11 ms·

Cars and Robust Cities Are Fundamentally Incompatible

70 points by wallflower 14y ago

Retric 14y ago
Flawed analysis, smaller city's have less congestion and less demand for public transit. The real issue with cars is they don't scale as you increase population density.
- dalke 14y ago
  How is the analysis flawed? It specifically looks at density. Quoting from the paper: > We analyzed a dozen historically dense, small cities from around the country in which the shares of residents getting to work by automobile range from 43 to 91 percent. We compared the rates of automobile use to the number residents and employees per square mile. The underlying abstract says: > Theory suggests that as automobile mode share increases in a city, the amount of land used for transportation also increases, whereas the land available for other uses decreases. This can result in a loss of activities from the city. This study compiles data from 12 cities in the United States to test these theoretical relationships. The findings suggest that on average each increase of 10 percentage points in the portion of commuters traveling by automobile is associated with an increase of more than 2500 m2 of parking per 1000 people and a decrease of 1700 people/km2. It's saying that the more the city promotes car commuting, the fewer activities are in the city ("decreased robustness"). Small cities can also be dense cities. The paper included Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA in the study. Both have populations around 110,000 with a relatively dense population.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Congestion is fairly independent of the amount of parking in a city. It also pushes people to use public transit where available. Public transit requires public buy in or it's not viable. Increased public transit allows for increased density, but in no way increases the carrying capacity of the local road system pushing up demand for public transportation further. In other words think of congestion as the engine of public transportation systems. Now, looking a small city's inside major metro areas vs outside major metro areas congestion is vary different. PS: Not to mention the relative student populations have direct effects on car ownership. Now, if they had looked at more city's this would have been less of an issue, but look at the 12 chosen.
    - dalke 14y ago
      Thanks. I didn't realize this was a paper on congestion. I couldn't find mention of that in the linked-to page, nor is it mentioned in the abstracts of the relevant paper. So I'm confused about how that's related to the analysis.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  This rebuttal only works if they were comparing, say, New Haven to New York. However, they chose three different cities for each of their "bins," and those cities all are relatively equal in size. New Haven CT: 129k Hartford CT: 125k Lowell MA: 107k Cambridge MA: 106k Berkeley CA: 113k For Arlington, I don't know which city they're talking about. It appears, regardless of the state, that it's the odd one out, so I'm not sure why they included it. Arlington MA: 42k Arlington VA: 216k
  - NoPiece 14y ago
    I'd like to see how Santa Monica compares. 90k pop., and more dense than Berkeley. No public rail (yet), a big commitment to parking lots, and tons of cars and commuters. But I think stands up to Berkeley as far as urban fabric. But maybe my perception of the amount of parking is off.
    - dalke 14y ago
      There are some pages on this topic. It seems that Santa Monica switched to a new scheme which detects if a car has left and resets the meter, rather than leaving some time for the next person. ("Greedy meters" say a few sources.) > But Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of “The High Cost of Free Parking,” sees Santa Monica’s plan as a pale imitation of the more ambitious plans in San Francisco and Los Angeles. > “I don’t see how this increases turnover — it just makes sure they get everyone to pay and they know how much they are getting,” said Professor Shoup, who is widely considered the intelligent-parking guru. “Anytime someone says something isn’t about money, it’s about money.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/santa-monica-resets-parking-meter-system.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/santa-monica-resets-par... (It looks like LA is using variable rate meters, which he says is better at improving turnover and of getting to the real market rate.) More at http://la.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/shoup.php http://la.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/shoup.php: > As an example in Santa Monica, which is starting to move in Shoup direction, but not quite there, we have some garages in Downtown that are in the red almost all the time during the week, and many blocks where on street parking is impossible, while hundreds of spaces are routinely unused at the Main Library underground lot and Civic Center garage at the same time. I know this because Santa Monica actually has a city website with live tracking of parking spots remaining at each of it's city lots. > If there were stronger price incentives (meaning make high demand lots and street spots more expensive while making under utilized lots and spaces dirt cheap) and advertising of the availability of the under utilized spaces, instead of the same garages filling up to the max and people freaking out that we need more and more parking, maybe we'd realize we actually have plenty. Then instead of wasting yet more land use and city money for more parking capacity, we could start making more open space for people, such as more park space and plazas. That was before the new meter system. Apparently, there's now an app for finding parking. That's all I could find before I grew disinterested.
aharner 14y ago
