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This reminds me of when blogger Mr Money Moustache proposed a car free city in Colorado, and then was flooded with media requests about when he was building it
by Dumblydorr 7y ago
This reminds me of when blogger Mr Money Moustache proposed a car free city in Colorado, and then was flooded with media requests about when he was building it and how.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/02/27/how-to-create-reality/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2019/02/27/how-to-create-rea...
- CalRobert 7y agoI want this so badly it hurts. I ache for it. I _hate_ the fact that I'm too terrified to let my kids cycle on city streets, or suburban streets, or country roads, and they're completely trapped on a small patch of land surrounded by asphalt ribbons of death on all sides. https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/ is close, but only in Arizona I believe
- sequoia 7y agoThis is a landing page. Is there anywhere to see more info?
- zip1234 7y agoI have two friends that died while cycling. It is kind of crazy how much people put the blinders on when looking at cars. I really wish more people could envision a different future than a car-centric one.
- hodder 7y agoSeems like a strong argument against biking, not cars.
- levythe 7y agoIt's an argument that cars and bicycles don't mix well.
- pieix 7y agoThis is exactly what GP meant by "blinders" — people (including children, the elderly, the disabled) should be free to engage in healthy, enjoyable, green recreational activities without fear of death by two ton tank.
- Noos 7y agowhy stop at bicycles? lets make cities safe for horses too, while we are at it. Thats what bicycles are closer too when it comes to planning for traffic.
- CalRobert 7y agoThere are some pretty big differences. Bikes don't poop, for one.
- Noos 7y agoHorses are more stable a riding platform and much more visible. Point is that trying to retrofit bikes in a city is much more similar to making horses work in a city; both simply do not work particularly well in any form of mixed traffic.
- bretthoerner 7y agohttps://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urban-design-great-horse-manure-crisis-1894/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...
- nguoi 7y agoUnfortunately, I do need to go to work if I'm interested in continuing to live.
- CalRobert 7y agoThat's like saying shootings are a strong argument against school (in the US at least)
- elliekelly 7y agoThe first time I visited Amsterdam it blew my mind. I don’t know why the rest of the world doesn’t use their streets as a model for more bike friendly cities.
- grenoire 7y agoAmsterdam works because it's a very flat and very dense city. I bet there are potential candidates in the States, but not as common as you would find in Europe. About the density, everything is just closer together over here. Public transportation is well-built and trains work great for anything further than that. Cars are mandatory by design in the US.
- OrangeMango 7y agoAmsterdam works because the residents and the government want it to work. You can find any number of cities with similar attributes such as flatness, density, etc. that do not have the same desires and thus do not have the same success.
- CalRobert 7y ago"everything is just closer together over here." It's not "just" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years. Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike. Lots of free parking though. This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>It's not "just" close together like it happened Development gets done in whatever way makes best use of the available resources at the time. The overwhelming majority of the cities and towns in Europe were built out before transportation over land was slow and expensive so you had dense town centers surrounded by farmland and dense cities surrounded by even more farmland so to avoid spending precious resources on transportation. The practical limits on transportation constrained development. By comparison huge portions of the US were built out after the advent the automobile (often tearing down and building over places that were previously more densely developed) and being geographically large there was always more land to build into so you got sprawling development because overcoming distance was fast and cheap. The way we have more or less not built any infrastructure since the 20th century despite increasing population (and increasing clustering of the population in urban areas) is starting to catch up and incentive density but it will take time and policy sticks/carrots if you want it to happen faster than it organically would. So yes, Europe to a large extent did win the lottery in that regard though they didn't know it at the time.
- CalRobert 7y agoThey do, but not in the US. https://www.duic.nl/wonen/plannen-voor-merwede-bekend-het-wordt-geen-woon-maar-autovrije-stadswijk/ https://www.duic.nl/wonen/plannen-voor-merwede-bekend-het-wo... Summary from @bicycledutch "Utrecht, Netherlands, plans a new neighbourhood with 4 to 6K homes for 12,000 people where everything is within walking and cycling distance (including the Central Railway Station). The design deliberately makes cars unnecessary." This is one of the top reasons my wife and I tried to build our life to get EU citizenship, and why I tell anyone from my former country who wants a better life about the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, letting any American who can employ themselves move to the Netherlands.
