8 ms·

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit i

This is one of those scaling vs. switching cost problems. If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. The problem is that as a city scales up, each individual step results in continually adding infrastructure for cars without ever making the active decision to switch, and redesign the entire city. When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense to add car infrastructure rather than rebuild everything. Again when you grow from medium to large it remains cheaper to add that new interchange rather than change the fundamental structure of the city. Growing from large city to metropolis often means incorporating other cities and their car based infrastructure, and making a coordinated move to anything else is extremely difficult/expensive. Edit: I doubt we could properly identify the "next big metropolis" early enough to put the proper infrastructure in place. Even if we could, the politics surrounding who gets the infrastructure spending would cloud the process. Neither do I think we could simply set up a new metropolis some where and "build it correctly from the start". The best bet is to find a means of bootstrapping the conversion of existing metropolises to walkable/dense/transit oriented methods. How do we mortgage the immense future benefits to apply pressure to make changes now? Is there an achievable half step toward the goal that provides enough benefit to drive the rest of the conversion? When I'm confronted with a switching cost vs scaling cost problem in operations, I would be putting in dual use infrastructure. Maintain compatibility while removing dependency.

davidw 8y ago
My wife is from a small town in Italy. It doesn't have transit, but it's quite possible to get around it on foot or by bike, because it's compact.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  I'd bet anything that your wife's small town in Italy was mostly settled and developed before cars, in a time when being able to get around town by foot (or by horse, at the fastest) was important.
  - jaredklewis 8y ago
    Obviously. But it still seems optimal to build cities this way today, and it is surprising we don’t. With modern levels of obesity and pollution, why don’t we want walkable cities?
    - InitialLastName 8y ago
      The (mostly American, mostly late 19th- mid-20th century) cities at issue were largely developed by people with cars in mind, before obesity and pollution were known issues. There's a lot of inertia to that kind of design.
- MR4D 8y ago
  I think your point gets missed by many people. Europeans tend to have cities that have been around much longer than cars have, and you can see it in the design - they were built back when horses were the fastest mode of transportation. Many small American towns were built after the introduction of the automobile (or at least significant chucks of the towns were). Trying to undo history, or even taking a new mode of design is extraordinarily difficult. The discussion threads on this post seems to highlight that difficulty, while many miss that root cause.
  - davidw 8y ago
    The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town. The really bad stuff only really started coming out after we got zoning and then accelerated with post WWII development. Can we make something just as walkable and nice as those Italian cities? Maybe not, but we can certainly walk back some of the worst excesses of the late 20th century. This site has a lot of ideas and discussion: https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ Oh, and it also turns out that much of suburbia is not very sustainable financially, and nor is it great for the environment.
    - jonknee 8y ago
      > And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town. But I bet almost everybody has a car.
    - MR4D 8y ago
      You give a great example - and raise an even better question: Can we "fix" cities to be more functional in a world dominated by autos? I wonder if we can. It seems like inertia has become so great that it will take many decades to overcome this. In Houston, I think this easily could take 1/2 a century or more.
      - davidw 8y ago
        The suburb I lived in, in Italy was mostly built out after widespread use of automobiles. And yes, it was walkable, because things were close to one another.
brugidou 8y ago
This generally happens if the city grows too fast to get enough time to experiment with transit, reorganize and densify neighborhoods entirely over centuries like Paris or London. However if the city grows fast enough like some Chinese cities, it's much more economical to directly invest in mass transit, taller buildinngs, walkable areas...etc.
the_gastropod 8y ago
Small towns can be built with walkability in mind. In fact towns built before automobiles were invented were built this way: dense, narrow streets with doors opening onto the streets, multi-use buildings, blocks with mixed commerce/residential use. This is a sustainable and resilient way to build communities. Building around cars is not.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Small towns can be built with walkability in mind This is true. Look at the bedroom communities surrounding Chicago. There are plenty of them where people take commuter rail into the city, then get around their home towns largely by foot. Cars are only used to go to the outlying malls and neighboring small towns. Chicago is also doing something interesting with the whole notion of "streets." Essentially, the notion is that since streets are public property, why are we allowing people to store their private property in them? Specifically, cars. Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly. Unfortunately, the backbone of the project -- Making it harder to park on the street to encourage people to park their private property in private parking garages -- got derailed when the mayor leased the city's parking meters to a private company for 99 years. Now every time a parking space is removed from use (whether for a parade or a street festival or turned into a pocket park), the city has to pay the private company for that space. The payments are in the order of $30 million/year. So, it'll be a good project in 94 years or so, when the parking spaces become public property again.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly. What? Why? It seems like it would be better to add additional lanes (shared left turn lane + 2 bike lanes or some similar configuration) to increase overall efficiency and throughput. When you have raised sidewalks traffic speeds don't really doesn't affect walk-ability as long as there's crossings at lights (regardless of traffic speed you won't find an opportunity to cross anywhere else if traffic is reasonably constant)
smogcutter 8y ago
What large city actually developed this way?
pasta 8y ago
Christopher Alexander wrote about this problem. The trick is to make it possible for cars to come in the surroundings of a city center without interacting with people. This post is too short to explain the details but when you have a walking area in front of shops you can have a parking area at the back side of the shops.
