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I couldn’t agree more with the article. Unfortunately as for America I think people wouldn’t be very happy with turning their stroads into streets. There is a v

I couldn’t agree more with the article. Unfortunately as for America I think people wouldn’t be very happy with turning their stroads into streets. There is a very toxic self centered car culture here; any impediment to it real or imaginary will make people very angry.

dghlsakjg 5y ago
The cognitive dissonance is wild. The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts). But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  I truly believe the reason has more to do with being antisocial than anyone cares to admit. It's not always the car's mobility that people enjoy so much as the barrier it creates from the outside world.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Socialization needs norms. It’s no accident that relatively urbanized civilizations have relatively strict codes of behavior. America’s wild and free frontier spirit, God bless it, is less fun in a crowded subway.
    - noobermin 5y ago
      And soul crushing traffic is wild and free? Or suburban strip malls are wild and free? Or endless cul de sacs? There is a lot of imposed structure to suburbia too, specifically because it is planned.
      - mcv 5y ago
        In fact, it has more imposed structure, exactly because of the unreasonably restrictive zoning laws in the US. Allow more variety and you get more choice.
- asdff 5y ago
  There's no cognitive dissonance here really. People are just self interested. They don't want a bunch of bars because that means people will drive drunk and piss and puke all over their property stumbling back after last call. They don't want fewer lanes because its just going to turn their commute from work into even more of a bottleneck. They don't want a mall built near them because of the traffic bottlenecks it would create, but they want a fast road to get to a mall at just enough distance away to not be affected by these issues themselves.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    The "less lanes means bottle neck" bit is not even true due to induced demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
    - asdff 5y ago
      It's definitely true in certain cases, induced demand is not some law of physics. Take a one lane road and a two lane road. It's pretty common for one lane roads to end up clogged up due to left turning traffic that's unable to clear intersections fast enough. On a two lane road, traffic that goes straight or right will have room two maneuver around the left turning traffic. And on top of that, planners for highways are really planning for throughput rather than commuting times. When you widen a freeway, speeds don't change or might even go down, but total throughput goes up accordingly and that's whats important when you have a mile of trucks backed up at your port.
  - mcv 5y ago
    If they're afraid that a mall will create traffic bottlenecks, maybe build those malls so they're easy to reach on foot, by bike, or with public transport. That way you don't get that traffic bottleneck.
    - asdff 5y ago
      People buy shopping carts worth of stuff at malls. That's not exactly easy to schlep on a bike or a bus for most people especially if you are in poor shape. A lot of people in the U.S. today live in walkable areas, but opt to just take a climate controlled car with a spacious trunk 5 mins to the grocery store vs walk 15 minutes one way and back with 25 pounds of groceries in poor weather.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Right, but like everything else in the US right now, the split is obvious along political lines. People who like cities are left, people who like suburbs/rural living/driving everywhere are right.
  - greenn 5y ago
    Huh, guess I'm "right" then. Weird that my voting history would indicate otherwise, but I don't like city living so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
maxerickson 5y ago
My favorite example of this is something I saw in a local bicycle planning study. A 4 lane stretch about 6 blocks long was converted to 2 lanes with parking and wider sidewalks (with the idea that people will naturally drive a bit slower with less of the street devoted to traffic). Someone was livid that it had happened, ranting about delays at the light on one end of the stretch. At busy times, the typical wait at the light is for the green (so not even a full cycle). Very occasionally a couple of cars don't make the busiest left on the first green.
csnover 5y ago
It was interesting for me to learn how this process happened in Copenhagen and Groningen in the 1960s and 1970s—people were angry, they protested, made death threats.[0] So it seems like re-pedestrianising areas has always made some people very angry everywhere, and that anger may not be so unique or significant a barrier as it might initially seem. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXNVnftaNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXNVnftaNs
- himinlomax 5y ago
  Just a few years ago, when Paris decided to pedestrianize (or rather restrict traffic on) rue des Rosiers, a small, commercial street in a historically Jewish neighborhood, shop owners were strongly opposed to it. When the work was completed, foot traffic in the shops doubled almost overnight. You can easily tell by the fact that long queues pop up in front of fallafel shops and delis at peak business hours that overflow in the street and that wouldn't have fit before on the tiny sidewalks. People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    This is similar in the town in Germany where I grew up. When I was a kid they converted the central part of the inner city into a walking mall, no cars allowed (except for delivery traffic outside of certain hours). The shop owners were up in arms, saying it would be the death of the city, everyone would go shopping at big malls outside of town etc.. The exact opposite happened, the city is absolutely packed, people come from far to go shopping there, cafe's everywhere. Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.
