4 ms·

Roads in cities are such a waste of space. A long time ago I did a quick survey of SF and found something like 20% of the land was dedicated to cars. Some artic

• throwaway984393 2y ago
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• devvvvvvv 2y ago
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• vlovich123 2y ago
  You’re not incorrect per se, but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough. You also need public transit options into it as well as transportation solutions for “out of towners” who descend onto downtown for some event (eg public parking lots outside the city that has public transit to the event). It can be an easier and more politically popular idea to just use streets to solve this problem at the individual level even if less efficient rather than requiring efficient central management planning by the government. And just to be clear, I’m a fan of the changes SF is making, just highlighting some of the challenges, not to mention that SF isn’t going quite so far as to rip up existing streets with the exception of the latest vote where the entire city basically voted against the will of the outer sunset to convert the highway to a park and not just closed on the weekends as it’s been since COVID (increasing maintenance costs due to erosion are another huge reason it’s a good idea).
  • geogod42 2y ago
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  • Qwertious 2y ago
    >but it’s important to note that deliveries into downtown would be important for it to be a thriving destination for shopping, residential or business. Not to mention space for heavy equipment to come in to do repairs and construction. Minimal maintenance corridors may not be enough. I used to work at a warehouse, the whole street of warehouses had a street width of at most 10m (30ft) wall-to-wall. People vastly overestimate how much throughput is needed purely for shipping, due to all the passenger cars on the road. Heavy equipment is also less of an issue than you'd think, because it tends to expand to fit the space it's permitted - like all engineering projects.
  • wongarsu 2y ago
    In any city that isn't hopelessly car-dependent there is some kind of rail to bring in commuters. A subway, tram, light rail, passenger rail, often a combination of all of them. Once you have a stable system to bring in commuters, adding a couple parking lots to stops on the outskirts for "out of towners" is pretty easy. The rest is just about not removing all the streets. You also need enough roads for emergency vehicles. But simple two-lane roads for arteries and one-lane roads everywhere else are enough for deliveries, maintenance and (European-sized) emergency vehicles. All the other lanes are just there so everyone can travel downtown in their personal car instead of using more efficient transport options.
    • pfg_ 2y ago
      You can also have fully closed streets open to emergency vehicles as long as a path is kept clear
    • bufferoverflow 2y ago
      One-lane road in a city means any car can block the whole road. So if an ambulance needs this road to save you, you're out of luck.
• dexwiz 2y ago
  How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles? I’m all for more walkable cities but rip them all up and replace them with what? Rails which are more expensive and less flexible? Pneumatic tube? Even if you switched to single person cargo bikes you would still want dedicated areas for vehicles versus pedestrians.
  • spaceguillotine 2y ago
    This problem has been solved by equipment designed for narrower roads. It is not a hard problem to solve and cities like this have been around a very long time. There are literally solutions to every issue you bring up that are already on the market.
  • browningstreet 2y ago
    See pedestrian first roads in the NL. There are bigger and more complicated cities that have done these things and became the better for it.
  • Ar-Curunir 2y ago
    Other countries just use more space-efficient vehicles.
  • throw0101a 2y ago
    > How do you propose we handle logistics or emergency vehicles? Find the the width of said emergencies vehicles, and then build bike lanes that are a little wider than that: the emergencies vehicles can drive down them quite easily (and cyclists can get out of the way quite quickly). Alternatively, if a city has trams, created segregated rights of way, and the emergency vehicles can use them. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ&t=18m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ&t=18m47s And less-car-centric areas ≠ no-vehicles-allowed-ever areas.
• nwiswell 2y ago
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  • dymk 2y ago
    I wonder how Tokyo functions? I guess people just die waiting for an ambulance or in a fire. See this part of the comment you’re replying to - > Yes we need some roads, but cars driving in the heart of downtown as normal transit?
    • fooker 2y ago
      Tokyo barely makes it into the top hundred by population density. Also yes, for most large cities you can find news articles about people dying in fires or because of an ambulance getting delayed.
      • wat10000 2y ago
        Funny how you don’t see articles about people dying in fires because they live on a suburb that’s 10% as dense as it should be and so the fire station is 3x farther away than it should be. No real surprise, though. People love stories where you can point to a few people and say, they’re the ones who did this. It’s much less fun when it’s systemic and no one person or group can be blamed.
