20 ms·

Cars kill cities

• skrebbel 15y ago
  I think in the Netherlands, we've had this discussion a while ago already. Outcome: cities like Amsterdam have intentionally few parking spaces in the center, and they cost ludicrous amounts of money per hour. People living in the center either complain their asses off, or ditch the car. I'm not sure that this really helped people much. Ditching the car means you can't go visit your grandma in that village without a train station on the other side of the country easily. Keeping the car means everything sucks (super-expensive, no place to put it, takes ages to get from your house to the highway). Real solution: keep the car and move away from the city center, the exact opposite from what the OP is suggesting. Long story short, I doubt there is a simple solution. Back in those wonderful old days, everybody lived 2 miles from their grandmas anyway. (there probably are plenty non-simple solutions though)
  • MetallicCloud 15y ago
    I think in this situation, rental cars would help. If 6 days out of 7 you can do without a car, then spending $50 or whatever it costs to hire a car for the seventh day would make sense. It would take a long time for that to add up to $20,000 - $30,000 people spend to own a car. Not to mention services and other car sundries.
    • darklajid 15y ago
      I agree - maybe because that's exactly what I do. Living in a crowded area near the Tel Aviv port (think shopping, clubs, restaurants and sometimes events) a car would've been a real hassle. In fact: If I'd have decided that I need a car here, this location wouldn't have made sense at all. But I think I can get by without one, most of the time. And given the traffic here I consciously decided that I really don't want to participate on a regular basis anyway. I rent a car for trips across the country if needed, use a bike for the rest. Rarely a bus/shuttle taxi/taxi. Trains are .. well .. kind of pointless for my uses so far. I'm convinced that I save money this way and do 'Something Good' (tm), both for myself and the environment.
      • ido 15y ago
        As an Israeli living abroad (Vienna in my case, have been here for 7 years), the lacking mass transport in Tel Aviv (you can kinda get by without a car, but it's not easy and as you say even if you live in a central location you still need a car sometimes) is my most major reason to not even consider Tel Aviv a real option right now (neither me nor my girlfriend have driving licenses or the will to ever have a car). Even just dropping the silly no-transit-on-saturday rule would be a huge improvement (then you could actually get pretty much anywhere you need to, just not very quickly and you'd have to live in a farily central location inside Tel Aviv proper). This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't? I rent a car for trips across the country if needed How do you visit people outside Tel Aviv on the weekend? Probably my most common ailment in your situation would be that I couldn't easily visit family members and friends even if they live in greater Tel Aviv on weekends, since the buses/trains don't work on Saturdays and shared taxis don't go everywhere.
        • darklajid 15y ago
          So - I have a license and love to drive. But here it is ~different~. The whole traffic 'culture' constantly makes me think that I'd cause accidents here: My Autobahn mindset doesn't translate to the driving behavior here, so I fear that _I_ will crash into someone, someday, because of 'No, he certainly won't do ... BOOM'. Agreed, the Saturday issue is annoying sometimes. You can go by train as far as I am informed (but where to? The options are limited) and the sherut + cab solution works. Bus, (sherut,) cab are ~cheap~ here. In TLV I need no car, never. For shopping it might be annoying sometimes, but that's really just my own lazyness, I think. Renting cars: I don't need one without planning ahead. If I do that, I can easily rent it in advance (ignoring the Saturday issue again). In the greater area I still try to use the bike. A car is for visits to the dead sea, to Haifa, Jerusalem (train works just as well though) etc. I don't have family here and friends are ~local~, i.e. TLV, Ramat Gan, Ramat Aviv etc. => Bike
        • llcoolv 15y ago
          This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't? Can you provide some source? Since, at least according to EUROSTAT the Prague NUTS-2 Region is in EU's top 10[1] and Tel Aviv is not even in the Middle East's top 10. Also, a lot of the machinery for the Czech mass transit systems (trams, trolleybuses, metro trains, Esko (commuter) trains, buses, fare collection systems) is produced locally, thus directly contributing to the economy. Israel just doesn't have those centuries of excellent tradition in machine-engineering and construction. 1. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/1-18022010-AP/EN/1-18022010-AP-EN.PDF http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_PUBLIC/1-18022010...
    • llimllib 15y ago
      > $20,000 - $30,000 people spend to own a car Yearly? That seems high. My car is paid off and I pay nothing for parking (other than whatever portion of my steep Baltimore City property taxes pays for it). Anyway, let's say I drive 8000 miles in a year, my car gets 30 mpg and gas is $4 a gallon. 8000/30=267 gallons * 4 = $1068 per year on gas. My car's paid off, but I bought it 5 years ago for $10k, so let's just amortize that evenly per year, and assume it will die at the end of the year, and say I paid $2k per year for it. My maintenance in the past year has been minimal; I think my greatest cost was replacing a headlamp. (knock on wood). Let's say $250 just to be conservative. Let's add another $250 for government taxes, fees, etc. Therefore, in the last year, my car cost me about 1068+2000+250+250 = $3568, nearly an order of magnitude less than your assessment.
      • _delirium 15y ago
        I assumed his estimate was for buying a new car, not yearly. Your numbers seem approximately right for yearly, although you also have to add in insurance. I think my maintenance expenses have averaged more like $500 as well, between routine maintenance and an oil change once a year, new tires every 4-5 years, battery change every 3-5 years, and miscellaneous mishaps (had to replace my windshield once after it got hit by a rock when parked in a city).
        • llimllib 15y ago
          Good points both, my insurance is $1300/yr, and if we up the maintenance estimate we get ~$5000/yr. I've been fortunate that my car has run with nearly no repairs, and city living hasn't done much damage to it besides some moron who ran into the bumper and drove off while it was parked. (I assumed it was for buying a new car too, I just wanted to point out that the yearly cost of owning a car is much less than the number he was using.)
      • jedbrown 15y ago
        You might have skipped insurance in your list, but I don't think the parent meant $20k-30k as the yearly cost (because that much is rare), but as the initial purchase price (which is common when buying new).
    • usaar333 15y ago
      I've done the math when I considered switching to zipcar and even here you barely break even. I spend just over $200 a month on my car (amortized maintenance, depreciation, insurance, etc.) before gas, which is pretty much the same number as here. With costs the same, I just go with the option where my car is always outside. `
  • ajju 15y ago
    Couldn't you just rent a car? I haven't been to the Netherlands so may be I am missing something obvious here. In the U.S. now you can rent not just by the day, but also get hourly rentals like Zipcar or peer rentals like GetAround. It is still early days for both those options, but those and similar new developments may make this a much easier problem to solve across the world.
