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Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. But in a way that's worse beca

Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm. But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? I've been to towns with trams in the middle of roads and it's normal for people to just walk around it or near the tracks without problem. But I am a stupid tourist so I kept my distance.

aqme28 4y ago
> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
- rzwitserloot 4y ago
  And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade. For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence. Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years. However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable. Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere. A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated. And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla. Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this: 1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent. 2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there. 3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with. It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper. Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work. And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
  - msrenee 4y ago
    If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road. The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
  - ska 4y ago
    >Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today" Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently. The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
- matthewfcarlson 4y ago
  I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any expense, especially here in America where the car-centric attitude is so deeply embedded.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them? Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
  - bluejekyll 4y ago
    Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same. You then can live in a bike friendly city.
    - jcpst 4y ago
      I second this. And here’s proof it’s possible. It took a while, but we now have a part of the city that is designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/community_development/neighborhoods/lenexa_city_center https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/co...
- abirch 4y ago
  I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs to the cities, but then people can use public transportation and bikes in the cities.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train stations that take them to the city.
    - trothamel 4y ago
      Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving a car. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times.html https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the point of the entire thread, I think.
      - abirch 4y ago
        With more self driving cars there should be fewer accidents which translates to even faster driving times.
      - jeremyjacob 4y ago
        That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        In São Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam. None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo? The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more automobile-centric days of the 1970s?
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.
- xg15 4y ago
  True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation. Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.
  - woile 4y ago
    Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      It's possible that the cyclists are only hazardous in the touristy and busy old city. I had no trouble walking in the less-dense areas.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    Where do you get your data from?
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Anecdotal but firsthand.
  - ska 4y ago
    I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just doesn't match my experience at all. Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.
- throwawaycuriou 4y ago
  Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam made?
  - erwincoumans 4y ago
    Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in-the-1970s-what-changed/ https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-dutch-made-utrecht-a-bicycle-first-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
  - roeles 4y ago
    Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM
scrollaway 4y ago
Indeed it wasn’t always this way. And this mindset plagued more countries. The Netherlands narrowly avoided it: https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI
masklinn 4y ago
> Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. Couldn't have been since US cities (at least on the east coast) predate the very existence of cars. > But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm. Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface. > But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases). And streetcars generally keep to pretty low speed (bike range) in pedestrian areas. You can see what it looks like in low-speed / pedestrian streets of europe, where streetcars are pretty common e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface. In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful. America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Nonsense. The ability to walk doesn't a pedestrian make" in the context of the discussion, and having to walk from the parking lot to the store and back isn't a pedestrian activity. > Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful. I didn't decide of the historical events of a hundred years ago mate. > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century. Even worse, completely ahistorical, nonsense. Long-term infrastructural decisions are rarely decided directly by voters (as Robert Moses knew and leveraged), and furthermore can often be swayed by short terms concerns.
Sharlin 4y ago
Surely it would have been difficult to be hostile towards walking at a time when walking was the only mode of transport readily available to most people?
iso1631 4y ago
I was in Birmingham for a couple of weeks, the squares and streets with trams (not busses, taxis, and other nonsense like oxford street in London) are great -- the tram is only every few minutes, you can easily hear it, you know exactly where it's going and where it stops, and through the pedestrian area it travels slowly.
jt2190 4y ago
> … trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? Horse manure was a huge problem on city streets. (Trams we’re originally horse-drawn.) > According to the 89th Annual Report of the Board of Health, nearly 500 tones of horse manure were collected from the streets of New York every day, produced by 62,208 horses living in 1,307 stables. https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure Edit: A more in-depth article https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-of-life-with-horses-in-cities/ https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-...
soneil 4y ago
I've never had a problem walking around trams, they're incredibly predictable. And horses (as vehicles) are the level of intelligence we're hoping to get self-driving vehicles back to - they don't actually want to run you over.
Voline 4y ago
Take a look: Rare film of Market Street in San Francisco in 1906. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9XXbKuYfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9XXbKuYfA
heavyset_go 4y ago
Philadelphia used to have extensive electric trolley systems that went down pretty much every street[1]. [1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png
joe_the_user 4y ago
Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. Well, the article is more saying the average person in cities was car hostile but it notes that authorities starting trying to force people to adapt to cars quite early by enforcing "jay-walking" ordinances and similar things.
asdff 4y ago
It was trams and horses and people and early cars. It was pure chaos, almost like images you see from countries without strong traffic laws. Here was downtown LA: https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/images/2019-01/Downtown%20Los%20Angeles%20April%201910.jpg https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/image... As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).

