6 ms·
Cities are great, if you build them for people, and not cars. We don't do this anymore (outside a few exemplar places like Denmark, NL, etc.), sadly.
by CalRobert 8y ago
Cities are great, if you build them for people, and not cars. We don't do this anymore (outside a few exemplar places like Denmark, NL, etc.), sadly.
- maxsilver 8y agoThis is why electric cars are so important. No exhaust, no noise. They're perfect for urban use.
- merpnderp 8y agoElectric self driving cars are so important. Sitting in and navigating traffic are huge sources of stress for urbanites. White knuckling it at 70mph in bumper to bumper traffic, or spending 45 minutes in stop and go traffic twice a day, are certainly high stress situations.
- CalRobert 8y agoThat doesn't sound like a real city, tbh. Just a sprawling suburb. TBF 98% of what the US calls "cities" are just giant suburbs of themselves.
- CalRobert 8y agoElectric cars don't solve: * kids being killed if they try to play in the street * urban centres being destroyed by parking lots * elderly people being terrified to cross the street * Dead cyclists etc...
- toomuchtodo 8y agoThey do solve allowing those of us who want to live in rural areas to do so in an environmentally friendly way. No cities please.
- klipt 8y ago80% of Americans live in cities. That means if they all moved to rural areas, the population density of rural areas would go up 5X. Would they still be rural then?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thrower123 8y agoThat's actually a good question... There is so much land, especially west of the Mississippi, that is almost completely unpeopled that I'm not sure that distributing the people concentrated in the most dense 1000 sq miles would make a significant increase. We need a Randall Monroe What If?
- magduf 8y agoMuch of the land west of the Mississippi isn't arable land or livable in any way, unless you do what they did in Phoenix and pump the rivers dry. That isn't sustainable; it's an environmental disaster.
- Ma8ee 8y agoThen use the cars in rural areas where they have a place. They don't belong in cities, electric or not. And one of the reasons that cities are better for the environment is less need of transportation.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBut are cities better for people if you're cramming everyone into less space and want them to move about less? If research says no, we shouldn't be promoting cities, but ways of reducing environmental impact while also reducing density when zoning/land use planning. "In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas."
- kelnos 8y agoExhaust and noise is a problem certainly, but IMO a bigger problem is the ridiculous amount of space that gets reserved to support cars that could be used to support people instead.
- CalRobert 8y agoIf only residents went to planning meetings to complain about a lack of places for people to sleep, instead of for cars to sleep.
- jweir 8y agoThey are a sign of urban failure. If your city needs cars your city has failed. Go spend some time a city without cars - or sections of a city that don’t allow cars - I’ll wager you like it. Unfortunately in the US many criticize such efforts as being like Disneyland - as if that is a bad a thing.
- rhapsodic 8y ago>They are a sign of urban failure. If your city needs cars your city has failed. Go spend some time a city without cars - or sections of a city that don’t allow cars - I’ll wager you like it. How would I get my drum kit to a gig in the heart of such a city?
- semafour 8y agoIn some states, suburban and rural folks find out they like concentrated areas made for people, not cars, once every year. They love the state fair.
- CompanionCuuube 8y agoDo you guarantee that the legal items one would normally transport in a car will be allowed on public transportation?
- CalRobert 8y agoI think most people agree there is _some_ use for automobiles in cities, just like there's _some_ use for helicopters in cities. It's _extremely_ limited though. I actually think it's silly to allow guns in cars and not on public transport (way more drive-bys than bus-bys, after all) but that's definitely an edge case.
- eswat 8y agoI believe it’s the urban planning involved in accommodating the physical traffic of vehicles the GP is getting at, not the emissions. Electric vehicles do nothing to address roads occupying more space than sidewalks, for example.
- progfix 8y agoOnly when they are significantly smaller than current cars. It isn't just about the emissions, it's about the space that cars take and the speed they are moving.
- logfromblammo 8y agoThe electric passenger vehicle most important to cities is actually... elevators. Press a button to call a ride. Press a button to select a destination. 24-hour automated operation, and free-to-use for passengers with hand-carried items. Compared with an elevator, a street-driven electric car is a bit of a nightmare. The closest horizontal analog is commuter trains on electrified rails, and even those are shaped by car culture. If a city were planned like a building, and horizontal movement given over to externally-powered single-car on-demand vehicles that move exclusively on dedicated trackways, there wouldn't be so much space and energy wasted on cars.
- lr4444lr 8y agoWhen I was in Copenhagen 4 years ago, cars were pretty plentiful. (Not so much street parking.) I read that car ownership there is about 30%. Where were you thinking of?
- deathanatos 8y agoAs an American, outside of NYC and maybe Boston, 30% car ownership sounds incredibly low to me. I'm in SF, and while I know some who don't, the overwhelming majority of people that I know own a car. I take public transit daily — and I need a car to get to it.
- jmchuster 8y agoQuick search indicates nowhere in the US is close to 30% car ownership, with NY coming at the lowest at 45% car ownership. New York, NY 45.6% Newark, NJ 59.7% Washington, DC 62.9% Jersey City, NJ 62.9% Cambridge, MA 63.2% Boston, MA 66.2% Paterson, NJ 67.0% Hartford, CT 67.4% San Francisco, CA 70.1%
- magduf 8y agoNYC is a very large city, that really would make more sense being separated from NY state and turned into a separate city-state. Manhattan alone is larger than many other cities, and it's only one "borough" in the city. If you look at Manhattan by itself, I'm sure you'll see very different numbers on car ownership. It's the people in Bronx, Queens, etc. that skew the numbers.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoThere's no qualifier you can put behind that first comma that makes your opening statement true in the general case.
- brandur 8y agoI really think there's something to this. I've been living in a dense urban area that does a poor job of traffic control (San Francisco), and of all the "city problems" that I find tearing most at my mental well-being is the poor urban design. After a while you realize that there's no such thing as a stress-free, liberating walk. Traffic is so all-pervasive that everywhere you go, you're constantly negotiating your way around vehicular traffic, most of which believes that yielding to pedestrians is a distant second concern to getting around as quickly as possible at any cost. Every cross-walk you use you have to watch yourself for drivers turning left and right who aren't paying attention. Every four-way stop you have to look around and make sure that drivers are actually going to stop for you. Blocks are short, so this is all you're doing all the time. The sheer volume of infrastructure that's built for cars means there's not much left over. The only places to get that that sense of liberation back besides distant parks or suburbs well outside the municipal core. Any parks of non-trivial size in the city are filled to the brim with roads, many of which actually act as throughfare shortcuts for standard traffic most of the time (e.g. JFK in Golden Gate Park), so you're facing all the car problems as any other street. After a while it's hard not to be constantly on edge looking out for the next person who's about to do something dangerous to you, which is quite stressful and almost certainly has negative long-term mental effects. It really doesn't have to be the case though — contrast the car-first streets of San Francisco and other American cities to the pedestrian plazas and legitimately car-free urban parks of some cities and Europe, and it's a world of difference. We could be doing so much better.
- phil248 8y agoStrongly agreed. Nearly all of the major irritants and genuine dangers I face on a daily basis in an urban center are directly caused by cars.
- carlosyasu91 8y agoFully agree with you, having been in Stuttgart, Germany for a Summer it was great to be able to get anywhere in public transportation