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There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake. The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on p

by ArnoVW 7y ago

There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake. The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine. The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives. The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.

simias 7y ago
I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation. Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars. I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.
- newaccoutnas 7y ago
  I take your point but you can't also discount the air quality in cities being quite a big factor as to becoming less dependent on cars. LEV's (Low Emission Vehicles) are taxed less, for example (although the infrastructure is still lacking, perhaps CAV's (Connected Autonomous Vehicles) may one day solve that as parking could be placed further away and there may be more of a 'sharing' system in place, such that you don't really own a car, just dial one up like an Uber)
- pjc50 7y ago
  Do people commute into Paris by car in relatively large numbers? Where on earth do they park? Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow. Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
  - kakwa_ 7y ago
    Well, it depends. Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged. As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it). As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet). All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max. If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same. However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour. As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years. Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option. And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it. As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours. Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people. So it really depends on your situation. On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now. Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest). This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-down-housing-gentrification-transit https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total. So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
  - lacampbell 7y ago
    Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest). I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses? That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.
    - maxsilver 7y ago
      Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation. This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich. The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.
  - DrOctagon 7y ago
    Class isn't purely economic. It is the perception of 'inner city elites' being out of touch with the rest of the country. In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030. The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
      Living unsustainably and ignoring pollution and global warming is their "need"? Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        In a democracy it's generally accepted that the people deserve to get what they want even if it's stupid and bad for them. History mostly indicates that the downsides of this approach are far less bad than the downsides of any system where the people do not get what they want.
  - 7y ago
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.
  - 0xB31B1B 7y ago
    That’s the trope, but in reality, the less well off take the bus in, and the drivers for the most part could live in the city if they decided they didn’t want a yard or a parking spot. Taking road space from cars and giving it to busses/bikes helps the lower and middle classes the most.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.
- adjkant 7y ago
  > I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened. Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US. So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets. I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
- hermitdev 7y ago
  Ive lived in Chicago for 20 years now. Between the L and Metra systems, Chicago's public works pretty great if you want to get from the suburbs into the Loop. I dont have much experience using rhe CTA or PACE bus systems. The transit system is pretty awful if you need to make an orbital commute, say from west suburbs to north, which I did for 2 years. Morning commute wasn't too bad, typically 40 minutes for 25 miles. Evening commute was typically 60 mins, maybe 90 or 120 depending on the number of accidents for the same 25 miles, on rare occasions 180 mins for bad weather. Conversely, the quickest scheduled public transit for my commute was at 180 mins each way. Had to go all the way into the Loop, then back out again. Faced with a normal 2 hour round driving trip vs 6 hour round public trans trip, yeah, I'm going to drive. New job, pays better, and spend 40 minutes in the car. Yeah, theres public trans options, but itd mean spending 3-4 hours commuting and a shit ton of walking that frankling I'm not up for 9 months of the year (either way too hot or way too cold).
icanhasjonas 7y ago
I live in Chicago, and I sold my tesla and my lamborghini and replaced them with subway, a boosted board and a divvy membership. I’ve never been happier. For road trips I still pull out the lil porsche, but that rarely happens any more. With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.
duxup 7y ago
I can certainly understand some rural reservations and concerns. I live in a suburban area where outside commuter type service there is no mass transit into the city. So as the city restricts parking I worry about accessibility. Park and rides are also usually a commuter hours only option too.
throwaway3627 7y ago
It won't work in LA because the layout is structurally geared to maximizing distance between necessities, rather than being walkable or having effective public transport.
vonmoltke 7y ago
> ...at least in an urban setting, in Europe... > The problem of the US is that outside of major cities... What urban setting does the US have outside its major cities? Arguably, that is one of the major problems.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  I'm assuming that "major cities" here is code for "Boston-to-Washington corridor, Chicago, and San Francisco"--the US cities that are the most similar to European cities and generally have strong downtowns, coherent transit systems, and generally dissuade car access to their city centers. This would be in contrast to the urban centers of places like LA or Dallas, where the downtowns are filled with surface parking lots instead of buildings.

