12), which would be completely impossible in suburbia.
The only thing you can do in the suburbs is try to privatize all these resources, which is what a backyard is more-or-less (and a private pool, a home theater, buying tons of toys, etc.), but you inevitably get lesser versions as a result.
The other aspect is having things to do. A backyard is nice, but we have so many parks and playgrounds and cafes and museums and kids' clubs within 15-20 minutes of us that I don't think there's any danger of kids getting bored. And all of that is available on foot or by tram. With the Deutschland-Ticket in Germany, you don't even need to worry about tickets, just hop in and go. As someone who moved here from the UK where these sorts of cities are much less common, the high density and accessible public transport is one of the reasons my wife and I ended up staying here to have children rather than moving back to the UK.
I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.
They're not gonna use it unless you build it, and they're not gonna use it unless it becomes more convenient than the car.
Right now you've got 3 unreliable bus lines, each bus 30 minutes apart, service stops at 8pm and the schedule is useless because they get stuck in traffic. Consequence is, nobody uses it and there's always a crackhead in the back (they're part of the population that actually uses it to get around even when it's inconvenient)
My point is, you can clean busses regularly (and you should but -), you can put a cop on every bus, you can do a lot of things to improve "the feeling of safety", but it's not going to offset inconvenience, and you won't need to do all that if you just make public transport the most convenient way to get around in your city. Except cleaning them. You'll still need to clean the bus.
Fundamentally it's a competition between public transit and the alternatives (usually cars). Cities can influence both ends - make driving less pleasant by cutting road infrastructure, parking, add fees for driving into the city, etc and make transit more pleasant by improving schedules, cleaning, etc. I'm a big fan of the latter instead of the former because the former often pisses voters off and leads to a backlash that sets progress back instead. Unfortunately, the latter often costs more as well.
I’ll point out that we had a postdoc in the lab I worked in from India, then Germany. When he told people he was going to Boston people told him he was crazy to come to crime ridden america where everyone has guns. He laughed about it hind-site but that image is real and gave him pause. It does real damage.
Cities aren’t perfect, but traffic needs to get bad enough or too costly and people will take transit (as my cousin pointed out about living in NYC). I just ended up riding my bike 50 minutes to work.
Drivers will come out of nowhere and complain, will start suddenly caring about people with disabilities (of course in no car areas we will figure out how emergency vehicles, deliveries, and people with disabilities will get around).
Sure our public transit system needs a lot of work, but that is not an argument for keeping the current car centric system we have in place now.
Cars obviously have their use cases and I can also understand why most of the US will never do this. But the car culture within cities is insane.
Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in the cities (and the highways between the biggest population centres in the south east corner where most of the people live) just keeps getting worse. When you give people real alternatives (convenient, frequent public transport, more cycling infrastructure, better planned cities so you can walk and cycle to things you need nearby) that actually gets people off the road and that is the one thing that can reduce traffic (apart from somewhere having a dwindling population).
Focusing all out infrastructure spend and making cars the primary mode continues to make car driving worse, but people get angry when too much money is spent on public and active transport, because “not enough” is being spent on road infrastructure. So politicians spruik their “congestion busting” road spending, and it keeps getting worse. It’s wild.
As someone for whom driving was just the default, I came around full circle.
One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
(edit: spelling)
From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this."
The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.
It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.
Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.
My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car.
But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands).
One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.
If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.
The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.
If it's the people (eventually) then it's just accounting.
All these things can be referenced, and checked. Rural roads are paved because they're used (the ones that aren't - they're gravel or mud).
Roads are not generating direct revenue, which is how you determine profit. There's no model where roads are profitable.
Additionally, we've been moving goods and services by rail for approximately two centuries in the United States - long before a car was on a road. Roads are not a requirement to move goods around.
Do you build one rail line or two? Do you build one bus route or two? Do you expand a road or build a new one?
Making it a train vs car or rail vs road obscures the problem AND the solution.
People tend not to point it out because most don't actually care about the profitability at all, it's just a meme opinion they present because they prefer cars and look at it like a competition. Other meme opinions that get used:
- disabled people need cars and you want to take cars away from them! (fake disability advocacy - disability advocates who have spent 10 minutes thinking about this know that disability is a spectrum and that many disabilities prevent people from being able to use cars or they are unable pay for the necessary modifications to be able to drive; also no one said anything about taking cars away from people)
- cyclists are a danger to pedestrians and cars! (rhetorical trick to get people to think bikes pose a greater danger to pedestrians than cars)
- buses are ugly! (so is your car)
- it increases traffic (so does your car)
- not everyone wants to ride a bike/walk/take the bus (no one said you have to)
They say these things even in non-adversarial contexts. Like in a discussion about wanting more pedestrian infrastructure and bike paths, they will say "just use [existing bike path], some of us have JOBS and ERRANDS to run" as if people only walk/bike for leisure. No, you don't understand, I'm trying to get as far away from the horrible drivers with Texas/Florida plates as possible!!
Or driving with no passengers at all, not uncommon for the buses where I live at certain times and routes.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. You can optimize equipment usage by running more buses on heavily used routes but you can't encourage new ridership on new routes without running enough buses to make it at least somewhat convenient. If you miss your bus and have to wait an hour or more for the next one, most people don't find that very appealing.
But at some point if you're running a whole bus to move a small number of people, you need to admit it's not worth it and eliminate that route. It would be more economical to just give those people taxi rides.
Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).
That said, my biggest gripe with driving/riding as a commute is that I get really bored of taking the exact same route every single day.
It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
It's hopeless to expect that things don't end up in this state. A decentralized system will naturally tend to a state of equilibrium balancing between desirability and pain, e.g. people will keep moving to a "nice" area until commutes or prices become unbearable.
I think the only way to end up with an utopia-like metropolis is to run it with a benevolent dictator government SimCity-like, which would probably involve restricted entry leading to very expensive real estate; therefore a lottery or similar admission system into low-cost housing would be needed to balance the needed support population. In other words probably unconstitutional in a dozen different ways and never going to happen.
Most of us, for quite a bit of our lives - when we're under 18 for a start, and over 75ish it isn't really a good idea (yes, I know, no viable alternatives for a lot of people right now, but it's still a bad idea). Whenever we've had a drink. There's a dozen or more medical conditions which can snatch your right to drive away with the stroke of a doctor's pen, and that's before we consider all the common meds which come with a don't drive advisory warning.
And then there's all the other times where it'd sure be nice not to have to. When we're tired, or stressed, or sick, or weather conditions make things dicey. Or when I just wanted to read that book, magazine, blog article, or watch that movie. Or we've got to be someplace with the kids but they actually need our undivided attention.
The point is, even if you drive and like driving, it's just basically civilised to have other affordable options. Even if they're a bit slower or come with other compromises, they should, y'know, exist. And sometimes allowing them to exist comes at a price of making driving your own speed-bubble at the times when you can and want to a little less convenient or more expensive.
I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis.
We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issue.
(I live in London, United Kingdom)
The context actually get far more granular than it. I lived without a car for 25 years of my life, buses and trains were enough. But all it takes to require a car is having a home 3-4 km from the city center bus stops (which probably covers >50% of population). Unless someone likes walking 1h one way in -10 deg in winter to get to work each day.
You don't live in a city. You live in a suburb.
That's exactly what "making cities work for people instead of cars" is all about.
Not much of Europe ever gets that low though. Edinburgh occasionally overnight, but it's rarely below about -4c / 24f during commute hours. Berlin mostly the same, Stockholm's maybe the only big European capital that gets to "walking for an hour stands a serious chance of killing you" temperatures for days at a time.
Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.
Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.
Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.
THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.
If you need to travel more than ~2-3 miles or so to get groceries or get to school (in a populous area) that's a failure of urban planning.
Yes, there will be some people with mobility limitations who still needs cars, but that's a tiny minority of the overall population.
I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
I particular I know that many schools in Germany have car free zones around them due to the problems that car drop offs cause (there is nothing worse as a rushed parent in an SUV dropping their kids off at school. The number of near misses I have seen and experienced makes we want to globally forbid cars within 2 km of a school).
For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.
So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.
The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.
But it turns out that actually urban density is pretty good indicator of reasonable public transport. of _course_ there are black spots, rural england lost its trains in the 60s and busses in the 2000s.
But
The british didn't make the tube for tourism, given that they've not built anything transport wise since the 90s (except the Elizabeth line)
Paris didn't make the metro for tourists, because they are french, they're not going to spend money on dirty tourists who get in the way.
the Netherlands didn't make trams for tourists, they can cycle like the rest of us.
It's not about the good times (on a good day, moving five kids by walking/stroller is easy) - it's about the bad times, the crying, the screaming, the attempted suicides, etc.
