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The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying. Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and

The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying. Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it. Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way. In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

ohmyzee 3y ago
I don't mean to be rude but are you over 45? There is a will with most people under that age in my experience. Or maybe cars are important culturally where you live?
- afavour 3y ago
  I live in New York City and even here I’m really not convinced most people under 45 have a will to get rid of cars. There isn’t a huge passion for them either, more like a resigned acceptance.
- JenrHywy 3y ago
  Many people under 45 don't have the same requirements for transport, though. It's easy to say you don't need a car when you're mobile and don't have to ship kids around. We try to minimize our car usage - we have one car for our family of 6; I ride an electric scooter to work etc. Not having a car at all though would be basically impossible unless we decided to cut out the kids sport and traveling to visit family.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    You're still way ahead of the game compared to so many American families. Most of my neighbors have more cars than licensed drivers at home. We aren't going to eliminate cars in my lifetime (hopefully I've got a good 40 years or so left) but if we can get more households going car-light that's still significant progress.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      More cars than drivers isn't really a problem once you're past the 1:1 ratio, as obviously they can't all be used simultaneously.
HPsquared 3y ago
It took 50 years for the car to become dominant; it'll take another 50 for it to be displaced.
- quadrangle 3y ago
  Naw, due to climate chaos, we'll have widespread civilizational collapse and the plain breakdown of the car-supporting infrastructure within less than 50 years.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    In a Mad Max world, cars are more likely to keep working than trains or buses.
    - quadrangle 3y ago
      I haven't read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand series but my impression is that Kunstler would agree with you except with the caveat that there won't be cars or trains or buses overall, mostly just return to actual low-scale functioning like horses.
hackermatic 3y ago
In many places, allowing and encouraging infill development and upzoning would make carfree life viable more quickly than you'd think. I've lived most of my life in former streetcar suburbs -- neighborhoods of single-family homes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings that were served by a streetcar line every few blocks. Today, some of those places require cars to get anywhere interesting and back, while some of them have a few well-used bus lines and a ton of local restaurants, groceries, and hardware stores in easy walking distance. The density tipping point is really low; a few four-plexes on each block, which didn't diminish any of the "neighborhood character" or lead to epic struggles to find parking. (I did still have a car, I just used it a lot less, and was much happier not having to bother.) And it felt a lot nicer than the all-or-nothing neighborhoods that are either single-family homes or large corporate apartment complexes.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  Yep, I live in such a town now. It's a 5 minute bike ride downtown, 8 minutes to the downtown of the closest neighboring town, 13 minutes to the next closest. And it would be 12 minutes to a major shopping center with a grocery store but there's no safe route there at the moment - but that's not an impossible change to make! Point is, you're right, it doesn't take that much density to make getting around without a car viable for many trips.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  Raising the streetcar suburb is a great point. Many major and minor cities all across North America were not designed for the car, as much as they may seem so today. They were designed for the streetcar, with commercial blocks strung out along those streetcar corridors. In older bigger cities these streetcar corridors densified and became commercial districts, while in younger ones they were on the precipice before the car and rigid zoning stopped the transition. These corridors remain as valuable arteries awaiting a return to their original designs. Simple and affordable upgrades like bus rapid transit, small apartment buildings and bike lanes could once again transition them into being powerful parts of a transportation network that does not rely on car ownership.
  - 3y ago
kibwen 3y ago
> Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way. In Boston there's both a will and a way. I haven't owned a car for as long as I've lived here, and the bike lanes are so, so much better now than when I first arrived. Neighboring Cambridge now has laws on the books requiring bike lanes to be added any time that a road is rebuilt. The new light-rail extension through Somerville added a bike path alongside most of its length, connecting the paths along the downtown riverside to the Minuteman bikeway that runs 15 miles out to Bedford. It can be done. But people have to organize and give a fuck.
- goatlover 3y ago
  So how much has that cut down on car traffic inside Boston?
  - ripe 3y ago
    I don't have numbers, but I can tell you that the city government is serious about providing other alternatives to cars. For example, making buses free. [1] [1] https://www.boston.gov/news/new-steps-reduce-vehicle-emissions-boston https://www.boston.gov/news/new-steps-reduce-vehicle-emissio...
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      The buses aren’t generally free though: https://www.mbta.com/fares/bus-fares https://www.mbta.com/fares/bus-fares They are free on only 3 lines (plus SL1 leaving the airport) https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-wu-takes-steps-expand-fare-free-bus-service https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-wu-takes-steps-expand-fare...
