11 ms·
End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile
- api 11y ago"End of" or "death of" == click bait hyperbole, almost always. It's the end of the age of car-centric design in large metropolitan areas, but not of the car or "car age" by any stretch of the imagination.
- aylons 11y agoWell, the end of the radio age hasn't finished the radio. I guess this can be said of about any technology - it is not finished, just not anymore the center of the attention.
- ams6110 11y agoThe article is about a very specific scenario: dense metropolitan city centers. It has always been the case in those areas that many people do not own cars, and yes you can get by very well by using public transport, taxis, walking/cycling, and the occasional rental when you do need to drive somewhere. Pretty much everywhere else, cars are almost essential to modern life.
- Retric 11y agoIt's a little more than that. The internet reduces peoples need to go somewhere, buy stuff, and take it home even outside of cities. This is killing the suburban shopping mall, but it also significantly reduces peoples need to move around with a pile of stuff. Because public transport is mostly focused on moving people and not their stuff this makes public transport more useful to more people. Even if they don’t give up both their cars living in a one car household is far easier nowadays. PS: It's not just about doing less shopping trips; if you only get 1 bag of stuff it's easy to carry around. If you’re getting a massive load of junk you really want to drop it off in your car.
- bunderbunder 11y agoIt's even a little more than that. The Internet is now making it so that I can hire someone else to deal with moving stuff for me. For example: https://getdolly.com/ https://getdolly.com/ and https://www.instacart.com/ https://www.instacart.com/ It's getting to the point where, if you live in a dense city, owning a car isn't just a thing you can live without. It's becoming one of the more obnoxious possible ways to get things done.
- mistermann 11y agoThe internet has largely removed my desire for physical goods. It's probably partially my age, but I suspect it's somewhat true for younger people as well. I'd just as soon read an in-depth review on a new piece of tech rather than buy it and get it configured before putting it on the shelf not to be used.
- drcross 11y agoDesktops with their huge CRT's have consolidated into laptops. Your phone consolidates an alarm clock, a landline, a camera, a torch and a calculator. You don't really need a TV or radio. Modern tech is slowly reducing the amount of clutter needed for daily life.
- WalterBright 11y agoI still love my huge desktop monitor and full size keyboard, laptops are too squinty and I make too many typos on the cramped keyboard. It's true I gave up listening to the radio years ago. The ads drove me away.
- davidgerard 11y agoI live in Waltham Forest, London, which is mentioned in the article. I am delighted not to have to own a car. We're sort of on the edge of the naturally car-free zone: end of the Victoria Line tube one way, boundless greenery and suburban shopping barns the other. So yeah, lotta people here do have cars.
- walshemj 11y agoCentral London was never car friendly :-)
- akgerber 11y agoTo put it succinctly: cars are useful, but also dangerous, and require huge amounts of land to run and store in any quantity. After discovering that trying to rebuild cities with room to run and store large amounts of cars, we've discovered many negative side effects, and so have stopped trying to build cities in such a fashion.
- rhino369 11y agoThe rise of driverless cars may actually reverse the trend away from cars. I wouldn't drive my own car to work, but I will uber.
- stevoo 11y agoI would agree. It is definetely not the end of the "car age" Cars will live on for many years but as self-driving cars come into play, owning a car wont be a need any more. For your day to day activities you can take public transport and bike to work. For weekends that you want to do a trip with family/friends you will simply "hire" a car that will take you where you want to go. I am excited about this future. Cars slowly being phased out for a more accessible city for the people. Taking back the roads from cars for bicycles and walking. But that just might be me.
- r00fus 11y ago"We will still have cars – people need them for carrying goods – but their speeds will be very low and there won’t be so many of them." I wonder how much things like Google Shopping Express, Amazon Fresh and (possibly in future) drone deliveries would help to reduce the need for personally owned cars?
- nazgob 11y agoIt might help in US (I guess?) but in most of Europe this is not the issue. I've lived in several EU countries, never had a car. I always walk to the nearest grocery shop or bike to a bigger one. City design allows me to do that.
- ars 11y ago> City design allows me to do that. Not having a large family allows you to do that. Good luck carrying home enough groceries for 6 people.
- btbuildem 11y agoIf there are six people in this family, surely some of them can help carry the groceries.. but I digress. I think you miss r00fus's point - in a walkable city, you're not forced to haul hundreds of pounds of groceries from one centralized megalocation once a week. The design of a livable city means there are plenty of small shops interspersed in and near residential areas, making it easy to frequently visit them to pick up whatever you may need.
- r00fus 11y agoActually in my 5 person family only 2 of us can carry stuff. One (me) is designated as the procurement person, so I do the shopping. I can't go every day because I have a busy schedule (even on days I WFH). Consequently I'm buying hundreds of dollars of stuff each time I go, and most times I have a kid pulling on my arm. How am I supposed to carry all this stuff? Luckily I have instacart, Google express, and Amazon to fulfill all non-groand the deliveries are sent to my house.