  • noelwelsh 15y ago
    When we lived in London, if we wanted to go somewhere that wasn't well served by rail we'd just rent a car. The couple of hundred pounds we'd spend on car rental was far less than the cost of owning a car. In the Netherlands I'd just cycle there. Nothing is that far away. ;-)
    • hessenwolf 15y ago
      I second this. I rent cars between 5 and 20 weekends a year, and have been doing this for about 6 years. It works out fine. The car is always in perfect condition, and it is not that expensive. It is true though that some trips that do not reach the importance threshold don't happen.
      • stevecooperorg 15y ago
        Also, taxis work well here in my hometown. About £8 will get me to the other side of the city, and a weekend hire costs about £50. I found owning a car, all-in, cost about £200/month (adding up tax, insurance, repair bills, etc) so it's cost-efficient to hire a vehicle when I need it.
    • pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      Before we had our own business (necessitating a vehicle) we spent a couple of years without a car - for 2 people it was always cheaper (sometimes quite a lot) to hire a car than it was to take the train. Such a shame as I generally love travelling by train.
  • hrktb 15y ago
    Japan's solution is to forbid owning a car if you can't prove you have a parking space for it (as a rented space or you own it, choice is yours). It worked pretty well IMO, and car rental was cheap enough to cover the need to see grandma case. BTW Paris is testing the casual car rental strategy also.
    • abracat1 15y ago
      Yes. And in Tokyo transportation is cheap. Taxis only cost 710 yen per kilometer and all trains stop 12h30 at night.
      • kanwisher 15y ago
        Taxis are rather expensive compared to Nyc . Trains are cheap tho
    • Too 15y ago
      It goes even further if i'm not mistaken, you have to prove you have TWO parking spaces, one at home and one at work.
      • hrktb 15y ago
        I didn't know, but it would be logical, yes. The fun part is, there is no strong definition of how much space you need to park a car, you have to prove you can actually park your car in the space you declare. An officer follows you to your parking place, and stands there watching your maneuvers.
      • nandemo 15y ago
        I don't think you have to prove that. In big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, most people use public transport to commute anyway. Although it's not mandatory, in practice every company will reimburse your commuting costs if you take public transportation.
  • arethuza 15y ago
    We live in the center of Edinburgh and the parking in the center of town is split into standard "Pay and Display" and zoned resident-only parking (which we pay a fixed amount per year for). This seems to work fairly well - we have a car that we really don't use that often (my wife and I both walk to work and our son walks to school) but we just keep it parked on one of the residents parking spaces on the street outside our flat. You have to have proof of actually living in the relevant zone to get a residents parking permit - but this is pretty easy to do (they check you against the council tax register).
  • morsch 15y ago
    Others have suggested renting. There's also car sharing, which makes a lot of sense for exactly the situations you suggest. What's more, for a country the size and density of the Netherlands, anybody should be able to visit their Grandma using public transportation (buses, too, not just trains). I'm not saying it's possible right now, but it ought to be.
    • Proleps 15y ago
      It is possible to get everywhere using public transport in the Netherlands, but the time difference is huge. If I use public transport to get to my girlfriends parents house it takes 60 to 90 minutes, if I go by car it takes 30 to 40 minutes.
      • morsch 15y ago
        Okay, I guess I was talking more about "viable" than "possible". Or maybe, it should be viable for 80% of all trips and at least possible for the remaining 20%. I guess you can't realise it for all of them, that's just a consequence of urban sprawl.
      • stdbrouw 15y ago
        I vastly prefer a longer ride in which I have my hands free and can do a little work or read a book, versus being chained to the steering wheel in a car. To each his own, of course.
  • derda 15y ago
    In germany the concept of car-sharing is becoming increasingly popular. Most bigger cities have multiple providers, some are backed by car manufacturers, some are independent. So if you want to pick up lots of beverages for your birthday party next weekend and don't feel like hauling them back in public transport or with your bike, you can just rent a car for x minutes, go shopping, drive home, park it in a reserved place in you neighborhood. The price model of most providers is however not the best for the visit grandma in the countryside problem, but most of those carsharing companies have special tarifs with rental providers, so you can get a relatively cheap car for the weekend. The way it technically works is almost always the same: You sign up and you get an RFID Key Card. You go on the internet or use an App to see if a car is available in your area and book it. You go to the car, open it with you keycard and find the keys in the glovebox. Sometimes you have to put in a PIN first. Some providers have a monthly fee, some just charge the usage. Some Websites for those interested: www.car2go.com - Backed by Daimler - Smart Cars even in some NA cities www.greenwheels.com - indipendent, has been around for ages www.flinkster.de - Backed by Deutsche Bahn (german railways), they also have bikes for rent www.stadtmobil.de www.drive-now.com - Sixt (biggest german rental firm) and BMW - nice 1-series and Minis www.web.quicar.de - Volkswagen got into the business,too + multiple regional projects
    • nmondollot 15y ago
      And also some peer-to-peer players that are gaining a lot of traction. A good overview is available here : http://futureofcarsharing.com/ http://futureofcarsharing.com/
      • cstuder 15y ago
        Wow, that site looks beautiful, amazing HTML5 and CSS-work. The source looks handcoded, apart from Modernizer and jQuery. I wonder how you would event start to design something like that.
        • pre 15y ago
          Yeah, but they've broken my middle-mouse-button and I can't open new tabs on the links. Which is s shame. That seems to be happening more and more.
  • rickmb 15y ago
    You are clearly not living in the city center of Amsterdam. The system works perfectly for people living there: those who want to keep their own car can get a relatively cheap parking permit, and most only use their car for exactly those rare scenarios you've described. It takes 10 minutes to get to the highway. Nobody is complaining, having a car is simply pointless 95% of the time. It's a very simple solution and it works.
    • tintin 15y ago
      Are you living in Amsterdam? You have to wait years for a parking permit. And when you want to park your car you have to drive around minutes before you will find a place to park.
