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The US has lots of "self sufficient" (in that you can live in walking distance and do all your retail, grocery, cafes on foot) micro-areas like that. They're ca

The US has lots of "self sufficient" (in that you can live in walking distance and do all your retail, grocery, cafes on foot) micro-areas like that. They're called more like "mixed use malls," though. So yeah, that's not exactly what a "superblock" is - because very few of them exist without parking. Doing both parking + easily walkable gets expensive. Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. All that to say: if the superblocks don't solve the need-for-a-car problem, they aren't gonna do much for the traffic or car-centric problem. And a mall surrounded by parking garages isn't exactly the walkable old European city people are wanting. So we're back to needing transit first. And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.

crooked-v 4y ago
> Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. You seem to be stretching really hard here to try and conflate "no driving through them middle of the superblock" and "people in the superblock aren't allowed to have cars", but those aren't the same thing at all. You just put the parking in centralized places at the edge of the superblock, where economy of scale can apply.
- majormajor 4y ago
  That's not the point I'm trying to make. If everyone still needs cars, you gotta put them somewhere. And the roads have to be big enough to accomodate the commuting and the inter-block traffic. If you put them on the perimeter and route the cars around the perimeter, you don't have a walkable city, you have a car-centric city of high-traffic roads people drive on to walk around little walkable islands. *Same even if you put them under the superblock.* Tons of these sorts of mini-downtown walkable areas in LA, for instance, but nobody's calling LA walkable. Transit, transit, transit. You can't superblock your way around the need for it. "Walking to a car to drive to another part of town" instead of "Walking to a train to get to another part of town" is going to give you a dramatically different experience, since one of those is far, far more friendly to low-density SFH surrounding development than the other.
mplewis 4y ago
Yes, you do still need the superblocks. A city with cars on the "walkable streets" isn't actually very walkable. You really need to spend some significant time in a walkable city outside of the US to see the difference it makes.
richk449 4y ago
I love how Americans insist that systems not designed around cars won’t work to the people who are happily living in the systems not designed around cars.
- rjbwork 4y ago
  I think it's more an argument about how to refactor from one to the other. If you think of the current state of US vs European cities, you can think of it it as a long series of decisions in a tree, where largely EU has taken one path, and US has taken quite another divergent path. It's somewhat obvious how to go from village, to hamlet, to town, to city with horses, to city with trams, to cities with a modern multi-facted public transit system. It's also pretty obvious how to go from horses to car dependent hellscape. It's not quite so obvious how to go from an extremely car-dependent hellscape like Houston or Atlanta or LA, to a walkable and bikable city with a modern public transit system like Amsterdam or London or Berlin. I'm kind of overselling the thesis here some, because from one perspective, the Netherlands did go from quite car dependent to its current state in the past 50 years...on the other, the Atlanta and Houston metros each have 1/3 the population of the entire Netherlands and LA has 2/3. Anyway, point being, the disbelief is in refactoring from Houston/Atlanta/LA to non-car designed cities, not so much in understanding how they can exist in the first place.
lmm 4y ago
If you don't start by pushing the cars out of the neighbourhoods and making them more human-friendly then transit is DoA - no-one will choose transit over driving door-to-door when they don't have to pay for the externalities of the latter. Yes, you probably do have to include some amount of parking at the edges of the superblock initially, and you probably have to build up your transit network in tandem with making your city more walkable. But small walkable neighbourhoods that you gradually expand are the only way to bootstrap it. Note that you don't have to replace car commuting to reduce car use on the margins. Most car journeys are short, e.g. going to the nearest shop, or taking children to/from school, and a superblock with parking on the edge can mean people don't drive for those journeys even if they still commute by car. Getting a household to go from 2 cars to 1 is just as much of a win as getting a 1-car household to eliminate it completely. > And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars. Such as? Where I live (Tokyo) most streets are "open" to cars in that a car can drive down them, but they're narrow with low speed limits and cars are expected to give way to pedestrians, which is much the same as on the inside of a superblock. You can't make a walkable city without putting walkers first.
crote 4y ago
Superblocks make it possible to separate high-speed and low-speed traffic: cars go in between superblocks while bikes go through them. This makes it way faster and safer to travel by bike, making it a viable method of commuting. Furthermore, the increased walkability reduces the number of bus stops needed and makes it way easier to construct bus lanes - which can get absolute priority at crossings. Walkable cities which are open to cars are a contradiction. Cars are absolutely massive and need a disproportionate amount of space. As long as you need to sacrifice half your neighborhood to cars, it is not going to become walkable.
hbosch 4y ago
>Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. This problem is solved by public transit.