aqme28 4y ago

> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.

rzwitserloot 4y ago
And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade. For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence. Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years. However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable. Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere. A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated. And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla. Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this: 1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent. 2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there. 3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with. It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper. Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work. And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.
- msrenee 4y ago
  If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road. The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
- ska 4y ago
  >Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, "The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today" Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently. The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
matthewfcarlson 4y ago
I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any expense, especially here in America where the car-centric attitude is so deeply embedded.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them? Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
- bluejekyll 4y ago
  Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same. You then can live in a bike friendly city.
  - jcpst 4y ago
    I second this. And here’s proof it’s possible. It took a while, but we now have a part of the city that is designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/community_development/neighborhoods/lenexa_city_center https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/co...
abirch 4y ago
I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs to the cities, but then people can use public transportation and bikes in the cities.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train stations that take them to the city.
  - trothamel 4y ago
    Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving a car. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times.html https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the point of the entire thread, I think.
    - abirch 4y ago
      With more self driving cars there should be fewer accidents which translates to even faster driving times.
    - jeremyjacob 4y ago
      That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      In São Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam. None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo? The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.
spamizbad 4y ago
Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more automobile-centric days of the 1970s?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.
xg15 4y ago
True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation. Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
nerdponx 4y ago
On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.
- woile 4y ago
  Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    It's possible that the cyclists are only hazardous in the touristy and busy old city. I had no trouble walking in the less-dense areas.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  Where do you get your data from?
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Anecdotal but firsthand.
- ska 4y ago
  I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just doesn't match my experience at all. Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.
throwawaycuriou 4y ago
Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam made?
- erwincoumans 4y ago
  Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in-the-1970s-what-changed/ https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-dutch-made-utrecht-a-bicycle-first-city https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
- roeles 4y ago
  Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM

scrollaway 4y ago

Indeed it wasn’t always this way. And this mindset plagued more countries. The Netherlands narrowly avoided it: https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI https://youtu.be/vI5pbDFDZyI

masklinn 4y ago

> Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong. Couldn't have been since US cities (at least on the east coast) predate the very existence of cars. > But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm. Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface. > But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases). And streetcars generally keep to pretty low speed (bike range) in pedestrian areas. You can see what it looks like in low-speed / pedestrian streets of europe, where streetcars are pretty common e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface. In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful. America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Nonsense. The ability to walk doesn't a pedestrian make" in the context of the discussion, and having to walk from the parking lot to the store and back isn't a pedestrian activity. > Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful. I didn't decide of the historical events of a hundred years ago mate. > America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century. Even worse, completely ahistorical, nonsense. Long-term infrastructural decisions are rarely decided directly by voters (as Robert Moses knew and leveraged), and furthermore can often be swayed by short terms concerns.

Sharlin 4y ago

Surely it would have been difficult to be hostile towards walking at a time when walking was the only mode of transport readily available to most people?

iso1631 4y ago

I was in Birmingham for a couple of weeks, the squares and streets with trams (not busses, taxis, and other nonsense like oxford street in London) are great -- the tram is only every few minutes, you can easily hear it, you know exactly where it's going and where it stops, and through the pedestrian area it travels slowly.

jt2190 4y ago

> … trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? Horse manure was a huge problem on city streets. (Trams we’re originally horse-drawn.) > According to the 89th Annual Report of the Board of Health, nearly 500 tones of horse manure were collected from the streets of New York every day, produced by 62,208 horses living in 1,307 stables. https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure Edit: A more in-depth article https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-of-life-with-horses-in-cities/ https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-...

soneil 4y ago

I've never had a problem walking around trams, they're incredibly predictable. And horses (as vehicles) are the level of intelligence we're hoping to get self-driving vehicles back to - they don't actually want to run you over.

Voline 4y ago

Take a look: Rare film of Market Street in San Francisco in 1906. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9XXbKuYfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG9XXbKuYfA

heavyset_go 4y ago

Philadelphia used to have extensive electric trolley systems that went down pretty much every street[1]. [1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png

joe_the_user 4y ago

Ouch, so US towns and cities didn't always be hostile towards walking. Well, the article is more saying the average person in cities was car hostile but it notes that authorities starting trying to force people to adapt to cars quite early by enforcing "jay-walking" ordinances and similar things.

asdff 4y ago

It was trams and horses and people and early cars. It was pure chaos, almost like images you see from countries without strong traffic laws. Here was downtown LA: https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/images/2019-01/Downtown%20Los%20Angeles%20April%201910.jpg https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/image... As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).