Brings to mind a quote from the mayor of Bogota, Colombia: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport."
- sheraz 14y ago
  I completely agree. I would encourage anyone interested to watch "Urbanized" by Gary Hustwit [1]. My favorite part is about Bogota and their charismatic mayor. Very, very interesting ideas are playing out there. [1] - http://urbanizedfilm.com/ http://urbanizedfilm.com/
- rayiner 14y ago
  One of the things I love about New York city is that you can get on a bus in the afternoon rush hour, and sit down with a banker making $5m/yr on one side and a Starbucks barista on the other.
  - joonix 14y ago
    And can anyone really argue that private cars add to quality of life in Manhattan? It should be limited to licensed taxi cabs (preferably electric/hybrid), emergency vehicles, commercial (delivery, maintenance, etc), and that's about it. Why should an individual be allowed to bring his Hummer into that tiny island full of pedestrians? Close more roads to vehicles and give them back to pedestrians and cyclists. If it's hard to ban, just jack up the bridge and tunnel tolls to $50/car.
    - rdouble 14y ago
      I was probably not adding to the quality of life, but I used to really enjoy driving around downtown Manhattan at night. FWIW, there were few signs of life down there after 10pm.
      - MrFoof 14y ago
        For car nuts living in the city, it's a bit of a thing you do. I live in Boston, and I'm fairly certain that the local Porsche dealership is catering to potential customers with very early morning test drives on Storrow Drive with demo cars. During the summer months I almost lose count of the number of 911s I encounter at 2AM (with a driver and a passenger, almost always both male) with window stickers on them, carving through the elevation changes and off-camber corners well beyond the speed limit. Last year it was so frequent I just got over to the rightmost lane whenever I would hear a wailing flat-six approaching.
mikeash 14y ago
Cars may cause trouble for cities, but the title is overstated to a degree that makes it hard for me to take the article seriously at all. I've seen a lot of cities I'd describe as "robust", and only one of them, Venice, wasn't swarming with cars. Although they may be at odds, it's clear from just looking at nearly any modern city that cars and robust cities are not incompatible. The article tacitly admits this, with the lowest rate of automobile commuting in their data set still over 40%. Which makes the terribly overstated title even more puzzling.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Venice is clogged with boats. These are basically cars on water. That their "roads" are flooded all the time is a technicality.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    When I visited (five years ago or so), boats were at least an order of magnitude less common in Venice's canals than cars are on the roads of a typical city, perhaps two or three orders of magnitude. It's far from a technicality.
    - dalke 14y ago
      http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/venice/canal-traffic-getting-venetians-angry http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/venice/canal-traffic-getting... - "Venice may have no cars but it has plenty of boats and their number has been on the increase over the past years. So much so that the usually tranquil canals of Venice now at times resemble the more chaotic traffic of Rome or Milan." I counted about 500 boats on the Grand Canal using Google's map imagery, either in motion or moored. (From the train station to Piazza San Marco.) The distance is ~3km. How do you map that to car traffic? Boats carry more than cars and a vaporetti caries more than a bus. After all, the boats carry a good fraction of the 18 million tourists per year. Boats also need more space and go at different speeds. Did you factor in wake pollution? Quoting the quite work from WPI (http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-122107-161101/unrestricted/Venetian_Boat_Traffic_and_Its_Environmental_Impacts.pdf http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-122107... ) "it is the only place in the world whose method of transportation has the literal ability to destroy the city." It also describes the effects of noise pollution, and the over 100 years of various attempts at traffic control. Given all of these differences, how did you base your comparison of the congestion of cars in a normal city vs. that of boats in Venice?
hammock 14y ago
OP argues that more drivers cause cities to be less dense. That is a factor- e.g. if you are a small business and you know all of your customers have cars to visit you, you will lease the cheaper out-of-town real estate rather than the expensive stuff next door to them. But it really works strongly the other way around. The closer you are to others, the less you have to drive to see them. Things like zoning and parking minimums increase the space between buildings (and therefore people), which necessitates more driving.
jstalin 14y ago
Ah yes, more "cars are evil" claptrap. Some people like dense urban living, some don't. Cars offer that option. The author is one of those who wants to remove that option.
- saosebastiao 14y ago
  If you don't like density, you don't have to live in it or work in it. Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle. Just don't ruin the cities we live in with your demands that we accommodate your lifestyle.
  - bdunbar 14y ago
    "Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle" Small town, in my case, 90 minutes from the nearest mid-size city. If you don't demand that I pay for rapid transit I'll never see, or use, don't restrict the kind of car or truck I can buy, then deal.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      If you really want people to only pay for the transportation infrastructure they themselves use, that's fine, but look for your gas taxes to triple. You might be paying for public transit you never use, but those of us living and/or working in cities are paying a lot more to maintain a highway to your small town that we never use.
