14 ms·

I'm amazed that so many people who consider themselves inclusive in their thoughts don't realize how exclusionary anti-automobile policies are. As someone who s

I'm amazed that so many people who consider themselves inclusive in their thoughts don't realize how exclusionary anti-automobile policies are. As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. On the bad days, even standing in line at a checkout for an extended period of time can send my knees and hips into a painful state (and the thought of riding across town standing on a scooter, frankly, horrifies me). Cars and the point-to-point transit that they offer are a GODSEND for me and many other people who are somewhat mobility restricted, but not so bad that we need wheelchairs or crutches. They enable me to live a very normal life that would be impossible in a heavily pedestrian optimized environment. The fact that you don't even consider some of the alternatives as viable - automated shared cars, electric cars, strong hybrids ... all of which solve the problems you identified (wasted space on parking, pollution, etc.) leads me to believe that you actually just hate cars, and not any of the (solvable) problems that are caused by their current embodiment. Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans. EDIT: To those who are saying that we'll still allow those with disabilities to have cars: many states require that you be able to walk less then 200 feet to get a disabled plate. On most days, I can walk at least 500 ... so by almost all standards, I do not qualify. However, walking 5-600 feet doesn't get you far enough to survive without a car. If the world were to go this route, we would have to reconsider what constitutes 'disabled'. Another thought that surfaces is that with my 36-37" inseam (I wear 36" pants because that's as big as they sell, but they're really still too short), I do not fit in most public transit, and most cars. Thankfully, because cars are privately owned, I can pick from the 2 or 3 models that I actually fit in. A public transit world is a world that marginalizes peoples who are in the last 5-10% in terms of height/weight.