      • furyg3 15y ago
        I live in Amsterdam (I'm an American used to US-car-culture). I have a bike. It lets me go almost anywhere in Amsterdam, cheaper, more easily, and generally faster than any other mode of transportation. Sometimes you get a bit wet. There are a few distances inside the city which are not handy. For those I use the wonderful tram/bus/metro network. Occasionally I'm lazy and don't want to bike, or need to go somewhere strange. Then I grab a car2go (electric smart car, €.30/min, including electricity, insurance, parking anywhere). When I get to my destination I park it anywhere and end the rental. Since moving here, my transportation costs have gone from many-hundreds-of-dollars per month for a car/gas/insurance/repairs/tolls/parking/fines in the US, to around €40 month for a bike, public transport usage, and short-term car rentals. It is much cheaper, and much more convenient, to call a taxi or rent a van when the above options don't fulfill my transportation needs.
        • Ergomane 15y ago
          That mode of living only works if you primarily travel _within_ the city or to a few well-connected cities in the region. Travelling from Amsterdam to places without a train station kinda sucks. In some cases, even travelling to places _with_ a train station takes almost twice as long by public transport.
  • draggnar 15y ago
    or if you are only using it to visit your grandma on the other side of the country, maybe just rent a car for a couple days? or if you have a car that is paid for leave it on the outskirts where it is cheaper and take transit to it?
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  The biggest problem with mass-transit is that most often riders do not want to pay what it actually costs, so they vote for some form of tax-supported subsidy. And that almost inevitably hobbles it, because acquiring new passengers will affect total revenue only a little, whereas conforming to the whims of the public and the local government will affect its revenue a lot. Aside from that, these sorts of analyses ignore the many benefits that cars provide and the many downsides of public transit. You aren't going to get people to switch just by pointing out how much more efficient something is, you have to make it actually better. When I have to commute I prefer to do so by bus, but there are still a ton of use cases for local travel where I would only consider mass transit as an absolute last resort due to the intrinsic advantages/disadvantages.
  • ajju 15y ago
    >Aside from that, these sorts of analyses ignore the many benefits that cars provide and the many downsides of public transit. Actually, the post doesn't ignore the benefits of cars. It says for example that an SUV is a great option for a family of 6 going to the suburbs. Perhaps you had some other benefits in mind?
    • dangrossman 15y ago
      > Perhaps you had some other benefits in mind? How many days can you feed your family on 2 bags of groceries? Gonna carry the new TV you just bought on the bus with you? I can't imagine doing normal shopping without a car.
      • ajju 15y ago
        >How many days can you feed your family on 2 bags of groceries? 4 of us actually live 2 blocks from the grocery store and I think someone gets a couple of bags every other day. The "10 bags of groceries" shopping trip is actually an effect of cars (and suburbanization). When cities are walkable, grocery stores are nearby too. I think it's obvious that just like a family of 6 can't fit on a bicycle and would need a SUV to go to Florida, you'd need a big vehicle to get a TV home. Presumably, you don't buy a TV every week.
• Tichy 15y ago
  What I really need is a good international network of car rental stations, such that I would only have too pay for transits between places. My main problem are holidays: renting a car for two or three weeks still seems too expensive (~1000€). I've never owned a car in my life, but my girl-friend loves driving and the discussions everytime we plan holidays are a huge pita. Likewise in the city a car sharing service that worked like that would be great. We need the car to visit our son's grandparents, and paying by the hour would easily come to 20 to 30€ per visit, while the car is mostly just sitting there waiting. Meanwhile I can only wait for autonomous cabs, I suppose :-(
• melling 15y ago
  If only there was a smartphone app that allowed you to call your self-driving car to swing by your apartment/office to pick you up. Then cars could be located underground in some out of the way location many miles from the city center. Of course, what I'm saying is science fiction, we don't have self-driving cars capable of driving 30mph to pick us up. http://udacity.com http://udacity.com
  • loup-vaillant 15y ago
    > Of course, what I'm saying is science fiction, we don't have self-driving cars capable of driving 30mph to pick us up. I suppose you're being sarcastic ? We already do have such cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car It will not be long before they are provably safer than professional human drivers. However, that doesn't get rid of all the problem : your car still have to drive in and out the city. But if you combine automation with sharing, then you can afford smaller, more specialised cars. You could have tiny delivery cars (they don't even need to transport a human). You could have truly individual commute cars that would take just 1 person. By using the car that fit the job and use less space, we may be able to help with congestion. Example of a "commute car": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EN-V_Pride_%28Jiao%29.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EN-V_Pride_%28Jiao%29.jpg
  • Tichy 15y ago
    I hope when those cars arrive, I won't have to own one. Instead I hope they'll just make cabs so cheap that I can always use them in cab mode.
  • 7952 15y ago
    Or just walk ten minutes to the underground location.
    • melling 15y ago
      I would guess that the average person might cover .5 mile (< 1km) in 10 minutes so it wouldn't be possible to reach the parking that's located "many miles" away. Also, I didn't say your car is 10 minutes by foot away, more like 10 miles. It could easily be 15-20 minutes for your car. Your goal is to minimize your commute time not your cars. This wouldn't work in NYC or London, which are much bigger cities than discussed in the article. The first leg of your journey there should be a train whisking you away from the city at 120 mph to a train station within 15-20 miles of your home where your car will leave home to pick you as soon as your phone tells it you are 15 minutes from your station.
• henrikschroder 15y ago
  When I visited Hawaii last year I noticed that something was different at all the hotels compared to hotels at similar locations elsewhere; Thailand, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. In Hawaii, all hotels had huge parking garages and a large valet parking staff. Similar-sized hotels in the other locations never had parking garages, hotels with hundreds of rooms might have a tiny parking-lot somewhere, on which a few rental cars would be parked. But in Hawaii, everyone rents a car, drives it the ten minutes from the airport to the hotel, parks it at the hotel, leaves it there for a week, then drives it back to the airport to get home. It's a pretty funny and stark reminder of the completely different mindset and attitude towards cars that most americans have. Having a car is so deeply ingrained that the alternatives don't have a chance.
  • ljf 15y ago
    People looked at us as though we were insane getting the bus from the Airport to our hotel - it took 15 mins, and cost about $2 each - a taxi would have been a shade quicker, but would have been $20 to $30. A few couples even came over to see if we'd made a mistake, or offering a lift in their hire-car. In the hotel we were asked a few time how on earth we could travel around the island without a hire-car.
    • vidarh 15y ago
      I don't have a drivers license. Never needed one. Imagine the reactions that gets me when I go to the US.