      - MisterBastahrd 14y ago
        Apples and oranges. Cities can't sustain themselves without agriculture and products from outside of the city. If I never go into a city, I will never use their public transportation. If you never leave a city, you will still use public roads in order to eat, even if you never actually step foot outside.
        philwelch 14y ago
        The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities. The whole point of infrastructure is that it benefits society as a whole. This is just as true of city infrastructure as it is infrastructure in the countryside. (Not to mention there's a whole lot of countryside that doesn't produce food...or much of anything, really, other than a place for misanthropic people to retire to.)
kps 14y ago
Once cars self-drive, most commuters' cars can be a quarter the size they are now. When traffic lights, stop signs, lanes, and such are gone, and cars instead talk to each other to make efficient use of the available space, one-person microcars will have an advantage, and the current disadvantage of being flattened by a soccer mom's Canyonero will be absent.
- jowiar 14y ago
  More importantly, we won't actually need to park the cars. Private ownership of vehicles will plummet as a perfect taxi system emerges.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    It ameliorates, but does not solve, these problems. Many people will still want their own car for comfort and status. Most people will still travel to and from work during the traditional rush hours.
  - run4yourlives 14y ago
    Yes because nobody buys a car as an extension of their personality at all...
- saosebastiao 14y ago
  This is imaginative but flawed technophilia at best. People with grand visionary ideas always seem to get two things wrong: 1) They underestimate problems with their ideas, and then brush them off with solutions which, when summed together, make the visionary idea much less palatable. For example, the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop signs is complicated by the fact that not everybody can, will, or even should use a car to get around. But in the world without traffic lights and stop signs, pedestrians and cyclists are trapped by fear. Sure, they might technically be able to walk out into traffic and the wondercars will stop for them, but in reality, nobody will do that, because the cost of being wrong is death. In every conversation I have had with these technophiles, the solution always ends up being some massively costly network of pedestrian bridges at every intersection of the city. Yeah, not so palatable anymore. 2) They fail to understand that, like evolution, intermediate states have to be viable improvements on their own merits. Wheeled animals do not exist, not because wheeled animals wouldn't have superior mobility, but because no possible intermediate evolutionary state has incremental benefit over the previous legged state. How do you transition a 2 lane road into three lanes when only 50% of the cars are self-driving? What about when 99.9% are self-driving? There are thousands of imaginary future states that do not have credible intermediate states, and will likely never see the future state as a result.
joseph_cooney 14y ago
Driverless cars are a big game-changer here, because they don't need to stay 'down town' during the day. Hypothetically they don't even need to stay with you at night either. Maybe they just live in a parking garage somewhere near where you live.
petercooper 14y ago
As a countryside-dweller who visits cities now and then, I'd be more than happy to use public transport in cities if they provided good ways to transition between driving and public transport. Very few cities have a good "park and ride" culture where you get safe, modern parking structures on the main approaches to the city, and then frequent express trains or buses into the center. Without this, it's more tempting to just stay in the car and put up with a little extra traffic and expense in the city center. (In London, the closest thing you get to this is parking at Westfield in Shepherd's Bush and tubing it in, but Shepherd's Bush is too central to London to avoid adding to the worst of the traffic.)
- bunderbunder 14y ago
  I think that folks driving into the city from the countryside is really a very minimal part of the issue. No offense, but on any given day y'all are a drop in the bucket. It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city. The amount of space that needs to be devoted to accommodating them can really be quite impressive. Here in Milwaukee, for example, the downtown area has essentially been choked off - there are office buildings, there are some hotels, there are a few eateries and pubs which specifically cater to the office workers and business travelers (many of them aren't even open on the weekends). And there is. . . parking. Lots and lots and lots and lots of parking. If you ever go down there at night, the parking is really the most noticeable thing because of the sense of void it creates. All these great huge swaths of the very core of a major urban center that are just completely empty. The feeling is downright oppressive; it's like being in a shopping mall where 30% of the storefronts are vacant.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city. See, I was lumping myself in with that group. Park and ride schemes should, ideally, be attractive to commuters in the outer suburbs (many of the smaller British cities do a good job with this - Oxford, especially - just not any of the big ones I can think of).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

