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I think one of the key points that is often not understood widely is that car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpl

I think one of the key points that is often not understood widely is that car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) than necessary. If every building is surrounded by a border of 15 meters of roads, that significantly expands the distances that a person needs to travel to get anywhere. This further prioritises cars and drives demand and cultural norms. I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. There's still a need for emergency vehicles and goods to be transported within the city, so we would still need some roads, but we could eliminate a considerable number of lanes.

nonameiguess 2y ago
I live in Dallas city center and I can only think of two roads that have more than a single lane in each direction. Banning passenger vehicles may still make plenty of sense for other reasons, to reduce pollution, noise, congestion, make it safer for pedestrians. And a few streets have actually shut down to vehicle traffic in the past decade. But I don't know what you're imagining about space. The roads we have aren't going anywhere. Aside from emergency vehicles, trucks still need to get in to make deliveries, and they require more space than passenger vehicles. The intercity bus station and both metro transit transfer centers are also in the city center, so seemingly you need room for buses, which also require more space than passenger vehicles. The water and sewer mains also run under the roads and need to have some minimum circumference to allow the throughput to supply a city center. Even if we somehow managed to eliminate roads, I'm still not sure I get what you're imagining. Are we going to tear down all of the existing buildings and replace them with buildings that have 7 meter wider bases? That would take decades and render the city mostly unusable while it was happening. There would also need to be room for trucks to bring in construction material and remove waste.
eweise 2y ago
More people live in the suburbs than city centers. That's where the real problem is. I don't have any problem walking around the streets of SF.
- noodlesUK 2y ago
  If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.
  - alexawarrior3 2y ago
    You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pablo-CA-94806/18508272_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pab... Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA-94520/18338819_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA... This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way). People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.
hn_user82179 2y ago
> car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) Good example here is Salt Lake City - the streets were designed intentionally to be very wide everywhere.
- treis 2y ago
  But not for cars. They were made wide enough for an ox wagon to turn around.
  - recursive 2y ago
    Ok, let's reduce ox wagons too then.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Are you sure that's a good example of car centricity? The streets in my town are wide enough for a six lane highway, yet the streets were built before the car was even a glimmer in someone's imagination.
  - recursive 2y ago
    If it wasn't car-centric then, it sure is now.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      Nah. If it were car-centric it would be much more friendly to cars. It has come to try to be everything-centric, which results in it being awful for everyone.
silvestrov 2y ago
A good example is looking at Apple's old campus: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/da... I get the total area to be 131351 m2 and the area inside the "Infinite loop" road to be 58029 m2, i.e. only 44% of the total area. So cars waste half of the area. https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculator-tool.htm https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculat...
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Forget the Apple campus Just look at Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/data=!3m1!1e3?authuser=0&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/dat... Half the city is parking
  - konschubert 2y ago
    What I absolutely don't understand: Why are there no parking garages, why only surface parking lots? Isn't that prime real estate? Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?
    - rd 2y ago
      Can’t say for certain but intuitive guess is it’s dirt (literally dirt in some cases) cheap to do a ground level parking slot? Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good? Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project? I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.
      - konschubert 2y ago
        How come no investors are buying that real estate and building skyscrapers or parking garages? Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?
Moldoteck 2y ago
Ban in the center is not enough, at least for us. Zoning and parking minimums should be ditched too. This would gradually densify the area
- fsckboy 2y ago
  if you want densification and you're willing to using zoning changes to achieve it, adopt the solution favored by truly dense cities: force more skyscrapers
  - Moldoteck 2y ago
    Densification is good up until a point. Ideally you would want mixed use and mixed style development
  - Hugsun 2y ago
    I was under the impression that skyscrapers weren't good for dense walkable areas. 4-7 story tall mixed use buildings are supposed to be the best. I'm afraid I don't have a source for this. The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes might have said this.
    - Moldoteck 2y ago
      it's a mixed bag. Some argue that sporadic skyscrapers might be a good thing since those would act as a point of easier orientation in space + providing housing/work area for ppl that want to live/work high. The problem appears when there are too many of them or public transport infra is not adapted to handle such an inflow of people towards a single point
  - presentation 2y ago