adrianN 8y ago
I'd be completely okay with cars for disabled people, deliveries, and people who have to transport a lot of stuff like tools for their job. But >90% of all cars on the road are driven by able-bodied people with nothing but themselves to transport.
- heydonovan 8y ago
  Completely agree! I'd love to hop on a bus and watch Netflix on my phone while someone else drives me downtown to work, but it's 3x as slow. It takes me about 25 minutes to drive myself, or 60-70 minutes by bus. That and a lot of the bus stops around me have zero shade from the sun or rain, or one tiny bench so that the majority of folks waiting have to stand. It feels like such an afterthought. Also, I'd like to point out the economic disadvantage that comes from having to own a vehicle to drive to certain jobs. I've had to turn down jobs back in the day because I couldn't save up enough to purchase a vehicle and maintain it as well. You end up losing a lot of personal time waiting on buses. I remember having to get up at 5:00AM to catch a bus a mile away, and then getting home around 9:00PM too tired to do anything else but sleep and repeat.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I'm sorry that public transport sucks in your city. Plans to reduce car traffic usually include improvements to public transport and bike infrastructure. In cities with good public transport it's usually faster to take a train and a bus than to drive. See for example London and Tokyo.
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    When I ride to work, trains are going every 2-3 minutes and it takes me 20 minutes to get to my destination at the other side of the city. I don't think I world make it through the traffic and all the red lights in the same time. Finding a parking spot would take a significant amount of time again.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > But >90% of all cars on the road are driven by able-bodied people with nothing but themselves to transport. Nowhere near 90% of cars in city centers, where all these bans are taking place, fit that description.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    90% seems like a reasonable guess to me.
openbasic 8y ago
This. So much this. Most supporters of anti-automobile policies think that everyone is a healthy young adult grabbing his latte on the way to his Scrum daily meeting. No responsibilities with dependents, such as children, elderly or disabled family members. No plantar fasciitis, lordosis, arthritis, etc. Grow up. Start seeing the world from the perspective of others.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Car-centric planning is horrible for children, the elderly, disabled people, sick people, and the poor. It makes them heavily dependent on able-bodied drivers (family members, taxis, hired helpers, ...) to move about. Children are much more independently mobile in cities with good transit. In car-centric suburbs parents or other caretakers are responsible for personally carting their children from place to place, with huge negative impact on children’s quality of life. Children end up sheltered, over-scheduled, over-controlled, and dramatically delayed in learning to live for themselves. It is for good reason that many college campuses and retirement homes are organized as little self-contained car-free villages. In my opinion car-centric suburbs are optimized for healthy, wealthy 30–50 year-old full-time workers, and increasingly hostile as people get further from matching that.
- themagician 8y ago
  Yeah, grow up. Be a wheel in the machine. Waste your life away sitting in traffic. Breathe in that toxic air. Risk life and lim every day so the trip to Walmart is a little shorter. This guy has arthritis and this guy is out of shape and has a kid, so let’s continue this insane dance to make it easier for them.
- detaro 8y ago
  That doesn't match the people advocating for less cars around me at all. Children and elderly are massive users of good public transport networks, where they exist, because they can't or don't want to use cars if it can be avoided. (And places where cars are absolutely not an option are very rare, so less cars can often benefit people who absolutely need cars)
- graeme 8y ago
apendleton 8y ago
I think it's important to recognize, though, that in many cases, heavy road users' road use is subsidized by lighter road users. Roads are expensive both in terms of construction/maintenance and land use, they're mostly not paid for by user fees anymore (gas taxes cover a relatively small share, and same for tolls), and many people benefiting from these subsidies are doing so for lifestyle choice reasons and not out of necessity -- like, they're choosing to live in a rural area far away from infrastructure and then expecting government to build and maintain low-traffic roads to provide them access, or they're choosing to live in an exurb and commute an hour every day, or whatever. Yours is not that case. You have a medical need, as do many people. But it's still reasonable to move away from the mentality that's common in the US of viewing road use and car use as a human right, and towards one that's about explicitly opting into or out of trade-offs about how best to make use of limited road space and government funds. Specifically: if we're going to subsidize road use, should we subsidize all of it, and if so, all of it at the same rate? I think you make a good case for why people with mobility restrictions should have access to such a subsidy, but I don't think it follows that because they should, everyone should. Maybe people who are able to take the bus or walk should have incentives to do so, or disincentives to not do so.
- danjayh 8y ago
  Actually, I'm going to argue for just the opposite: Let users of cars pay for the infrastructure they use (through gas and plate taxes), let users of public transit pay for the services and infrastructure they use (through ridership fees). Right now, public transit is heavily subsidized by income taxes and use taxes for cars (at least in my area). I think that if all transit users were forced to pay for their share of the cost of the services they use, you would see public transit use decrease in many mid-sized cities, and potentially increase in extremely dense cities. If you really have a desire to 'stick it to the wealthy' while still enabling all to use the roads, sell access to HOV lanes at some extremely high cost and use it to pay for improvements to the infrastructure as a whole. I honestly think that this is a much better plan than the current (ridiculous) trend of offering HOV access to hybrids and EVs, because getting people into hybrids and EVs does nothing to ease congestion, which is the purpose of HOV lanes. Charging an extremely high tax for single-occupied HOV use would provide additional money to build improved infrastructure for all users, which would achieve the HOV goal of reducing congestion and pollution (because for traditional cars, congestion = horrible MPG). PS - hybrids and EVs don't make sense in all areas. I have a Fusion Energi which has a plug-in range of about 20 miles, and I live in Michigan. I bought it because I wanted to be able to eat lunch in my car without idling the engine (to save wear and tear), but in general, hybrids and EVs are a complete waste of time in the midwest. 1/3 of the year is spent in arctic conditions below 30 degrees, and another 1/3 of the year is spent in sweltering 85+ degree temperatures ... and in both cases, hybrids and EVs don't do notably better than gas cars (first hand experience here). As an additional aside, until we build more nuclear plants, and/or provide infrastructure to charge EVs during the day, they are kind of pointless. Solar power is not available at night (when most people charge EVs), so the electricity ends up coming from hyrdocarbon fuels plants. The conversion and transmission losses associated with going from Thermal->Mechanical->Electrical->High Voltage->Transmit->Low Voltage->DC->battery are so high that EVs really are currently not better than gas vehicles in much of the country. In areas where the waste heat from the gasoline is used to provide cabin heat, EVs are significantly worse in terms of overall energy use (especially those that use resistive heating for cabin heat).
maxxxxx 8y ago
I am perfectly fine to give people with medical issues an exception. But that doesn't mean that we should build everything around cars. Cars also cause a lot of health issues which should also be accounted for.
- andys627 8y ago
  Yes - the argument is against the primacy and dominance of cars, not their existence in reasonable circumstances.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Going to the extreme is a good strategy to kill any debate. I am not sure if the GP intended this but I so often hear "Want to make changes to health care/ taxes/ others? Socialism! go to Venezuela!". Debate ended.
    - coding123 8y ago
      Lol definitely agree that this thread is mostly filled with extremeness. I don't think people should be advocating the removal of all cars/vehicles on the planet until there is a reasonable way to replace their functions (how do people, goods and large-scale construction projects get around in in normal and emergency situations). Similarly I don't think providing specific car free zones in small 1 mile blocks is the same as murdering elderly and pregnant people.
      - andys627 8y ago
        Agree. We've really put all our eggs in one basket in the USA... you NEED a car to reasonably participate in most parts of society. Sure public transit or biking are options, but they are much less efficient than driving. This is the problem. We've spent 75 years building this way, now when we want to take small steps towards reversing that, the steps are widely misunderstood. In a sense we've been extremely car oriented for 75 years, so that when anything except ultimate car domination is presented, it appears extreme.
graeme 8y ago
You also need to redesign streets around cars, widening them, and making the city less pedestrian friendly in the process. And the less people walk, the younger they die and the more health problems they have along the way. You see your visible problem but don't consider the more diffuse and less visible problems caused by the car subsidies you favour. What do people with your condition in Paris or Rome do? Most of Europe isn't designed around cars the way the usa is.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  And keep in mind, most cities in the USA weren't designed around cars. New York City got it's street plan in 1810. San Francisco did in 1839. Our cities were designed with walkers in mind. The car is invasive. The only American cities where "it was designed for cars" is an excuse are those built largely after the 1940s, when cars (and air conditioning) became commonplace: LA, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, etc.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
From the article > A few spots are left, converted into parking for disabled drivers or EV charging, and some streets are open for delivery trucks for a couple of hours in the morning. Emergency vehicles still have access. Nobody who has thought about this issue for a bit is suggesting that we ban cars like we banned chemical weapons. Simply that the number of cars can be cut by a factor of 5-10 easily, leaving behind only those users who actually need the car, and not using it as a convenience at enormous unaccountable externalities. Not to mention that the the health of many (but not all) is destroyed by absolute minimum exercise needed in car centric cities. When everyone starts walking 5-10K steps everyday, many mobility related ailments are avoided or controlled or managed sufficiently.
- otachack 8y ago
  Not to mention the abuse of handicap licenses in the states. I speak to this as witnessing an acquaintance borrowing a handicap permit from a family member and using it for themselves. This kind of behavior would have to be enforced more strictly.
  - smsm42 8y ago