Don't need a crazy expensive stroller though. A sling when they're small and light, and once they get big and heavy, they're large enough to go in a more basic foldable stroller. The childcare products industry is honestly awful at scamming new or expecting parents into buying shit they don't need.
Find a good cheap triple or higher stroller. Then you're looking at used car prices.
And I agree - a train is nice with a family, because once you're in, you're in.
But a train is more like a plane than a car; it's the subway that's closest to short commuting trips, and they rarely have bathrooms and often subway stops don't have them, either.
(Sometimes the temptation to get an RV with a toilet is high, mind you.)
Driving your car is absolutely a choice in many cities, and a poor choice at that.
Ask me how i know
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power.
Internet marketing, for example.
The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room.
You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us.
And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this.
Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
A coworker once told me his view of his commute drastically changed when he realized he could take the ferry to work. He got fresh air, it was less cramped, and it only took an extra 5-10 minutes.
That is physically impossible. Again, it's a "me problem", I'm not trying to say that the world needs to accommodate my unique personality, but if other people are within speaking distance of me with no partition, they cannot "melt away."
When I was younger, discovering my mysophonia and autism, my mother would used to say things to me like "just tune out the noise." If only! I mean, how do I develop that super-power? Please, it would change my life so much for the better. I don't know what that means.
The thing that practically defines mysophonia is an inability to do that with trigger sounds.
But for me it's not just noise. I can't relax in the presence of other people. I guess it could be an extreme form of social anxiety. But it's not so much that I feel fear or anxious ... it's that I am hyper-alert when other people are around me. If I can see someone out of the corner of my eye, my brain can't go "just ignore them." It's not wired that way.
One of my trigger sounds, speaking of mysophonia, is actually people talking. I don't like listening to the sound of people speaking amongst each other. I don't know anyone else that has that particular trigger sound. But if I'm minding my own business somewhere and suddenly I hear people having a conversation ... it can send me into an autistic meltdown.
And yeah, you can put on noise cancelling headphones in public. Which I do when I'm in those situations. If it was just the noise alone then it would be a problem that is not insurmountable. Though it would still be a problem.
But reading a book? Impossible for me when there is even a single other person in the room.
Again, it's a me problem. I'm not saying the world should change for me. All I'm saying is please don't take away my car. It's the only thing that enables me to be at all mobile.
Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.
>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".
Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.
>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...
The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by.
> It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/
I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.
FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.
Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common.
Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason.
Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane.
Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate.
I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city.
London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better.
Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable.
I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!
The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.
To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".
Personally I think it's contentious whether drunk driving etc injuries can be considered "intentional" even if they are expected and reckless. When I think of intentional injuries, I'm thinking of ones where the perpetrator has that as their preferred outcome, something I don't think applies to most drunk driving injuries.
The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.
So this might kill his attorney's opportunity to even claim that the Ukrainian woman was tormenting and threatening his life or something. It's one of those things that sounds irrelevant but turns out to have a gigantic impact on self-defense claims, which really, are the only hope the neck stabber has of not going down for some kind of murder charge.
This concern never even occurred to me. Are you not far more likely to die in a car crash?
Indeed they are. GP has done an extremely poor job of risk assessment.
Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.
And I say that while owning a comfortable car.
I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.
Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.
But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.
When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.
Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.
Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.
> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.
The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".
I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may.
There are two big problems with this though.
First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball.
Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".
Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.
For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)
Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.
One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.
I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...
The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes.
Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
Then again, one gets to enjoy the countryside and nature.
Not for all the other people around you, no.
Let trains where people are packed like sardines compete with trains with face to face seating and with self-driving cars with the same features, and people can chose whichever they prefer based on cost, convenience, and personal preference.
Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.
Then there's oil and gas subsidies that should be taken into account, since around 24% of oil consumption is from cars and light trucks. [1]
Then there's some other factors that are hard to quantify but have a huge impact on taxes, like how low density suburbs are subsidised by high density cities [2] as an effect of car-first infrastructure. It's not as simple as just the cost of roads.
[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
[1] https://carsbibles.com/what-percentage-of-oil-is-used-for-ca...
Oil and gas subsidies are an entirely separate debate which would have almost no effect on the costs of some types of cars (electric) anyway, so it's rather pointless to bring up in this context.
That Not Just Bikes video isn't showing "low density suburbs" being "subsidised by high density cities", it's showing low density parts of a city are subsided by high-density parts of that same city. That's still a fair point, but when I think of the suburbs I think of areas outside city limits, usually with their own separate governments and separate tax system. Those survive just fine without any such subsidies; low density parts of a city would be fine without them too.
And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges).
As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
I completely disagree. On a train or bus I can stand up and stretch my legs, I'm not cramped into a single valid sitting position. I don't get motion sickness on trains or busses like I do in cars, and don't feel claustrophobic. Also in cars I'm constantly stuck in traffic and can't do anything, whereas a bus or train no matter what's happening I can just read a book or people watch or whatever.
No during rush hour you're more likely to be cramped into a single valid standing position.
I sympathize with people that aren't so lucky, but, if Taipei can figure it out, there's really no excuse elsewhere. Good public transit really is the only viable way to move people. The private car is, objectively, the worst.
Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.
I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.
But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.
It's a very balanced system.
In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.
Some do, but many need to for work. As mobility for non-rich average people is reduced, more and more people simply must be in the city for work/services. (That is the only reason I am in a city. I would escape in a heartbeat if my job allowed it.) Where personal transport is cheaper and more available, people flock to suburbs and even "exurbs", which are a big thing now in Texas.
My example: I am often on 1-hour 24/7 recall (military, I don't get to choose my work location). That means I suffer on both ends. I need to be in the city and I must either live/sleep/shop within mile of work or have instant access to a personal vehicle. I guess could setup a cot and sleep beside my desk. That would reduce congestion. But is that a life anyone wants to live?
That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.
>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.
I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?
Considering that, almost by definition, urban environments house a magnitude more people than rural areas, I'd wager a guess that indeed most people do want walkable cities, or at least they would if they weren't brainwashed by car lobbyists to believe that covering an entire continent in asphalt just to park our metal boxes wasn't an idiotic use of space and resources.
> Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store.
I'm not really familiar with what a "boutique" corner store means here, but fair enough if you don't, though this sounds like more of a "I'm used to doing things my way" type of thing. I buy groceries 3 times a week on my way back home from wherever I might've been, it takes me no longer than 5-10 minutes, all I need is a single backpack, and it's a 2 minute cycle from the store to my house. And it's an actual house, with a garden and all the other fancy stuff people have in the suburbs. At the same time, I know people who have cargo bikes and do the once-every-2-weeks shopping sprees that you're talking about.
> So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day.
Some of my colleagues take a 1-2h train journey once a week, and they live in farmland as well. I understand the US is very large, but rural doesn't have to necessitate a lack of transport options either.
I do value having several gyms and restaurants (and friends) within just a short bike ride from my current house; and since one of the gyms I visit regularly is in the shopping mall, if I have an interest to cook something specific, I can buy whatever's necessary with like 5-10 mins of extra overhead.
And I do go to the local convenience store more or less daily anyway, if only for some snack, produce or fresh bread. There's a shop in each direction wherever I'd want to go, so the only way for me _not_ to inadvertently pass by one would be if I didn't leave my home at all entire day.
I'm not discounting anyone's general preference for country life, it's perfectly valid; I'm just saying that some of the things you're saying seem overexaggerated.
I am all for it out of general principle, but most car drivers will likely disagree.
Good point regarding the costs. The other advantage of dedicated / purpose-built bike paths is they likely don't have to be built to the same spec as ones designed for vehicle use (I assume - not a civil engineer).
The value of a bike lane isn't in the lane in isolation, in the same way that the value of a street isn't in that street alone. It's in the ability of that lane/street to get you where you need or want to go.
And, more abstractly, if a dedicated bike lane means more people taking the bicycle, that also means fewer cars on the road, making it that much more pleasant for those who continue to drive.
Speaking as someone who enjoys driving, I'm all for dedicated bike lanes, even if that means reducing car lanes.
We’re so instinctively competitive though it feels hopeless.
They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
There’s also the matter of weather, which is less obvious to people who don’t live in locations that see extreme weather or deep snow. Safety and cleanliness is another issue depending on the location. There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
People who hold up numeric metrics like number of people transported per unit area don’t understand why people prefer to hop in their car and go to their destination rather than spend potentially far more time navigating a crowded subway system.
If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.
The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.
Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.
Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.
And all the associated pollution, overheating and flooding issues that go along with it
That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.
Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.
> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.
They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.
> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.
Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...
Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.