by ArnoVW 7y ago

simias 7y ago

I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation. Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars. I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

newaccoutnas 7y ago
I take your point but you can't also discount the air quality in cities being quite a big factor as to becoming less dependent on cars. LEV's (Low Emission Vehicles) are taxed less, for example (although the infrastructure is still lacking, perhaps CAV's (Connected Autonomous Vehicles) may one day solve that as parking could be placed further away and there may be more of a 'sharing' system in place, such that you don't really own a car, just dial one up like an Uber)
pjc50 7y ago
Do people commute into Paris by car in relatively large numbers? Where on earth do they park? Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow. Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way to fix Cambridge's traffic problem without demolishing a college, then someone showed me a 1960s plan that involved taking a corner off St John's.
- kakwa_ 7y ago
  Well, it depends. Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged. As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diameter, and you have a station every 500 meters or so in any direction within it). As for the Paris area, the regional trains (RER) are roughly in a star pattern, with the crossing point between the lines in the center of Paris (Chatelet). All that means that if you live withing Paris, you can easily go anywhere in Paris, but also in most of the Paris area in roughly 1 hour max. If you are in the suburbs and work within Paris, it's pretty much the same. However, if you are in the suburbs, and work in the suburbs, then, it tends to suck, because if you are unlucky, you have to go from your home "suburb" to Paris and then from Paris to your "work" suburb which can be a huge detour. As an example, I used to live southeast of Paris (Evry), and work in the southwest of Paris (Clamart), in that configuration using a car was the only viable option, and the few times I didn't have my car, taking the transports meant 4 to 5 hours commuting every day. Typically, I drove around 25000km per year in these years. Then I moved within Paris, and my car became far less useful, I went for 25000km a year to 3000km a year because the public transports became a viable option. And lately my job got closer to Paris, so I finally sold my car without replacing it. As for traffic, the roads are not that bad, and there are quite a lot of rings/partial rings, (Peripherique near Paris, in place of the old city walls from the XIXth century, A86 about 10/15km from the center, and the A104/n104/n118 20/30km away from the center, and quite a few highways radiating from the Peripherique (A13, A6, A1, etc). But it's not enough and there are a lot of traffic jams. As an example, the 40km commute when I lived in the suburbs was taking me ~30 minutes without traffic jams, but typically it was taking me ~1 hour and in some cases, with an accident for example, even 2 hours. Also, a lot of people tend to live in the east of Paris, where housing is a bit cheaper (like almost every European city in fact, the dominant winds pushing smokes and bad smells west to east). But you have more activities in the West, the biggest being La Defense (business district just west of Paris). Which means a lot of long commutes for these people. So it really depends on your situation. On last point that is interesting to note: I grew-up outside of Paris, passing your driving license between 18 and 20 years old is considered normal in such cases. When I started studying in Paris, I was a bit surprised to learn that a good portion of the students native from Paris don't even learn how to drive, or do so much, much, much later.
maxsilver 7y ago
This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now. Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest). This is sold, in theory, on being "green". But the new bus system covers less than 5% of the road system it replaces, and their gentrification efforts actually decrease the usefulness of the buses that already existed, since they cut down a small forests worth of trees on the edge of the city every time they displace an previously-urban neighborhood -- so the net result is almost always lower ridership - https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-down-housing-gentrification-transit https://la.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18628524/metro-ridership-dow... - and their attempts to remove cars from the city (through intentional congestion, artificial scarcity, use fees, whatever) move this transportation to less efficient routes far outside the city, where they must burn more gasoline per person to accomplish identical trips, emitting more CO2 per person and in total. So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public transit" (mostly buses in the midwest). I don't understand... you are saying they replace roads and freeways and replace them with buses? That's like replacing a glass with water. It makes no sense.
  - maxsilver 7y ago
    Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).
Barrin92 7y ago
>So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation. This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich. The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated middle class that fled to the suburbs. The same is true for the yellow vests in France. The people participating where generally not poor, which was very obvious when one looked at the demographic makeup of the group, notably, immigrants and people of color were largely absent.
- DrOctagon 7y ago
  Class isn't purely economic. It is the perception of 'inner city elites' being out of touch with the rest of the country. In the recent Australian election, the (losing) Labour Party had a policy to target 50% of vehicles being electric by 2030. The Liberal party jumped on this and ran a scare campaign that Labour was trying to take away the vehicles that Australians love for work and recreation, utes and 4WD/SUVs. It worked, not because any inherent inferiority of electric vehicles but, because people don't want to be told what is best for them by people that don't understand their needs.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    Living unsustainably and ignoring pollution and global warming is their "need"? Politicians running that kind of campaign should be jailed. They probably do much more actual damage than those who support terrorism or racism, which are illegal in most countries.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      In a democracy it's generally accepted that the people deserve to get what they want even if it's stupid and bad for them. History mostly indicates that the downsides of this approach are far less bad than the downsides of any system where the people do not get what they want.
- 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
> rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.
- 0xB31B1B 7y ago
  That’s the trope, but in reality, the less well off take the bus in, and the drivers for the most part could live in the city if they decided they didn’t want a yard or a parking spot. Taking road space from cars and giving it to busses/bikes helps the lower and middle classes the most.
Gibbon1 7y ago
> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.
adjkant 7y ago
> I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers. For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened. Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US. So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets. I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
hermitdev 7y ago
Ive lived in Chicago for 20 years now. Between the L and Metra systems, Chicago's public works pretty great if you want to get from the suburbs into the Loop. I dont have much experience using rhe CTA or PACE bus systems. The transit system is pretty awful if you need to make an orbital commute, say from west suburbs to north, which I did for 2 years. Morning commute wasn't too bad, typically 40 minutes for 25 miles. Evening commute was typically 60 mins, maybe 90 or 120 depending on the number of accidents for the same 25 miles, on rare occasions 180 mins for bad weather. Conversely, the quickest scheduled public transit for my commute was at 180 mins each way. Had to go all the way into the Loop, then back out again. Faced with a normal 2 hour round driving trip vs 6 hour round public trans trip, yeah, I'm going to drive. New job, pays better, and spend 40 minutes in the car. Yeah, theres public trans options, but itd mean spending 3-4 hours commuting and a shit ton of walking that frankling I'm not up for 9 months of the year (either way too hot or way too cold).