    Borrowing handicap permit is already illegal, and AFAIR carries pretty hefty fine. Of course, enforcing it is hard - would you demand a spot physical endurance exam from everybody parking in a handicapped place? How would you even know? I used the temporary handicapped placard once for a while, when I broke my leg. When recovering, on some days, I could walk for a bit. On others, I could only walk with crutches and for a short distance. But maybe I was just faking, who knows? And of course I didn't carry my medical records with me everywhere I went. So how would you know if I'm legitimately hurt or just borrowed the placard? If you are reluctant to harass legitimately disabled people, some amount of abuse would slip in. I think unless the abuse is so rampant that legitimate users get denied access (e.g. so many fakers are parking in handicap spots that the real ones have no spot) ignoring most of it as the inevitable price of not making lives of legitimately affected people yet harder is the right way to go.
    - 8y ago
Buldak 8y ago
This is important to consider, but even if anti-car policies inadvertently exclude some people, I'd push back against the presumption that they are more exclusionary than pro-car policies. They might still represent an improvement over the status quo in this regard. For instance, anti-car advocates often argue that policies which effectively require people to buy and maintain cars to participate in society are exclusionary of the poor.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  For germany, there's a study that estimates that up to 30% of a flats rent in densely populated areas is directly or indirectly caused by car-centric planning. And if I just go round the block and estimate how much space is taken by (toll-free) parking and car lanes, I can quite well imagine that this number might be on the high side, but not entirely unfounded. Just half a block from my flat is a road that is double lane, at intersections 3-4 lanes including turn lanes in each direction, each direction offers a parking along the road and in the middle are two parking lanes 90° to the road. The parking space allocated would be sufficient to create a full house the entire length of the road. All that road space is built and maintained by the city, which receives neither vehicle tax nor any petrol taxes or any of the taxes that car owners pay. I'm not generally opposed to people owning cars and using them. I'm opposed to people offloading the costs and space requirements of their private property onto the community.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    A single parking spot is roughly equivalent to a large room in a flat. Parking spots are about 10m^2 each. Buildings have between three and five stories. At the relatively cheap rent prices here in Berlin, a parking spot should cost its user about 400€/month.
- ip26 8y ago
  Exclusionary of the elderly, too. What exactly do you do if you live in car-burg where the only way to get around is by automobile, and you lose your license due to declining faculties? You become totally stranded & alone.
gwbas1c 8y ago
You really need a disabled placard. There's no shame in using it when you need it. The parking spots aren't just for people with wheelchairs. My grandmother got one when she had to use a walker. You deserve it!
- zdragnar 8y ago
  I'm in a similar boat, and do not qualify either. It sucks, but that's life. With that said, I would really hate to not be able to take my car anywhere I need to go, because a good day can turn bad quickly. In fact, it is among the many reasons I am glad to have moved to a rural area.
gamegoblin 8y ago
I broke my foot and ankle in several places in a rock climbing accident 1.5 years ago, and was put in a similar place to you (unable to stand for more than 20 minutes, unable to walk more than a few hundred yards, etc). This was a huge lifestyle impact to me -- before the injury, if it was less than a 30 minute walk, I almost always walked. If I wasn't in a hurry, up to 60 minutes. What helped me a lot was getting an e-bike that I'm able to cruise around town at 20mph (32kph) in. I understand that this particular solution doesn't apply to you, since arthritis is triggered by joint movement, whereas my pain is triggered by impact on the damaged foot and ankle (and e-biking is low impact). But this experience got me thinking a lot about small electric vehicles. One could imagine a city center where most people walk or bike, and people with a medical permit could drive around in speed-limited, electric golf carts, which are fairly compatible with pedestrian-only areas. Perhaps the city itself would staff the golf carts with drivers who were summonable via app. So people like us could drive to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city center, and then there would either be rentable golf carts at the garage, or golf carts able to be summoned to go into the city center.
- rhacker 8y ago
  Not bad, and reasonable solution - this is how crowded airports work too. Golf carts for employees and helping less abled people get to the gates.
- improbable22 8y ago
  Similar experience: I broke my leg, while I happened to be living both with a car, and in a building with underground parking. This really made staying independent possible, for the months it took before I could walk properly. Sure it was slower to drive to the supermarket & park underground there, instead of walking... but much quicker than waiting for someone else to have time to help. I agree that solutions other than a traditional car would be possible. But right now, thinking through other places I've lived fine without a car, they would all have been hell.
  - danjayh 8y ago
    I was in Shanghai for work for about 3 weeks a few years back. For the first week, I tried to use mass transit, because everyone said it was the best way around (and in shanghai, their mass transit is absolutely world-class, the best of the best). It was absolute hell - a perfect description; I was in constant pain. After the first week I broke down and just took cabs everywhere. Perfectly practical, but only when somebody else (in this case, my employer) is paying for it.
coldtea 8y ago
>I'm amazed that so many people who consider themselves inclusive in their thoughts don't realize how exclusionary anti-automobile policies are. As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. Oslo, and European cities without or with much less cars, have tons of people with arthritis as well and they're doing just fine. A walkable city will be even more welcoming for things like powered wheelchairs, healthier to breath for everybody, and will have low cost (and in some cases in here, free) mass transportation. >Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans. Yeah, because nothing says compassion like car ridden cities, and urban areas designed around driving.
- frabbit 8y ago
  What about orphaned children with arthritis? How does your elitist public transport serve them? Monster.
unionemployee 8y ago
I think some of us who hate cars (me included) also picture development patterns where cities aren't so sprawling that those with disabilities would have trouble getting around. In your case, a walk/bike ride across town might not be necessary. The market would be nearby, accessible to you via some small electric vehicle that operates on something closer to a human scale than a Ford F150. Heck, even the design of buildings themselves cause you problems because of cars. Instead of a small market, we have big box stores that require one to move significantly further while shopping.
briankelly 8y ago
Anti-automobile policies need to be careful to accommodate the disabled but it's unfair to label them as "exclusionary" compared to the racist and classist history of automobile adoption and according public infrastructure support. From Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, America's most influential and prolific public planner and builder, The Power Broker: “Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!'... [...] Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.” Also detailed in this book is destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities by the common policy of appropriating their land for roads and highways. The lasting effects of these practices is plainly obvious in so many US cities and will not go away without active efforts to reverse the damage. In comparison, disabled-friendly infrastructure is frankly more easily solved.
- JewsDidIt 8y ago
  He's not wrong. Look around primarily nier vs aryan populated areas. On average which is cleaner and less run down? Don't spout that historical racism/slavery bullsh*t at me, they were a socially underdeveloped breed while they were alone with their own devices before aryans tried to uplift them (and failed while also bringing those problems home to destroy their own nests with their overinflated sense of social justice and liberal 'immigration' policies).
iamalexm 8y ago
I would honestly hope that this would facilitate a move to a more even distribution of businesses in neighborhoods. Perhaps making local deliveries cheaper and more feasible. Might make lighter transportation such as smaller, short range electric vehicles more of an option and cheaper as well.
- danjayh 8y ago
  This is probably one of the most insightful comments in this entire thread. Density isn't the problem - zoning is. Even in a suburban area, if there was a corner store, you could just take a golf cart, provided that you live someplace with a climate like the West Coast. I live in an area that swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so for many months out of the year any transport without HVAC is not something you'd actually want to use.
drcross 8y ago
There's always someone, no matter what, who rails as hard as they can for the victim card. Go and take a look in the mirror.
yongjik 8y ago
It's not unusual in America to find shopping centers where you have to drive, park your car, and then walk several hundred feet to actually enter the store, thanks to the enormous parking lot, because everybody has to park. So, I'm not exactly sure how much the car culture is actually working in your favor. The alternative (public transportation) means parking lots can be smaller and closer to the actual destination.
- danjayh 8y ago
  On bad days, I either avoid extremely large stores or wait until I get a good spot. On good days, I walk from whatever spot I get. Either way, it's less walking than I'd do to/from a transit station.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    In some countries with well-developed public transport, transit stations ARE malls, or malls have their own train stop.
ocschwar 8y ago
The first thing you should realize is that pedestrianized spaces are really nice for traveling in a wheelchair or mobility scooter. The second thing is that there are cars available in Europe, called Cantas, that are conventional gasoline ICE cars with purposely shrunk engine displacement. You'd never take one of those on the highway, but the underpowered engines make them safe (and legal) to take on any sidewalk or bike path. All in all, a car free space can be far better for the disabled than what we have right now.
sorenjan 8y ago
Do you need a two tonne steel box, or could you make due with an electric wheelchair?
- danjayh 8y ago
  Electric wheelchairs typically go 3-4 mph. They are not a replacement for point-to-point transit. My area also swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so anything that's not climate controlled is quite unpleasant.
  - sorenjan 8y ago
    I think an electric wheelchair makes perfect sense when compared to walking, and using public transport. There are small foldable ones that can fit in a taxi or Uber as well.
simonsarris 8y ago
The number of elderly and disabled who are excluded by the automobile-only neighborhoods in the USA vastly outnumber the people who require an automobile to get around within a city center. The pro-con in helping disabled people isn't even close in how many people would be helped by anti-automobile policies.
fouc 8y ago