RangerScience 8y ago
Pre-auto LA was a series of towns connected by a trolley network. Seemed to work pretty well.
lgregg 8y ago
I think a lot of the headaches could be avoided by zoning in ways that allow for density improvements to occur. We can't just build every new city as a planned green city too (i.e. Masdar City). I think it would be beneficial if there was some kind of standard at a state level for not just building codes but zone codes. It would also be nice if there was some kind of zoning and code for underground, so lower levels could be built as density increased (i.e. Lower Wacker in Chicago[0]) to allow vehicles to still park and travel but allow the buildings to narrow on the upper street. It would then also provide a separation of humans and cars which would help for safety. [2] That also would allow for the potential building of middle-ground assets that are much more affordable like the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel to allow for BRT/Light Rail. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicago and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development
- djsumdog 8y ago
  American cities don't like to mix commercial and residential zoning. If you had a mix, you'd see more places with grocery stores you could walk to, like in London or Chicago.
  - yardie 8y ago
    They don't like to but they are doing it now. They have no choice as a younger demographic is clamoring for it and developers are responding by getting zoning for it. If a city isn't planning with mixed use, mid/high density housing in mind then I'm not sure I'd call them a city.
  - lgregg 8y ago
    I'm not sure which cities your referring too but even in towns like where my Dad grew up, a population of 40k, they're beginning to zone mix-use in urban areas. As yardie mentioned, there is a huge demand for mix-use properties. To keep with Chicago as an example, I lived near a large area of small mutli-family (Du/Quad-plex or multi-story flats) and large single-family homes. There was plenty of commercial space but there was a huge local demand for mix-use property which led to it being developed. Called "New City" it was a tower on top of a movie theatre, a grocery store, with surrounding retail and restaurants.[0] [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9086253,-87.6488544,17z https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9086253,-87.6488544,17z & http://experiencenewcity.com/ http://experiencenewcity.com/ I wouldn't be surprised to see more zoning like that in small to medium cities, however, it's likely they would be more like landscrapers than skyscrapers.
djsumdog 8y ago
This is simply not true at all. There were countless small towns in America that had streetcars. It scales up quite well too. Your town turns into a city? Demolish the park-n-rides and turn them into stores. I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in <100 years. It was because GM and Ford bought up all the street cars and replaced them with buses or killed them. It can be reversed. Jena, Germany is a town of $100k with 4 trams and 3 intercity rail stations. Chattanooga, TN, home of the famous song about the Chattanooga Choo Choo, has 200k people and doesn't even have an AmTrak station. Public transport is the single largest factor in reducing poverty in any town or city. Car ownership should never be required of any American. It should always be a luxury item.
- ingsoc79 8y ago
  The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling.
  - pm90 8y ago
    No, no, no. The amount of misinformation in this post is staggering. I'm assuming good faith on your part but its hard to do so. > The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. They killed it because they knew that a car-dominated culture would substantially increase their markets. By killing streetcars, they were simply increasing their market. They did not do this out of any sense of altruism. The other step that greatly helped was convincing the Federal Government to invest in an interstate highway system that deliberately cut through the major cities. > The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. They weren't always this way. Suburbia as we know it now was a consequence of the postwar boom and white flight; most towns fairly dense. In fact, they were dense enough to be effectively served by trams! > The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling. No its not.
coldtea 8y ago
>If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. Were did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on -- like tons of Europeans do in tons of small (and even larger) towns, including towns where cars are totally forbidden and others were (because the town was built in medieval times and its buildings still stand just fine) they are impractical in large areas of a town. And besides costly transit infrastructure like subways (which you probably have in mind), buses and trams are totally find for small towns as well. In (most of) Europe you don't have to be a heroin addict or homeless person to ride the bus. Nobody has a problem riding the bus. >When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense to add car infrastructure rather than rebuild everything. Again, what? Who said there's any need to "rebuild everything"? You can keep the "historic center" (as it's usually referred to), that is, the original small part of town, and build around it, all the while improving and extending transit infrastructure. No reason to extend the city around car infrastructure -- like the horrible sprawls one sees in Texas for example. In fact the US has a nice example of a "city" (speaking of the main area of Manhattan up and slightly beyond the Central Park) that has great density, and if there was the will, could be equipped with a great modern subway (not the way NYC subway is now), and lots of quality buses (modern, air-con, well maintained, not meant for the piss poor), a trolley line, and so on. The area could be expanded from ~ 1 million people, to say 5 times the size, and with all those plus Uber/Taxi options, bikes and electric scooters, nobody would even care for driving their car there.
- zanny 8y ago
  US towns stopped building as a dense collection of buildings at the end of the 19th century. Modern "towns" are a dozen or so old buildings from that era surrounded by dozens of square miles of urban sprawl mcmansion housing. Fundamentally the US simply has a density problem at all grades of construction. Its just more apparent in cities where the overconsumption of land per capita impacts more people.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    The US also has a ton of land. I stayed with family in a British suburb once, and everything was still neatly squished in together, even single-family houses, compared to the expansive yards of American suburbs. Kids could walk to school and everything.