70 points by wallflower 14y ago

Flawed analysis, smaller city's have less congestion and less demand for public transit. The real issue with cars is they don't scale as you increase population density.

dalke 14y ago
How is the analysis flawed? It specifically looks at density. Quoting from the paper: > We analyzed a dozen historically dense, small cities from around the country in which the shares of residents getting to work by automobile range from 43 to 91 percent. We compared the rates of automobile use to the number residents and employees per square mile. The underlying abstract says: > Theory suggests that as automobile mode share increases in a city, the amount of land used for transportation also increases, whereas the land available for other uses decreases. This can result in a loss of activities from the city. This study compiles data from 12 cities in the United States to test these theoretical relationships. The findings suggest that on average each increase of 10 percentage points in the portion of commuters traveling by automobile is associated with an increase of more than 2500 m2 of parking per 1000 people and a decrease of 1700 people/km2. It's saying that the more the city promotes car commuting, the fewer activities are in the city ("decreased robustness"). Small cities can also be dense cities. The paper included Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA in the study. Both have populations around 110,000 with a relatively dense population.
- Retric 14y ago
  Congestion is fairly independent of the amount of parking in a city. It also pushes people to use public transit where available. Public transit requires public buy in or it's not viable. Increased public transit allows for increased density, but in no way increases the carrying capacity of the local road system pushing up demand for public transportation further. In other words think of congestion as the engine of public transportation systems. Now, looking a small city's inside major metro areas vs outside major metro areas congestion is vary different. PS: Not to mention the relative student populations have direct effects on car ownership. Now, if they had looked at more city's this would have been less of an issue, but look at the 12 chosen.
  - dalke 14y ago
    Thanks. I didn't realize this was a paper on congestion. I couldn't find mention of that in the linked-to page, nor is it mentioned in the abstracts of the relevant paper. So I'm confused about how that's related to the analysis.
mjmahone17 14y ago
This rebuttal only works if they were comparing, say, New Haven to New York. However, they chose three different cities for each of their "bins," and those cities all are relatively equal in size. New Haven CT: 129k Hartford CT: 125k Lowell MA: 107k Cambridge MA: 106k Berkeley CA: 113k For Arlington, I don't know which city they're talking about. It appears, regardless of the state, that it's the odd one out, so I'm not sure why they included it. Arlington MA: 42k Arlington VA: 216k
- NoPiece 14y ago
  I'd like to see how Santa Monica compares. 90k pop., and more dense than Berkeley. No public rail (yet), a big commitment to parking lots, and tons of cars and commuters. But I think stands up to Berkeley as far as urban fabric. But maybe my perception of the amount of parking is off.
  - dalke 14y ago
    There are some pages on this topic. It seems that Santa Monica switched to a new scheme which detects if a car has left and resets the meter, rather than leaving some time for the next person. ("Greedy meters" say a few sources.) > But Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of “The High Cost of Free Parking,” sees Santa Monica’s plan as a pale imitation of the more ambitious plans in San Francisco and Los Angeles. > “I don’t see how this increases turnover — it just makes sure they get everyone to pay and they know how much they are getting,” said Professor Shoup, who is widely considered the intelligent-parking guru. “Anytime someone says something isn’t about money, it’s about money.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/santa-monica-resets-parking-meter-system.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/santa-monica-resets-par... (It looks like LA is using variable rate meters, which he says is better at improving turnover and of getting to the real market rate.) More at http://la.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/shoup.php http://la.curbed.com/archives/2010/10/shoup.php: > As an example in Santa Monica, which is starting to move in Shoup direction, but not quite there, we have some garages in Downtown that are in the red almost all the time during the week, and many blocks where on street parking is impossible, while hundreds of spaces are routinely unused at the Main Library underground lot and Civic Center garage at the same time. I know this because Santa Monica actually has a city website with live tracking of parking spots remaining at each of it's city lots. > If there were stronger price incentives (meaning make high demand lots and street spots more expensive while making under utilized lots and spaces dirt cheap) and advertising of the availability of the under utilized spaces, instead of the same garages filling up to the max and people freaking out that we need more and more parking, maybe we'd realize we actually have plenty. Then instead of wasting yet more land use and city money for more parking capacity, we could start making more open space for people, such as more park space and plazas. That was before the new meter system. Apparently, there's now an app for finding parking. That's all I could find before I grew disinterested.

aharner 14y ago

Brings to mind a quote from the mayor of Bogota, Colombia: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transport."