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Free buses should not be considered in any city. Spend that money on more frequent routes. People will not use a free bus that only comes once an hour, or doesn't stop close to them. Until your city is covered with transit coming every 5 minutes you need to work on that not cost. Not even the best transit cities have transit every 5 minutes all over the city. There is a lot of room to improve in them all
hot_gril 3y ago
The silliest mistake I see wasn't creating suburbs but shoving roads into denser cities. In some cases this was the result of corporate lobbying, like in Los Angeles. Wastes like 1/3 of the space and ruins the enjoyment of living there, so people prefer suburbs instead in most places. The little success I keep thinking of is downtown Mountain View during/after covid19 lockdowns. They shut down the roads, so people walk around and interact. Some still drive to there and park on the perimeter of that big walking area. If they keep this kind of thing up, making these areas desirable to live in and growing them, things will become more consolidated. Eventually with those fewer "point masses," public transit can go between them. Doesn't make sense currently because there are just too many destinations. Meanwhile those who really want to live in suburbs and drive around can still do it. They could even drive to the dense areas and park. They'd just be missing out.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  There are two aspects to this story. For one, large arterials were placed where the most marginalized in society lived so that they couldn't protest. Historically black neighborhoods and poor white neighborhoods were flattened to accommodate large arterials. The other is sprawl. Newer arterials, built after the problematic era, started out as state highways designed for transport. Once interstates were built, due to height and FAR limits in residential and commercial zones, new development sprawled out, sometimes onto these state highways which now had interstate alternatives. Naturally it was mostly low cost housing or commercial real estate as those are the most likely uses that would work adjacent to a large arterial.
ilyt 3y ago
It's not really "remove cars" problem tho. Cars are fine and are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike easily. It's make other forms of transport more viable for day to day stuff You still need vans and trucks delivering stuff to people and businesses. Bus is far more flexible form of transport than tram. Just... if you need to wait ages for one and there is no stop nearby nobody will want to wait.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  > Cars are fine and are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike easily What’s the percentage of cars on the road you see moving big stuff that could not be moved by other means? (Aka not people).
  - decremental 3y ago
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    - deleted 3y ago
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    - californical 3y ago
      In many European cities, you can just walk to a grocery store a few blocks away, and just go every day or two, picking up a few items each time. You only need one bag, so it’s not a burden at all. Worst case, it’s incredibly easy to add a basket to a bike (or mobility scooter), so you can put your day’s groceries in there. And as an added benefit of density, grocery stores are more efficient. There is a “general” one with all of the basics — fruit and veggies, cereal, meat, pasta, basic sauces, breads, convenience foods. Those are everywhere. Then if you go a little further, you’ll find specialty stores with “asian foods” or others, which you may not use as often but can get some rarer things there.
      - erik_seaberg 3y ago
        That sounds a lot more time consuming than going to Costco (a five mile drive) every week or two.
alistairSH 3y ago
The Netherlands did almost exactly what you claim is not possible.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  And more importantly, lots of Western European countries are following that, a couple of decades later - so even today, it's possible to make strides in that direction.
Swizec 3y ago
> Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person Nonsense. Ljubljana went from full of cars downtown to a 1 square mile pedestrian area with zero cars. It’s fantastic. And all the major arteries into the city went from 2 lanes to 1 lane + bus. Amsterdam famously reversed its car centric design in the 1980’s. Even San Francisco was able to close its main city artery to car traffic and transform many of the big roads with dedicated bus and bike lanes. And those are just the cities I know about. There’s bound to be more. The feat is completely possible, but takes a while as any large refactoring does.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  Another big example is Tokyo. Sure there's cars and roads in Tokyo, but it's absolutely not the major way that people move around. It's a relatively car light city. Or closer to NA have a look at Vancouver. From a high level looking at the whole region, it's about as devoted to cars as everywhere else in North America, though if you peek down to the neighbourhood level you can see some incredible successes in moving people away from car use. In the near downtown West End area for example, some 45% of the population walks to work.
  - Swizec 3y ago
    Honestly it feels like when a city/area gets dense enough people naturally stop using cats because it just isn’t practical. Most trips in SF are faster on a bicycle than by car, for example. Then when that happens, it’s easy to refactor architecture to be more in line with what people are doing already.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      You'd think so but with the anemic enforcement we have in the US this often isn't the case. Who cares if all the parking spots are taken up when you can just double park in a lane and nobody will do anything about it. When you can speed up the shoulder and skip a few traffic jams with no consequences, why not? Red light running has increased multi-fold since the start of the pandemic. In a lot of busy American cities you'll notice that the lack of enforcement on bad driver behavior means that drivers will bend as many rules possible to make their mode convenient for them. It's an inherent dynamic in car centrism here.