crooked-v 4y ago

> Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. You seem to be stretching really hard here to try and conflate "no driving through them middle of the superblock" and "people in the superblock aren't allowed to have cars", but those aren't the same thing at all. You just put the parking in centralized places at the edge of the superblock, where economy of scale can apply.

majormajor 4y ago
That's not the point I'm trying to make. If everyone still needs cars, you gotta put them somewhere. And the roads have to be big enough to accomodate the commuting and the inter-block traffic. If you put them on the perimeter and route the cars around the perimeter, you don't have a walkable city, you have a car-centric city of high-traffic roads people drive on to walk around little walkable islands. *Same even if you put them under the superblock.* Tons of these sorts of mini-downtown walkable areas in LA, for instance, but nobody's calling LA walkable. Transit, transit, transit. You can't superblock your way around the need for it. "Walking to a car to drive to another part of town" instead of "Walking to a train to get to another part of town" is going to give you a dramatically different experience, since one of those is far, far more friendly to low-density SFH surrounding development than the other.

mplewis 4y ago

Yes, you do still need the superblocks. A city with cars on the "walkable streets" isn't actually very walkable. You really need to spend some significant time in a walkable city outside of the US to see the difference it makes.

richk449 4y ago

I love how Americans insist that systems not designed around cars won’t work to the people who are happily living in the systems not designed around cars.

rjbwork 4y ago
I think it's more an argument about how to refactor from one to the other. If you think of the current state of US vs European cities, you can think of it it as a long series of decisions in a tree, where largely EU has taken one path, and US has taken quite another divergent path. It's somewhat obvious how to go from village, to hamlet, to town, to city with horses, to city with trams, to cities with a modern multi-facted public transit system. It's also pretty obvious how to go from horses to car dependent hellscape. It's not quite so obvious how to go from an extremely car-dependent hellscape like Houston or Atlanta or LA, to a walkable and bikable city with a modern public transit system like Amsterdam or London or Berlin. I'm kind of overselling the thesis here some, because from one perspective, the Netherlands did go from quite car dependent to its current state in the past 50 years...on the other, the Atlanta and Houston metros each have 1/3 the population of the entire Netherlands and LA has 2/3. Anyway, point being, the disbelief is in refactoring from Houston/Atlanta/LA to non-car designed cities, not so much in understanding how they can exist in the first place.

lmm 4y ago

If you don't start by pushing the cars out of the neighbourhoods and making them more human-friendly then transit is DoA - no-one will choose transit over driving door-to-door when they don't have to pay for the externalities of the latter. Yes, you probably do have to include some amount of parking at the edges of the superblock initially, and you probably have to build up your transit network in tandem with making your city more walkable. But small walkable neighbourhoods that you gradually expand are the only way to bootstrap it. Note that you don't have to replace car commuting to reduce car use on the margins. Most car journeys are short, e.g. going to the nearest shop, or taking children to/from school, and a superblock with parking on the edge can mean people don't drive for those journeys even if they still commute by car. Getting a household to go from 2 cars to 1 is just as much of a win as getting a 1-car household to eliminate it completely. > And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars. Such as? Where I live (Tokyo) most streets are "open" to cars in that a car can drive down them, but they're narrow with low speed limits and cars are expected to give way to pedestrians, which is much the same as on the inside of a superblock. You can't make a walkable city without putting walkers first.

crote 4y ago

Superblocks make it possible to separate high-speed and low-speed traffic: cars go in between superblocks while bikes go through them. This makes it way faster and safer to travel by bike, making it a viable method of commuting. Furthermore, the increased walkability reduces the number of bus stops needed and makes it way easier to construct bus lanes - which can get absolute priority at crossings. Walkable cities which are open to cars are a contradiction. Cars are absolutely massive and need a disproportionate amount of space. As long as you need to sacrifice half your neighborhood to cars, it is not going to become walkable.

hbosch 4y ago

>Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks. This problem is solved by public transit.