- nseggs 7y agoWow this is the first I’ve heard of the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, it sounds like a great program.
- Vinnl 7y agoNote that those 4 to 6K homes (and others planned) are already too few for the planned population growth. Utrecht is also certainly not a car-free city, but probably about as close to it as you're going to get today.
- Reason077 7y agoCities like Utrecht show that you don’t have to be car-free to be cycling friendly. You can drive a car in Utrecht when you really need to, but most of the time it’s better and more convenient to walk or cycle.
- sailfast 7y agoThis is true, but it's not trade-off free. It requires tight control over zoning and any new housing development. It is difficult to do this type of development in the United States without a much higher degree of centralized planning and/or restrictive zoning. In the US, freedom afforded to property owners / zoning especially in more rural areas, not to mention an immense amount of open, "unused" land that makes this kind of car-centric development the norm. I imagine it's also much "cheaper" for the developer (if we ignore the cost to the commons)
- konschubert 7y agoYou and me can’t be the only ones. It would be nice if there could be one big city in the world that fully embraces the ban of private cars.
- staticautomatic 7y agoDavis, CA?
- cgriswald 7y agoDavis is just a college town that has a large number of bicyclists because it hosts the largest (by area) of the UCs and as a result has formed a bicyclist quasi-culture. There's otherwise nothing special which lends itself to any kind of bicyclist utopia and in many ways I found it to be a bicycle dystopia from a frequent-pedestrian, sometimes-driver perspective.
- staticautomatic 7y agoSo the tremendous number of bike paths don't count for anything?
- cgriswald 7y agoI'd rather bike in Davis than in Daly City, but it is not a model of a bicycle utopia, which in my mind would separate bicycle, pedestrian, and motor vehicle traffic far more than is done in Davis and would include methods for getting into and around town. The center of Davis is devoid of bicycle paths outside of some parks that don't actually go anywhere or connect to any other paths. If you're on the south side, you can get downtown fairly easily mostly by bike path (especially from campus), but you won't find any bike paths when you get there (and actually, depending on what you consider downtown, only one path actually makes it all the way there). So sure, the paths 'count', but I wouldn't even call Davis bicycle-centric. I definitely don't think it's what the original poster has in mind.
- CalRobert 7y agoDavis made a concerted effort to put in bicycle infrastructure, especially near the university, and it has paid off in "not quite horrible" bike modeshare. Lots of towns/cities have big universities. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has a large surface area and tens of thousands of students and that town, at least when I lived there, had pretty bad cycle modeshare once you got away from the immediate campus area.
- jdlyga 7y agoThere's some really nice bike riding areas around Manhattan. The Hudson River Greenway is a continuous car-free bike route that goes all along the Hudson River. On the New Jersey of the Hudson River, there's also a beautiful walkway that extends for miles with bike share bikes all along it.
- CalRobert 7y agoThat's great! Can my child ride on it to school, and can I ride on it to work?
- Noos 7y agono one will use it to ride to school or work for 3+ months out of the year. This is the Northeast, with constant rainfall and low winter temperatures; short of wearing heated gear, much of the year will be miserable to ride that bike on anyways. A lot of people here seem to never have actually ridden bikes. I have, did so for 20 years, and it gets very miserable, very fast if the weather is nothing short of perfect.
- silveroriole 7y agoI know it’s not as bad as cars, but cyclists also contribute to creating asphalt ribbons of death... nice dirt path walking routes get paved over so cyclists can whizz along them at top speed. And unlike cars they’re completely silent and share your space, so woe betide you if you want to walk your dog along the river without constantly being nearly knocked into the water with no warning. If I had to pick between walking on a road at night vs a cycle path I’d pick the road for safety every time, at least you can hear and see cars coming.