What's the excuse with cities like Oulu in Finland, which isn't flat and is covered in snow more often than it is dry? Despite those 2 potentially huge issues, they still have incredible cycling infrastructure. Or Switzerland, where in my experience in at least Geneva and Bern the cycling infrastructure was also superb despite the mountainous terrain? No one's saying you need a cross-country bicycle highway, as long as the dense urban centers have good bike infrastructure it's more than enough.
Also I didn't even mention bikes in the comment you were replying to, I was talking about public transport like trains, trams and buses. Again, Switzerland despite being extremely mountainous has a world-class rail system that literally cuts through massive mountains.
What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.
I don't think the entire "car tunnels" thing is reasonable either, but this one is wrong. The bottleneck for cars is the inherent interference in the 2-dimensional streets. If you shove them all in a few tunnels right until they get into a low-transit region close to the destination, it would increase their capacity by a lot.
It's also a huge amount of money that is better used some other way. But it has an effect.
One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.
People who primarily drive cars? People who primarily drive cars when competitive options exist? People who argue for cars in areas where its not very feasible? People who prefer car oriented cities?
I think most people who primarily drive arent estimating subways at all.
I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.
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Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.
As someone who will have a runny nose all day if I sit next to that lady, yes I do worry about her perfume more than I worry about the drunk driver. While the drunk driver is a worse situation if the odds hit me, the odds the perfumed lady is too close to me is much higher.
This is what all economists get slightly wrong? They say humans are rational agents, soak in all the information, calculate the costs and benefits with the probabilities and make rational decisions. But humans almost always make emotional decisions. A perfume lady is way more scarier than a 5000 lb vehicle hurtling down at 60 mph, custom built to protect the person driving the vehicle, on surfaces built for vehicles and vehicles only (trillions of dollars in maintenance and tens of trillions of dollars healthcare costs).
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.
> Oh and you might be odor sensitive
I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.
I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building those formats anymore.
Worse, they're not an option for more americans specifically because of zoning and regulation. If not for government micro management there'd be more density, more cheap housing and you wouldn't need to drive 4hr out of the city to find a single family that's affordable.
>There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing.
There would perhaps be if not for all the regulation. Maybe not brick, probably something with brick veneer, but someone would be shoehorning them into small lots.
Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.
Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.
But there are other benefits. That local coffee shop or clothing store is better able to compete, because they don't have to compete on efficient product delivery which is something that you see in the suburbs Ala Starbucks or Wal-Mart. This increases entrepreneurial activities and helps money spread instead of concentrate. It's no coincidence in my mind that income inequality has increased partially because of tax rates, but also because of concentration of businesses that can best realize supply chain efficiency.
To your point about brick, sure yea homes don't have to be brick, but generally plastic siding sucks visually, plus suburban houses are built incoherently, so if we could just get something that looks good that's half the battle. But perhaps the most important part, which I'm not sure suburban housing design can really accommodate, is the layout and streetscape design that enables a healthy mix of SFH, apartments, and other living arrangements mixed with businesses and amenities.
Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).
Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.
Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.
[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.
Today we do not have market choices, because the Federal Highway Administration and every state department of transportation enforces and reinforces centralized design patterns that as we can see today no longer work (and likely never did). It's baked into their raison d'être. Unfortunately, as you also note, items like roads and housing developments live in the public sphere and so we can't and won't completely divorce the government from managing those projects or regulations, but we can examine what works well and increases attributes we want more of and do our best to drive regulation toward those attributes, and in some cases remove regulation to see more of those attributes. In my mind, work that increases walking, biking (or other similar transportation), and rail provide the best mix of low government regulation and effective development patterns which preserve most of the other things we like, such as cars and convenience.
I'm not sure I'm in favor of banning random crap, or maybe you read something into my comment that I didn't intend?
Sometime I wonder in what alternative world people live in which rain is a problem... Yes it's life, sometimes it' warm, sometimes cold, sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Buy a $10 rain poncho or umbrella and move on lol. How fragile are you that you can't deal with basic things like rain ? There are hard things in life, like your kid getting diagnosed with leukemia or your spouse dying, rain is waaay down the list.
We need a reality show about you people, I don't pay for netflix but I'd pay for that
In other words, the problem here that the car is solving, is a problem that the car is causing.
It's too bad that we lost that knowledge. But we could probably rediscover it with a moderate investment on research.
No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.
When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.
Yeah I mean that's like 99.9% of the surface of the world, nobody is preventing you to go live your dream. We're specifically talking about cities, a city without population density is not a city by definition
Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.
Most people do not work in Manhattan. I'm not sure about OPs situation, but there are a lot of other places people work in New York City, not to mention other cities.
I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.
For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.
But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!
Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.
I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.
So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.
I could stand to wait an hour, have to do a ridiculous dance for "security", traipse two miles across a vast building designed on the wrong scale for humans and so on, that's all fine, but the flying I do not like at all.
It is an interesting exercise to see how frequently people start using their Bahn app, trying to work around what might be their way to still make it into the destination, as the pause times between stations increase.
Or urine.
Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".
The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk.
US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infrastructure that has been intentionally sabotaged over half-a-century.
Anecdotally, among myself and my friends we have more stories of problems with theft and encounters with hostile people from very brief travels to Europe than all time spent on public transport in the USA. To be fair, I haven’t lived in NYC where public transport is famously more dangerous.
I also suspect that foreigners are more targeted for wallet thefts while traveling in Europe.
However, watching multiple friends get pickpocketed on European public transport and having to shake some sketchy people who were being aggressive with women in our group during our brief travels shattered my illusions that European public transport is universally superior in safety.
Edit to add: I also thought it was funny when we met up with someone’s friend in a populous European city who refused to ride public transportation with us. He would drive his car from point to point and meet up with us at the destination. He seemed to believe that the underground was not something people his age liked and was surprised we were riding it without a second thought.
I could imagine Paris and London in that list, despite both being very safe for locals (and.. both being Northern Europe)- but perhaps less safe for tourists.
I would imagine Prague being a middle-European tourist destination that is plagued much worse by this (but, also, very safe for locals- I lived there briefly).
Where were you in Europe?
Depending upon the issue you might reduce europe down to the rich western bits. You might include or exclude the former soviet influenced areas depending upon the context. You might only look at nations on the Mediterranean or only exclude them, etc, etc.
Yet whenever you look at the US you always include the whole thing no exceptions.
[1]just to be clear, by "I get a chuckle" I mean "the way we just accept this behavior is a condemnation of the community and the people who make it up"
Okay, but then why can’t we Americans just exclude the bad parts of America and only allow you to compare to the good parts?
Why must every America-Europe comparison be about the worst case American cities (usually taken from headlines) but only compared to a select subset of European locations?
You would likely agree that the USA and Mexico are incomparable and its sort of the same, though the EU evens some things out: its much less far reaching than a federal government.
That said: happy to compare the best case US public transport to the Nordics. Literally anywhere in the Nordics to anywhere in the US.
But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation.
Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable.
So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.
What this means of course is that an effective way of reducing traffic is by speeding up the alternatives.
Not if you are like me and likely to take a short nap after a long day at work...
Edit: I own a car, I use it all the time. But I also use the train a lot - all depends where I want to go and what I will be doing when I get there.
Edit2: I sometimes even drive to the train station, get out of my car and into a train!
I hate driving even when I'm alone on the road. I'm forced to stare at the road when I want to be doing something else. I can't even take a break, since a simple 5 minute nap has high odds of killing me even if I'm the only car on the road.
Plus cars are slower than trains or airplanes. Even on the autobahn with unlimited speed allowed, most people are not going nearly as fast as a high speed train, much less an airplane.
To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.
There’s cities that are not setup for efficient public transportation or walkable living. Redesign it from ground up and put a metro smack bang through the middle. Until then, it’s just not going to work.
People, and especially people who like the idea of walkable cities that reside in council chairs, often miss this fundamental step.
“Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living. All key ingredients for walkable cities with well served public transport.
Most British cities predate cars. They have had tramlines put in, taken out, and put in again. They have had roads widened, then bus and cycle lanes added. Train underground lines have been built.
> “Build it and they will come” won’t get you housing density, small local retailers, geographic compression of services, suitable climate, a different way of living.
You can build and change housing. We have lots of what used to be big houses that are now blocks of flats. You can encourage small retailers in many ways. Services can be reorganised or public transport routes designed to ensure access to them
Not sure what you mean about climate - there are cities you can manage without cars from the tropics to very cold places.
You can pedestrianise roads in existing existing towns and cities.