- tehchromic 11y agocan't happen soon enough.
- Zigurd 11y agoCars kill over a million people annually and injure millions more. Let that sink in. Getting rid of cars as we know them will be like curing a dread disease.
- dba7dba 11y agoI have a small theory about cars and low birth rate. If you look at developed nations with well developed public transportation (which means less need for private cars), you generally see lower birth rate. Really low. Look at Japan. S Korea. Europe. However developed nations with less developed public transportation (meaning more ownership of private cars), you generally see higher birth rate. Examples are most of US (excluding NYC), Canada, Aus. I personally think young moms just decide to have less kids if their option of traveling within the city is limited to public transportation. And with young kids, you do have to travel more than usual to get to doctors office, school, activities etc. When you have a sedan/suv/minivan, traveling with kids is much more tolerable. You don't have to carry everything on your back or in your hands. You can strap them into car seats once and that's just about the only time you have to worry about it.
- exelius 11y agoI think you're drawing conclusions from coincidence. If I had to pick a reason for the disparity, it's that public transit and dense city centers make less sense in countries with large, rural areas. Rural areas tend to have lower levels of education, and level of education has been linked with birth rate (specifically, higher female educational achievement leads to lower birth rates). The three areas you list as "developed nations with well developed public transportation" are all compact and densely populated. The three you listed as "less developed public transit" are much larger, with a significantly higher rural population. I would bet that if you normalized for education, you would see any disparities between your cohorts disappear.
- whatusername 11y agoAustralia has quite a high urbanization rate (89.2%): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
- vorg 11y ago> Examples are most of US (excluding NYC), Canada, Aus. You chose as your example the colonized English-speaking world, a.k.a. the U.S. (including its 51st and 52nd states)?
- vorg 11y ago> This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted wisdom across the developed world. “The height [of buildings] is going up; density is going up; borough policies and London plan policies are all about intensification and densification of land uses,” [...] People live very close and they don’t travel at all because everything is on their doorstep; the population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you could ever want. Densely built cities will be a lot easier to build encasings around, that filter the air on the outside before it circulates around inside the encasing, when they'll need it in 20 or 30 years time, than low density single-house cities fed by cars on freeways. East Asian and some European cities seem better suited for this than most in the U.S.
- alphapapa 11y agoWhy will we need to encase our cities and filter the air that comes in from outside the city?
- vorg 11y agoIf you're asking, then either: * you've never heard of air pollution and global warming, * you don't experience air pollution every day for it to register in your thinking, or * you disagree that polluted air will within decades encompass the globe. Far more people live in places like Beijing China and Delhi India than Adelaide Australia or Anchorage Alaska, and the only trend they see wrt air pollution is an ongoing increase. A decrease is only talk by people whose other hand is milking the machine.
- ptaipale 11y agoMost of the pollution comes from inside the city, so encasing the city would be rather disastrous. And you can't really protect against the global warming, aka greenhouse effect, by building a greenhouse - because that's effecticely what encasing a city is. A very large greenhouse which gets very hot inside. (The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)
- InclinedPlane 11y agoIt's the dawn of the second age of modern cities. There was a period of time in the mid 20th century when cities were being drained of people. Some of that was motivated by a desire to have a nuclear family living in a house in the suburbs with a lawn and a garage. Some of that was motivated by the perception of the cities as an unsafe or unsavory place to live. Some of that was motivated by blatant racism (so-called "white flight"). The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910, as did the population of Paris, the population of Detroit around 1950, the population of San Francisco originally peaked around 1950 as well. But since around the 1980s or so there's been a revitalization of cities, especially in America. Changes in crime, changes in the economy, and changes in culture have brought people back to the cities. The suburban nuclear family is no longer the ideal for ambitious 20 to 30 somethings. The best paying jobs are no longer factory or industrial jobs outside the city, frequently they are knowledge worker jobs in urban centers. And young professionals seem to prefer the city life in many cases. The crime waves of the late '80s and early '90s (due to innumerable factors, especially the onset of the "crack epidemic") abated by the late '90s, right as the tech boom started. The result of all of these changes has been an influx of population and business back to urban centers. And that has led to the increasing importance of public transit as well as walkable/bikable cities. Cities are discovering that expecting everyone to drive their car to work every day leads to gridlock, and they are reaping the consequences of low urban populations, low city revenues, and low investment in transportation infrastructure during the mid-20th century. They're also discovering that there are strong benefits to walkable and bikable cities. It leads to generally more appealing downtowns and, at least the perception of, nicer cities to live in. The improvements in telecommunications as well as delivery and other services (smartphones, amazon, uber, etc.) has reduced a lot of the traditional downsides to not owning a car (it's easier to find your way around due to GPS and maps, it's easier to coordinate with friends, it's easier to get important household goods delivered, etc.) Cars are still relevant, and important, but things are changing in terms of where people want to live and work, and the era of the city designed solely around car transit is finally coming to an end.