easytiger 3y ago
What came before cars? What utility do cars provide? Do zealots even consider these basic questions?
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  > What came before cars? Horses > What utility do cars provide? They don't shit on the street.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Nobody talks about horses, even though we have tons of footage proving that we had "horse-centric cities" long before Benz started doing his thing.
    - jhbadger 3y ago
      For the most part people didn't ride horses to get around town (despite what Westerns depict). Horses were mostly used to pull carts moving goods around like trucks do today. The average city dweller walked or rode trams.
      - easytiger 3y ago
        In England in the 1600s it was perfectly normal to get a hackney carriage around town. Boats for longer distances. Until 1976 the law was still extant that they had to keep a bale of hay in the vehicle. The prices were even regulated http://www.londonancestor.com/stow/stow-hack.htm http://www.londonancestor.com/stow/stow-hack.htm Indeed the Romans even had regulations about road width to ensure drawn carts could pass each other https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
        jhbadger 3y ago
        Even so, that's just using a cart and a hired one at that. I mean the analogy of a horse to a car (as in something you owned personally and rode around on) was never really true, at least in cities. Also, speaking of London, the Underground is surprisingly old -- the first parts of the system opened in 1863. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as going by hackney, but had he really existed, he could have ridden the Tube.
analog31 3y ago
The political issue I've seen is that the people who are even part of the conversation about reducing car use, tend to be somewhat over-the-top about it. Most people are just apathetic about it, or consider bike traffic to be an annoying indulgence.
baby 3y ago
What I don't understand is that you can keep the car-centric cities we have and still improve some zones. You could create pedestrian streets, for example. And you could allow shops and commerces to open fronts on more than just a few blocks in a commercial street. Yet US cities refuse to do both. Here in SF we got slow streets, which nobody asked, and basically did not change anything about the topology of the streets. Not a single pedestrian street was created during covid, and restaurants had to fight to turn parking space in parklet. Parklets are being removed everywhere now.
kerkeslager 3y ago
The shift to trains/bikes is harder, but the shift to buses is not as bad from what I've seen, because it re-uses car infrastructure well, and can be improved with minimal construction (often, just signage making a lane bus-only or similar).
- bippihippi1 3y ago
  adding bike lanes can just take paint on largish streets. thinner roads also make people drive slower, so it's a win win
  - mcdonje 3y ago
    Paint is not good enough. Bike lanes separated from the road by just paint and no significant barrier like bollards or something will not be used much because bikers won't feel safe, and cars will use it as a parking lane.
    - Tiktaalik 3y ago
      But yea even with separation it's incredibly cheap to make temporary bike lanes. Drop a few jersey barriers or even big planters and there you go.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      It's a spectrum. As a biker, of course I prefer real, separated lanes. But there are plenty of roads that I will bike on despite having only painted-on lanes. Others might be less lenient (would only bike on separated lanes) or more lenient (the die-hard lycra warriors). Even just having a painted-on lane is an improvement because it accommodates some people who previously wouldn't have biked, and that's still an improvement, and it's an approach that can be done very cheaply. That doesn't mean we should be satisfied with only painted-on lanes, but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of progress.
      - earthling8118 3y ago
        I have a strong desire to bike but I won't do it on those lanes. They're not as bad as the painted bike symbols that say "theoretically you can ride a bike on this road" but they're still not going to make me comfortable enough to do it. I'm barely comfortable enough with these other drivers to get into an actual vehicle on the roads due to the maniacs I see out there so bikes are a slim chance.
rcpt 3y ago
Every once in a while there's a real challenge. Rental e-bikes and e-scooters currently. The problem is that these are crippled by regulations that only apply to the new transportation modes. In Los Angeles we put GPS speed limiters and parking enforcement on scooters while letting cars park practically anywhere. You can drive 80mph through a school zone and nobody will do anything unless a cop happens to be there when you do it. It feels like an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen. https://transfersmagazine.org/2018/08/15/monopolizing-scooters-bird-backlash-threatens-competition-and-innovation/ https://transfersmagazine.org/2018/08/15/monopolizing-scoote...
rfmc 3y ago
What you say isn't possible is being done with the greatest amount of success in Amsterdam, great success in Copenhagen, and it's picking up steam now in Paris. Just to mention a few. It's a gradual process, and part of the problem is actually embedded on your analogy, it's not like perform a heart and artery transplant, because there's no single action that can solve the problem, but years, and years of multiple, small and large initiatives, to make car dependency goes down.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Did you really just compare a midsized US citing to freaking Amsterdam? That’s… hopelessly out of touch is about the kindest thing I could say.
  - rfmc 3y ago
    Oh yeah. I forgot that the USA operate by another set of rules than the rest of humanity. What is your point even? Population? Sprawl?