    Tokyo is truly dense and is not skyscraper heavy. They just have tiny roads and tightly packed buildings, mostly low-rise and single family homes.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
8organicbits 2y ago
Another thing I've noticed is that people drive even when there are nearby options. I live in a suburb of DC, right where a residential area meets a commercial area. There is a large Korean grocery store less than a block away, fully accessible by shaded sidewalks. My neighbors always drive 10-20 minutes to different stores. I go to the nearby one because it has cheaper and fresher produce, although I still make bulk purchases by car.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  I mean, I sort of get it. There was a time when I stopped driving to the grocery store all together but it was only because there was a great independent grocer right on my walk home from public transit. The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what we needed, and I wasn’t even going out of my way to do so. It was fantastic, I loved it. Maybe once a month we drove somewhere to get anything we needed that they didn’t carry, or for a big pantry restock. If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would. And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    > The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.
kettlecorn 2y ago
I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful: If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer. Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space. The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher. Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded. It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.
- ajuc 2y ago
  It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more. So in practice it's worse than 10x.
- alexawarrior3 2y ago
  "Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded." Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was. The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.
ajuc 2y ago
Detached houses and tenament houses also space things out compared to commie blocks which is why I have unpopular opionion that low-height (+- 4-story) commieblock neighbourhoods designed before cars were widespread are the best form of walkable cities. When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns. I mean sth like this - from before commie blocks were adapted to cars: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8
underlipton 2y ago
Even in suburbs, it does seem that the potential of in-fill development and mixed-use repurposing is undervalued. For example, I've lived in many low-rise apartment complexes; they always had one or two ground-floor units that were unpopular and frequently vacant because of their proximity to a road or something, and it never made any sense to me that they couldn't be converted into a small commercial space for the neighborhood. Something like a small cafe or corner store. With a higher commercial rent, residential rents in the area could be lower, and car trips to similar spaces would be reduced. These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c4463c54d4--cycle-shelters-bike-storage.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride. The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
exactly, especially in the suburbs. My closest places to talk to - ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable". - now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need. - And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk) Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown. >I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  It honestly isn't _that_ different in the UK. Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything. Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses. About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I sure hope y'all don't have to climb 200 ft hills in those areas. If it wasn't for that I'd say it's a walkable enough area for my needs. I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.
mrcartmeneses 2y ago
It’s worth remembering that a lot of car centric design has political roots. For example many of Berlin’s wide roads were built so that Nazi tanks could traverse them. Likewise Paris’s wide streets were built so that cavalry army’s could pass. And a big part of America’s single family home suburb design (which necessitates cars) is born out of a desire keeping white and black people separate (as well as regulatory capture by the auto industry). My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Very subjective question I know, but how significant do you think racist intentions are compared to the many other factors? I wasn't under the impression it was one of the top two factors that pushed us towards a car centered built environment.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I think it was an enormous factor. Just google for "white flight". While the rise of the automobile was a big enabler, there were other factors like the real estate industry practicing "redlining" which prevented Black people from moving into the suburbs to follow the white people who were abandoning the inner cities. If you don't realize just how horribly racist most Americans throughout most of the 20th century, you must not be very old. I still remember how commonplace it was in the 1980s even.
presentation 2y ago
I always think when walking around the USA that one could literally insert a narrow block into the middle of even a 2-lane-each-way road and end up with similar spacing as a typical Tokyo neighborhood. Imagine how much density that would create.
hot_gril 2y ago
This is the only way it can work. Walking makes natural sense in dense city centers, and the paths don't even have to be pretty. By all means, have ample roads and parking around the center so people can drive to it, but there's no reason people need to drive through it. Close 4 blocks, let businesses develop, then close more. Just making the paths nice and other stuff mentioned in this article isn't enough if there's nowhere to go. A lot of the time, this effort only worsens traffic.