davidw 8y ago

My wife is from a small town in Italy. It doesn't have transit, but it's quite possible to get around it on foot or by bike, because it's compact.

InitialLastName 8y ago
I'd bet anything that your wife's small town in Italy was mostly settled and developed before cars, in a time when being able to get around town by foot (or by horse, at the fastest) was important.
- jaredklewis 8y ago
  Obviously. But it still seems optimal to build cities this way today, and it is surprising we don’t. With modern levels of obesity and pollution, why don’t we want walkable cities?
  - InitialLastName 8y ago
    The (mostly American, mostly late 19th- mid-20th century) cities at issue were largely developed by people with cars in mind, before obesity and pollution were known issues. There's a lot of inertia to that kind of design.
MR4D 8y ago
I think your point gets missed by many people. Europeans tend to have cities that have been around much longer than cars have, and you can see it in the design - they were built back when horses were the fastest mode of transportation. Many small American towns were built after the introduction of the automobile (or at least significant chucks of the towns were). Trying to undo history, or even taking a new mode of design is extraordinarily difficult. The discussion threads on this post seems to highlight that difficulty, while many miss that root cause.
- davidw 8y ago
  The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town. The really bad stuff only really started coming out after we got zoning and then accelerated with post WWII development. Can we make something just as walkable and nice as those Italian cities? Maybe not, but we can certainly walk back some of the worst excesses of the late 20th century. This site has a lot of ideas and discussion: https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ Oh, and it also turns out that much of suburbia is not very sustainable financially, and nor is it great for the environment.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    > And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town. But I bet almost everybody has a car.
  - MR4D 8y ago
    You give a great example - and raise an even better question: Can we "fix" cities to be more functional in a world dominated by autos? I wonder if we can. It seems like inertia has become so great that it will take many decades to overcome this. In Houston, I think this easily could take 1/2 a century or more.
    - davidw 8y ago
      The suburb I lived in, in Italy was mostly built out after widespread use of automobiles. And yes, it was walkable, because things were close to one another.