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Well, yes? The Amsterdam metro area is almost 3M people. This is like acting surprised people don’t consider a dog and a cow comparable as pets.
      - rfmc 3y ago
        Copenhagen is 600k. Shitty weather year-round, predicting the next point of pro car dependency arguments.
        TylerE 3y ago
        Which is still 3x the city in question. No sale.
        3y ago
JoshGG 3y ago
"it is not clear if there is a way." This is what the car lobby wants you to think. The transformation to a better and more livable city free from overwhelming car traffic is closer and faster than you imagine. The primary challenge is the power of the car-industrial complex both inside and outside government and the continued work to destroy and hobble other forms of transit.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  Not everyone lives in a city. And certainly not everyone lives in an LA/NYC city. The city I live in is modest in size, 250k-300k depending on who you ask. It will never be a walkable city. Throughout much of the year, that's asking to die of heatstroke or something. It will never have a subway. Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall. It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size. My in-laws live in a township of about 6000 an hour away. Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong. Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus, when it'd add 20 minutes of irritation to my day? It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better. I'd be shocked if there's a non-coastal city or town anywhere in North America that supports your vision.
  - tjr225 3y ago
    [dead]
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Cities of 200k have good transit in some areas. Look around for inspiration. Most of them do not have English as the native language so it can be hard finding them
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      I have no desire to be "inspired". Others may wander around hoping to have epiphanies about how everyone else should live, but I don't care how others live as long as they leave me alone. I don't want them to make themselves miserable making it better for me... It's enough that they don't make things worse for me specifically and spitefully. I do wonder why that wouldn't be good enough for you.
hibikir 3y ago
It's pretty easy to do, other than the politics, in the highest growth cities. They tend to have so many areas that are severely underdeveloped that it would be economical to upzone them with transit in mind. Many a European city is far less car-centric than they were 30 years ago, just via rebuilding streets that were already dense enough to make sense. A good 50% of my home town is already just for pedestrians and delivery vehicles, and I read streets are changing. The real problem is both cities that are not growing at all, and cities that are still digging into the car hole. You might be able to rezone 50 year old suburbs, if just because the houses themselves keep losing value (as the real price increases are just land). But when the house was just built 10 years ago, it's a very tough sell. And if you expect a couple of million people, who are living in very low density suburb, to come downtown for any reason, you either make their transit story hell, or you are stuck wasting a lot of space just to manage their cars: Bad either way. The cities that aren't growing just are going to have a lot of trouble becoming denser, and the political problem will be even bigger, as every effort to make the area near the city center denser in a city that doesn't grow is just making the outer suburbs less valuable. I am really worried about those cities. As having the infrastructure to support four times the number of people that you have is just a road to fiscal ruin.
angarg12 3y ago
I didn't own a car for about 7 years while I lived in different countries. I can't say sometimes I didn't miss it, but I managed just fine. Last year we moved to the US, and we couldn't last 6 months without a car. I mean, technically we could, but it made life so extremely inconvenient as to not be worth it. Also, the alternative was to use tons of Ubers, which I'm not entirely convinced counts as ditching the car.
- quadrangle 3y ago
  Yes indeed, but there's no reason even in the U.S. that we need to stick with private car ownership. We could easily get by and accomplish everything we need, even with the current awful car-dependent situation by actually sharing cars more. Uber is not the answer really as is, but some form of fewer cars used more often with much less parking needed — that would be an improvement. If we can then get rid of half the parking lots and fill them in with a mix of medium-density mixed-use development and green space, that could set us up for enough walking/biking/transit contexts that we can take the next step away from car dependency.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I've always suspected that you could do something interesting with a moderate density apartment complex where renting the apartment comes with the ability to use any of the X vehicles the complex owns. It would be some bit of legal/liability wrangling and maybe some accounting to do it, but imagine if you had 50 families in a building, and ten vehicles available ranging from a small car to a pickup truck to a van to a moving truck. Tune it a bit and there you go!
cjohnson318 3y ago
Yeah, it's a lot easier to imagine a car-free world when you're in New York and you can walk around a corner to a grocery. The rest of us live at least ten minutes from the nearest grocery by car, which makes for about a thirty minute walk, which is fine, unless you need more than two days of food, or it's snowing, or you just don't have an extra hour or so that day.
walleeee 3y ago
people get heart transplants because they need them for very serious ailments likewise for industrialized humanity
quickthrower2 3y ago
I hope we keep cars, but they are self driving, electric, cheap and you don’t own one you book one on your app. You might end up sharing it. Some will be mini buses for ride shares. Best of both worlds. No need to own a car but the convenience is there when you need it.