        • fooker 2y ago
          As a rule of thumb, you can't design anything trying to account for black swan events. Optimizing for the regular, daily use case is hard enough. It would help to think of this as a smart but random person reading about a security issue like spectre and offering you software design advice. Common sense arguments are only useful to an extent, the devil is in the details.
          • wat10000 2y ago
            I’m not sure how to apply this here. What does optimizing for regular daily use and not black swan events look like when it comes to fire and ambulance services? It seems to me that black swans are a major purpose for them. That’s why the local fire station tends to have a lot of time where the firefighters are sitting around, and why simple calls often get 3x more response than they need. The services are greatly overprovisioned for daily needs because they also exist for the times when an entire apartment building burns down, or some maniac bombs the subway.
• jonathan_landy 2y ago
  I like to drive. Edit: see also this pro-car, pro-toll note by Bryan Caplan. https://www.betonit.ai/p/cars-could-be-even-more-convenient https://www.betonit.ai/p/cars-could-be-even-more-convenient
  • Daishiman 2y ago
    This is a non-informational take which is just ahistorical, as evidenced by the fact that just 30 years a lot of European cities were very much car-centric and were much more awful by pretty much every metric than they are today.
    • starspangled 2y ago
      About one in every two households in Amsterdam own a car. I would bet many that don't use taxi services themselves now and again, and almost everybody would indirectly rely on roads used for deliveries, workmen, emergency services. And that's about the best case for a European city. It's comparable to New York City. Paris, London, Prague -- higher. The reality is that these romantic notions people have of cities not relying on cars or roads is an unrealistic fantasy. Yes it's certainly nice if you have good public transport that many people can use for most of their transport. The reality is though that even in the very best cases of those like Amsterdam and Tokyo, personal car ownership rates are still enormous, and the cities would cease to function without small private vehicles for commercial operations, let alone removing the roads for garbage collections, busses, emergency vehicles, etc.
      • MattPalmer1086 2y ago
        And yet, if you walk around Amsterdam or Rotterdam you see a lot of bicycles and trams and pedestrians, and very few cars. Cars certainly exist, but they are clearly not used by default for everything. Contrast with my recent visit to New Jersey. The hotel was surrounded on all sides by parking lots and multi lane roads). There was no sidewalk.
        • 2y ago
• ekianjo 2y ago
  Downtown only exists in the first place because roads go there. You know the old saying? All roads lead to Rome. Cities concentrate people and need a lot of resources to be sustainable, and roads are what bring these resources.
  • dymk 2y ago
    You know what those roads originally had on them? Small carriages (see etymology) and foot traffic, not modern cars. It blows my mind that people think cars are necessary for modern cities when the best ones to live have very few or no cars
  • Ar-Curunir 2y ago
    That’s just pure nonsense. Have you been to, like, any major non-American city? People just take public transit, or walk, or, live in downtown
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      This entire comment section is simultaneously hilarious and sad to read, because it's obviously a bunch of myopic Americans who have never ventured outside of America and have no clue how other cities in the world work. Honestly I try to avoid commenting in forums like this because it's so fruitless: it's just like trying to have a rational discussion about vaccines (or anything really) with a bunch of Trump followers.
      • wat10000 2y ago
        What’s funny is that I’m sure most of them know other kinds of cities exist. And they know that people somehow manage to survive and thrive there, even if they don’t know how. But this all gets ignored once you start talking about trying to emulate some of that. For too many Americans, there’s no difference between “that can’t work,” “that can’t work here,” and “we don’t do that.”
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        All large European cities have a lot of traffic, public transit notwithstanding. And in the small towns, most people have a car because public transit is not economical in sparsely populated areas.
• modeless 2y ago
  Roads are useful, but what I really think we should get rid of is parking lots. When cars can drive themselves we should build over all the lots and knock down the garages. The cars can spend the day on the road and the night parked outside the city. There should be zero parked inside the city.
  • geogod42 2y ago
    roads are dirty tho, n really expensive
  • jerlam 2y ago
    If the cars can't park, then they're clogging up the roads and preventing them from being used as intended for transportation. I am fine with parking lots as long as they're not publicly funded and are taxed just as every other parcel in the city. And on-street parking should be prohibited.
    • gpm 2y ago
      In fact I'd say that self driving cars will mean that it's important that parking is not more expensive than simply driving in circles. You can bet that companies will drive self driving cars in circles to store them while not in use if it's cheaper than parking, and that takes up both more space, and higher value space.