closeparen 5y ago
Suburbia is a tree. The best residential property is closest to the leaf nodes, since this minimizes through traffic (think cul-de-sac). The best commercial property is closest to the root, since this maximizes it (think McDonalds). The tree empties every morning and fills every night, placing enormous demands on the edges near the root. Those are generally the stroads. Slashing the capacity of a stroad/arterial by turning it to a street would cut off the entire subtree from the world. Homeowners are right to resist that. Their property would be useless. If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping. The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees. To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community. But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.
- farnsworth 5y ago
  The takeaway here is a lesson about how we build cities, not that we should decrease the traffic capacity of some stroads and make no other changes.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    In practice, new cities, when that even happens, doesn't happen out of thin air either, not in the US at least. We don't build cities (too much infrastructure investment required), but even when we do, they don't go from 0-100 mph and go from being a small sleepy town into a city overnight. History of a place thus dictates what the future of it will look like. How we build cities, effectively, involves decreasing traffic capacity in some places. Strongtowns.org has a large number of other changes, not just limiting stroads.
- mcv 5y ago
refurb 5y ago
The truth is there isn't that much demand for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods. They are mostly attractive to young childless adults. Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia. I would say communities like San Mateo or Belmont on the peninsula are what's in demand. Small "cute" downtowns with trendy shops and dining, but also enough parking so you can drive, surrounded by single family homes, big parks and open spaces and mixed multi-unit apartments/condos. People can have the benefits of their own property, exclusive space and enough space for a family, while enjoying a "downtown" experience when they want to. “California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,”[1] [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-inland-cities-in-a-mass-pandemic-era-exodus-11637521731 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-...
- noobermin 5y ago
  This is patently false given how expensive housing in cities is. It does vary but walkable neighborhoods can be pretty expensive in North America.
- quadrangle 5y ago
  It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want. Demand-driven economy has a place, but it's definitely not something to accept simplistically. Famous examples: people wanted better horse-carriages and didn't anticipate cars. People wanted better keyboards on their blackberry-style phones, not an iPhone. Etc etc. Nobody who experiences life in the Netherlands where biking and walking is actually safe ends up wishing they could return to stroad-style car-dependency. Everyone who says they prefer it is just saying that they don't know any better. And any appeal to saying we have to keep making dangerous garbage sprawl because that's what people demand, that's disengenuous nonsense. Strong Towns actually has the answer to this, the one that doesn't involve being condescending to people in sprawlville, USA. They point out that EVERYONE when you ask them about their priorities, especially for the streets where they live, they always say they care about safety, capacity, cost, and speed, basically in that order. But engineering assumptions put it more like speed, capacity, cost, safety. (Wish I could give you the optimal link, but the one thing Strong Towns is weakest at is making it easy to find the right links in their enormous backlog of articles; the site search tool is really annoying; I know the concepts I'm mentioning are discussed multiple places, including in their two books)
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
> There is a very toxic self centered car culture here; any impediment to it real or imaginary will make people very angry. I have seen more comments and people talking about this toxic car culture than seen it in real life. Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. There is a historic racial divide. White folks live in more bike friendly places. https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycling-76256 https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl... https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/uncomfortable-facts-about-biking-and-minorities/316886/ https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
- detaro 5y ago
  Are you suggesting it's impossible to have cars while not having a "very toxic self centered car culture"? Also, bikes are not the only or natural alternative to cars.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Not everyone is young enough (or old enough!) or healthy enough or rich enough to drive a car either. That's exactly the point of people advocating for less car-centric infrastructure. Walkable neighborhoods and public transit are much more inclusive.
- irdc 5y ago
  As a Dutch person: everybody bikes here. Young people, old people (sometimes with electrical assist bikes), women, men, people with and without an immigration background. It's the money sink that is a car that's the real privilege.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. In the same way curb cuts improved the well being of way more than people in wheelchair, good, grade-separated walking and biking infrastructure makes moving around much easier and safer for way more than just cyclists. Not everyone is young, healthy, and rich enough to be able to own and operate a 2.5t vehicle at high speed. And where walkers, wheelchairs, and other assisting devices can mix with little difficulty with bike traffic, that’s not the case with high-speed road traffic.