ohmyzee 3y ago

I don't mean to be rude but are you over 45? There is a will with most people under that age in my experience. Or maybe cars are important culturally where you live?

afavour 3y ago
I live in New York City and even here I’m really not convinced most people under 45 have a will to get rid of cars. There isn’t a huge passion for them either, more like a resigned acceptance.
JenrHywy 3y ago
Many people under 45 don't have the same requirements for transport, though. It's easy to say you don't need a car when you're mobile and don't have to ship kids around. We try to minimize our car usage - we have one car for our family of 6; I ride an electric scooter to work etc. Not having a car at all though would be basically impossible unless we decided to cut out the kids sport and traveling to visit family.
- brewdad 3y ago
  You're still way ahead of the game compared to so many American families. Most of my neighbors have more cars than licensed drivers at home. We aren't going to eliminate cars in my lifetime (hopefully I've got a good 40 years or so left) but if we can get more households going car-light that's still significant progress.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    More cars than drivers isn't really a problem once you're past the 1:1 ratio, as obviously they can't all be used simultaneously.

HPsquared 3y ago

It took 50 years for the car to become dominant; it'll take another 50 for it to be displaced.

quadrangle 3y ago
Naw, due to climate chaos, we'll have widespread civilizational collapse and the plain breakdown of the car-supporting infrastructure within less than 50 years.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  In a Mad Max world, cars are more likely to keep working than trains or buses.
  - quadrangle 3y ago
    I haven't read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand series but my impression is that Kunstler would agree with you except with the caveat that there won't be cars or trains or buses overall, mostly just return to actual low-scale functioning like horses.

hackermatic 3y ago

In many places, allowing and encouraging infill development and upzoning would make carfree life viable more quickly than you'd think. I've lived most of my life in former streetcar suburbs -- neighborhoods of single-family homes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings that were served by a streetcar line every few blocks. Today, some of those places require cars to get anywhere interesting and back, while some of them have a few well-used bus lines and a ton of local restaurants, groceries, and hardware stores in easy walking distance. The density tipping point is really low; a few four-plexes on each block, which didn't diminish any of the "neighborhood character" or lead to epic struggles to find parking. (I did still have a car, I just used it a lot less, and was much happier not having to bother.) And it felt a lot nicer than the all-or-nothing neighborhoods that are either single-family homes or large corporate apartment complexes.

ryukafalz 3y ago
Yep, I live in such a town now. It's a 5 minute bike ride downtown, 8 minutes to the downtown of the closest neighboring town, 13 minutes to the next closest. And it would be 12 minutes to a major shopping center with a grocery store but there's no safe route there at the moment - but that's not an impossible change to make! Point is, you're right, it doesn't take that much density to make getting around without a car viable for many trips.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
Raising the streetcar suburb is a great point. Many major and minor cities all across North America were not designed for the car, as much as they may seem so today. They were designed for the streetcar, with commercial blocks strung out along those streetcar corridors. In older bigger cities these streetcar corridors densified and became commercial districts, while in younger ones they were on the precipice before the car and rigid zoning stopped the transition. These corridors remain as valuable arteries awaiting a return to their original designs. Simple and affordable upgrades like bus rapid transit, small apartment buildings and bike lanes could once again transition them into being powerful parts of a transportation network that does not rely on car ownership.
- 3y ago

kibwen 3y ago

> Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way. In Boston there's both a will and a way. I haven't owned a car for as long as I've lived here, and the bike lanes are so, so much better now than when I first arrived. Neighboring Cambridge now has laws on the books requiring bike lanes to be added any time that a road is rebuilt. The new light-rail extension through Somerville added a bike path alongside most of its length, connecting the paths along the downtown riverside to the Minuteman bikeway that runs 15 miles out to Bedford. It can be done. But people have to organize and give a fuck.

goatlover 3y ago
So how much has that cut down on car traffic inside Boston?
- ripe 3y ago
  I don't have numbers, but I can tell you that the city government is serious about providing other alternatives to cars. For example, making buses free. [1] [1] https://www.boston.gov/news/new-steps-reduce-vehicle-emissions-boston https://www.boston.gov/news/new-steps-reduce-vehicle-emissio...
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    The buses aren’t generally free though: https://www.mbta.com/fares/bus-fares https://www.mbta.com/fares/bus-fares They are free on only 3 lines (plus SL1 leaving the airport) https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-wu-takes-steps-expand-fare-free-bus-service https://www.boston.gov/news/mayor-wu-takes-steps-expand-fare...
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Free buses should not be considered in any city. Spend that money on more frequent routes. People will not use a free bus that only comes once an hour, or doesn't stop close to them. Until your city is covered with transit coming every 5 minutes you need to work on that not cost. Not even the best transit cities have transit every 5 minutes all over the city. There is a lot of room to improve in them all