Worst case is that 99% of the rest of the city is still accessible by automobile. High density areas like city downtowns should cater to pedestrians more due to that being the more humane overall. As other people mentioned, there'd be workarounds for people with mobility issues for sure.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  In what city is the high-density area confined to 1% of the city area?
  - fouc 8y ago
    Well, Calgary for example has a Land area of 825.56 km2 or an Urban area of 586.08 km2, and a downtown area of 1.8 km2. Which means it has less than 0.3% area for the downtown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary I suppose there are pockets of high density that aren't counted for. Also Calgary is probably unusually spread out for the given population compared to larger cities like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.
house_atr 8y ago
You need a car BECAUSE cities are designed entirely and obsessively around them. Huge space and miles of nothing in-between destinations.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
Car-dominant policies are also exclusionary, just for a different group. Being effectively required to drive is an enormous burden on the impoverished. Also it sounds like a mobility scooter is kind of what you want?
- danjayh 8y ago
  Mobility scooters don't work so well in 3 inches of slushy snow (unless they make them with wheelchair sized wheels?) In any case, my area swings from -5f and lower on the cold winter days to 105f+ on the hot summer days, so anything that's not climate controlled is fairly unpleasant. We just hired in some contractors from the west cost, and we're predicted to have 12" of snow on Monday, a full day of sub-0f on Wednesday, and a -10f night the weekend after. They're quickly learning a lot about West Michigan weather :).
bjourne 8y ago
You do know that exercise is crucial for people with arthritis?
ntsplnkv2 8y ago
There are plenty of handicapped, disabled, elderly people on public transit. You are fortunate enough to be able to afford cars and think that we should continue to design around what works for you. That simply benefits you - and not the handicapped, disabled people who use public transit every day.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mikekchar 8y ago
I have considerable sympathy for you, especially since my mother has chronic back pain and similar shopping trips can be a nightmare on her bad days. However, I think there is considerable room for win-win on these things. Just consider the trip to the Wal-Mart. I haven't lived in North America for a long time, but in my recent trip to Canada to visit my parents, we went to Wal-Mart. Look at those sprawling mall complexes with their massive parking lots. We had to drive from parking lot to parking lot, just to visit another store! And the Wal-Mart itself was this behemoth structure with football field after football field of space under its roof. I mean it's half a kilometer from the frozen pizza to the checkout line. If you can't walk 200 meters, you can't shop in Wal-Mart without using their motorised carts (which are admittedly very cool). Imagine a completely different situation (one which I thankfully live in every day). Imagine that you had stores that were close to where you lived. So close, in fact, that you could walk there if you were abled bodied. But if you were not, you could take an electric bicycle (which many elderly people use where I live) or even an electric cart similar to the one that you can find at Wal-Mart (these are really rare where I live -- most people are quite happy with their electric bicycles, but I've seen them frequently in the UK where I used to live). Imagine that instead of several square kilometers of parking lots to contend with, you had hundreds of small shops. You had butchers that are just big enough to house the meat it sells. You go up to a counter, which is less than 10 feet from the door and you get your meat and -- lo and behold! There's the cash register, not 3 feet from where you are standing. I could go on, but the biggest thing that makes this hard for people in North America to imagine is that it is so different. The lifestyle is completely different. Instead of going once a week or once a month to some massive discount store and buying a van full of goods, you go every other day and buy enough to fit in a basket on your bike. It seems like a lot of time, but instead of driving for 30 minutes to the store and spending 20 minutes fining a parking space, you walk 5 or 10 minutes to the store. That's what it means to build cities that are good for walking. I write this with the full knowledge that my words are not good enough to explain this concept. Even my parents don't understand. When I stayed with them, I discovered that there was a shopping centre only a 20 minute walk from their house. I started walking there to pick up small things for dinner every day (hey 40 minutes of walking a day is not bad). They thought I was insane. Why would you walk to the store when you can drive? Why would you spend 40 minutes when you could send 10? They couldn't understand that the walk was the point. And so, while it is unreasonable to expect North America to become Asia or Europe suddenly, I think there is a lot of things that can be done to improve the situation dramatically -- like rezoning areas so that shops can be build where people live. Things like mandating that parking lots have pedestrian paths that allow you to walk to the store without being driven over by a mini van. Things like having down town cores which are already mixed use to have walking only areas. Things like building safe public transit. Things like not approving large box malls in the middle of nowhere surrounded by seas of parking lots and no access to public transit.
princeb 8y ago
> a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding i can't imagine taking a car to get to a bodega on the other side of the block or across the street is easier than just walking to the bodega directly.
agumonkey 8y ago
it's true, too intense emotions are an issue; we should reduce car usage for energy, pollution, life quality but let's not be extremists
rvp-x 8y ago
I don't have a disability, but the non-car accessible vehicles seem to enable a lot more freedom than cars, because they don't have the same restrictions as cars.
emiliobumachar 8y ago
The notion that one needs to be "disabled enough" for a powered wheelchair but not for a car is entirely socially constructed and could change. A car can fairly be seen as a grossly overpowered wheelchair with an extra ton of metal or two.
melling 8y ago
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or one. Seriously, we can come up with something other than 2 ton vehicles. Hundreds of millions of people will live better lives if we can build our cities without needing cars.
lsc 8y ago
>As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. I've heard this before... and maybe I'm not qualified to speak, as I'm not yet the age where I really have to worry, but from what I know of current technology, I can totally go out and buy a walking speed electric wheelchair that is safe to operate even after my vision and attention degrade... but self-driving capabilities in cars are still quite some ways off. Personally, my body would have to degrade a lot before I needed that wheelchair to make it a few blocks; but my attention and vision? that wouldn't have to degrade as much before I would not be able to safely operate a car. This is actually something I've thought a lot about; I mean, I personally am bearish on self-driving cars, and if we don't get self-driving cars? I think I might need to plan on retiring to New York, as that's probably one of the few places I can count on aging without being expected to drive.
skookumchuck 8y ago
Perhaps a Segway might work for you? Keep it in your car.
xorcist 8y ago
You have arthritis, so therefore we should center our urban planning around personal cars? That is not logical. What is logical, is that if car usage was heavily reduced inside urban areas, it would leave more space for the few cases where cars and lorries are actually needed. It is a variant of the old argument "but without cars and lorries there would be no food transport" (or ambulances, constuction, or something else where it is easy to see the benefits). That has always been a false premise. The biggest problems with cars in urban areas in cogestion. Fewer cars would mean more space where it's most desperately needed.
stefs 8y ago
you seem to be a very unlucky edge case, falling through the cracks like that, and in a car-reduced city your case definitely would have to be reconsidered. that said, having a city that is designed for cars is exclusionary to a lot more people - people who can't drive or own cars. the difference between newer cities built for cars and old pre-car inner cities is quite extreme in that regard. i've got a supermarket 150m and a smallish shopping centre 500m away, which might be too far for you, but an elderly or visually impaired person could still get their shopping done on their own. the shopping centers at the edge of the city - which are pretty much only reachable by car and you seem to depend on - have a disastrous and self reinforcing effect on inner city QOL (at least that's true for all the smaller cities around here, where cars are required to get around), as they cause most of the small local shops to die off, increasing the distance you have to walk to get to the remaining ones. removing cars from the equation brings those back, which also means the distances are getting smaller. that said, i doubt i cover a much smaller distance on foot when i drive out to the big shopping centers at the city pheriphery, as the distances from most parking spots to the destination inside a huge box store are at least as big as what i'd cover walking to my usual local shop. of course this doesn't help you much if the distances are to big no matter what - i could see you getting around on a motorized scooter around here without problems though (as a few of my neighbors do). so, from the perspective of an european inner city dweller, getting rid of cars would be much more inclusionary than the other way round.
nvarsj 8y ago
People, predominantly children or the elderly, are literally dying from auto pollution in urban areas. I’m sorry for your medical conditions, but driving is not worth the cost to others. As you say - have some compassion for your fellow humans.
mymythisisthis 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM The City of Golf Carts
a12432 8y ago
Nice strawman. The topic is no cars in the downtown area. You are walking over 500ft downtown from your parking spot to your destination, and there is no Walmart downtown.
klunger 8y ago
I live in Oslo and have similar mobility issues (Ehlers Danlos syndrome). I am not classified as disabled, but it is hard for me to walk long distances or stay standing for more than about 30 minutes in general. Luckily, almost everywhere I want to go is less than half a kilometer from the nearest bus/tram/metro stop. If I really need to, I can still take a taxi to anywhere in the city center. All that being said, Oslo is NOT a good city to live in if you need a wheelchair or crutches (which I do, with unfortunate regularity). 500 meters might as well be 100 kilometers if you are on crutches in the winter. Even if where you are going is right next to a train stop, the stops are not very accessible (long ramps way out of the way etc). The curbs do not consistently have ramps at crosswalks. The sidewalks are often covered in ice in the winter. There are stairs everywhere. Even with a car and being able to park near your destination, you still dealt with these issues. So, I guess my point is, Oslo making the city center mostly car free is not what makes it unfriendly for people with mobility issues. Taking public transportation is still better than parking and walking wherever. But it still sucks if you have crutches.
point78 8y ago
As an American you just don't know anything else. Do you think there are people with arthritis and disabilities in Europe? So many city centres make cars a nightmare, but they are infinitely better places to live than the US. Not to mention our healthcare but that's another thread...
obfk 8y ago
We'll have the drones bring you what you need.