dghlsakjg 5y ago

The cognitive dissonance is wild. The busiest and most economically vibrant areas in the US are the ones that deprioritize cars (main streets, downtowns, outdoor malls, bar districts). But if you try to change an existing area into a less car friendly area people absolutely lose their heads

SantalBlush 5y ago
I truly believe the reason has more to do with being antisocial than anyone cares to admit. It's not always the car's mobility that people enjoy so much as the barrier it creates from the outside world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 5y ago
  Socialization needs norms. It’s no accident that relatively urbanized civilizations have relatively strict codes of behavior. America’s wild and free frontier spirit, God bless it, is less fun in a crowded subway.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    And soul crushing traffic is wild and free? Or suburban strip malls are wild and free? Or endless cul de sacs? There is a lot of imposed structure to suburbia too, specifically because it is planned.
    - mcv 5y ago
      In fact, it has more imposed structure, exactly because of the unreasonably restrictive zoning laws in the US. Allow more variety and you get more choice.
asdff 5y ago
There's no cognitive dissonance here really. People are just self interested. They don't want a bunch of bars because that means people will drive drunk and piss and puke all over their property stumbling back after last call. They don't want fewer lanes because its just going to turn their commute from work into even more of a bottleneck. They don't want a mall built near them because of the traffic bottlenecks it would create, but they want a fast road to get to a mall at just enough distance away to not be affected by these issues themselves.
- noobermin 5y ago
  The "less lanes means bottle neck" bit is not even true due to induced demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  - asdff 5y ago
    It's definitely true in certain cases, induced demand is not some law of physics. Take a one lane road and a two lane road. It's pretty common for one lane roads to end up clogged up due to left turning traffic that's unable to clear intersections fast enough. On a two lane road, traffic that goes straight or right will have room two maneuver around the left turning traffic. And on top of that, planners for highways are really planning for throughput rather than commuting times. When you widen a freeway, speeds don't change or might even go down, but total throughput goes up accordingly and that's whats important when you have a mile of trucks backed up at your port.
- mcv 5y ago
  If they're afraid that a mall will create traffic bottlenecks, maybe build those malls so they're easy to reach on foot, by bike, or with public transport. That way you don't get that traffic bottleneck.
  - asdff 5y ago
    People buy shopping carts worth of stuff at malls. That's not exactly easy to schlep on a bike or a bus for most people especially if you are in poor shape. A lot of people in the U.S. today live in walkable areas, but opt to just take a climate controlled car with a spacious trunk 5 mins to the grocery store vs walk 15 minutes one way and back with 25 pounds of groceries in poor weather.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Right, but like everything else in the US right now, the split is obvious along political lines. People who like cities are left, people who like suburbs/rural living/driving everywhere are right.
- greenn 5y ago
  Huh, guess I'm "right" then. Weird that my voting history would indicate otherwise, but I don't like city living so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

maxerickson 5y ago

My favorite example of this is something I saw in a local bicycle planning study. A 4 lane stretch about 6 blocks long was converted to 2 lanes with parking and wider sidewalks (with the idea that people will naturally drive a bit slower with less of the street devoted to traffic). Someone was livid that it had happened, ranting about delays at the light on one end of the stretch. At busy times, the typical wait at the light is for the green (so not even a full cycle). Very occasionally a couple of cars don't make the busiest left on the first green.

csnover 5y ago

It was interesting for me to learn how this process happened in Copenhagen and Groningen in the 1960s and 1970s—people were angry, they protested, made death threats.[0] So it seems like re-pedestrianising areas has always made some people very angry everywhere, and that anger may not be so unique or significant a barrier as it might initially seem. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXNVnftaNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlXNVnftaNs

himinlomax 5y ago
Just a few years ago, when Paris decided to pedestrianize (or rather restrict traffic on) rue des Rosiers, a small, commercial street in a historically Jewish neighborhood, shop owners were strongly opposed to it. When the work was completed, foot traffic in the shops doubled almost overnight. You can easily tell by the fact that long queues pop up in front of fallafel shops and delis at peak business hours that overflow in the street and that wouldn't have fit before on the tiny sidewalks. People are scared of change, even when the benefits are quite obvious. At least it was obvious to me when I was handed an hyperbolic leaflet opposing the change before it was done: I knew pedestrian streets were beneficial to shops, the area has no lack of transportation being in the center of Paris, there's no parking nearby, and you don't get in a car to go buy a damn sandwich in Paris unless you're completely fucking insane.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  This is similar in the town in Germany where I grew up. When I was a kid they converted the central part of the inner city into a walking mall, no cars allowed (except for delivery traffic outside of certain hours). The shop owners were up in arms, saying it would be the death of the city, everyone would go shopping at big malls outside of town etc.. The exact opposite happened, the city is absolutely packed, people come from far to go shopping there, cafe's everywhere. Ironically, the city is considering expanding the pedestrian zones and shop owners are bringing forth the same arguments they did 30 years ago, as if they didn't learn anything.

closeparen 5y ago

Suburbia is a tree. The best residential property is closest to the leaf nodes, since this minimizes through traffic (think cul-de-sac). The best commercial property is closest to the root, since this maximizes it (think McDonalds). The tree empties every morning and fills every night, placing enormous demands on the edges near the root. Those are generally the stroads. Slashing the capacity of a stroad/arterial by turning it to a street would cut off the entire subtree from the world. Homeowners are right to resist that. Their property would be useless. If we’re fighting stroads, those have to become roads. One way to get this done is simply banish the businesses. But this strains capacity on the arterials even worse, since you now need to leave the suburb to go shopping. The other way is to push businesses down the tree, closer to houses, more decentralized. But the residents won’t abide that either, on the theory that businesses will attract traffic to their sub-trees. To that I say: get over it. It’s utterly insane to have a whole street for the private use of a few dozen families. It’s literally impossible to make arterials big enough to compensate. You can have your street slow, but it’s going to be part of a network and it’s going to be used by more than just the hyper local community. But of course they don’t see this as particularly less bad than total isolation, so they won’t allow it either. The whole thing is fucked.