hot_gril 3y ago

The silliest mistake I see wasn't creating suburbs but shoving roads into denser cities. In some cases this was the result of corporate lobbying, like in Los Angeles. Wastes like 1/3 of the space and ruins the enjoyment of living there, so people prefer suburbs instead in most places. The little success I keep thinking of is downtown Mountain View during/after covid19 lockdowns. They shut down the roads, so people walk around and interact. Some still drive to there and park on the perimeter of that big walking area. If they keep this kind of thing up, making these areas desirable to live in and growing them, things will become more consolidated. Eventually with those fewer "point masses," public transit can go between them. Doesn't make sense currently because there are just too many destinations. Meanwhile those who really want to live in suburbs and drive around can still do it. They could even drive to the dense areas and park. They'd just be missing out.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
There are two aspects to this story. For one, large arterials were placed where the most marginalized in society lived so that they couldn't protest. Historically black neighborhoods and poor white neighborhoods were flattened to accommodate large arterials. The other is sprawl. Newer arterials, built after the problematic era, started out as state highways designed for transport. Once interstates were built, due to height and FAR limits in residential and commercial zones, new development sprawled out, sometimes onto these state highways which now had interstate alternatives. Naturally it was mostly low cost housing or commercial real estate as those are the most likely uses that would work adjacent to a large arterial.

ilyt 3y ago

It's not really "remove cars" problem tho. Cars are fine and are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike easily. It's make other forms of transport more viable for day to day stuff You still need vans and trucks delivering stuff to people and businesses. Bus is far more flexible form of transport than tram. Just... if you need to wait ages for one and there is no stop nearby nobody will want to wait.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
> Cars are fine and are needed, you can't move anything big with tram or bike easily What’s the percentage of cars on the road you see moving big stuff that could not be moved by other means? (Aka not people).
- decremental 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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  - californical 3y ago
    In many European cities, you can just walk to a grocery store a few blocks away, and just go every day or two, picking up a few items each time. You only need one bag, so it’s not a burden at all. Worst case, it’s incredibly easy to add a basket to a bike (or mobility scooter), so you can put your day’s groceries in there. And as an added benefit of density, grocery stores are more efficient. There is a “general” one with all of the basics — fruit and veggies, cereal, meat, pasta, basic sauces, breads, convenience foods. Those are everywhere. Then if you go a little further, you’ll find specialty stores with “asian foods” or others, which you may not use as often but can get some rarer things there.
    - erik_seaberg 3y ago
      That sounds a lot more time consuming than going to Costco (a five mile drive) every week or two.

alistairSH 3y ago

The Netherlands did almost exactly what you claim is not possible.

Vinnl 3y ago
And more importantly, lots of Western European countries are following that, a couple of decades later - so even today, it's possible to make strides in that direction.

Swizec 3y ago

> Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person Nonsense. Ljubljana went from full of cars downtown to a 1 square mile pedestrian area with zero cars. It’s fantastic. And all the major arteries into the city went from 2 lanes to 1 lane + bus. Amsterdam famously reversed its car centric design in the 1980’s. Even San Francisco was able to close its main city artery to car traffic and transform many of the big roads with dedicated bus and bike lanes. And those are just the cities I know about. There’s bound to be more. The feat is completely possible, but takes a while as any large refactoring does.

Tiktaalik 3y ago
Another big example is Tokyo. Sure there's cars and roads in Tokyo, but it's absolutely not the major way that people move around. It's a relatively car light city. Or closer to NA have a look at Vancouver. From a high level looking at the whole region, it's about as devoted to cars as everywhere else in North America, though if you peek down to the neighbourhood level you can see some incredible successes in moving people away from car use. In the near downtown West End area for example, some 45% of the population walks to work.
- Swizec 3y ago
  Honestly it feels like when a city/area gets dense enough people naturally stop using cats because it just isn’t practical. Most trips in SF are faster on a bicycle than by car, for example. Then when that happens, it’s easy to refactor architecture to be more in line with what people are doing already.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    You'd think so but with the anemic enforcement we have in the US this often isn't the case. Who cares if all the parking spots are taken up when you can just double park in a lane and nobody will do anything about it. When you can speed up the shoulder and skip a few traffic jams with no consequences, why not? Red light running has increased multi-fold since the start of the pandemic. In a lot of busy American cities you'll notice that the lack of enforcement on bad driver behavior means that drivers will bend as many rules possible to make their mode convenient for them. It's an inherent dynamic in car centrism here.

easytiger 3y ago

What came before cars? What utility do cars provide? Do zealots even consider these basic questions?