      • drostie 15y ago
        I don't have a drivers license either, and in the US I find myself cycling a bit. Cars don't really know what to do with you there. ^_^ When I mention that I'm not cycling to work and it takes me 30 minutes to walk, even my fellow Nederlanders look at me in shock and disbelief. 30 minutes, for reference, is about the duration of a typical podcast, and is also pretty standard for downloadable audio lectures, so it's not like I lose productivity -- and even without those, it really does clear my head to spend half an hour with my own mind and no internet to distract me. When I had a bike, I lived further away and spent 50 minutes cycling to work. The thing is, that was only maybe 5 minutes longer than my next-best option, public transport (bus-to-train-to-bus). A car would have been a tremendous, polluting investment, and I lost something like 35 kg just because I got my daily exercise in. So yeah. If you live in an urban environment, driving works but seems lazy.
• backrecord 15y ago
  In Phnom Penh (where I live), people are just starting to get rich enough to own cars, so you can watch the transition happening. The roads and the (lack of) traffic rules work really well with just motos / pedestrians / bicycles. But add cars into the mix and it starts to fall apart. 1. More congestion. 2. the "road rules" don't work with such large objects. 3. lack of consequence if anyone hits anyone else.
• hezekiah 15y ago
  "What I really want is clean, walkable, safe, affordable, and family-friendly cities and towns. In a strange way, I kind of want to live in Mayberry." Sounds like what you really want is to live in Germany. Well except maybe Munich, it's not very affordable.
• guard-of-terra 15y ago
  Moscow citisen here. You can make a reasonably well working mass transit that everyone will use. People would still buy cars to stay in traffic for hours. But the real long-scale problem is that cities discourage children. People living in a big city tend to have two to zero children and that makes country population unsustainable. On the upside, you can always find a good school for your few children if you care. In recent times I don't see many children on the streets. It seems that children are being turned into indoors pets. This is sad. Adults feel obliged to drive children around to their activities. The pedophile hysteria being promoted by media doesn't help either. In other word, it's sad.
• akg 15y ago
  When I used to live in LA I used to be so dependent on my car, not to mention the hassle of finding parking wherever I went. Since then, I got rid of my car and have lived in SF, NY. I haven't had a need to own a car in any of these places. Public transportation in SF and NY are really great and whenever you do need to make that trip out to the suburbs or have to make an IKEA run, there is always Zipcar. Zipcar works really well in SF. I'm walking more, which is healthier, have no need to find parking, which is less stressful, and no need to pay loan-payments/gas, which saves me a ton of money every month.
• VMG 15y ago
  It will be interesting to see what happens when self-driving cars become viable.
  • Gring 15y ago
    One of the things that might happen is that you get out of the car in the city, and the car drives itself to a parking space a few kilometers away. This will make all those inner urban parking spaces available for better use again.
• stephth 15y ago
  I completely agree. It's sad that we've let cars completely take over in detriment of quality of life. I worked on this set of visualizations on traffic in the center of Madrid a few years ago: http://trsp.net/cow http://trsp.net/cow I found the numbers stunning. Some avenues had an average of 100k vehicles driving through daily. I've since moved to San Francisco, and find that traffic in US cities is less painful, the cities' grids and sidewalks are better prepared. But still, it's ridiculous how much freedom cars are given. A few months ago traffic in Valencia St, one of the nicest streets in the Mission, was cut off, and it was bliss to take a walk there, even though the street was super crowded. At least some streets should always be traffic free, I dont think it's that much effort to ask, and the benefits in quality of living are tremendous.
  • _delirium 15y ago
    The main opposition to pedestrian streets in the U.S. tends to be from merchants. Their view is that cars driving by is good advertising. Even if the cars don't actually stop, when they drive by a store daily, they're reminded it's there and might eventually visit, while if the traffic gets routed in a different way, fewer eyeballs will see the stores daily (and instead they'll see different stores). State Street in Chicago was pedestrianized from 1979-1996, for example, but merchant pressure eventually caused it to be reopened to traffic.
    • ekoontz 15y ago
      It depends a lot on the circumstances. Here's a recent situation where the decision to make some streets in Chinatown pedestrian-only and removing parking on others (if only for a day) was supported and well-received by merchants: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2012/01/24/chinatown-businesses-thrive-during-a-week-without-car-parking/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2012/01/24/chinatown-businesses-th...
• karman 15y ago
  One case not mentioned here is families with small children. With 3 little ones, public transportation becomes a real hassle, especially when there is walking to be done on either side. It is by far my top reason for owning a car in the city.
  • mildavw 15y ago
    I have two little kids (I know that's not three) and public transit or biking (I can fit both on my bike) is great for outings. It turns the journey into an experience itself. Driving with the kids strapped into car seats the whole time is much less fun. I live in a very bikable town within walking distance to light rail, but that was by design. We bought our house by drawing 1/2 mile circles around parks, rail stops, and grocery stores. Bought the first place that intersected all three. I was just thinking recently about how my kids likely be autonomous much earlier. By age 11 or 12 they'll be able to go all around the city on their own.
    • cchurch 15y ago
      Curiously, where do you live? I wouldn't let my kids ride transit by themselves; that's where the crum bums go to pee. I also don't want to be against a grocery store as the noise from the large parking lot (and busy road) is annoying. Living by a park is highly desirable.
      • mildavw 15y ago
        http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.528017,-122.598179&spn=0.003609,0.00567&t=h&z=18&vpsrc=6 http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=45.528017,-122.598179... We're protected from the busy road and the grocery store parking lot by elevation; we're 50 ft below either. We can hear the highway, but I only notice it when the din is missing when we visit friends in the country!
        • cchurch 15y ago
          That looks nice.
• fossuser 15y ago
  This seems like a problem that will be largely solved (or at least nominally effected) by autonomous vehicles.
  • spacemanaki 15y ago
    If everyone had their own self-driving car we'd still have the same problems described in the OP.
    • fossuser 15y ago
      True, but I think that's thinking too small. In a autonomous car world why would everyone have their own? The car could drive itself home after driving you to work to take other people where they need to go, but that is still thinking too small - thinking within the current system. In a world with autonomous cars I think a subscription service for car ownership makes more sense. A parked car is a wasted resource, autonomous cars could have uptimes similar to airplanes. Of course this isn't even including the advantages an autonomous fleet would have with fuel efficiency and traffic handling.
• lordlarm 15y ago
  You'll find many videos of this on YouTube, but here is an example: Rush hour traffic in the center of Amsterdam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M It is really striking to see how many bicycles and buses there are. As I live in Norway I'm seeing a stronger focus on public transport here as well, but nothing compared to e.g. Amsterdam or Copenhagen in Denmark.
  • Ergomane 15y ago
    "Bicycle Rush Hour Utrecht (Netherlands) III" :) Utrecht is a much nicer city for cyclists than Amsterdam.