farnsworth 5y ago
The takeaway here is a lesson about how we build cities, not that we should decrease the traffic capacity of some stroads and make no other changes.
- fragmede 5y ago
  In practice, new cities, when that even happens, doesn't happen out of thin air either, not in the US at least. We don't build cities (too much infrastructure investment required), but even when we do, they don't go from 0-100 mph and go from being a small sleepy town into a city overnight. History of a place thus dictates what the future of it will look like. How we build cities, effectively, involves decreasing traffic capacity in some places. Strongtowns.org has a large number of other changes, not just limiting stroads.
mcv 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

The truth is there isn't that much demand for high density housing and walkable neighborhoods. They are mostly attractive to young childless adults. Some of them stick around once they have kids, but it's rare and usually reserved for the well-off who can afford private schools and family-sized homes. In SF you've got the parents who are happy to put their kids and groceries on the back of their bike, but most look to find something a bit closer to suburbia. I would say communities like San Mateo or Belmont on the peninsula are what's in demand. Small "cute" downtowns with trendy shops and dining, but also enough parking so you can drive, surrounded by single family homes, big parks and open spaces and mixed multi-unit apartments/condos. People can have the benefits of their own property, exclusive space and enough space for a family, while enjoying a "downtown" experience when they want to. “California is changing because of a desire of many millions of people to have something that looks like the conventional, traditional California Dream: a house on a lot in a neighborhood of similar houses on lots,”[1] [1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-inland-cities-in-a-mass-pandemic-era-exodus-11637521731 https://www.wsj.com/articles/californians-flee-the-coast-to-...

noobermin 5y ago
This is patently false given how expensive housing in cities is. It does vary but walkable neighborhoods can be pretty expensive in North America.
quadrangle 5y ago
It's mostly a case of people not knowing what they really want. Demand-driven economy has a place, but it's definitely not something to accept simplistically. Famous examples: people wanted better horse-carriages and didn't anticipate cars. People wanted better keyboards on their blackberry-style phones, not an iPhone. Etc etc. Nobody who experiences life in the Netherlands where biking and walking is actually safe ends up wishing they could return to stroad-style car-dependency. Everyone who says they prefer it is just saying that they don't know any better. And any appeal to saying we have to keep making dangerous garbage sprawl because that's what people demand, that's disengenuous nonsense. Strong Towns actually has the answer to this, the one that doesn't involve being condescending to people in sprawlville, USA. They point out that EVERYONE when you ask them about their priorities, especially for the streets where they live, they always say they care about safety, capacity, cost, and speed, basically in that order. But engineering assumptions put it more like speed, capacity, cost, safety. (Wish I could give you the optimal link, but the one thing Strong Towns is weakest at is making it easy to find the right links in their enormous backlog of articles; the site search tool is really annoying; I know the concepts I'm mentioning are discussed multiple places, including in their two books)

cscurmudgeon 5y ago

> There is a very toxic self centered car culture here; any impediment to it real or imaginary will make people very angry. I have seen more comments and people talking about this toxic car culture than seen it in real life. Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. There is a historic racial divide. White folks live in more bike friendly places. https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycling-76256 https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl... https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/uncomfortable-facts-about-biking-and-minorities/316886/ https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

detaro 5y ago
Are you suggesting it's impossible to have cars while not having a "very toxic self centered car culture"? Also, bikes are not the only or natural alternative to cars.
adrianN 5y ago
Not everyone is young enough (or old enough!) or healthy enough or rich enough to drive a car either. That's exactly the point of people advocating for less car-centric infrastructure. Walkable neighborhoods and public transit are much more inclusive.
irdc 5y ago
As a Dutch person: everybody bikes here. Young people, old people (sometimes with electrical assist bikes), women, men, people with and without an immigration background. It's the money sink that is a car that's the real privilege.
masklinn 5y ago
> Not everyone is young, healthy and rich enough to bike. In the same way curb cuts improved the well being of way more than people in wheelchair, good, grade-separated walking and biking infrastructure makes moving around much easier and safer for way more than just cyclists. Not everyone is young, healthy, and rich enough to be able to own and operate a 2.5t vehicle at high speed. And where walkers, wheelchairs, and other assisting devices can mix with little difficulty with bike traffic, that’s not the case with high-speed road traffic.