SoftTalker 3y ago
> What came before cars? Horses > What utility do cars provide? They don't shit on the street.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Nobody talks about horses, even though we have tons of footage proving that we had "horse-centric cities" long before Benz started doing his thing.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    For the most part people didn't ride horses to get around town (despite what Westerns depict). Horses were mostly used to pull carts moving goods around like trucks do today. The average city dweller walked or rode trams.
    - easytiger 3y ago
      In England in the 1600s it was perfectly normal to get a hackney carriage around town. Boats for longer distances. Until 1976 the law was still extant that they had to keep a bale of hay in the vehicle. The prices were even regulated http://www.londonancestor.com/stow/stow-hack.htm http://www.londonancestor.com/stow/stow-hack.htm Indeed the Romans even had regulations about road width to ensure drawn carts could pass each other https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads
      - jhbadger 3y ago
        Even so, that's just using a cart and a hired one at that. I mean the analogy of a horse to a car (as in something you owned personally and rode around on) was never really true, at least in cities. Also, speaking of London, the Underground is surprisingly old -- the first parts of the system opened in 1863. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as going by hackney, but had he really existed, he could have ridden the Tube.

analog31 3y ago

The political issue I've seen is that the people who are even part of the conversation about reducing car use, tend to be somewhat over-the-top about it. Most people are just apathetic about it, or consider bike traffic to be an annoying indulgence.

baby 3y ago

What I don't understand is that you can keep the car-centric cities we have and still improve some zones. You could create pedestrian streets, for example. And you could allow shops and commerces to open fronts on more than just a few blocks in a commercial street. Yet US cities refuse to do both. Here in SF we got slow streets, which nobody asked, and basically did not change anything about the topology of the streets. Not a single pedestrian street was created during covid, and restaurants had to fight to turn parking space in parklet. Parklets are being removed everywhere now.

kerkeslager 3y ago

The shift to trains/bikes is harder, but the shift to buses is not as bad from what I've seen, because it re-uses car infrastructure well, and can be improved with minimal construction (often, just signage making a lane bus-only or similar).

bippihippi1 3y ago
adding bike lanes can just take paint on largish streets. thinner roads also make people drive slower, so it's a win win
- mcdonje 3y ago
  Paint is not good enough. Bike lanes separated from the road by just paint and no significant barrier like bollards or something will not be used much because bikers won't feel safe, and cars will use it as a parking lane.
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    But yea even with separation it's incredibly cheap to make temporary bike lanes. Drop a few jersey barriers or even big planters and there you go.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    It's a spectrum. As a biker, of course I prefer real, separated lanes. But there are plenty of roads that I will bike on despite having only painted-on lanes. Others might be less lenient (would only bike on separated lanes) or more lenient (the die-hard lycra warriors). Even just having a painted-on lane is an improvement because it accommodates some people who previously wouldn't have biked, and that's still an improvement, and it's an approach that can be done very cheaply. That doesn't mean we should be satisfied with only painted-on lanes, but I won't let the perfect be the enemy of progress.
    - earthling8118 3y ago
      I have a strong desire to bike but I won't do it on those lanes. They're not as bad as the painted bike symbols that say "theoretically you can ride a bike on this road" but they're still not going to make me comfortable enough to do it. I'm barely comfortable enough with these other drivers to get into an actual vehicle on the roads due to the maniacs I see out there so bikes are a slim chance.

rcpt 3y ago

Every once in a while there's a real challenge. Rental e-bikes and e-scooters currently. The problem is that these are crippled by regulations that only apply to the new transportation modes. In Los Angeles we put GPS speed limiters and parking enforcement on scooters while letting cars park practically anywhere. You can drive 80mph through a school zone and nobody will do anything unless a cop happens to be there when you do it. It feels like an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen. https://transfersmagazine.org/2018/08/15/monopolizing-scooters-bird-backlash-threatens-competition-and-innovation/ https://transfersmagazine.org/2018/08/15/monopolizing-scoote...

rfmc 3y ago

What you say isn't possible is being done with the greatest amount of success in Amsterdam, great success in Copenhagen, and it's picking up steam now in Paris. Just to mention a few. It's a gradual process, and part of the problem is actually embedded on your analogy, it's not like perform a heart and artery transplant, because there's no single action that can solve the problem, but years, and years of multiple, small and large initiatives, to make car dependency goes down.