- magduf 7y agoThat's why you're supposed to have separate bike lanes for bikes to ride on at full speed. Lots of cities have something like this. A path that cyclists use to actually get somewhere in a short time should not be the same path that loafers with dogs use to bumble around and relax on. Cycling isn't just for fun; lots of people actually use it for transportation, because it's much faster and more efficient than walking. And there's nothing wrong with bumbling around with your dog (on a leash), but it's a very different activity than what the cyclists are doing. Similarly, you wouldn't have the busy airspace over an airport shared by people playing around with their R/C planes and drones.
- rayiner 7y ago> I _hate_ the fact that I'm too terrified to let my kids cycle on city streets, or suburban streets, or country roads, and they're completely trapped on a small patch of land surrounded by asphalt ribbons of death on all sides. This is an irrational fear. In 2016, there were about 245 children under 14 killed by cars as pedestrians in the entire year: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812491 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.... There are about 75 million children under 18, so let's say 40 million between ages 5 and 14. That's 0.6 child pedestrian deaths per 100,000 ambulatory children. That's about 1/5 as likely as the risk of a white person being killed in a homicide in any given year. Moreover, about 332 children ages 5-14 were the victims of homicide in 2017: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses.html. Us urbanists ridicule suburban parents for worrying that their kid will be shot if they live in an urban neighborhood. Your child being killed by a car while playing in the street is even less likely, and having any special anxiety about it--apart from the general terror of parenthood--is equally irrational. We could certainly do better on this front. I'm pretty lucky to live in a pre-zoning code suburb with narrow little streets and houses close together, where I can let my seven year old play outside with my one year old as long as they're more or less within visual range. Neighborhoods like mine are illegal to build today. But, I grew up in a standard suburb, and we played on standard suburban streets starting at age 6+. It's pretty common outside big cities and pearl-clutching millennial parents.
- CalRobert 7y agoThose kids were killed despite a culture that puts "NEVER GO IN THE STREET" front and center in how children should interact with their built environment. This came as a result of cars killing many, many people - cars that showed up on streets where kids (and adults) had walked for centuries without being run over. I mean, if I fill the local pool with sharks it is indeed true that shark deaths will fall to 0 pretty quick.
- harryh 7y agoThis came as a result of cars killing many, many people When was this? I can find no time period in which child pedestrian fatalities were all that significant.
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- mark_l_watson 7y agoMe too. I live in a small town that is very walkable (30 minutes to library, 15 minutes to the food bank where I volunteer, 10 minutes to groceries and our movie theater). When I retired last spring I gave my car to my granddaughter and shipped it to her. I can use my wife’s car and use Uber in a pinch, but I like walking. Safety is an issue. A friend’s roommate was walking in our town and hit by a car and killed before Christmas. I would enjoy walking even more if we had more sidewalks, and more dedicated lanes for the bikers.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago>I want this so badly it hurts. I ache for it. How badly? Because I assure you, there are many communities (caveat: I'm Canadian) where the idea of letting your child bike the streets is not equivalent to signing a death warrant. Here's the rub: you have to leave the metropolis. Not many people are actually willing.
- ramijames 7y agoSo I live in a Kibbutz in Israel, and well, it's just one giant green space for kids to run around in. I can't imagine living in a city.
- kiliantics 7y agoYes, if only bicycle manufacturing giants (haha) could generate the same kind of hype
- JKCalhoun 7y ago> a car free city How ironic if the utopian, factory-city for Toyota is one free of cars.
- nameless912 7y agoToyota makes lots of other stuff too, they're very much like Mitsubishi in that regard. TBH I get it, they see the writing on the wall that a city without cars is the only way in the future, and they want to get ahead of the curve.
- splatcollision 7y agoPrior art from HST's 1971 campaign for sheriff of Aspen, CO: "Rip up all city streets with jackhammers" and "sod the streets at once ... All public movement would be by foot and a fleet of bicycles, maintained by the city police force." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Aspen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Aspen