sheraz 14y ago
I completely agree. I would encourage anyone interested to watch "Urbanized" by Gary Hustwit [1]. My favorite part is about Bogota and their charismatic mayor. Very, very interesting ideas are playing out there. [1] - http://urbanizedfilm.com/ http://urbanizedfilm.com/
rayiner 14y ago
One of the things I love about New York city is that you can get on a bus in the afternoon rush hour, and sit down with a banker making $5m/yr on one side and a Starbucks barista on the other.
- joonix 14y ago
  And can anyone really argue that private cars add to quality of life in Manhattan? It should be limited to licensed taxi cabs (preferably electric/hybrid), emergency vehicles, commercial (delivery, maintenance, etc), and that's about it. Why should an individual be allowed to bring his Hummer into that tiny island full of pedestrians? Close more roads to vehicles and give them back to pedestrians and cyclists. If it's hard to ban, just jack up the bridge and tunnel tolls to $50/car.
  - rdouble 14y ago
    I was probably not adding to the quality of life, but I used to really enjoy driving around downtown Manhattan at night. FWIW, there were few signs of life down there after 10pm.
    - MrFoof 14y ago
      For car nuts living in the city, it's a bit of a thing you do. I live in Boston, and I'm fairly certain that the local Porsche dealership is catering to potential customers with very early morning test drives on Storrow Drive with demo cars. During the summer months I almost lose count of the number of 911s I encounter at 2AM (with a driver and a passenger, almost always both male) with window stickers on them, carving through the elevation changes and off-camber corners well beyond the speed limit. Last year it was so frequent I just got over to the rightmost lane whenever I would hear a wailing flat-six approaching.

mikeash 14y ago

Cars may cause trouble for cities, but the title is overstated to a degree that makes it hard for me to take the article seriously at all. I've seen a lot of cities I'd describe as "robust", and only one of them, Venice, wasn't swarming with cars. Although they may be at odds, it's clear from just looking at nearly any modern city that cars and robust cities are not incompatible. The article tacitly admits this, with the lowest rate of automobile commuting in their data set still over 40%. Which makes the terribly overstated title even more puzzling.

astrodust 14y ago
Venice is clogged with boats. These are basically cars on water. That their "roads" are flooded all the time is a technicality.
- mikeash 14y ago
  When I visited (five years ago or so), boats were at least an order of magnitude less common in Venice's canals than cars are on the roads of a typical city, perhaps two or three orders of magnitude. It's far from a technicality.
  - dalke 14y ago
    http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/venice/canal-traffic-getting-venetians-angry http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/venice/canal-traffic-getting... - "Venice may have no cars but it has plenty of boats and their number has been on the increase over the past years. So much so that the usually tranquil canals of Venice now at times resemble the more chaotic traffic of Rome or Milan." I counted about 500 boats on the Grand Canal using Google's map imagery, either in motion or moored. (From the train station to Piazza San Marco.) The distance is ~3km. How do you map that to car traffic? Boats carry more than cars and a vaporetti caries more than a bus. After all, the boats carry a good fraction of the 18 million tourists per year. Boats also need more space and go at different speeds. Did you factor in wake pollution? Quoting the quite work from WPI (http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-122107-161101/unrestricted/Venetian_Boat_Traffic_and_Its_Environmental_Impacts.pdf http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-122107... ) "it is the only place in the world whose method of transportation has the literal ability to destroy the city." It also describes the effects of noise pollution, and the over 100 years of various attempts at traffic control. Given all of these differences, how did you base your comparison of the congestion of cars in a normal city vs. that of boats in Venice?

hammock 14y ago

OP argues that more drivers cause cities to be less dense. That is a factor- e.g. if you are a small business and you know all of your customers have cars to visit you, you will lease the cheaper out-of-town real estate rather than the expensive stuff next door to them. But it really works strongly the other way around. The closer you are to others, the less you have to drive to see them. Things like zoning and parking minimums increase the space between buildings (and therefore people), which necessitates more driving.

jstalin 14y ago

Ah yes, more "cars are evil" claptrap. Some people like dense urban living, some don't. Cars offer that option. The author is one of those who wants to remove that option.