This canal was, in fact, always there, they just turned it into a highway at some point in the 70s. So the reverse is more than possible, it's a question of will to do so and convincing the, frankly, selfish car drivers. Having lived in the US myself for a stint, there's plenty of cities that could easily have work done similar to what happened in Utrecht, it's just that there's a lack of a will to do so to make things much better.
Sure, you won't have a direct train from NYC to Dallas (although, seeing China's high speed rail I don't see why that couldn't be on the table), but we're talking about individual cities making these changes a bit at a time.
The first thing we should do is target development. For example, planning laws should require new development (suburbs etc.) to be built around some kind of transit (ideally rail). Zoning should always be mixed - for example it should always be permissible to have at least small apartment blocks, groups of townhouses (like row houses), and small shops and cafes in suburbs. The idea of mandating areas be dedicated to only detached single family dwellings should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There’s just so much like that that can be started right now. But we don’t - we just keep making the same mistakes and things get worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9kql9bBNII
Utrecht did something similar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPGOSrqXrjs
People centric infrastructure didn't fall out of the sky, we recognised bad ideas and reworked cities over decades to make them liveable. And it worked!
Of course there are limits to this, but cities are often grown historically over centuries and city planning usually takes place in such constraints rather than planning cities from scratch. Don't let the perfect be the enemie of the good.
Yes it does. It will take 20 years, but if you don't start now you will never get there. Are you willing to invest in a better future or just accept the status quo?
I prefer to walk and take public transport, but where I live now (small town) busses are infrequent, and fairly short journeys can require changing. It can take two hours on the bus to get somewhere that is less than half an hour by car.
I think people here would be delighted with more public transport. The main complaint I hear about roads is not repairing potholes which is not hugely expensive. The problem is that the political push is to use a stick (make cars more expensive and inconvenient) rather than a carrot (provide better public transport).
The starkest example of this for me is comparing Orlando, Florida with Malmö, Sweden. Orlando is the end game of car-centric planning. The city feels bigger than its population suggests because you spend half an hour in a car just to get anywhere. The eight-lane highways and endless parking lots are supposed to make driving easier, but they create the very congestion that makes driving miserable. This architecture of disconnection means fewer spontaneous encounters and more social isolation. The city is designed for a machine, not for people.
In contrast, Malmö's population is actually larger than Orlando's, yet a 30-minute bike ride can get you literally anywhere. The largest road through the city center is a quiet, two-lane street that prioritises people over cars; as there are large crossings and lights. This isn't an accident, it's a choice. The city's excellent public transportation and extensive bike lanes make the car a choice, not a necessity and because it's penalised: the only drivers are the ones who need to be driving, for which now there are open roads (as long as you're patient).
The truth is, every person on a bus, a train, or a bike is one less car in front of you. Giving people real alternatives is the only thing that can truly reduce traffic. This isn't an attack on cars. It's a demand for sanity, a call to build cities that work for everyone, including those who choose to drive.
That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).
Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.
No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.
> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.
Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.
> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway
Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
If someone chooses to not make a trip then I count it as impossible. I could walk across the North Pole to Europe, but I think everyone would agree when I say the trip is impossible anyway despite that.
> This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)
You absolute can and I disagree with the studies. Now I will agree that building 50 layers of highway bridges needed is not a reasonable thing to do, but it still a solvable engineering challenge if we wanted to put the money into it.
But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.
Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.
All this to say, if the public is sufficiently informed, they are not going to reject public transport. We've been brainwashed that car centric transport is the best.
Then there is Japan, they kept a station open just for one girl, so she can get to school - https://www.ndtv.com/feature/kyu-shirataki-station-japanese-...
Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric.
Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.
I 100% agree. I live in Newcastle, a city that is fairly car centric, but we have a Metro line and have had pushes to increase bus and bicycle transport (though Labour are generally bad for active travel).
My brother moved to Leeds, one of the largest cities in Europe without a Metro or tram. Driving anywhere in the city is fucking awful. The planners clearly kept trying to add one more lane and the result is congestion everywhere, even at quiet times.
I've also driven round Liverpool and Manchester and found, though they're better as they have Metro lines, the car-centric roads are still really awful to drive on.
One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus.
I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.
I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10.
Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.
> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.
Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.
And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
It is, it takes political effort and most importantly it takes adequate staffing on the state/local government for supervision and proper tender processes, and both is really short in supply - one might say that the latter is done on purpose as an excuse to privatize yet another piece of public infrastructure.
Of course a private toll road company can build faster and keep up with maintenance, it doesn't have to deal with tender bullshit, it can hire enough of its own staff to make sure vendors don't screw them over, and if it's a large enough company they can hire their own construction crews. Oh and obviously it can provide a source of extra income for the grifter politicians that vote for the privatization...
These ones aren't really accurate in this century. China is making massive gains in clean energy and undoing a lot of the mess they made in the 20th century. I'm honestly blown away by how clean the water, air, and everything as a whole is over there. And I'm a freak who loves visiting places in the middle of nowhere, so it's not some Potemkin village stuff like YouTube China Truthers(tm) pretend is widespread.
> When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged
Yeah, you watch a little too much YouTube. That stuff doesn't happen. Why would anyone be stupid enough to be an engineer if they risk having their entire family being arrested? Seriously.
You say this like China is the country openly flaunting the climate, purposely pushing for more carbon emissions to enrich a few people, calling climate change a hoax, 1984'ing all government research and policy on climate change, and forbidding agencies from even researching it, selling off public lands for profit.
That's not China, that's the good ol USA
Oh, and the USA also sent multiple completely innocent people to gulags.
Where's your high horse now?
Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
That's a bold claim without data.
Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too.
> In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process.
A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween.
Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.
Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because people know exactly where they are going to be - a bus can possible swerve and hit you but the tram will always be on its tracks so people feel (and are) much safer sharing space with them. And just because they feel more ‘premium’ than busses people seriously are more likely to use them.
This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)
> and are way more energy efficient to boot.
This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A bus does much more damage to the road than a tramway though (to say nothing of trucks, these are even worse). Anything rail based, the load from weight and movement is transferred via the rails and subterranean sleepers to the foundation, whereas a decently used bus road will need to be resurfaced at least every five years, more in a hotter climate as the buses will inevitably seriously groove the asphalt. Tramways is more like every 20 if not 30 years until you need to do a full replacement.
On top of that, this "the cost is already paid" math is annoying to me on a personal ethical level because it excuses putting people into cars and freight onto trucks because "they already are there".
> A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.
A single Class R 3.3 tramway vehicle (~36 tons) in Munich carries 218 people, more if you squish the passengers ("Sardinenbüchse" feeling). Munich's largest bus with a carriage unit, in contrast, carries 130 people [1] at ~20 tons. The gain from regenerative braking that you get on tramways actually matters at that scale, and as said, drivers are already short in supply.
Fully agree on your calculation regarding traffic by the way, however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/setzt-anhaenger-busse...
What is the weight of that bus and tram when they only have 20 people on though? Similarly what is the cost of the driver or a bus vs tram when there are only 20 people you need to move on the vehicle? Because this is a problem you should be aiming to have: getting transit to those less dense areas that will never have 200 people on board with 5 minute frequencies. You should prioritize high frequency service over larger vehicles until you are running something every 5 minutes because that high frequency is the best way to kill complaints that transit is not convenient. It is of course expensive, if you are getting enough riders to need a bigger vehicle you should have the money from those riders to give them better service.
There are places in the world where you need the capacity of a tram. However I submit that most places should be building a fully automatic metro system anyplace they are thinking about a tram. Only after you have that comprehensive system can we ask if there really is enough demand to also run a tram for shorter trips. The down side of a metro is the grade separation means very short trips are not feasible because of the need to get to the tracks - but most areas can live without that additional service and they need the additional speed a metro can give.
> however the problem in practice often is that a bus network is planned and installed based on very conservative estimates, induced demand hits and the buses are overcrowded, but no one wants to put up the money and upgrade to a tramway because "we just got buses, they aren't even paid off yet".
Nothing you can do about bad planning. Though really if the buses are that full and not paid for you should have already had them anyway, and there are plenty of other places you that don't have service yet (because if you did you would see this coming and the buses would be paid for) that you can move the buses. The only issue is the cost of building the tram - buying a lot of buses is cheaper than building a new tram line. (I'm assuming you are not talking about Bus Rapid Transit - that has a place but it is rarely a good answer)
I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
The other problem is that city councils historically have run busses, whereas the State Government runs the rail, so a lot of our bus network competes with the rail instead of working together as an integrated network. At least the ticketing is integrated, but the network still has never felt like it’s designed to work together as an integrated transit network.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
In towns, and large towns especially, public mobility should be the rule and private one the exception. If any.
And maybe also for long distance mobility.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.
That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.
I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.