adrianN 8y ago

I'd be completely okay with cars for disabled people, deliveries, and people who have to transport a lot of stuff like tools for their job. But >90% of all cars on the road are driven by able-bodied people with nothing but themselves to transport.

heydonovan 8y ago
Completely agree! I'd love to hop on a bus and watch Netflix on my phone while someone else drives me downtown to work, but it's 3x as slow. It takes me about 25 minutes to drive myself, or 60-70 minutes by bus. That and a lot of the bus stops around me have zero shade from the sun or rain, or one tiny bench so that the majority of folks waiting have to stand. It feels like such an afterthought. Also, I'd like to point out the economic disadvantage that comes from having to own a vehicle to drive to certain jobs. I've had to turn down jobs back in the day because I couldn't save up enough to purchase a vehicle and maintain it as well. You end up losing a lot of personal time waiting on buses. I remember having to get up at 5:00AM to catch a bus a mile away, and then getting home around 9:00PM too tired to do anything else but sleep and repeat.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I'm sorry that public transport sucks in your city. Plans to reduce car traffic usually include improvements to public transport and bike infrastructure. In cities with good public transport it's usually faster to take a train and a bus than to drive. See for example London and Tokyo.
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  When I ride to work, trains are going every 2-3 minutes and it takes me 20 minutes to get to my destination at the other side of the city. I don't think I world make it through the traffic and all the red lights in the same time. Finding a parking spot would take a significant amount of time again.
vonmoltke 8y ago
> But >90% of all cars on the road are driven by able-bodied people with nothing but themselves to transport. Nowhere near 90% of cars in city centers, where all these bans are taking place, fit that description.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  90% seems like a reasonable guess to me.

openbasic 8y ago

This. So much this. Most supporters of anti-automobile policies think that everyone is a healthy young adult grabbing his latte on the way to his Scrum daily meeting. No responsibilities with dependents, such as children, elderly or disabled family members. No plantar fasciitis, lordosis, arthritis, etc. Grow up. Start seeing the world from the perspective of others.

jacobolus 8y ago
Car-centric planning is horrible for children, the elderly, disabled people, sick people, and the poor. It makes them heavily dependent on able-bodied drivers (family members, taxis, hired helpers, ...) to move about. Children are much more independently mobile in cities with good transit. In car-centric suburbs parents or other caretakers are responsible for personally carting their children from place to place, with huge negative impact on children’s quality of life. Children end up sheltered, over-scheduled, over-controlled, and dramatically delayed in learning to live for themselves. It is for good reason that many college campuses and retirement homes are organized as little self-contained car-free villages. In my opinion car-centric suburbs are optimized for healthy, wealthy 30–50 year-old full-time workers, and increasingly hostile as people get further from matching that.
themagician 8y ago
Yeah, grow up. Be a wheel in the machine. Waste your life away sitting in traffic. Breathe in that toxic air. Risk life and lim every day so the trip to Walmart is a little shorter. This guy has arthritis and this guy is out of shape and has a kid, so let’s continue this insane dance to make it easier for them.
detaro 8y ago
That doesn't match the people advocating for less cars around me at all. Children and elderly are massive users of good public transport networks, where they exist, because they can't or don't want to use cars if it can be avoided. (And places where cars are absolutely not an option are very rare, so less cars can often benefit people who absolutely need cars)
graeme 8y ago

apendleton 8y ago

I think it's important to recognize, though, that in many cases, heavy road users' road use is subsidized by lighter road users. Roads are expensive both in terms of construction/maintenance and land use, they're mostly not paid for by user fees anymore (gas taxes cover a relatively small share, and same for tolls), and many people benefiting from these subsidies are doing so for lifestyle choice reasons and not out of necessity -- like, they're choosing to live in a rural area far away from infrastructure and then expecting government to build and maintain low-traffic roads to provide them access, or they're choosing to live in an exurb and commute an hour every day, or whatever. Yours is not that case. You have a medical need, as do many people. But it's still reasonable to move away from the mentality that's common in the US of viewing road use and car use as a human right, and towards one that's about explicitly opting into or out of trade-offs about how best to make use of limited road space and government funds. Specifically: if we're going to subsidize road use, should we subsidize all of it, and if so, all of it at the same rate? I think you make a good case for why people with mobility restrictions should have access to such a subsidy, but I don't think it follows that because they should, everyone should. Maybe people who are able to take the bus or walk should have incentives to do so, or disincentives to not do so.

danjayh 8y ago
Actually, I'm going to argue for just the opposite: Let users of cars pay for the infrastructure they use (through gas and plate taxes), let users of public transit pay for the services and infrastructure they use (through ridership fees). Right now, public transit is heavily subsidized by income taxes and use taxes for cars (at least in my area). I think that if all transit users were forced to pay for their share of the cost of the services they use, you would see public transit use decrease in many mid-sized cities, and potentially increase in extremely dense cities. If you really have a desire to 'stick it to the wealthy' while still enabling all to use the roads, sell access to HOV lanes at some extremely high cost and use it to pay for improvements to the infrastructure as a whole. I honestly think that this is a much better plan than the current (ridiculous) trend of offering HOV access to hybrids and EVs, because getting people into hybrids and EVs does nothing to ease congestion, which is the purpose of HOV lanes. Charging an extremely high tax for single-occupied HOV use would provide additional money to build improved infrastructure for all users, which would achieve the HOV goal of reducing congestion and pollution (because for traditional cars, congestion = horrible MPG). PS - hybrids and EVs don't make sense in all areas. I have a Fusion Energi which has a plug-in range of about 20 miles, and I live in Michigan. I bought it because I wanted to be able to eat lunch in my car without idling the engine (to save wear and tear), but in general, hybrids and EVs are a complete waste of time in the midwest. 1/3 of the year is spent in arctic conditions below 30 degrees, and another 1/3 of the year is spent in sweltering 85+ degree temperatures ... and in both cases, hybrids and EVs don't do notably better than gas cars (first hand experience here). As an additional aside, until we build more nuclear plants, and/or provide infrastructure to charge EVs during the day, they are kind of pointless. Solar power is not available at night (when most people charge EVs), so the electricity ends up coming from hyrdocarbon fuels plants. The conversion and transmission losses associated with going from Thermal->Mechanical->Electrical->High Voltage->Transmit->Low Voltage->DC->battery are so high that EVs really are currently not better than gas vehicles in much of the country. In areas where the waste heat from the gasoline is used to provide cabin heat, EVs are significantly worse in terms of overall energy use (especially those that use resistive heating for cabin heat).