• Killah911 15y ago
  If a city is a conglomeration of asphalt and buildings, then Cars are just a part of that. Sure traffic jams suck, but another effect of a car is less social interaction overall. If a city is a place for people to live, interact, share ideas etc, the picking up the dry cleaning by driving is not only bad for the environment etc, it's also a way to really isolate yourself from others en route to your destination. Commutes on the other hand where you're driving yourself can be equally anti social and wastes the most precious thing we have, time. In NYC, used to take the subway. I was able to read books, meet others. Got to know some neighbors who also took the train the at the same time to get to work, and even ran into friends I hadn't seen in a while. I'm sure you wouldn't want to run into a long lost friend while driving (or anyone else for that fact). After moving down south I realized how little social interaction I get outside my specifically chosen work group or actively seeking out social engagements. Mass transportation is sparse at best here and walking to the dry cleaners would take half a day.
  • agilecaveman 15y ago
    Good point. One of the best places for social interaction in the US are universities. It's no coincidence that students rarely own cars. Back in my college (Yale), the campus and building layouts were pretty great. Some dorm complexes were much larger than city blocks, food was available in most living spaces. The ability to bump into people you know without need for mass planning is sorely missing from "adult" life.
    • usaar333 15y ago
      Most of that is due to college being an incredibly efficient social filter. The odds of a social interaction between Yale student and another being worthwhile (so to speak) are an order of magnitude higher than a Yale student and non-Yale New Haven dweller.
  • deleted 15y ago
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• llcoolv 15y ago
  good morning - a 10 seconds glance at a US city, 30% of whose area is occupied by parking lots and (always-clogged) highways is more than enough to come to that conclusion.
• newandimproved 15y ago
  Cars are essentially what is causing urban sprawl and the rapid annihilation of nature. It would also seem city planners design municipalities for cars first, not people. But it's bad planning for everyone, and even bad for business: http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are-so-happy-and-why-its-at-risk/ http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are...
• tmh88j 15y ago
  >I completely agree. It's sad that we've let cars completely take over in detriment of quality of life. I agree that they can be a burden if you live in a major city with an average or slightly-above average income because parking becomes an issue. However, I am probably not on the same page as everyone else because I'm a huge automotive enthusiast. I'm the kind of guy that would go on vacation to go driving in another area. I could easily spend more money on renting an exotic car than what I would pay for the hotel. Nurburgring anyone?
  • dedwards8 15y ago
    Auto-enthusiasts should be all for alternative transportation. It gets jerks like me, who don't like to drive, off the road and out of the way.
• twelvechairs 15y ago
  This article is very broad and (probably because of this) doesnt really go in depth on many issues. If anyone is seriously interested in transportation, I highly reccommend the excellent blog http://www.humantransit.org/ http://www.humantransit.org/ I do take some issue with the title of this article however. Whilst agreeing with the general sentiment of the article (US cities need to generally focus on more accessible development), cars dont 'kill' cities. Cities couldn't survive without cars (and trucks) - this is important. Cars kill pedestrianisation, but this is a different story - only small parts of our cities (even European cities) are (and have to be) attractive and enjoyable for pedestrians....
• woodpanel 15y ago
  It may be the story's catchy title or the implying "solutions" of it, but i feel compelled to play devils advocate here, and defend the car. Cars improve the lives of drivers with increased range movement, more time independent movement (start your journey when it suits you, not when a timetable allows you to) and allow for more freight to be carried. When cars are criticized for bringing down the quality of life it is mostly an issue in urban environments. People in rural or suburban areas rely heavily on cars. The car may even have saved the quality of life in rural areas (ie stopped/slowed down the flight from those areas into cities) while it's what makes the existance of modern suburbia possible. It therefor provides cheaper housing and a broader choice of how you want to live (Not everybody needs five starbucks and a movie theatre in the neighbourhood). They also slowed the population increase of cities. Adding costs to drivers in urban areas mean higher burdens for people that have to commute by car, since suburban/rural areas are too thinly populated to allow for efficient public transportation. The quality of life argument often tends to demonize technological progress and romanticizes the past. The funny thing is, that this romance is only possible because technologies provided us with spare time. So did motorization. People who lived back then, would have always opted for the new technologies. That being said, cars do decrease urban quality of life in certain ways. But it is important to not let generalization allow for bad policies. Light Rail for instance is alwas proposed, while it costs more than individual motorized traffic and while rail tracks usually decrease nearby quality of life more than any road could. I'd propose simpler measures: 1) stop providing free parking. Allow the parking space usage to be priced at what the value of that land would have provided in real property taxes, if it had been tilled with a house. There's an interesting book about the "cost of free parking" by an UCLA Professor http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf 2) get rid of cab driving restrictions to dramatically lower cab fair prices. cities with limited amounts of cab driving licenses have higher fair costs. A NY cab medallion is considered a better investment than gold http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/ny-cab-medallions-worth-more-than-gold-chart-of-the-day.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/ny-cab-medallions-w... 3) If property owners where to decide, they'd propably opt more likely for narrowing the streets and expanding sidewalks as it would increase their properties value. BID (business improvement districts) often do this. Enable more owners to make those decisions. 4) start with yourself and ditch your car if you don't need it. Do you really need more range? Do you really need to be able to start your journey every minute and not just every 10 minutes. And do you always need to be able to haul up to 4 fridges? And thus do 5) car sharing. i'm a very satisfied user of http://www.car2go.com/ http://www.car2go.com/ and similar services. 6) if there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are, this need could have already been eliminated by using more buses for public transport.
• RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  For those times when a car is the only practical way to get somewhere, car-sharing is a much more sensible alternative to universal personal car ownership. Most cars sit idle and unoccupied for 90-95% of the time. That represents a huge opportunity to increase the productivity of each car while reducing the price of access and the cost in money and wasted space of storage (i.e. parking).