> It's not an either-or. You can have streets which are car-friendly, bike-friendly, and pedestrian-friendly at the same time. Just look at the Dutch, they've been doing it for years. That is until recently in some big cities, though, where some less knowledgeable politicians have also adopted this false populist either-car-or-bike concept. Though the traditional principle still applies to about 99% of the country's roadworks, and it works really well.
Adding onto that, sentences like "made for people, not cars" absolutely validate my point that this is nothing but populist activism. I'm hoping that we can all have a honest, intellectual discussion on how to make infrastructure better for everyone. Just make sure to always remember in every discussion about this topic: it is never either-or, not even in the densely populated Netherlands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Río
There's also the subway (impressive sprawl, infrastructure itself not so much), and decent buses.
Plenty of areas have also been closed to car traffic.
I'm all for restricting traffic, but it doesn't need to be completely either-or, even in a larger city.
You can accommodate both regions within one city, but they can't overlap without compromising one or the other (edit: although this compromise is a desirable middle ground for some people). Note that Pontevedra built huge free parking areas on the outskirts of its urban area. For their whole city it's not either-or, but in any given place they've had to make a decision.
That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.
Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.
To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.
Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?
To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...
Look around at places with very high car use (especially in North America) and you'll discover that this solution simply does not scale. Cars take up a gigantic amount of room on roads, and even gigantic highways like Onatrio's 401 [1] just have not been able to keep up with the level of sprawl that occurs when people move out of the city to surrounding suburbs and commute into the city by car.
Adding lanes to the highway does not help and just induces more traffic on it, and it also causes all the surrounding villages to sprawl outwards until they become indistinct blobs that merge into the nearby metropolitan city.
Trains are a much better solution to this problem because they have way better throughput, don't destroy cities with massive highways and parking garages, and encourage denser development that lets nearby villages retain their character and size.
I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.
The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.
Live remotely in low density villages in italy if you want, you can accommodate everybody's car just fine there - but when you need to visit Milan, don't complain that it won't let you bring a car in with you and they kindly ask you to leave it outside & take public transit to reach the center.
There is nowhere to go without driving. Kids who grow up in the suburbs are pretty much trapped on an island. There’s nowhere to explore because the surrounding 5 mile radius might be nothing but more developments
There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shifting in the geographic region (water, food, electricity generation) that has to occur in the surrounding area which negatively impacts not only the city but the environments it pulls those resources out of.
Sprawl leaves room to interweave humans with the rest of the natural world in a way in which densely packed cities do not. It leaves room for trees to grow, critters to roam, rain water to be reclaimed into aquifers. It also spreads the strain of resource extraction and reduces the impact from hot spots at the most granular level.
Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.
> This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it
Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.
> Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers
Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable houses and apartments on rail lines where you can be in the city in 15min.
You don't need to own a car to live in a house with a garden if you have proper public transport.
And you can live in the city and have plenty of access to nature as well. And cites don't need to be ugly and ful of skyscrapers.
> To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way.
People living remotely with cars are the opposite of sustainable, in fact, literally every study on the subject shows the opposite. Not communing makes it better, but its still nowhere near as good as a city.
Citation is really needed for this one. Especially if you consider Swiss real estate "affordable."
[1] Trust me. Blindly. Please?
In Switzerland you have to move out of the city center but because the S-Bahn you can be in the city very fast. In Luzern for exmaple, places like Ebikon or Emmenbrück, Horw.
It feels great.
Now let me hear your objections to why public transport could never work at your location
I jest, but it's true that my city of 650k souls is in a dire need of around 100 bus/tram drivers and that many emigrated to rich countries which provide an overall better standard of work/living.
Personally for minor errands I cycle because I can't rely on public transport and neither can anyone else, so there's traffic congestion everywhere. I'm not happy with this, but I don't really have other options.
I travel all across Europe for work and only few places has similarly functioning public transport as Zürich. Stockholm city center, that's about it.
I am not from Switzerland.
That's my complaint too. We've added plenty of things to make driving worse where I am, but there's no real alternative presented. I can walk a mile to a bus stop in the sun where the bus may or may not show up for an hour (they promise they will improve it eventually) and will then drop me off somewhere I still have to walk most of a mile from. They made the road to the bus stop a bit worse to walk on and I gave up.
I would love to not have to drive. But I'm not really given the option, I'm just given less parking so that there's a nice bike lane I can jump into when someone comes barrelling down the sidewalk.
In Luxembourg, public transport is for free. Also great.
Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.
Having grown up in the Netherlands and having a decision to make where we want our kids to grow up (US spouse), this feels painful to read. I suppose the SWE salaries aren't worth it.
Also this is one of the best towns to cycle in the Netherlands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w&ab_channel=NotJu...
These 2 houses are 100 meters from each other but you have to walk 1700 meters and most of the distance is without any sidewalk, only "Odell Cir" has it. The small amount of sidewalk is so narrow and close to the cars that it is hardly a sidewalk.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/28.8760292,-81.9827997/28.87...
Edit: compare to this: longer distance for cars but there is a direct walking path: https://www.google.dk/maps/dir/55.6714604,12.3530984/55.6716...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/parents-charged-manslaughter-boy-s...
- A largish house in the subs, and a nice car that you'll be seeing a lot of, unfortunately.
- A tiny house closer to work.
While European SWE salaries are significantly lower, they can generally buy you a decent house close to work.
Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.
For comparison, Amsterdam's price per square meter for apartments is some 30% higher than in Seattle and my big tech company that offers total compensation around $500k/yr for L5 in Seattle pays low $200s (converted to USD) in Amsterdam. The only colleagues I know who live in a single family home within reasonable biking distance are late career (L6/L7) American expats.
In any European city, that has a decent tech job market, owning a house (even a small one by American standards) in walking/biking distance of the office means you're rich rich.
And hello from Houten :-). If you’re here and want to talk bikes maybe we could have a coffee some time!
The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.
In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.
European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.
One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.
Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.
Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewalks where available, and took alternate routes through the woods, the cemetery, private property, etc. to avoid busy areas. This is anecdotal, of course, but no kid from my town ever got hit by a car when I was growing up (one kid did die chasing a ball into the street, though).
I'm all for building bike lanes and public transport. And also not all suburban areas are equal - I've definitely seen areas of the US where I would not feel safe riding a bike even as an adult. But I think whatever is keeping kids confined to their homes is just as much a cultural change as it is a lack of infrastructure.
No amount of cultural change is going to make suburban charlotte a good place for 8 year olds to bike alone.
A map link showing the current state:
https://kartat.tampere.fi/oskari?zoomLevel=7&coord=327979.56...
TIL that Nokia originated in Tampere.
Thank you for the information sharing!
And yep, Nokia is literally the name of the town it originates from.
* reducing drivers' perceived safety, and
* making it more uncomfortable for the drivers to speed.
The fact that you park your private car in a public space is crazy: if you don’t have room for your freezer, do you put it on the sidewalk?
I completely understand dedicating space to public transport instead of cars. But dedicating space to cars seems entirely reasonable in isolation, because the city has an interest in making it possible to get there. Parking spaces store cars - but is that their entire function? Or is that just an aspect of enabling people to drive into the city?
Consider the fact that you cannot in fact store a freezer in a public parking space. Nor even a car, actually, beyond a certain period of time, precisely because it's all about enabling movement.
But, when talking about the expectation* that every public space have acres of free-to-use public parking, it makes a fair amount of sense.
* In my experience, this is a very common expectation in the USA.
Compare Brookline MA, which allows on-street parking, but only during the day to neighborhoods in Boston proper which has free on-street parking permits for residents.
All of Greece is car oriented. Of course if you stay near Acropolis you get the impression of walk-ability. Spain outside of the historic city centers is car oriented. Average mileage traveled by car per person in Germany is about the same as is in Canada.
I can continue your generalization about my home city - Montreal. Which is walk-able .. but not really, see the second part here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4
In fact, if you use their transportation network, you actually get somewhat better treatment: in all of the parks, there's a shorter walk to/from the transit terminal than to your car, and in one of them (Magic Kingdom), you are required to park a distance from the park and take a connecting ferry.
I am in Madison, Wisconsin and we have a number of areas like State Street where walking is the norm: https://visitdowntownmadison.com/
By and large this is not the case but it isn't as if it's unimaginable what it would be like.
Europeans must marvel at being able the size of living accommodations in the US. They can not even fathom in their brains what it's like not to be crammed into a tiny 20sqm flat.
Do you want to live here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
I prefer that cities are walkable and have good inter and intra public transport. So I'm with the anti-car crowd on that.