maxxxxx 8y ago

I am perfectly fine to give people with medical issues an exception. But that doesn't mean that we should build everything around cars. Cars also cause a lot of health issues which should also be accounted for.

andys627 8y ago
Yes - the argument is against the primacy and dominance of cars, not their existence in reasonable circumstances.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Going to the extreme is a good strategy to kill any debate. I am not sure if the GP intended this but I so often hear "Want to make changes to health care/ taxes/ others? Socialism! go to Venezuela!". Debate ended.
  - coding123 8y ago
    Lol definitely agree that this thread is mostly filled with extremeness. I don't think people should be advocating the removal of all cars/vehicles on the planet until there is a reasonable way to replace their functions (how do people, goods and large-scale construction projects get around in in normal and emergency situations). Similarly I don't think providing specific car free zones in small 1 mile blocks is the same as murdering elderly and pregnant people.
    - andys627 8y ago
      Agree. We've really put all our eggs in one basket in the USA... you NEED a car to reasonably participate in most parts of society. Sure public transit or biking are options, but they are much less efficient than driving. This is the problem. We've spent 75 years building this way, now when we want to take small steps towards reversing that, the steps are widely misunderstood. In a sense we've been extremely car oriented for 75 years, so that when anything except ultimate car domination is presented, it appears extreme.

graeme 8y ago

You also need to redesign streets around cars, widening them, and making the city less pedestrian friendly in the process. And the less people walk, the younger they die and the more health problems they have along the way. You see your visible problem but don't consider the more diffuse and less visible problems caused by the car subsidies you favour. What do people with your condition in Paris or Rome do? Most of Europe isn't designed around cars the way the usa is.

hannasanarion 8y ago
And keep in mind, most cities in the USA weren't designed around cars. New York City got it's street plan in 1810. San Francisco did in 1839. Our cities were designed with walkers in mind. The car is invasive. The only American cities where "it was designed for cars" is an excuse are those built largely after the 1940s, when cars (and air conditioning) became commonplace: LA, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, etc.

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

From the article > A few spots are left, converted into parking for disabled drivers or EV charging, and some streets are open for delivery trucks for a couple of hours in the morning. Emergency vehicles still have access. Nobody who has thought about this issue for a bit is suggesting that we ban cars like we banned chemical weapons. Simply that the number of cars can be cut by a factor of 5-10 easily, leaving behind only those users who actually need the car, and not using it as a convenience at enormous unaccountable externalities. Not to mention that the the health of many (but not all) is destroyed by absolute minimum exercise needed in car centric cities. When everyone starts walking 5-10K steps everyday, many mobility related ailments are avoided or controlled or managed sufficiently.

otachack 8y ago
Not to mention the abuse of handicap licenses in the states. I speak to this as witnessing an acquaintance borrowing a handicap permit from a family member and using it for themselves. This kind of behavior would have to be enforced more strictly.
- smsm42 8y ago
  Borrowing handicap permit is already illegal, and AFAIR carries pretty hefty fine. Of course, enforcing it is hard - would you demand a spot physical endurance exam from everybody parking in a handicapped place? How would you even know? I used the temporary handicapped placard once for a while, when I broke my leg. When recovering, on some days, I could walk for a bit. On others, I could only walk with crutches and for a short distance. But maybe I was just faking, who knows? And of course I didn't carry my medical records with me everywhere I went. So how would you know if I'm legitimately hurt or just borrowed the placard? If you are reluctant to harass legitimately disabled people, some amount of abuse would slip in. I think unless the abuse is so rampant that legitimate users get denied access (e.g. so many fakers are parking in handicap spots that the real ones have no spot) ignoring most of it as the inevitable price of not making lives of legitimately affected people yet harder is the right way to go.
  - 8y ago

Buldak 8y ago

This is important to consider, but even if anti-car policies inadvertently exclude some people, I'd push back against the presumption that they are more exclusionary than pro-car policies. They might still represent an improvement over the status quo in this regard. For instance, anti-car advocates often argue that policies which effectively require people to buy and maintain cars to participate in society are exclusionary of the poor.

Xylakant 8y ago
For germany, there's a study that estimates that up to 30% of a flats rent in densely populated areas is directly or indirectly caused by car-centric planning. And if I just go round the block and estimate how much space is taken by (toll-free) parking and car lanes, I can quite well imagine that this number might be on the high side, but not entirely unfounded. Just half a block from my flat is a road that is double lane, at intersections 3-4 lanes including turn lanes in each direction, each direction offers a parking along the road and in the middle are two parking lanes 90° to the road. The parking space allocated would be sufficient to create a full house the entire length of the road. All that road space is built and maintained by the city, which receives neither vehicle tax nor any petrol taxes or any of the taxes that car owners pay. I'm not generally opposed to people owning cars and using them. I'm opposed to people offloading the costs and space requirements of their private property onto the community.
- adrianN 8y ago
  A single parking spot is roughly equivalent to a large room in a flat. Parking spots are about 10m^2 each. Buildings have between three and five stories. At the relatively cheap rent prices here in Berlin, a parking spot should cost its user about 400€/month.
ip26 8y ago
Exclusionary of the elderly, too. What exactly do you do if you live in car-burg where the only way to get around is by automobile, and you lose your license due to declining faculties? You become totally stranded & alone.

gwbas1c 8y ago

You really need a disabled placard. There's no shame in using it when you need it. The parking spots aren't just for people with wheelchairs. My grandmother got one when she had to use a walker. You deserve it!

zdragnar 8y ago
I'm in a similar boat, and do not qualify either. It sucks, but that's life. With that said, I would really hate to not be able to take my car anywhere I need to go, because a good day can turn bad quickly. In fact, it is among the many reasons I am glad to have moved to a rural area.

gamegoblin 8y ago

I broke my foot and ankle in several places in a rock climbing accident 1.5 years ago, and was put in a similar place to you (unable to stand for more than 20 minutes, unable to walk more than a few hundred yards, etc). This was a huge lifestyle impact to me -- before the injury, if it was less than a 30 minute walk, I almost always walked. If I wasn't in a hurry, up to 60 minutes. What helped me a lot was getting an e-bike that I'm able to cruise around town at 20mph (32kph) in. I understand that this particular solution doesn't apply to you, since arthritis is triggered by joint movement, whereas my pain is triggered by impact on the damaged foot and ankle (and e-biking is low impact). But this experience got me thinking a lot about small electric vehicles. One could imagine a city center where most people walk or bike, and people with a medical permit could drive around in speed-limited, electric golf carts, which are fairly compatible with pedestrian-only areas. Perhaps the city itself would staff the golf carts with drivers who were summonable via app. So people like us could drive to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city center, and then there would either be rentable golf carts at the garage, or golf carts able to be summoned to go into the city center.

rhacker 8y ago
Not bad, and reasonable solution - this is how crowded airports work too. Golf carts for employees and helping less abled people get to the gates.
improbable22 8y ago
Similar experience: I broke my leg, while I happened to be living both with a car, and in a building with underground parking. This really made staying independent possible, for the months it took before I could walk properly. Sure it was slower to drive to the supermarket & park underground there, instead of walking... but much quicker than waiting for someone else to have time to help. I agree that solutions other than a traditional car would be possible. But right now, thinking through other places I've lived fine without a car, they would all have been hell.
- danjayh 8y ago
  I was in Shanghai for work for about 3 weeks a few years back. For the first week, I tried to use mass transit, because everyone said it was the best way around (and in shanghai, their mass transit is absolutely world-class, the best of the best). It was absolute hell - a perfect description; I was in constant pain. After the first week I broke down and just took cabs everywhere. Perfectly practical, but only when somebody else (in this case, my employer) is paying for it.