TylerE 3y ago
Did you really just compare a midsized US citing to freaking Amsterdam? That’s… hopelessly out of touch is about the kindest thing I could say.
- rfmc 3y ago
  Oh yeah. I forgot that the USA operate by another set of rules than the rest of humanity. What is your point even? Population? Sprawl?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Well, yes? The Amsterdam metro area is almost 3M people. This is like acting surprised people don’t consider a dog and a cow comparable as pets.
    - rfmc 3y ago
      Copenhagen is 600k. Shitty weather year-round, predicting the next point of pro car dependency arguments.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Which is still 3x the city in question. No sale.
        3y ago

JoshGG 3y ago

"it is not clear if there is a way." This is what the car lobby wants you to think. The transformation to a better and more livable city free from overwhelming car traffic is closer and faster than you imagine. The primary challenge is the power of the car-industrial complex both inside and outside government and the continued work to destroy and hobble other forms of transit.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Not everyone lives in a city. And certainly not everyone lives in an LA/NYC city. The city I live in is modest in size, 250k-300k depending on who you ask. It will never be a walkable city. Throughout much of the year, that's asking to die of heatstroke or something. It will never have a subway. Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall. It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size. My in-laws live in a township of about 6000 an hour away. Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong. Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus, when it'd add 20 minutes of irritation to my day? It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better. I'd be shocked if there's a non-coastal city or town anywhere in North America that supports your vision.
- tjr225 3y ago
  [dead]
- bluGill 3y ago
  Cities of 200k have good transit in some areas. Look around for inspiration. Most of them do not have English as the native language so it can be hard finding them
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    I have no desire to be "inspired". Others may wander around hoping to have epiphanies about how everyone else should live, but I don't care how others live as long as they leave me alone. I don't want them to make themselves miserable making it better for me... It's enough that they don't make things worse for me specifically and spitefully. I do wonder why that wouldn't be good enough for you.

hibikir 3y ago

It's pretty easy to do, other than the politics, in the highest growth cities. They tend to have so many areas that are severely underdeveloped that it would be economical to upzone them with transit in mind. Many a European city is far less car-centric than they were 30 years ago, just via rebuilding streets that were already dense enough to make sense. A good 50% of my home town is already just for pedestrians and delivery vehicles, and I read streets are changing. The real problem is both cities that are not growing at all, and cities that are still digging into the car hole. You might be able to rezone 50 year old suburbs, if just because the houses themselves keep losing value (as the real price increases are just land). But when the house was just built 10 years ago, it's a very tough sell. And if you expect a couple of million people, who are living in very low density suburb, to come downtown for any reason, you either make their transit story hell, or you are stuck wasting a lot of space just to manage their cars: Bad either way. The cities that aren't growing just are going to have a lot of trouble becoming denser, and the political problem will be even bigger, as every effort to make the area near the city center denser in a city that doesn't grow is just making the outer suburbs less valuable. I am really worried about those cities. As having the infrastructure to support four times the number of people that you have is just a road to fiscal ruin.

angarg12 3y ago

I didn't own a car for about 7 years while I lived in different countries. I can't say sometimes I didn't miss it, but I managed just fine. Last year we moved to the US, and we couldn't last 6 months without a car. I mean, technically we could, but it made life so extremely inconvenient as to not be worth it. Also, the alternative was to use tons of Ubers, which I'm not entirely convinced counts as ditching the car.

quadrangle 3y ago
Yes indeed, but there's no reason even in the U.S. that we need to stick with private car ownership. We could easily get by and accomplish everything we need, even with the current awful car-dependent situation by actually sharing cars more. Uber is not the answer really as is, but some form of fewer cars used more often with much less parking needed — that would be an improvement. If we can then get rid of half the parking lots and fill them in with a mix of medium-density mixed-use development and green space, that could set us up for enough walking/biking/transit contexts that we can take the next step away from car dependency.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I've always suspected that you could do something interesting with a moderate density apartment complex where renting the apartment comes with the ability to use any of the X vehicles the complex owns. It would be some bit of legal/liability wrangling and maybe some accounting to do it, but imagine if you had 50 families in a building, and ten vehicles available ranging from a small car to a pickup truck to a van to a moving truck. Tune it a bit and there you go!

cjohnson318 3y ago

Yeah, it's a lot easier to imagine a car-free world when you're in New York and you can walk around a corner to a grocery. The rest of us live at least ten minutes from the nearest grocery by car, which makes for about a thirty minute walk, which is fine, unless you need more than two days of food, or it's snowing, or you just don't have an extra hour or so that day.

walleeee 3y ago

people get heart transplants because they need them for very serious ailments likewise for industrialized humanity

quickthrower2 3y ago

I hope we keep cars, but they are self driving, electric, cheap and you don’t own one you book one on your app. You might end up sharing it. Some will be mini buses for ride shares. Best of both worlds. No need to own a car but the convenience is there when you need it.