However, I do not prefer cities in general. So I'm with the pro-car people on this one. I enjoy the trend of spacious car-friendly suburbs and rural areas. I value the space and freedom over the conveniences of the city.
A lot of it over here is for show, like ULEZ where huge range rovers are somehow exempt. Or where LTNs are always put on the richest streets in the nicest neighborhoods for reasons of "think of the wee children playing in the street" when there are plenty of children living outside of LTNs. Just a coincidence that all the properties inside an LTN are worth >£850k.
People always seem to talk about these things like it's one size fits all, when needs vary massively from one city to another. And even from one neighborhood to another.
Bike lanes and public transport will reduce traffic congestion as long as they are well-designed and people actually use them. And being able to get into a car and drive somewhere is incredibly convenient when traffic is light and parking is plentiful.
Houston is almost entirely lanes and parking, they're still congested. At which point do you have enough car lanes?
The rest of the lanes sure; a fully used bike lane like Boulevard de Sébastopol is worth 8 lanes of car traffic. That helps. But more car lanes?
I'm not very familiar with Houston, but a quick google search shows that there is a big project underway right now to add more lanes in Houston [1]. So it would seem that civil engineers there have found a place to put more car lanes that they think will help with traffic congestion.
> At which point do you have enough car lanes?
As long as Houston is growing (currently it is the second fastest growing city in the US), I don't think there will ever be enough. They need to continuously improve their transportation infrastucture to keep up with a growing population. As I said above, I think this should include bike lanes and public transportation too. But if engineers identify a solution to alleviate traffic congestion by building more roads, then I think that is worth considering, too.
[1] https://www.txdot.gov/about/newsroom/local/houston/i45-const...
To buy a car you need a certificate from the police attesting that you have a free parking spot of a certain size. The expressway tolls in Japan are often more expensive than gas for any long distance travel (and even the gas is expensive because there is basically no domestic oil production). The process of getting a license is much more intensive than in America. Japan has significantly more strict drunk driving laws than America (>0.03% for up to 3 years in prison, >0.05% is up to 5). Many workplaces don't allow you to drive to work (even if you could find parking) because by law their workman's comp insurance has to cover commuting and getting a policy that covers driving costs extra. There is absolutely no on-street residential parking.
All of these are deliberate policy choices that contribute to making the majority of road traffic in Tokyo be commercial and for most residents to default to some other form of transit.
Perhaps I could have been more clear, but that was my major point of contention. Bike lanes on the road are problematic. And of course its a given that the trains will have their own dedicated paths.
a comment about bikes on the sidewalk in tokyo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801479
For one a self driving taxi fleet could take up vastly less space - you'd no longer need one car per person, you'd need far fewer parking spots, most cars could be single or double seaters again taking less space and running more efficiently.
The space savings could be used to boost rail-based public transit options, which would see more adoption as self driving taxis make last-mile transport cheaper and easier. A bunch of positive feedback loops driving public transit adoption and improvements.
Result is cleaner and more efficient transport for all, and vast amounts of space returned from serving cars to serving people.
At least that's the dream!
What I suggest instead: make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate) Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.
Your EV argument does not address the main issue of urban sprawl in car-centric design and how the ever-increasing infrastructure costs (and decreased revenue: parking lots dont create wealth) are bankrupting cities.
Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and interest rates.
A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone. This is likely to be the outcome in other cities that take similar measures, governments always fail eventually, once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result, because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore.
The UK government for example is reducing subsidies for the railway and raising prices sometimes even 12-14% per year. This would be unimaginable 10 years ago. We have many railway workers who feel underpaid and some that feel they deserve the same pay as speciality doctors. This gets directly paid for by price rises. It is strike again /again/ for the railways.
I think the time is now that governments don't care about public transport
In the Baltic a massive rail expansion is happening. Former eastern countries like Czechia still have a good rail system and starting to upgrade it. Poland is upgrading in many places as well.
Spain has globally the best construction cost for new infrastructure and they are expanding things like Madrid metro.
The UK is doing badly as usual as of recently but despite the price rises, their network is incredibly full and well used.
But I wouldn't take the UK as typical.
This is my favourite phrase. "lots of investment". Crime, drugs and violence gets worse, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in police — just meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
Public transport gets more expensive and worse every year, but there is a "lots of investment" in public transport — meaning we keep sending more money and getting worse results.
Energy is getting more expensive, but it's okay because there is "lots of investment" in energy — meaning we keep spending more money and getting worse results.
But it's okay, you should be happy, at least there is "lots of investment", what are you going to do with your money anyway, after all you can't go anywhere because it's unsafe, the public transportation is probably not working, and you don't have money for it after paying your bills because of all the "investment" anyway, and even if you did the government can always find more things to "invest" the money in.
> can't go anywhere because it's unsafe
I'm sure this is true in the fantasy land that exist in your head.
Do your far right-wing rants somewhere else.
You can ignore the data on the public transport delays and cancellations, like the government and media does, but it does not mean it's not rising.
> Also,
Those sound like a bunch of far-right wing talking points. Do you have statistics to back any of this up?
And they don't match my own experience even a little bit. Because in most countries cars tend to cost more overall and are generally less safe.
> A city that was altered greatly to accommodate pedestrians has become a city that does not accommodate anyone.
t was an absolutely delight walking around the city, being able to walk on the roads or crossing roads because traffic has been reduced so much. That a fantastic policy that made the city more attractive.
The city was extremely welcoming and navigating on food or by bus or train was fantastic. There were tons of people around and lots of people in all the restaurants and museums. Plenty of people hanging out at the beautiful water-front.
The claim that it 'doesn't work' is just pure nonsense. It only doesn't work if you want to drive in from the subburbs on a daily basis.
> governments always fail eventually
So we should have cities without governments? If you want to privatize the operations of some public transit, that is potentially reasonable. But 'governemnt=bad does not mean therefore we need cars everywhere'.
> once it becomes impractical to use cars the country's economy will suffer greatly as a result
This has been stupid quite a bit, there is literally a field of urban studies, and it universally find the exact opposite.
> , because there will come a time when the government just decides they don't care about public transport anymore and it can be as horrible as possible because nobody has any choices anymore
Ah here it is. That's the '15 min city is a globalist conspiracy to make us prisoners in our own city' nonsense. You have dipped deep into it haven't you?
Please anybody that reads this, go to Oslo and enjoy the beautiful, vibrant, save city it actually is.
It has an impact on businesses and delivery operators that end up being obstructed.
Ideally I think one should move towards layered cities, pedestrians on the ground while beneath them roads, parkings and especially train and train carts thrive.
The land value of your city will be so much better if you have a walkable city. Walkable is always the start, then you map bikes, and public transport on top.
You will have city that is economically productive and vibrant.
I often ride a bike, but it is generally surprising that after a century of development of the car, the creation of comfortable climate control systems, noise insulation and multimedia, I am seriously asked to take children to school in the rain, wind or snow on a bike. For me, this sounds like regression
Most European villages and town are unreachable without cars.
Some can already consider themselves lucky if there is a daily connection into one direction.
Everyone likes to think we are all living in Paris, Berlin within city boundaries.
Imagine a city without personal cars in its inner limits. Residents who decide to own a personal car can park it in a Park&Ride which also includes unlimited transit access for the duration of the parking.
Deliveries, you say? Those aren't personal cars, but I'll comply. Businesses will be able to drive in the cities, within the permitted times/routes.
Emergency vehicles? Those aren't personal cars, either. They're also allowed.
What I need is a transport infrastructure that cares about people that live outside city central area.
Maybe it will blow your mind that with P+R some of us take about 2h to come to work, versus 45m with a car.
Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy? P+R isn't even a known concept.
Maybe because there isn't such El Dorado.
In my US town, which I believe gets high walkability scores, they've shifted more pedestrian-hostile in the last few years (while incidentally also managing to tick off many drivers and brick&mortar small business owners).
For one thing, the "separated" bike lanes are hated by many drivers and business owners, and seem more dangerous for pedestrians than before. (Reduced visibility of cars, and now almost universal reckless freeway-like use by motorized e-bikes/scooters which more normal bikes are now mimicking.)
Also, during Covid, they let restaurants spread out onto the sidewalks and street parking of very busy streets, and now this is not only pretty unpleasant and unhealthy seating for customers (desperate for even the slightest hint of what human-friendly planning could be like), but tends to be an obstacle course for people who just want to walk on the already problematic sidewalks.
And in stretches of the sidewalk on major streets that don't have restaurants blocking them, at any moment, someone will come plowing through at full speed on one of those huge 'e-bikes' with the huge tires.