• cletus 15y ago
  I'm Australian and have lived in Germany (Cologne), Zurich, London and (now) New York City so I'll add my perspective. I'll also add that I can't drive (because of an eye condition). Australia is very much like California. Population density is low. Almost all of Australia is car dependent. Land sizes are large. This makes public transport largely uneconomic and unworkable, with certain exceptions (eg parts of Perth, inner Sydney, Melbourne). Even then, that transport is largely limited to going into and out of the city. If you want to go somewhere else it's a huge problem. Gas taxes are much higher in Australia (petrol costs $1.40-1.50 per litre last I saw and there are ~4 litres to the gallon). I'm not sure if this covers the cost of roads and infrastructure (for the quarter acre dream) but I highly doubt it, especially once you factor in indirect costs. London is a mix of inner London where public transport is very good and outer London (Zone 5+) where you are car dependent but you absolutely can get away with using car rental when you need it most of the time. The problem is public transport largely stops at midnight (apart from night buses). Personally I found the light rail in Cologne (and Bonn) great and never felt the lack of a car. You absolutely do not need a car in Zurich or pretty much all but rural Switzerland. Intracity and intercity transport is superb. Even getting to ski resorts by train/bus is fine. Which brings me to NYC. NYC for me has the ultimate public transportation system. It's cheap, goes almost everywhere, runs 24 hours a day (HUGELY important IMHO) and unlike every other example listed above, cabs are actually relatively cheap, although there are oddities to the system (eg the peculiarities of shift change make it somehow impossible to get a cab to the airport in Manhattan at 3pm). NYC also has an extremely large commuter belt covered by trains and buses such that no one I know drives into the city for work. I live 7 minutes walk to work, which I love. Actually the idea for me is about 20-30 minutes walk each way because that's just about the right balance between time taken and getting some exercise (IMHO), particularly for us engineers. What I don't see in this thread is the issue of people (like me) who don't have the option of driving a car. For this reason I can see myself largely living in either NYC or one of several European cities. Charging homeowners fairly for their infrastructure costs is a hugely divisive and problematic issue. For example, hiking gas taxes would have all sorts of unintended consequences, not the least of which is inflation (since that cost is built into transporting food and everything else). It seems fair(er) to build maintenance costs into property taxes and initial capital costs into land costs. Peak oil [1] is either here or soon will be (IMHO we've already passed it). Arguably cities produce lower per-capita carbon footprints [2]. At some point people are going to need to realize that their gas-guzzling ways can't (and won't) continue forever. [1]: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/01/nature-journal-study-peak-oil/ http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/01/nature-journal-study-pe... [2]: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/31/new-study-shows-that-suburbs-can-pollute-more-than-cities/ http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/31/new-study-shows-t...
• draggnar 15y ago
  This reminds me of a study that compared Hartford, New Haven, and Cambridge: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/17/parking-datapoints-of-the-day/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/17/parking-dat... Basically, all 3 cities had been steadily increasing the number of parking spots they had, until Cambridge deviated and banned creating new parking spots. Cambridge grew much faster than the other two after this change was made, and the chart correlated fairly closely. This may have been because of rent-control or other issues but the case for parking rules is strong.
  • jaredmck 15y ago
    Well, also Cambridge is right next to a much larger city. This seems like it might have more to do with it.
  • ghaff 15y ago
    I doubt it had a lot to do with parking spaces. Cambridge has had huge growth in biotech and other high-tech in a lot of the old industrial area over the past couple of decades. Several of the more rundown areas have gentrified as a result. Parking in Cambridge varies. It's really tight in some areas--though those are mostly fairly accessible by public transportation. In others, it's not bad.
• dkarl 15y ago
  Cars need lots of land for parking because they spend most of their time idle, because people find it cheaper to own their own car than to use taxicabs. Also, people buy the largest car they could plausibly need, unless they buy more than one. Individuals' strong identification with the car they drive further contributes to excessive size and power. Automated taxis solve the problem. They will spend much less time idle, can be parked more compactly, don't need to be parked near a destination, and can have a size distribution that matches the needs of individual trips (i.e., mostly very small.) If they're cheap enough, then they'll be widely used, and wait times will be small. Because they will be automated, they can be taken in and out of service very quickly, and there will always be about the right number available. Also, they'll be much safer for cyclists and pedestrians to share the road with, and they'll use less of the existing road space, allowing us to add and widen bike lanes throughout our cities.
• ynniv 15y ago
  The midtown Atlanta example is all wrong. Yes, there are a lot of cars in Atlanta. Yes, there are a lot of parking lots in Atlanta. Are these parking lots required to sustain these cars? Not at all. The rates for parking vary wildly, because people only want to park near where they are going. Those parking lots are not for cars, they are for flipping real estate. Real estate in midtown has been booming for a little over a decade as small run down buildings are demolished and 10 ~ 40 story skyscrapers are built. That means huge increases in land value, which attracts speculation. When a lot with a small building is purchased, what happens next? If the building stays, it will have to be serviceable, and a tenant found, which will lock the property up until the tenant leaves. So the building has to go, and the property might need to be re-zoned from single family residential. If you pave over that lot, not only do you remove unwanted structures and get the opportunity to re-zone, there will be some low-maintenance passive income generated from people using the property to park their car. So ultimately, those parking lots are good for the city in the long run. They're useless eyesores right now, but are more easily converted into high density buildings, as they have been doing for the last decade. In fact the real problem with midtown is that there has been too much high density construction too quickly, and not enough people have moved in yet. So as much as I love a naval gazing rant, reality is a little more subtle, and a lot more complicated.
  • noodle 15y ago
    I live in and own real estate in a building that is pictured on that map. Some notes: 1) Not every red box is accurate. For example, one of them contains a bank as well as a parking structure, yet the bank was circled as well. 2) Not everything is counted evenly. Some condo and office buildings' parking structures are circled, and some aren't. Almost all of the condo buildings have their own interior parking, most of which is not circled. Hell, mine has an exterior blacktop parking lot and its not even circled. 3) The majority of those lots circled are not for flipping real estate. The ones circled are mostly commuter lots and business lots that are often mostly empty.
    • ynniv 15y ago
      The majority of those lots circled are not for flipping real estate. The ones circled are mostly commuter lots and business lots that are often mostly empty. It might be a matter of perspective, but a mostly empty parking lot is not in the business of being a parking lot. Flipping commercial real estate can take decades, the point is that the lot is not required and will likely help the area become more city-like.
• maurits 15y ago
  Build safe bicycle infrastructure and the cyclists will come "How the Dutch got their cycle paths" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o
• Kilimanjaro 15y ago
  Cars don't kill cities, hi-rise buildings do. A thousand people getting in an out of on acre of land will cause all the problems we see today in big cities. Stick your head out of your window office and see how many people there is in your own acre and then imagine how many cars are needed to move all of them. If I were a benevolent dictator I would prohibit all buildings higher than a story and solve the traffic issue once and for all. You say you like tall buildings? Then enjoy your damn traffic and shut up.