brugidou 8y ago

This generally happens if the city grows too fast to get enough time to experiment with transit, reorganize and densify neighborhoods entirely over centuries like Paris or London. However if the city grows fast enough like some Chinese cities, it's much more economical to directly invest in mass transit, taller buildinngs, walkable areas...etc.

the_gastropod 8y ago

Small towns can be built with walkability in mind. In fact towns built before automobiles were invented were built this way: dense, narrow streets with doors opening onto the streets, multi-use buildings, blocks with mixed commerce/residential use. This is a sustainable and resilient way to build communities. Building around cars is not.

reaperducer 8y ago
Small towns can be built with walkability in mind This is true. Look at the bedroom communities surrounding Chicago. There are plenty of them where people take commuter rail into the city, then get around their home towns largely by foot. Cars are only used to go to the outlying malls and neighboring small towns. Chicago is also doing something interesting with the whole notion of "streets." Essentially, the notion is that since streets are public property, why are we allowing people to store their private property in them? Specifically, cars. Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly. Unfortunately, the backbone of the project -- Making it harder to park on the street to encourage people to park their private property in private parking garages -- got derailed when the mayor leased the city's parking meters to a private company for 99 years. Now every time a parking space is removed from use (whether for a parade or a street festival or turned into a pocket park), the city has to pay the private company for that space. The payments are in the order of $30 million/year. So, it'll be a good project in 94 years or so, when the parking spaces become public property again.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Parking spaces are being turned into miniature parks, or the parking lanes eliminated entirely in what are called "traffic calming" schemes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly. What? Why? It seems like it would be better to add additional lanes (shared left turn lane + 2 bike lanes or some similar configuration) to increase overall efficiency and throughput. When you have raised sidewalks traffic speeds don't really doesn't affect walk-ability as long as there's crossings at lights (regardless of traffic speed you won't find an opportunity to cross anywhere else if traffic is reasonably constant)

smogcutter 8y ago

What large city actually developed this way?

pasta 8y ago

Christopher Alexander wrote about this problem. The trick is to make it possible for cars to come in the surroundings of a city center without interacting with people. This post is too short to explain the details but when you have a walking area in front of shops you can have a parking area at the back side of the shops.

RangerScience 8y ago

Pre-auto LA was a series of towns connected by a trolley network. Seemed to work pretty well.

lgregg 8y ago

I think a lot of the headaches could be avoided by zoning in ways that allow for density improvements to occur. We can't just build every new city as a planned green city too (i.e. Masdar City). I think it would be beneficial if there was some kind of standard at a state level for not just building codes but zone codes. It would also be nice if there was some kind of zoning and code for underground, so lower levels could be built as density increased (i.e. Lower Wacker in Chicago[0]) to allow vehicles to still park and travel but allow the buildings to narrow on the upper street. It would then also provide a separation of humans and cars which would help for safety. [2] That also would allow for the potential building of middle-ground assets that are much more affordable like the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel to allow for BRT/Light Rail. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilevel_streets_in_Chicago and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacker_Drive [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development