icanhasjonas 7y ago

I live in Chicago, and I sold my tesla and my lamborghini and replaced them with subway, a boosted board and a divvy membership. I’ve never been happier. For road trips I still pull out the lil porsche, but that rarely happens any more. With home delivery of pretty much everything I need, I rely on Wholefoods and Peapod for what I used to have my car for. 5 Years ago that wasn’t an option.

duxup 7y ago

I can certainly understand some rural reservations and concerns. I live in a suburban area where outside commuter type service there is no mass transit into the city. So as the city restricts parking I worry about accessibility. Park and rides are also usually a commuter hours only option too.

throwaway3627 7y ago

It won't work in LA because the layout is structurally geared to maximizing distance between necessities, rather than being walkable or having effective public transport.

vonmoltke 7y ago

> ...at least in an urban setting, in Europe... > The problem of the US is that outside of major cities... What urban setting does the US have outside its major cities? Arguably, that is one of the major problems.

jcranmer 7y ago
I'm assuming that "major cities" here is code for "Boston-to-Washington corridor, Chicago, and San Francisco"--the US cities that are the most similar to European cities and generally have strong downtowns, coherent transit systems, and generally dissuade car access to their city centers. This would be in contrast to the urban centers of places like LA or Dallas, where the downtowns are filled with surface parking lots instead of buildings.