saosebastiao 14y ago
If you don't like density, you don't have to live in it or work in it. Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle. Just don't ruin the cities we live in with your demands that we accommodate your lifestyle.
- bdunbar 14y ago
  "Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle" Small town, in my case, 90 minutes from the nearest mid-size city. If you don't demand that I pay for rapid transit I'll never see, or use, don't restrict the kind of car or truck I can buy, then deal.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    If you really want people to only pay for the transportation infrastructure they themselves use, that's fine, but look for your gas taxes to triple. You might be paying for public transit you never use, but those of us living and/or working in cities are paying a lot more to maintain a highway to your small town that we never use.
    - MisterBastahrd 14y ago
      Apples and oranges. Cities can't sustain themselves without agriculture and products from outside of the city. If I never go into a city, I will never use their public transportation. If you never leave a city, you will still use public roads in order to eat, even if you never actually step foot outside.
      - philwelch 14y ago
        The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities. The whole point of infrastructure is that it benefits society as a whole. This is just as true of city infrastructure as it is infrastructure in the countryside. (Not to mention there's a whole lot of countryside that doesn't produce food...or much of anything, really, other than a place for misanthropic people to retire to.)

kps 14y ago

Once cars self-drive, most commuters' cars can be a quarter the size they are now. When traffic lights, stop signs, lanes, and such are gone, and cars instead talk to each other to make efficient use of the available space, one-person microcars will have an advantage, and the current disadvantage of being flattened by a soccer mom's Canyonero will be absent.

jowiar 14y ago
More importantly, we won't actually need to park the cars. Private ownership of vehicles will plummet as a perfect taxi system emerges.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  It ameliorates, but does not solve, these problems. Many people will still want their own car for comfort and status. Most people will still travel to and from work during the traditional rush hours.
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  Yes because nobody buys a car as an extension of their personality at all...
saosebastiao 14y ago
This is imaginative but flawed technophilia at best. People with grand visionary ideas always seem to get two things wrong: 1) They underestimate problems with their ideas, and then brush them off with solutions which, when summed together, make the visionary idea much less palatable. For example, the idea that we can abandon traffic lights and stop signs is complicated by the fact that not everybody can, will, or even should use a car to get around. But in the world without traffic lights and stop signs, pedestrians and cyclists are trapped by fear. Sure, they might technically be able to walk out into traffic and the wondercars will stop for them, but in reality, nobody will do that, because the cost of being wrong is death. In every conversation I have had with these technophiles, the solution always ends up being some massively costly network of pedestrian bridges at every intersection of the city. Yeah, not so palatable anymore. 2) They fail to understand that, like evolution, intermediate states have to be viable improvements on their own merits. Wheeled animals do not exist, not because wheeled animals wouldn't have superior mobility, but because no possible intermediate evolutionary state has incremental benefit over the previous legged state. How do you transition a 2 lane road into three lanes when only 50% of the cars are self-driving? What about when 99.9% are self-driving? There are thousands of imaginary future states that do not have credible intermediate states, and will likely never see the future state as a result.

joseph_cooney 14y ago

Driverless cars are a big game-changer here, because they don't need to stay 'down town' during the day. Hypothetically they don't even need to stay with you at night either. Maybe they just live in a parking garage somewhere near where you live.

petercooper 14y ago

As a countryside-dweller who visits cities now and then, I'd be more than happy to use public transport in cities if they provided good ways to transition between driving and public transport. Very few cities have a good "park and ride" culture where you get safe, modern parking structures on the main approaches to the city, and then frequent express trains or buses into the center. Without this, it's more tempting to just stay in the car and put up with a little extra traffic and expense in the city center. (In London, the closest thing you get to this is parking at Westfield in Shepherd's Bush and tubing it in, but Shepherd's Bush is too central to London to avoid adding to the worst of the traffic.)

bunderbunder 14y ago
I think that folks driving into the city from the countryside is really a very minimal part of the issue. No offense, but on any given day y'all are a drop in the bucket. It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city. The amount of space that needs to be devoted to accommodating them can really be quite impressive. Here in Milwaukee, for example, the downtown area has essentially been choked off - there are office buildings, there are some hotels, there are a few eateries and pubs which specifically cater to the office workers and business travelers (many of them aren't even open on the weekends). And there is. . . parking. Lots and lots and lots and lots of parking. If you ever go down there at night, the parking is really the most noticeable thing because of the sense of void it creates. All these great huge swaths of the very core of a major urban center that are just completely empty. The feeling is downright oppressive; it's like being in a shopping mall where 30% of the storefronts are vacant.
- petercooper 14y ago
  It's really about the daily commuters who drive in from outside the city. See, I was lumping myself in with that group. Park and ride schemes should, ideally, be attractive to commuters in the outer suburbs (many of the smaller British cities do a good job with this - Oxford, especially - just not any of the big ones I can think of).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]