The one a few nights ago, through dense walkers on the sidewalk of the central business drag along a main street, at high speed... the rider of the 'e-bike' the size of a large motorcycle was clearly paying close attention, and his face looked like he was operating at near the edge of his ability to avoid hitting anyone (which would cripple or kill them), with the confidence and judgment that comes from being barely 20. Which confidence should gamble only his own life and limb, not those of others.
I think the bike rental stations on the sidewalks (now including e-bikes) also now lead to even sensible people being desensitized to riding the sidewalk, since you have to go some length of sidewalk with the bike just to access the station. Many people end up riding right up to it, and accustomed to that, even though it's illegal in at least some cases.
(The first thing I would do is temporarily outlaw all the motorized bikes/scooters, except for people with official medical reasons, it's gotten so bad. Until we can treat them as motor vehicles with sufficient regulations, and re-educate people not to be completely stupid bordering on psychotic. Then, after correcting for all the backsliding on safety and street life, we can resume thinking about the cars, which, even though 4-wheel drivers have long been called "Massholes", lately the 4-wheel car drivers been paragons of responsibility, compared to 2-wheel drivers in general.)
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
if everyone is driving, noone is. This is simple game theory and a system fault happens when there are too many cars. You can't widen city streets.
For example: public transportation in NY is often faster and cheaper than a car + parking.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
Meanwhile there are places in the US that managed to preserve a more balanced approach. Take for example the borough of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fgs9pBLmGCgWbtLGA?g_st=ac
At first glance it looks like a typical car-oriented landscape, but note the presence of sidewalks. There's on-street parking, but hardly any driveway visible, because they're at the back, connected to one-way alleys.
That is brilliant. On one hand the area is fully walkable, on the other everyone gets to live in their detached house with a garage and whatnot. You can drive, but you can also walk. Hell, you could probably even cycle through those alleys as cars use them only to park, so they won't be speeding through there.
The thing most mass transportation advocates need to understand when it comes to the US is that we don't want cars necessarily for convenience, we want them to be able to avoid other people. We don't want to have to endure the constant micro aggressions of other passengers. We certainly don't want to have to endure the assaults, murders and rapes that happen. We don't want to be forced to mix with the most violent of society while unarmed and packed liked sardines.
Every argument you make about cars being more dangerous are 100% valid, we just don't care. We would rather die 10 times due to an accident than a violent murder. Its just our nature. Until you can get crime to essentially zero or ensure either an armed officer in every train car or allow citizens to carry mass transportation will not be a thing in the US. Especially not in Red states. I'm talking complete removal of all inconveniences, including things as minor as someone playing their music loudly on a blue tooth speaker. This murder of the Ukrainian woman combined with the treatment of Penny essentially killed any hope of mass transit being popular in Red states for the next 100 years. I am not arguing for or against Penny's actions I am simply stating the effect that it had on most people that support what he did, the same people that would need to support mass transit for it to catch on.
Again I am not arguing numbers here, mass transportation is obviously statistically safer than car travel by a massive degree. I am arguing human nature. We will not subject ourselves to criminals and intentional violence when there is an alternative no matter how much more dangerous that alternative ends up being
Needless to say, we didn't get along.
cars are just people that move from A to B.
if there is no sensible way to move where you need to go it is not a city made for humans but just hostile to people and their requirements.
i need exactly 63 downvotes please, don't be cheap.
About a year ago I started to take the bus. My commute went from an hour on the bike to over two hours. Spending four hours a day on a bus to travel such a short distance is not a fun experience. The bus meanders through a city choked with traffic. It's often faster if I get off and walk that part of the journey (I've checked). I enjoyed cycling for the most part. It was great for fitness and clearing my head. The parts of my commute away from cars were beautiful but there was a significant risk of death or serious injury every time I got on the bike. More and more drivers are buried in their phones. Cycle or bus and you'll see this.
The bus was slowly killing me. It was hard to work as the crowded bus wobbled around narrow Dublin streets along with various degrees of anti-social behaviour. I got off the bus angry and frustrated and groggy.
I've just bought a small little electric car and I can get to work in around 40 minutes. I don't have to listen to other people's loud voice calls or TikToks that are so loud they penetrate through ANC. I don't have to ask someone to make space on the seat they are occupying all by themselves and their bag and endure the dirty looks for it. I don't have to wait and wait for buses that never show up. I hate the bus. I hate that I hate the bus. I feel like a failure for having to buy a second car but I fucking tried!
I'm happy in my car. It's fun to drive and it makes me happy and guilty. I feel like I have so much more freedom. I'm not tied to the bus schedule which placed very tight limits on my time, and the bus frequently didn't show. Otherwise it would take much longer to get home. I can stop by somewhere on the way home and pick something up. Like the bike, I am by myself in the car and I can decompress. I can sing if I want.
It makes no sense for a 25km commute to take two hours. Its madness. By travelling from one suburb to another via the city centre the bus becomes wholly impractical. A public transport system has to work so that people leave their car at home. London worked for me, I got the tube everywhere. Valencia has an amazing public transport system. Dublin is completely broken.
As a comparison to the Netherlands, public transport always has right of way vs regular traffic, they have their own dedicated lanes that traffic isn't allowed into (this includes taxis! They can use the public transport lanes) and even their traffic signals treat them preferentially. I take a bus very often, and quite often it won't stop at a single red light because the traffic lights are programmed to help the flow of public transport, despite the street it travels on having 5 or 6 different traffic lights. In many cities, only public transport is allowed in some of the denser streets too, so they don't have to compete with other drivers on the road.
Trams, metros and trains are pretty obvious as to why they work so well.
Same with bike lanes. First of all, whenever they can be they are wholly separated from the main traffic and live in their own independent lanes. If a bike has to join regular streets, they have the right of way and these situations are kept at an absolute minimum. The streets and intersections themselves are also designed so that drivers are forced into driving safely via traffic easing measures and low speed limits. Plus, everyone here bikes, so there isn't the same type of animosity or stigma you see elsewhere because drivers understand what it's like to be a cyclist and view it as a normal thing.
So it's not your fault and you shouldn't feel bad, it's the fault of your government for not investing into proper public transport infrastructure. They are trying to squeeze in public transport infra into existing road infra, whereas what they should be doing is redesigning the current infra to make sure public transport is better integrated.
And, guess what, the roads here are still awesome for drivers! Other than the centers of the bigger cities, there isn't much congestion to speak of and the highways are of extremely high quality (to the point we have a billion memes about feeling the bumps of Belgium as soon as you cross the border). It's not like NL is a car-free utopia, something like 65% of people still have cars, the difference is that there are alternate options that are just as good, and often better than driving. That's the secret sauce to good public transport.
A recent local council attempt to remove a couple of parking spaces and install a shared space in the area I live was met with a wave of anger and vitriolic abuse. In a public consultation people were complaining about how it would prevent them bringing some elderly relative to the GP in the snow, while transporting a fridge. Meanwhile the area is permanently clogged with cars dodging a nearby toll making the place extremely unpleasant to use as an amenity.
It’s incredibly frustrating and saddening to contribute to the problems after trying so hard to do better.
There is a posibility between "muh America is car-centric, and btw i am bad at driving so i hate driving" and "you have to walk even in bad wrarher and when you are 70, think about the climate bruh".
HN are a special kind of nonsense crowd.
Also allow me to point you to Mexico City - you can’t imagine the hell it is for car drivers when all the things you mention happen (rain, protests choking half the city, and the subway shut down due to either failure or a strike). I’m talking literally 4-5 hours to get to your in-the-city destination; I once spent 2 hours driving half a kilometer and it was only raining. Just in case your actual point is “it’s better to drive as you’re less vulnerable to an eventuality with public transport or alternative mobility”.
Strikers are "hostage takers", demonstrators are "vandals", etc. It's all part of the theatre to discredit opposition.
Unplug your brain for the twitter matrix and go outside my dude, there is a whole life out there that isn't populated by grumpy terminally ill people who think everyone is plotting to slit their throat at the first opportunity
An example of making things unsafe: One of the railway unions took strike action to preserve 12 hour shifts for signallers. That might seem counter-intuitive, who wants 12 hour shifts? Well, you work 3 x 12 hour shifts, that's your week = 4 days per week off. Whereas if the safety reform demands max hour 8 shifts that's only 2-3 days off, so of course affected signallers hated that.