  • frankus 15y ago
    What you've just described is known in the planning field as suburban sprawl, and is not without traffic problems of its own. If you start with an assumption of auto-dependence, then your conclusion follows, but the article is really arguing against making that assumption in the first place.
    • Kilimanjaro 15y ago
      You can't decouple urban density from traffic of any kind, be it pedestrians, bicycles, cars, buses or even flying cars, they go hand in hand. There is no magic trick to solve it no matter how much money you throw at the problem. Show me the city in the world with the worst traffic and I'll show you the city with the highest buildings. Only accepting that fact we can start planning better cities. Also worth considering, giving telecommute a high priority, since most of the office work done in these big cities can be easily done from home. Suburban sprawl becomes a problem only when those millions of people have to drive downtown to work clogging the driveways, but traffic is not an issue in suburban areas per se, lower urban density wins again.
  • bdunbar 15y ago
    Hi-rise buildings are prohibited in Washington D.C. The traffic there is as bad as any big city I've been in.
• seles 15y ago
  Driving is like a chicken and egg problem. I need to drive because everyone else drives. I live in a city that is very sparse because of all the parking lots and wide roads, like the article mentions. So not much is walkable. I also can't feasibly bike to work because the direct route involves taking an interstate as there aren't any near alternatives over a river, doing this on bike is illegal. Add in the no bike lanes and idiot drivers and it just isn't not a good idea. All of these reasons for needing a car are caused by infrastructure to support cars. Therefore the only way to break this cycle for the public good is to make driving less economic. Gas tax seems like the obvious choice, but it is usually not done because of purported public opinion. But really it actually would be fair as onemoreact said the maintenance for roads is so expensive, that without gas tax you are really just subsidizing driving.
  • agilecaveman 15y ago
    Gas tax is an annoying way to make something less economic, because there is no way to control where the money will go. What about tolling roads and/or privatizing them? This way it's easier to know which roads need expansion and which one's need to go away.
• driverdan 15y ago
  One thing this article disregards and I haven't seen touched on here yet is time value. My time is worth money. If driving a car saves me more money in time than it costs I'll drive a car. For example, if it would take 20 minutes in a car vs 1 hour in a bus I've saved 40 minutes. If I bill at $75/h that's $50 worth of time or $100 round trip (assuming I work instead). Do that a few times a month and the car has paid for itself.
  • pdkp 15y ago
    "My time is worth money. [...] assuming I work instead" That is a big assumption. I think the assertion that time is ALWAYS money is incorrect. Often, it is just time. At 3AM, or after you stop working, your time is probably not worth $75/h. In your example, you only loose money if you stop working early to account for the drive. So, for example, instead of working 8AM-5PM, you work 8:30AM-4:30PM, in order to still get home at 5PM. With that sort of logic, you could just as easily say that if you work 2 Extra hours each day for a month, the car paid for itself and you still get to live in the country. However, like your example, this assumes your work amount is infinite. So, while an argument could certainly be made for saving money in gas, spending less time driving, or more time with family, unless you decide to take the drive time out of your work hours, the opposite of how most people determine when they need to be at or leave work, you wouldn't be loosing money, only time.
• thetrendycyborg 15y ago
  The reason people commute is generally because living in a city is very expensive, and living outside the city means a nice house and maybe even a back yard.
  • pwthornton 15y ago
    This is a supply and demand issue. A lot of people do want to live in dense, urban areas, but there isn't enough housing stock to meet demand, hence the expensiveness of urban living. But if you factor in your transportation costs into living expenses, all of the sudden living outside of an urban area isn't so cheap: http://htaindex.cnt.org/ http://htaindex.cnt.org/ There has been a big push to see housing affordability as intertwined with transportation costs. If you have to drive a car to do everything in your life, that costs a lot more than someone who can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bar, etc.
    • wes-exp 15y ago
      The flaw (or shall I say, "limitation") of this HTA index is that it apparently ties affordability to the median income of the region. I think this would be subject to a kind of selection bias, for example punishing rural areas for employing laborers and so on. In fact, one of the reasons manufacturers set up shop in rural areas is because the areas have lower real costs of living. If laborers move to Manhattan, they won't suddenly start making a banker's salary. So the fact that housing is affordable somewhere relative to average incomes there, in many cases, is wholly irrelevant. Similarly, if an urban high-earner could take his earnings into a low-cost suburban area, his purchasing power would be huge. Transportation costs are a real issue that should be weighed, but that index completely distorts it by tying cost of living to regional incomes. If I'm wrong, then all the retirees in Florida must be misguided, and really they should move to NYC, where things are "cheaper".
• tlb 15y ago
  Dedicating all this land to car storage basically reduces the density by about half, doubles the average distance between locations ... Halving density increases average distance by sqrt(2), not double.
• berserkpi 15y ago
  Hi from Mexico City. Do you think you are living a "cars nightmare", then believe when I say this: "Never come here pals!". Civic/Vial culture is absolutely absent. Public transport is a surreal dream, I would say... an adventure (not an enjoyable one). "Urban planning" is not a known term for people on charge. We are a troubled city in a troubled world.
  • WildUtah 15y ago
    I bike commuted in Mexico City for a year and it was excellent. Also, the public transit is great; it's just that lines 1, 2, and 3 of the Metro and 1 of the Metrobus are badly overcrowded and need to be expanded with quadruple express tracks and higher frequency automatic train control systems.
• akharris 15y ago
  Cars do not kill cities - urban planning without enough foresight into how cars actually interact with one another, and with cities kill cities. A large portion of current urban plans date to Robert Moses - he essentially built New York, invented the ring of highways system used in DC and other places, and advised places like LA in constructing their major arteries. Moses was in love with cars, but never experienced traffic as his limo was chauffered with a police escort. He built highways and made them inaccessible to public transportation (see the West Side Highway) so that poor people could not use them. He had no real understanding of capacity utilization/maximization for transport and stopped learning long before he stopped designing. He never updated his understanding of the damages caused by simply adding more highways, but retained the power to keep building them. The most pernicious impact of Moses's style of urban planning is not, however, gridlock or a lack of walkability. Moses decided that he could put roads wherever he wanted, and used eminent domain to put them right through vibrant communities - which he destroyed. He killed the bronx, parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and almost ran a huge raised highway across 34th street. In any case, The Power Broker is an amazing book to read if you're curious about these issues and why cities are designed the way they are now.