coldtea 8y ago

>I'm amazed that so many people who consider themselves inclusive in their thoughts don't realize how exclusionary anti-automobile policies are. As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. Oslo, and European cities without or with much less cars, have tons of people with arthritis as well and they're doing just fine. A walkable city will be even more welcoming for things like powered wheelchairs, healthier to breath for everybody, and will have low cost (and in some cases in here, free) mass transportation. >Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans. Yeah, because nothing says compassion like car ridden cities, and urban areas designed around driving.

frabbit 8y ago
What about orphaned children with arthritis? How does your elitist public transport serve them? Monster.

unionemployee 8y ago

I think some of us who hate cars (me included) also picture development patterns where cities aren't so sprawling that those with disabilities would have trouble getting around. In your case, a walk/bike ride across town might not be necessary. The market would be nearby, accessible to you via some small electric vehicle that operates on something closer to a human scale than a Ford F150. Heck, even the design of buildings themselves cause you problems because of cars. Instead of a small market, we have big box stores that require one to move significantly further while shopping.

briankelly 8y ago

Anti-automobile policies need to be careful to accommodate the disabled but it's unfair to label them as "exclusionary" compared to the racist and classist history of automobile adoption and according public infrastructure support. From Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, America's most influential and prolific public planner and builder, The Power Broker: “Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!'... [...] Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.” Also detailed in this book is destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities by the common policy of appropriating their land for roads and highways. The lasting effects of these practices is plainly obvious in so many US cities and will not go away without active efforts to reverse the damage. In comparison, disabled-friendly infrastructure is frankly more easily solved.

JewsDidIt 8y ago
He's not wrong. Look around primarily nier vs aryan populated areas. On average which is cleaner and less run down? Don't spout that historical racism/slavery bullsh*t at me, they were a socially underdeveloped breed while they were alone with their own devices before aryans tried to uplift them (and failed while also bringing those problems home to destroy their own nests with their overinflated sense of social justice and liberal 'immigration' policies).

iamalexm 8y ago

I would honestly hope that this would facilitate a move to a more even distribution of businesses in neighborhoods. Perhaps making local deliveries cheaper and more feasible. Might make lighter transportation such as smaller, short range electric vehicles more of an option and cheaper as well.

danjayh 8y ago
This is probably one of the most insightful comments in this entire thread. Density isn't the problem - zoning is. Even in a suburban area, if there was a corner store, you could just take a golf cart, provided that you live someplace with a climate like the West Coast. I live in an area that swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so for many months out of the year any transport without HVAC is not something you'd actually want to use.

drcross 8y ago

There's always someone, no matter what, who rails as hard as they can for the victim card. Go and take a look in the mirror.

yongjik 8y ago

It's not unusual in America to find shopping centers where you have to drive, park your car, and then walk several hundred feet to actually enter the store, thanks to the enormous parking lot, because everybody has to park. So, I'm not exactly sure how much the car culture is actually working in your favor. The alternative (public transportation) means parking lots can be smaller and closer to the actual destination.

danjayh 8y ago
On bad days, I either avoid extremely large stores or wait until I get a good spot. On good days, I walk from whatever spot I get. Either way, it's less walking than I'd do to/from a transit station.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  In some countries with well-developed public transport, transit stations ARE malls, or malls have their own train stop.

ocschwar 8y ago

The first thing you should realize is that pedestrianized spaces are really nice for traveling in a wheelchair or mobility scooter. The second thing is that there are cars available in Europe, called Cantas, that are conventional gasoline ICE cars with purposely shrunk engine displacement. You'd never take one of those on the highway, but the underpowered engines make them safe (and legal) to take on any sidewalk or bike path. All in all, a car free space can be far better for the disabled than what we have right now.

sorenjan 8y ago

Do you need a two tonne steel box, or could you make due with an electric wheelchair?

danjayh 8y ago
Electric wheelchairs typically go 3-4 mph. They are not a replacement for point-to-point transit. My area also swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so anything that's not climate controlled is quite unpleasant.
- sorenjan 8y ago
  I think an electric wheelchair makes perfect sense when compared to walking, and using public transport. There are small foldable ones that can fit in a taxi or Uber as well.

simonsarris 8y ago

The number of elderly and disabled who are excluded by the automobile-only neighborhoods in the USA vastly outnumber the people who require an automobile to get around within a city center. The pro-con in helping disabled people isn't even close in how many people would be helped by anti-automobile policies.

fouc 8y ago

Worst case is that 99% of the rest of the city is still accessible by automobile. High density areas like city downtowns should cater to pedestrians more due to that being the more humane overall. As other people mentioned, there'd be workarounds for people with mobility issues for sure.

vonmoltke 8y ago
In what city is the high-density area confined to 1% of the city area?
- fouc 8y ago
  Well, Calgary for example has a Land area of 825.56 km2 or an Urban area of 586.08 km2, and a downtown area of 1.8 km2. Which means it has less than 0.3% area for the downtown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary I suppose there are pockets of high density that aren't counted for. Also Calgary is probably unusually spread out for the given population compared to larger cities like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

house_atr 8y ago

You need a car BECAUSE cities are designed entirely and obsessively around them. Huge space and miles of nothing in-between destinations.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

Car-dominant policies are also exclusionary, just for a different group. Being effectively required to drive is an enormous burden on the impoverished. Also it sounds like a mobility scooter is kind of what you want?

danjayh 8y ago
Mobility scooters don't work so well in 3 inches of slushy snow (unless they make them with wheelchair sized wheels?) In any case, my area swings from -5f and lower on the cold winter days to 105f+ on the hot summer days, so anything that's not climate controlled is fairly unpleasant. We just hired in some contractors from the west cost, and we're predicted to have 12" of snow on Monday, a full day of sub-0f on Wednesday, and a -10f night the weekend after. They're quickly learning a lot about West Michigan weather :).

bjourne 8y ago

You do know that exercise is crucial for people with arthritis?

ntsplnkv2 8y ago

There are plenty of handicapped, disabled, elderly people on public transit. You are fortunate enough to be able to afford cars and think that we should continue to design around what works for you. That simply benefits you - and not the handicapped, disabled people who use public transit every day.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mikekchar 8y ago