Why was it unsafe? Well humans can't really work 12 hours. We get bored & our minds wander, if it's dark and warm we fall asleep or stumble around dazed. And a signaller's job is normally pretty calm, you could do it half asleep and it'd be OK. "Ding ding" that's the last city express, pull 18, wait a beat, press buzzer, pull 19 and 25. But, sometimes it gets very exciting very fast, and that's why it's a job for a skilled human. "Ding ding" - the express, pull 18, it sticks, uh, what? Pull harder, still sticks. Er... now you should be wide awake, that express at 100mph is about to reach a Danger signal, is it because there's really danger? What should you do? But you are tired, it's been a long day, release 16 and that'll fix it right? Now 18 moves. But wait there's a loud noise and this needle is deflected, what did I do? And now the phone is ringing. We've just de-railed the back half of the slow coal train that was still crossing right in front of the express we've just given a green light. Hope nobody dies.
But this is the exception not the rule.
Overground, National Rail, DLR, the Elizabeth line, trams and buses are all working. And the few parts of the tube network that don't have any nearby heavy rail services (eg. the Hainault loop on the Central line) are mostly still running.
Sure, the non-tube services are (much!) busier than normal but this situation is actually a great demonstration of one of the most important factors in making public transport useful: route redundancy, so that if one is suspended for whatever reason there are reasonable alternative options for most journeys.
Edit: To explain - I was cycling on a that was on top of an embankment and a strong gust of wind unbalanced me at a bad moment when a lorry was passing - I actually hit the lorry with my shoulder and was knocked back upright again. This was all quite exciting at the time.
> "Galicia is mainly and historically ruled by the right-wing Popular Party"... (Galician Nationalist Bloc)
So they likely have much stricter standards of what constitutes acceptable urban behavior...
... than, say, New York, where very recently a person with 30-year criminal history has allegedly killed a couple...
... or in Charlotte, where an Ukrainian refugee was fatally stabbed in the light rail.
Is there a charitable explanation for why people cherrypick a single homicide in a metro of 8 million people and somehow act like it's proof for the downfall of liberal democracy?
Especially when by most relevant metrics, illiberal democracy performs dramatically worse?
People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.
> when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative.
I happen to live in one of those war-torn anarchist cities that was claimed by Fox and friends to be an open charnel pit back in 2020, and I assure you, there is something off with a narrative.
Specifically, the narrative that my city is a lawless hellscape.
That narrative (along with the sudden and immediate need for the military to be illegally deployed in it) is back, by the way.
They do. I’ve seen games like changing the rules by which deaths are counted as homicides and when. For example by requiring certain things are proven before it can be counted in a reported stat.
Do you have any proof for this, or is this a 'the earth is flat' sort of assertion? Can I just as confidently assert that it's actually the Republican-ran states that dramatically doctor and undercount homicide stats?
Maybe Memphis actually has 10x the homicide rate of NYC...
Here is how it looks like on the actual world: urban centers are dominated by Democrats in almost every state. The leniency regarding criminals comes from Democrats, specially regarding violent criminals.
Memphis' Paul Young is affiliated with the Democratic Party https://bestneighborhood.org/conservative-vs-liberal-map-mem...
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_affiliation_of_the_mayors_of_t...
The state and the PD has far more influence over access to firearms and serious crime than a city's politics do. A city's authority is largely limited to handing out parking tickets and graffiti citations.
And republican supermajority states have never had any issue overriding any municipal legislature or policies that they don't like. It's as easy as drafting a piece of legislature for them. Municipalities don't enjoy even the illusion of sovereignty, or, really, any codified rights in the US.
----
And if you think it's the cities; fault, why is the homicide rate outside of cities in deep-Republican states so high? Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, the Carolinas... All have a horrible state-wide violent crime problem. How many more decades of Republican supermajorities will they need to bury the myth that Republican policies reduce crime?
How many times a PD arrests a criminal then a judge later releases? That criminal with 30-year history would never be free if judged in a rural county instead of urban NYC or Charlotte.
The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
Felony prosecution is done by DAs, which are subservient to the state.
Police politics is completely relevant, because they prioritize enforcement and have incredible leeway in its execution.
> The real drivers are prosecutorial policies driven by political priorities.
Those policies are ultimately set at the state level, because that's who DAs are accountable to.
> And we all know that who sides with criminals most of the time are the Democrats.
Is that why the Republican party has elected a convicted felon to lead it?
The "air pollution" argument is disappearing fast as well with the ongoing transition to EVs.
What we need is a good balance. Pedestrians, bicycles, public transport, and cars.
This review is a good jumping-off point for research on the subject if you are interested: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096669232...
I wrote it because in my experience a "balance" between modes can mean something like Amsterdam, or it can mean the status quo in the USA-outside-NYC, which is to say extreme and punishing car dependence. Sorry if I had you wrongly pegged. My belief is that a good balance is radically fewer cars in city centers. What's your idea of a good balance?
I've just invented a thing I call a horseless carriage. It will only kill 1 million people a year. Give me money.
Not only wouldn't it get funded, you'd be confined to a special prison for super villains for coming up with this bad idea. The fact that we live with such massive negative externalities that we don't make manufacturers or consumers of cars pay for is the Jedi mind trick.
Every single thread or post about anything adjacent to cars or public transportation devolves into this. There is hardly any nuance, little effort is made to respond in good faith, and there are insults and insinuations thrown around all the time. Anyone perceived as being on the “wrong side” is instantly given a label and mocked. You don’t even have to be overzealous about it. Even the most benign comment will have someone piling on usually. “Just one more bus bro”
Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.
It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper.
Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots.
But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house.
The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.
> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.
This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.
It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.
You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity. While programmers can live in one room for years and just use Zoom for everything, others can't.
Sorry to say, but most of my European friends who were much anti-car, have changed their opinion after... buying a car. Being able to move in whatever direction at whatever time and being able to carry some stuff in your trunk makes your life convenient. Add to that the privacy and your personal AC and you won't be able to top it off. In South Africa personal vehicle means security at night.
The only places where this works are the places where: 1. People live for retirement and pleasure. 2. The road infrastructure is just straight hell. (Like Portugal. It's bad in Lisbon. It is terrible in there). 3. Where you are not under any circumstances can be robbed by a random person on a street.
So, the so-called cars problem is not something solvable. You just have to handle other factors to and cars will follow. I've seen cities where improvement in economic and social conditions led to the development of nice pedestrian and bike infrastructure.
And let's not forget, that if you want a more fair society, you cannot assume that just everybody can afford a car. I went to university by bus and it was a horrible experience. I could only dream of the modern cheap electric vehicles. But still, the city I studied has barely any infrastructure for this, and you risk your life every time, even though it would be PERFECT for this.
This is such a modern take on life, we have to run everywhere to consume as much as possible as fast as possible. The irony is that you're probably missing out more of what makes life "life" by being entirely driven by FOMO and checking boxes of the infinite TODO list.
What's funny is that the faster the means of transportation the more time we spend time in them, commute times are getting longer, you're most likely literally missing opportunities due to cars more than anything else.
Even if it is widely dangerous to do so (most american cities i've ever visited)
You can hem and haw - but its pretty bang on
When you then add finding parking at the ends of your trip to it it is crazyly more efficient timewise.
Now even copenhagen denmark has rain causing many more to take a car or public transport (that works).
But it is very clear that the time argument is simply not true.
Now you can argue convenience at the start of the trip vs agony in the end (finding that parking space)
Or for "need to lug an ikea sofa across time"
Or even for "my kids and familiy needs to go as well"
That's super fine, and all true - but 70-80% of ALL trips in cars are by 1 person sitting in 1 car. So moving just 10% of car users to alternate means free up a tremendous amount of space in the city.
I love my car, my bikes and my public transports and each does something nice for me - but seriously do you think cities like l.a. are even livable on a human scale - people don't even walk if the distance is over 1000meters.
I certainly agree with the idea of "uhm lets try to plan for otherthings than cars going forward"
'In Romania, one cyclist dies every two days'
The other factor I found is that quality and affordability of housing is inversely proportinal to access to services/public transit; that is, in the Netherlands you can live like a king in eastern Groningen for the same amount of money you buy a starter home in the Randstad, but to get to the nearest city you're looking at at least an hour's travel (by car or bus/train).
> You either transport your body fast, or you are missing out. And the greatest thing to miss out is an opportunity.
This is what’s known as "fomo". Arguments driven on fear never sustainable.
Also apparently you have never been stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in the aftermath of a massive event. Or maybe county closes major roadway for repairs. Or a _single_ motor vehicle accident brings an entire highway to a halt for _hours_ (many people rubber necking as well …)
I will be very surprised if there's anywhere in the world where the expected loss from being robbed on the street while walking exceeds the expected loss from being in a car accident while driving.
Getting in a car is by far the most dangerous thing most people do routinely.
It is dangerous for pedestrians to walk on sidewalks, because cyclists on their electric motorbikes are driving there 30 mph!
Aggresive off-leash dogs are everywhere! Entire cities, parks and streets are one big dog toilet!