• quadyeast 15y ago
  In the US, an increased tax on gasoline is political suicide. Another solution, would be for the oil companies to pay their fair share of the wars we have been in to defend their supply. This would more directly, make real, the cost of our gas.
• agilecaveman 15y ago
  Great article. Maybe another request for startups could be to kill cars.
• anamax 15y ago
  How much of the "road cost" can be eliminated by reducing car usage by 90% in cities? I'm pretty sure that buses, delivery trucks, ambulances, and police cars need roads, so a significant fraction of the road cost (in cities) is required even if there isn't a single private passenger car.
  • saalweachter 15y ago
    Eliminating extra traffic reduces the amount of wear-and-tear on a street, which means you can go more years without resurfacing or replacing it. So even if you still need all of the roads, they could still cost significantly less to maintain. That said, I'm not really sure how the math works: delivery trucks and buses are a smaller number of the vehicles on the road, but they also weigh a lot more than cars. Some DOT probably has a chart somewhere which breaks down road wear by vehicle type.
    • anamax 15y ago
      > Eliminating extra traffic reduces the amount of wear-and-tear on a street, which means you can go more years without resurfacing or replacing it. The standard argument is that wear goes up either exponentially (which seems wrong) or quadratically (seems more reasonable) with vehicle weight. Since heavy vehicle use will actually go up (more delivery) if we eliminate cars.... I've seen how other activities, tearing up streets for utilities and the like, which are surprisingly common in cities, lead to street repair. Those activities won't change if cars are eliminated. Parking garages will go away, and major streets could be narrower. I doubt that either effect is significant compared to the road costs which have been claimed to be huge.
      • saalweachter 15y ago
        The formula I found was quartic, from [1] Nref = Nx (Wx / Wref)^4 Nref = number of trips of reference vehicle Nx = number of trips of other vehicle Wref = weight of reference vehicle Wx = weight of other vehicle The quartic formula really works in our favor for bicycle commuting: if a bicycle (with rider) is 1/20th the weight of a car, the bicycle will produce 0.000625% the wear of the car. So if commuting were the only purpose of the road, you would essentially never need to replace a road again. This does make adding (larger) delivery vehicles quite bad. If the average delivery vehicle is twice as heavy as the average passenger car which was formerly used, each trip will produce 16 times as much wear. Looking up the curb weights for a Chevy cargo van (5000 lb) and a Toyota Corolla (2800 lb), the actual wear factor is 10x. [1] http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=601 http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=601
• vacri 15y ago
  Cars also grow cities - the blanket of small-to-medium cities covering the eastern half of the US is the product of having cars. Public transport needs serious population before it can start up.
• anamax 15y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300078153 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300078153 "Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)"
• dandrews 15y ago
  The original vision for Walt Disney's EPCOT was a radially designed city, where "the pedestrian will be king" (Walt's own words) and electric vehicles are segregated from the streets. See: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/the-epcot-film-transcript https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/the-epcot-fil...
• jonstjohn 15y ago
  My wife and I share a single car in Salt Lake City and have done so in other places, included Washington DC and semi-rural West Virginia. This setup is ideal, because we can coordinate our use of the car and combine that with biking/walking and public transportation. We also have a 2 year-old son who goes to pre-school every day and has to get dropped off an picked up by car. Sharing w/i a couple or family is a really good way to reduce car usage but retain the benefits of having a car. I'm definitely a proponent of reduced usage combined with biking/walking and public transportation.
• IceCreamYou 15y ago
  I wrote up my response to this article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3516307 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3516307 As a resident of Atlanta, I disagree with many of the assumptions this article makes.
• idlecapacity 15y ago
  I love your point that car storage decreases city density and therefore walkability. I was made aware in grade school that cars enabled low density settlement, but you have enlightened me to a case in which they FORCE it! Something you may investigate in further posts is that the path versatility of cars(and trucks) is also a waste of resource capacity on most long or oft repeated trips.
• Detrus 15y ago
  Masdar City is an experiment around Dubai where all cars are underground, top level is pedestrian. They built it from scratch so they had that luxury. http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/ http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masdar_City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB_5TBZQNRY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB_5TBZQNRY Also the cars are automated - self driving. They don't have to deal with pedestrians and traffic, so much easier to automate driving.
• whatusername 15y ago
  Has anyone noticed the problem with that picture (with the bus/cars/bikes?) The bus and bikes are at full capacity. The Cars are at 1/5th capacity.
  • SCdF 15y ago
    Yes, but that's how cars are driven. Bikes are obviously at capacity (since it's 1). Buses are arguable, but the point of a bus is that you get it to capacity, which is not how cars are driven. If you're really bored sometime sit beside a busy road and count the number of cars that have more than one person in them, it's a surprisingly low number.
• mhartl 15y ago
  It's not cars that are the problem. It's cars that are usually 3/4ths empty that are the problem. Full cars are comparably good to other forms of mass transit. The solution is called "jitney transit". It is illegal due to taxi medallion laws. So the real problem is special-interest groups (such as taxi cartels)—and a political system that encourages their formation.
• euccastro 15y ago
  How this was solved in a Brazilian city back in the 70s. Some nice thinking in there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo
• thomasfl 15y ago
  The city building industry must be one of the greatest business opportunities ahead of us. It's very cost intensive, and the stakes are hight, but the possible returns is even higher. In short, create a new manhattan on a desolate location, and the increase in real estate prices could be extreme.
• sakopov 15y ago
  This is probably going to sound foreign to many of you guys. After reading these comments, it almost seems like most people here are from the Bay Area, NYC, Chicago. So here i go... Just because you live in a certain area where walking from A to B is possible or even preferred, doesn't mean the rest should/can follow. I live in Kansas City, a place where owning a vehicle isn't a convenience, but a necessity. My residential neighborhood doesn't have any sidewalks to any convenience stores or main roads. I have to walk on a narrow two-way road, which is a tragedy waiting to happen. I simply cannot WALK anywhere. I could opt-in for public transport, which happens to be very inefficient because nobody uses it, and wait 40-50 minutes for a bus to arrive. The irritating thing is that I'd have to drive to the closest bus station. This scenario is pretty typical for most suburban neighborhoods in KC. I even tried biking at some point, but people here just don't understand it. They'll honk at you, flip you off, run you off the road or throw stuff at you. Commuting by foot has never been popular here. Therefore, the city infrastructure never saw the need to support it and likely never will, unless people start mass-croaking from heart failure. So, when someone start a BS rant about cars killing cities and the need to abolish personal transport, I immediately close the browser tab. You guys need a reality check.