djsumdog 8y ago
American cities don't like to mix commercial and residential zoning. If you had a mix, you'd see more places with grocery stores you could walk to, like in London or Chicago.
- yardie 8y ago
  They don't like to but they are doing it now. They have no choice as a younger demographic is clamoring for it and developers are responding by getting zoning for it. If a city isn't planning with mixed use, mid/high density housing in mind then I'm not sure I'd call them a city.
- lgregg 8y ago
  I'm not sure which cities your referring too but even in towns like where my Dad grew up, a population of 40k, they're beginning to zone mix-use in urban areas. As yardie mentioned, there is a huge demand for mix-use properties. To keep with Chicago as an example, I lived near a large area of small mutli-family (Du/Quad-plex or multi-story flats) and large single-family homes. There was plenty of commercial space but there was a huge local demand for mix-use property which led to it being developed. Called "New City" it was a tower on top of a movie theatre, a grocery store, with surrounding retail and restaurants.[0] [0] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9086253,-87.6488544,17z https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9086253,-87.6488544,17z & http://experiencenewcity.com/ http://experiencenewcity.com/ I wouldn't be surprised to see more zoning like that in small to medium cities, however, it's likely they would be more like landscrapers than skyscrapers.

djsumdog 8y ago

This is simply not true at all. There were countless small towns in America that had streetcars. It scales up quite well too. Your town turns into a city? Demolish the park-n-rides and turn them into stores. I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in <100 years. It was because GM and Ford bought up all the street cars and replaced them with buses or killed them. It can be reversed. Jena, Germany is a town of $100k with 4 trams and 3 intercity rail stations. Chattanooga, TN, home of the famous song about the Chattanooga Choo Choo, has 200k people and doesn't even have an AmTrak station. Public transport is the single largest factor in reducing poverty in any town or city. Car ownership should never be required of any American. It should always be a luxury item.

ingsoc79 8y ago
The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling.
- pm90 8y ago
  No, no, no. The amount of misinformation in this post is staggering. I'm assuming good faith on your part but its hard to do so. > The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. They killed it because they knew that a car-dominated culture would substantially increase their markets. By killing streetcars, they were simply increasing their market. They did not do this out of any sense of altruism. The other step that greatly helped was convincing the Federal Government to invest in an interstate highway system that deliberately cut through the major cities. > The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. They weren't always this way. Suburbia as we know it now was a consequence of the postwar boom and white flight; most towns fairly dense. In fact, they were dense enough to be effectively served by trams! > The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling. No its not.

coldtea 8y ago

>If you have a small town, then cars are a better option than transit. In a large metropolis, transit is better. Were did that came from? In a small town, you can get by fine with walking, bikes and so on -- like tons of Europeans do in tons of small (and even larger) towns, including towns where cars are totally forbidden and others were (because the town was built in medieval times and its buildings still stand just fine) they are impractical in large areas of a town. And besides costly transit infrastructure like subways (which you probably have in mind), buses and trams are totally find for small towns as well. In (most of) Europe you don't have to be a heroin addict or homeless person to ride the bus. Nobody has a problem riding the bus. >When a small town grows into a medium, it makes sense to add car infrastructure rather than rebuild everything. Again, what? Who said there's any need to "rebuild everything"? You can keep the "historic center" (as it's usually referred to), that is, the original small part of town, and build around it, all the while improving and extending transit infrastructure. No reason to extend the city around car infrastructure -- like the horrible sprawls one sees in Texas for example. In fact the US has a nice example of a "city" (speaking of the main area of Manhattan up and slightly beyond the Central Park) that has great density, and if there was the will, could be equipped with a great modern subway (not the way NYC subway is now), and lots of quality buses (modern, air-con, well maintained, not meant for the piss poor), a trolley line, and so on. The area could be expanded from ~ 1 million people, to say 5 times the size, and with all those plus Uber/Taxi options, bikes and electric scooters, nobody would even care for driving their car there.

zanny 8y ago
US towns stopped building as a dense collection of buildings at the end of the 19th century. Modern "towns" are a dozen or so old buildings from that era surrounded by dozens of square miles of urban sprawl mcmansion housing. Fundamentally the US simply has a density problem at all grades of construction. Its just more apparent in cities where the overconsumption of land per capita impacts more people.
- philwelch 8y ago
  The US also has a ton of land. I stayed with family in a British suburb once, and everything was still neatly squished in together, even single-family houses, compared to the expansive yards of American suburbs. Kids could walk to school and everything.