7 ms·

I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wis

by bedobi 5y ago

I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)

tinco 5y ago
Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  It also took them the better part of several decades. Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      You don't need outward collective action, really. We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
- thanatos519 5y ago
  It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9069311,177m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.
xwolfi 5y ago
Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose). Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.
- BishopOfTurkey 5y ago
  I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts. For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car. Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.
  - post_from_work 5y ago
    >>>For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car. But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available..... Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well! POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.
null_object 5y ago
> I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London. Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout. Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.
- bedobi 5y ago
  Add it to the long list of popular misconceptions about Sweden in general, most of which are held by the Swedes themselves, lol.
  - dijit 5y ago
    It’s not all of Sweden though. I live in Malmo and I haven’t felt the need to drive at all. There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward. I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.
    - null_object 5y ago
      The city council in Stockholm in the 60s had a plan to empty what they saw was the slum-center of the town, the residents of which they felt were morally degenerate, and move them out to the suburbs. The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since. Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.
- cjblomqvist 5y ago
smcl 5y ago
These US vs EU cities discussions appear a lot on HN and when I see people lamenting that their European city is too car-centric I always wonder if they mean a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is b) their city is completely unlivable without a car Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).
- ido 5y ago
  Depends which city but it’s A for decent sized cities in central/north/Western Europe (less so for eastern and Southern Europe although major cities there will also be like that). Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece. But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Public transport is not utopia, yes you can go everywhere but you'll be squeezed in with 50 other people (or worse) in a can.
  - smcl 5y ago
    I regularly go "in a can" (tram) with more than 50 other people and it's really quite comfortable and pleasant.
- bedobi 5y ago
  In the case of Stockholm, public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between. livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)

by bedobi 5y ago

tinco 5y ago

Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.

bobthepanda 5y ago
It also took them the better part of several decades. Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  The US can't even imagine the collective attention span required to achieve this.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    You don't need outward collective action, really. We remade our cities in favor of cars, mostly through applying changes to engineering standards. We could do it again, but the current engineering establishment doesn't want to change in many cases. (They had an easier time applying their standards, because by and large no codified standards existed before them.)
thanatos519 5y ago
It just keeps getting better! The next step is to eliminate car thoroughfare entirely, e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9069311,177m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Hortusbrug/@52.3673495,4.9... which as of a few years ago only has tram, bicycle, and pedestrian access.

xwolfi 5y ago

Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe the rest by train (but again, train multiply cost for a group when car divides it so hard to choose). Now I live in Hong Kong, bought a 1998 Porsche 911 that guzzled gas and spat good smoke, that cost me so much in eco tax and gas tax (the same thing, really) for so little use I gave up and am car-free now :D Cant wait for massive electric cars adoption where the discussion will move away from how we murder the world for fleeting amusement, and back to transport convenience and pleasure to drive. But Im sure we ll find problems with Lithium mining or whatever.

BishopOfTurkey 5y ago
I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts. For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car. Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.
- post_from_work 5y ago
  >>>For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car. But cars are not only transportation. They are also secure, climate-controlled semi-private spaces. If I leave a nightclub with a woman at 1am, too far from my home to walk there, trains shut down for the night, no taxis available..... Having extra pocket money to buy train tickets is useless in such scenarios. If I have my own privately-owned vehicle (POV), I can bang the woman in the back seat, in the club parking lot. And I sure as shit don't want to "car share" with anybody ELSE inclined to do so as well! POV ownership is like having insurance: it's often underutilized but when you REALLY need it for those rare edge cases, it's worth its weight in gold.

null_object 5y ago

> I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I’m really glad to see this because I moved from central London to central Stockholm 20 years ago and no one believes me when I tell them I find this town more car-centric even than London. Away from the tourist areas, everything in Stockholm is arranged around the free-flow of traffic - from the phase of traffic lights, the dimensions of the roads vs pavements, to the sheer design of the street layout. Unfortunately the car-mania of the 1960s and 70s still survives here, which is dangerous for kids and enervating to live with, and such a contrast to other European towns.

bedobi 5y ago
Add it to the long list of popular misconceptions about Sweden in general, most of which are held by the Swedes themselves, lol.
- dijit 5y ago
  It’s not all of Sweden though. I live in Malmo and I haven’t felt the need to drive at all. There are people who drive of course by the bulk of the city feels like it’s for the pedestrians and cyclists, and driving through the city itself is simply awkward. I moved here from London. If that helps lay context.
  - null_object 5y ago
    The city council in Stockholm in the 60s had a plan to empty what they saw was the slum-center of the town, the residents of which they felt were morally degenerate, and move them out to the suburbs. The working classes would then commute into work on public transport, while ‘fine’ office workers would take their car. The cachet attached to traveling by car has never been lost, and any attempt to curtail car use is always met with enormous resistance ever since. Looking at pictures of Stockholm in the 40s and 50s one can see the streets were full of cyclists.
cjblomqvist 5y ago

smcl 5y ago

These US vs EU cities discussions appear a lot on HN and when I see people lamenting that their European city is too car-centric I always wonder if they mean a) their city is not the public transport utopia people want to believe it is b) their city is completely unlivable without a car Because this is quite important distinction - I suspect that many Europeans want to convey point a) but are potentially being understood as saying point b).

ido 5y ago
Depends which city but it’s A for decent sized cities in central/north/Western Europe (less so for eastern and Southern Europe although major cities there will also be like that). Even midsized towns in Germany, Austria & Switzerland will be pretty doable without a car. In less affluent countries like Poland and Czechia (I have lots of friends in both and lots of relatives in the latter) outside the major cities people expect to drive (it might still be possible just less convenient than in the German speaking countries to rely on transit). I have Greek friends who say it’s similarly inconvenient in many parts of Greece. But I suspect almost nowhere urban in Europe will be completely unlivable without a car.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Public transport is not utopia, yes you can go everywhere but you'll be squeezed in with 50 other people (or worse) in a can.
- smcl 5y ago
  I regularly go "in a can" (tram) with more than 50 other people and it's really quite comfortable and pleasant.
bedobi 5y ago
In the case of Stockholm, public transport is better than places like LA and Brisbane Australia (which isn't saying much), but hilariously bad compared to Tokyo and London. So it's somewhere in between. livability without a car likewise is OK in inner city and immediate surroundings, but quickly gets a lot worse the further out you get. (unlike eg Tokyo, where even suburbs very far from the inner city are very convenient and liveable without a car)