      • jakelazaroff 2y ago
        Perhaps there should be some sort of vacancy tax where the operators of driverless cars are charged for every mile they drive without a human passenger.
        • omnimus 2y ago
          Youve just invented a new job which is dummy human who is cheaper than parking lot who drives all day around city in otherwise empty cars.
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• deleted 2y ago
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• pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Cities have had roads long before there were cars. So many people like to pretend that before "car culture" there were no roads in cities or that before cars there were no big roads. There were huge roads in cities in the 1800s to accommodate carriages, streetcars, and all the extra people on the road because a 5 minute trip by car takes 20 minutes on foot. Cities in 1000 AD had roads, and a lot of them were pretty damn wide. Ancient Rome was famous for building roads. Roads are not a waste of space. Roads are infrastructure.
  • Ar-Curunir 2y ago
    Cars need a disproportionate amount of space for the number of people that they serve compared to every other means of transport. Bicycles, e-scooters, buses, etc serve many more people per square foot compared to mostly empty cars.
    • pclmulqdq 2y ago
      You can certainly pack more bicycles/e-scooters per square mile, but they also move a lot slower. Not to mention cargo capacity of trucks vs. things like e-scooters. Buses and trains also don't go everywhere. If you banned cars and expanded bus routes to compensate, you would get much less utilization of space for your buses. In other words, buses are dense because other modes of transport allow you to only put a bus route on very common paths. The point still stands, though. The roads that they are complaining about were largely planned and built before cars. Downtown SF had roads that were very similar in size in 1900 as they are in 2025. The roads didn't magically get wider when cars came in. If they weren't a waste of space with no cars, they aren't magically a waste of space now. Many other cities that were built up much later have huge parking lots in their city centers, which are a massive waste of space. Roads, on the other hand, are not.
• fooker 2y ago
  No amount of reason will negate the fact that people like the convenience of cars. There is a reason cars, and paradoxically larger cars are being bought in increasing numbers. You can of course force people to give up conveniences they like, you just have to contend with the fact that the modern world makes it easy for people to move or vote with their wallet.
• redox99 2y ago
  This line of thought is pretty silly. Claiming that the city is subsidizing X billions because some public space is free. The land there is so valuable because it's desirable. Sure, NYC could sell central park for a bazillion dollars. But the land there is so expensive because central park exists. If it were sold and became buildings, the price of sq ft in Manhattan would massively drop.
  • asdasdsddd 2y ago
    Except in downtown SF there are dozens of giant empty lots, some are just abandoned, some are flat lots used for 6hrs a week for event parking.
    • Breza 2y ago
      We still have a few of those here in DC. I've always assumed they're just a way for the owner to hold onto the real estate until it's time to sell.
      • amyames 2y ago
        SF only approves something like 3-4 new housing construction projects a month for its 800,000 or so population. If I have that wrong, just chime in. So even if you lucked out and acquired land , inherited it , or whatever . It could be years before you can do anything with it. If you even have the money to build on it. Parking is the only rent you might be collecting on it.
    • deleted 2y ago
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• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Nah roads are great and cars are great. They let people get around in ways that are much faster than public transit, with your friends and cargo, protected from the weather, without the safety issues, directly to your destination. If you overbuild and create density of inhuman levels, and don’t build adequate road infrastructure, you will have problems. But otherwise, it’s fine and it works very well in cities of low-mid density.
  • omnimus 2y ago
    Nah.
  • Ajedi32 2y ago
    While this is true, roads are also expensive; particularly in places like dense cities where space is at a premium. It makes perfect sense to charge road users for their consumption of of an expensive, limited resource, as long the price is fair (determined by supply and demand and not just as ploy by people who hate cars to eliminate their use).
• tim333 2y ago
  >That is the most subsidized land on the planet but people don't think of it that way. That's because it generally isn't in terms of paying cash subsidies. What happens is that when the city is laid out areas are blocked out for access. Doing that doesn't really cost you anything. In places that get pedestrianised the road space is still there, just used for people rather than cars.
• deleted 2y ago
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• johnea 2y ago
  In Manhattan you might have an argument. They have the most extensive public transit system in the US. Anywhere else, you're completely wrong. Here in San Diego, a typical car drive of ~20 minutes round trip would take ~3 hours on the bus 8-( Unless you're planning to walk to Minnesota and back (or where ever else you're going) in the current state of affairs you pretty much need roads... p.s. Also with the "raise the taxes on this until no one uses it" argument, what you're really saying is "make it accessible only to the wealthy".