I have considerable sympathy for you, especially since my mother has chronic back pain and similar shopping trips can be a nightmare on her bad days. However, I think there is considerable room for win-win on these things. Just consider the trip to the Wal-Mart. I haven't lived in North America for a long time, but in my recent trip to Canada to visit my parents, we went to Wal-Mart. Look at those sprawling mall complexes with their massive parking lots. We had to drive from parking lot to parking lot, just to visit another store! And the Wal-Mart itself was this behemoth structure with football field after football field of space under its roof. I mean it's half a kilometer from the frozen pizza to the checkout line. If you can't walk 200 meters, you can't shop in Wal-Mart without using their motorised carts (which are admittedly very cool). Imagine a completely different situation (one which I thankfully live in every day). Imagine that you had stores that were close to where you lived. So close, in fact, that you could walk there if you were abled bodied. But if you were not, you could take an electric bicycle (which many elderly people use where I live) or even an electric cart similar to the one that you can find at Wal-Mart (these are really rare where I live -- most people are quite happy with their electric bicycles, but I've seen them frequently in the UK where I used to live). Imagine that instead of several square kilometers of parking lots to contend with, you had hundreds of small shops. You had butchers that are just big enough to house the meat it sells. You go up to a counter, which is less than 10 feet from the door and you get your meat and -- lo and behold! There's the cash register, not 3 feet from where you are standing. I could go on, but the biggest thing that makes this hard for people in North America to imagine is that it is so different. The lifestyle is completely different. Instead of going once a week or once a month to some massive discount store and buying a van full of goods, you go every other day and buy enough to fit in a basket on your bike. It seems like a lot of time, but instead of driving for 30 minutes to the store and spending 20 minutes fining a parking space, you walk 5 or 10 minutes to the store. That's what it means to build cities that are good for walking. I write this with the full knowledge that my words are not good enough to explain this concept. Even my parents don't understand. When I stayed with them, I discovered that there was a shopping centre only a 20 minute walk from their house. I started walking there to pick up small things for dinner every day (hey 40 minutes of walking a day is not bad). They thought I was insane. Why would you walk to the store when you can drive? Why would you spend 40 minutes when you could send 10? They couldn't understand that the walk was the point. And so, while it is unreasonable to expect North America to become Asia or Europe suddenly, I think there is a lot of things that can be done to improve the situation dramatically -- like rezoning areas so that shops can be build where people live. Things like mandating that parking lots have pedestrian paths that allow you to walk to the store without being driven over by a mini van. Things like having down town cores which are already mixed use to have walking only areas. Things like building safe public transit. Things like not approving large box malls in the middle of nowhere surrounded by seas of parking lots and no access to public transit.

princeb 8y ago

> a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding i can't imagine taking a car to get to a bodega on the other side of the block or across the street is easier than just walking to the bodega directly.

agumonkey 8y ago

it's true, too intense emotions are an issue; we should reduce car usage for energy, pollution, life quality but let's not be extremists

rvp-x 8y ago

I don't have a disability, but the non-car accessible vehicles seem to enable a lot more freedom than cars, because they don't have the same restrictions as cars.

emiliobumachar 8y ago

The notion that one needs to be "disabled enough" for a powered wheelchair but not for a car is entirely socially constructed and could change. A car can fairly be seen as a grossly overpowered wheelchair with an extra ton of metal or two.

melling 8y ago

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or one. Seriously, we can come up with something other than 2 ton vehicles. Hundreds of millions of people will live better lives if we can build our cities without needing cars.

lsc 8y ago

>As someone who suffers from mild arthritis, the trip to the back of a Wal-Mart can be painful for me, and a walk or bike ride across a city block absolutely foreboding. I've heard this before... and maybe I'm not qualified to speak, as I'm not yet the age where I really have to worry, but from what I know of current technology, I can totally go out and buy a walking speed electric wheelchair that is safe to operate even after my vision and attention degrade... but self-driving capabilities in cars are still quite some ways off. Personally, my body would have to degrade a lot before I needed that wheelchair to make it a few blocks; but my attention and vision? that wouldn't have to degrade as much before I would not be able to safely operate a car. This is actually something I've thought a lot about; I mean, I personally am bearish on self-driving cars, and if we don't get self-driving cars? I think I might need to plan on retiring to New York, as that's probably one of the few places I can count on aging without being expected to drive.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Perhaps a Segway might work for you? Keep it in your car.

xorcist 8y ago

You have arthritis, so therefore we should center our urban planning around personal cars? That is not logical. What is logical, is that if car usage was heavily reduced inside urban areas, it would leave more space for the few cases where cars and lorries are actually needed. It is a variant of the old argument "but without cars and lorries there would be no food transport" (or ambulances, constuction, or something else where it is easy to see the benefits). That has always been a false premise. The biggest problems with cars in urban areas in cogestion. Fewer cars would mean more space where it's most desperately needed.

stefs 8y ago

you seem to be a very unlucky edge case, falling through the cracks like that, and in a car-reduced city your case definitely would have to be reconsidered. that said, having a city that is designed for cars is exclusionary to a lot more people - people who can't drive or own cars. the difference between newer cities built for cars and old pre-car inner cities is quite extreme in that regard. i've got a supermarket 150m and a smallish shopping centre 500m away, which might be too far for you, but an elderly or visually impaired person could still get their shopping done on their own. the shopping centers at the edge of the city - which are pretty much only reachable by car and you seem to depend on - have a disastrous and self reinforcing effect on inner city QOL (at least that's true for all the smaller cities around here, where cars are required to get around), as they cause most of the small local shops to die off, increasing the distance you have to walk to get to the remaining ones. removing cars from the equation brings those back, which also means the distances are getting smaller. that said, i doubt i cover a much smaller distance on foot when i drive out to the big shopping centers at the city pheriphery, as the distances from most parking spots to the destination inside a huge box store are at least as big as what i'd cover walking to my usual local shop. of course this doesn't help you much if the distances are to big no matter what - i could see you getting around on a motorized scooter around here without problems though (as a few of my neighbors do). so, from the perspective of an european inner city dweller, getting rid of cars would be much more inclusionary than the other way round.

nvarsj 8y ago

People, predominantly children or the elderly, are literally dying from auto pollution in urban areas. I’m sorry for your medical conditions, but driving is not worth the cost to others. As you say - have some compassion for your fellow humans.

mymythisisthis 8y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcVGqtmd2wM The City of Golf Carts

a12432 8y ago

Nice strawman. The topic is no cars in the downtown area. You are walking over 500ft downtown from your parking spot to your destination, and there is no Walmart downtown.

klunger 8y ago

I live in Oslo and have similar mobility issues (Ehlers Danlos syndrome). I am not classified as disabled, but it is hard for me to walk long distances or stay standing for more than about 30 minutes in general. Luckily, almost everywhere I want to go is less than half a kilometer from the nearest bus/tram/metro stop. If I really need to, I can still take a taxi to anywhere in the city center. All that being said, Oslo is NOT a good city to live in if you need a wheelchair or crutches (which I do, with unfortunate regularity). 500 meters might as well be 100 kilometers if you are on crutches in the winter. Even if where you are going is right next to a train stop, the stops are not very accessible (long ramps way out of the way etc). The curbs do not consistently have ramps at crosswalks. The sidewalks are often covered in ice in the winter. There are stairs everywhere. Even with a car and being able to park near your destination, you still dealt with these issues. So, I guess my point is, Oslo making the city center mostly car free is not what makes it unfriendly for people with mobility issues. Taking public transportation is still better than parking and walking wherever. But it still sucks if you have crutches.

point78 8y ago

As an American you just don't know anything else. Do you think there are people with arthritis and disabilities in Europe? So many city centres make cars a nightmare, but they are infinitely better places to live than the US. Not to mention our healthcare but that's another thread...

obfk 8y ago

We'll have the drones bring you what you need.