nonameiguess 2y ago

I live in Dallas city center and I can only think of two roads that have more than a single lane in each direction. Banning passenger vehicles may still make plenty of sense for other reasons, to reduce pollution, noise, congestion, make it safer for pedestrians. And a few streets have actually shut down to vehicle traffic in the past decade. But I don't know what you're imagining about space. The roads we have aren't going anywhere. Aside from emergency vehicles, trucks still need to get in to make deliveries, and they require more space than passenger vehicles. The intercity bus station and both metro transit transfer centers are also in the city center, so seemingly you need room for buses, which also require more space than passenger vehicles. The water and sewer mains also run under the roads and need to have some minimum circumference to allow the throughput to supply a city center. Even if we somehow managed to eliminate roads, I'm still not sure I get what you're imagining. Are we going to tear down all of the existing buildings and replace them with buildings that have 7 meter wider bases? That would take decades and render the city mostly unusable while it was happening. There would also need to be room for trucks to bring in construction material and remove waste.

eweise 2y ago

More people live in the suburbs than city centers. That's where the real problem is. I don't have any problem walking around the streets of SF.

noodlesUK 2y ago
If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.
- alexawarrior3 2y ago
  You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pablo-CA-94806/18508272_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pab... Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA-94520/18338819_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA... This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way). People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.

hn_user82179 2y ago

> car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) Good example here is Salt Lake City - the streets were designed intentionally to be very wide everywhere.

treis 2y ago
But not for cars. They were made wide enough for an ox wagon to turn around.
- recursive 2y ago
  Ok, let's reduce ox wagons too then.
randomdata 2y ago
Are you sure that's a good example of car centricity? The streets in my town are wide enough for a six lane highway, yet the streets were built before the car was even a glimmer in someone's imagination.
- recursive 2y ago
  If it wasn't car-centric then, it sure is now.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Nah. If it were car-centric it would be much more friendly to cars. It has come to try to be everything-centric, which results in it being awful for everyone.

silvestrov 2y ago

A good example is looking at Apple's old campus: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/da... I get the total area to be 131351 m2 and the area inside the "Infinite loop" road to be 58029 m2, i.e. only 44% of the total area. So cars waste half of the area. https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculator-tool.htm https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculat...

Workaccount2 2y ago
Forget the Apple campus Just look at Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/data=!3m1!1e3?authuser=0&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/dat... Half the city is parking
- konschubert 2y ago
  What I absolutely don't understand: Why are there no parking garages, why only surface parking lots? Isn't that prime real estate? Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?
  - rd 2y ago
    Can’t say for certain but intuitive guess is it’s dirt (literally dirt in some cases) cheap to do a ground level parking slot? Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good? Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project? I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.
    - konschubert 2y ago
      How come no investors are buying that real estate and building skyscrapers or parking garages? Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?

Moldoteck 2y ago

Ban in the center is not enough, at least for us. Zoning and parking minimums should be ditched too. This would gradually densify the area

fsckboy 2y ago
if you want densification and you're willing to using zoning changes to achieve it, adopt the solution favored by truly dense cities: force more skyscrapers
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  Densification is good up until a point. Ideally you would want mixed use and mixed style development
- Hugsun 2y ago
  I was under the impression that skyscrapers weren't good for dense walkable areas. 4-7 story tall mixed use buildings are supposed to be the best. I'm afraid I don't have a source for this. The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes might have said this.
  - Moldoteck 2y ago
    it's a mixed bag. Some argue that sporadic skyscrapers might be a good thing since those would act as a point of easier orientation in space + providing housing/work area for ppl that want to live/work high. The problem appears when there are too many of them or public transport infra is not adapted to handle such an inflow of people towards a single point
- presentation 2y ago
  Tokyo is truly dense and is not skyscraper heavy. They just have tiny roads and tightly packed buildings, mostly low-rise and single family homes.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago

8organicbits 2y ago

Another thing I've noticed is that people drive even when there are nearby options. I live in a suburb of DC, right where a residential area meets a commercial area. There is a large Korean grocery store less than a block away, fully accessible by shaded sidewalks. My neighbors always drive 10-20 minutes to different stores. I go to the nearby one because it has cheaper and fresher produce, although I still make bulk purchases by car.

nkrisc 2y ago
I mean, I sort of get it. There was a time when I stopped driving to the grocery store all together but it was only because there was a great independent grocer right on my walk home from public transit. The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what we needed, and I wasn’t even going out of my way to do so. It was fantastic, I loved it. Maybe once a month we drove somewhere to get anything we needed that they didn’t carry, or for a big pantry restock. If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would. And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.

kettlecorn 2y ago

I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful: If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer. Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space. The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher. Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded. It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.

ajuc 2y ago
It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more. So in practice it's worse than 10x.
alexawarrior3 2y ago
"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded." Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was. The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

ajuc 2y ago

Detached houses and tenament houses also space things out compared to commie blocks which is why I have unpopular opionion that low-height (+- 4-story) commieblock neighbourhoods designed before cars were widespread are the best form of walkable cities. When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns. I mean sth like this - from before commie blocks were adapted to cars: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8

underlipton 2y ago

Even in suburbs, it does seem that the potential of in-fill development and mixed-use repurposing is undervalued. For example, I've lived in many low-rise apartment complexes; they always had one or two ground-floor units that were unpopular and frequently vacant because of their proximity to a road or something, and it never made any sense to me that they couldn't be converted into a small commercial space for the neighborhood. Something like a small cafe or corner store. With a higher commercial rent, residential rents in the area could be lower, and car trips to similar spaces would be reduced. These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c4463c54d4--cycle-shelters-bike-storage.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride. The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

exactly, especially in the suburbs. My closest places to talk to - ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable". - now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need. - And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk) Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown. >I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.

throwaway22032 2y ago
It honestly isn't _that_ different in the UK. Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything. Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses. About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I sure hope y'all don't have to climb 200 ft hills in those areas. If it wasn't for that I'd say it's a walkable enough area for my needs. I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.

mrcartmeneses 2y ago

It’s worth remembering that a lot of car centric design has political roots. For example many of Berlin’s wide roads were built so that Nazi tanks could traverse them. Likewise Paris’s wide streets were built so that cavalry army’s could pass. And a big part of America’s single family home suburb design (which necessitates cars) is born out of a desire keeping white and black people separate (as well as regulatory capture by the auto industry). My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
Very subjective question I know, but how significant do you think racist intentions are compared to the many other factors? I wasn't under the impression it was one of the top two factors that pushed us towards a car centered built environment.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I think it was an enormous factor. Just google for "white flight". While the rise of the automobile was a big enabler, there were other factors like the real estate industry practicing "redlining" which prevented Black people from moving into the suburbs to follow the white people who were abandoning the inner cities. If you don't realize just how horribly racist most Americans throughout most of the 20th century, you must not be very old. I still remember how commonplace it was in the 1980s even.

presentation 2y ago

I always think when walking around the USA that one could literally insert a narrow block into the middle of even a 2-lane-each-way road and end up with similar spacing as a typical Tokyo neighborhood. Imagine how much density that would create.

hot_gril 2y ago

This is the only way it can work. Walking makes natural sense in dense city centers, and the paths don't even have to be pretty. By all means, have ample roads and parking around the center so people can drive to it, but there's no reason people need to drive through it. Close 4 blocks, let businesses develop, then close more. Just making the paths nice and other stuff mentioned in this article isn't enough if there's nowhere to go. A lot of the time, this effort only worsens traffic.