- kazinator 11y agoIt's funny when drivers echo the sentiment that their city would be better off with fewer cars. Of course, they mean "my driving experience would be better off with fewer other cars on the road".
- MBlume 11y agoOr "my life would be better if owning a car and driving it everywhere weren't the least-bad option available to me"
- michaelchisari 11y agoOr "My life would be better if driving a car was for road trips, family visits, adventures and special occasions, not everyday life."
- notatoad 11y agohttp://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-commuters-favor-public-tra,1434/ http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-com... Still, even if this is selfish and hypocritical, it can be harnessed - transportation is all about "if you build it they will come". If people support the development of alternative transport, it will get used. The biggest obstacle is people demanding that all the transport funding goes to building roads and parking lots, if we can defeat that mentality by telling people it will make the roads better for them, thats good.
- crpatino 11y agoIt is not completely true. Sometimes a critical mass is required. I'd be happy to bike to work. It is not a very long commute and the exercise would do wonders to my sedentary self. Though, I will not risk my life to the maniacs on the road.[1] A few people do, but many don't, so no cyclist lane is going to get build that I could use. [1] Cyclist like to say it is more the perception than reality. Still, one pedestrian or cyclist per week get killed in this town, by public transportation alone.
- jivardo_nucci 11y agoI hate to be a downer but this "idea" will vanish like morning mist with the first terrorist nuke. Urban designers for densely-populated countries should plan instead for people and industry to spread out as much as possible to eliminate the effective damage of WMDs. I think there was a sci-fi novel (by Asimov?) where people no longer lived or even met with each other, fearing death through either disease or malfeasance. And the way drones are progressing, we'll soon have some like those in Dune - "bugs" that fly to their target, identify him/her and kill only that individual. I haven't heard of anyone working on a bug spray yet. One solace: all the above was brought to us, one way or another, by democratically-elected large powerful national governments. Guess we wanted these things, eh?
- Zigurd 11y agoThe reality of terrorist WMDs is one incident, ever. That was the Aum cult's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. That's it. That was a hell of an effort to achieve a result that a) could easily have been exceeded by a small, simple low-explosive IED; b) Ended up having the opposite effect of the goal of terroism - it highlighted how difficult and relatively ineffective WMDs are.
- alphapapa 11y agoBy "reality" do you mean "history"? Or are you predicting the future?
- ptaipale 11y agoYou are thinking of Caves of Steel and its follow-up novels. The "spacer" worlds were extremely sparsely populated, just a few thousand people per planet, and the people did not want to meet physically for fear of infections and dirt (much of which was mental). But in these novels, the Earth was living in huge underground cities; big, noisy and somewhat dirty. The funny thing is that in Asimov's future Earth, population density was very extreme, people did have very little privacy (their apartments didn't even have own bathrooms, regular citizens used only public bathrooms and toilets). This was for 8 billion people, which in early 1950's looked like a huge population. This was supposedly achieved by megacities covering entire continents. But today, the world has 7 billion people, and will have 8 billion people in a couple of decades - and life will not be that much different from what it is right now.
- ianstallings 11y agoIt's not that surprising given that most of them were originally built for horse and cart traffic.
- pcr0 11y agoI live in Hong Kong, where 95% of the population uses public transport daily, and has a very low car ownership rate. Reasons include $7.4 petrol (gal), vehicle registration tax that can exceed 100%, and expensive parking ($400 a month for a single car, and that's just at home) Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs). That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.
- e2e4 11y ago> The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers. Couldn't agree more. Situation is very similar in Tokyo. Almost from anywhere in the city, one can walk to a train station within 15 min; and trains come every 5-10 min if not more often. I was very surprised when I had to wait for 1 hour for CalTrain to go from airport to Palo Alto.
- hberg 11y agoTo be fair, Hong Kong is an extremely dense city, built in a location with very little developable land. The density is both the reason for the high cost of car ownership as well as the efficiency of its public transportation system.
- ptaipale 11y agoAnd the density has other impacts on life as well, of course. The density we talk about looks like this in some places: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/01/12/article-2085752-0F6D9F1F00000578-316_964x641.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/01/12/article-2085752-0F... (Just googled a random picture, but you get the idea; Hong Kong density is rather extreme).
- restalis 11y agoI tried to imagine what kind of transport infrastructure can be developed to accommodate possession of at least 2 cars per household in such places. So I realized that the only thing keeping the current cities developing and looking like some kinky SciFi version of them is ...regulation!
- SixSigma 11y agoNo mention of electric bicycles or more powerful two wheeled vehicles such as the 70 million petrol scooters in Vietnam. How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your shopping home from your local store.
- humanrebar 11y ago> How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your shopping home from your local store. That requires a handicap-accessible city. There absolutely cannot be stairs between your front door and the aisles of the store (including bus rides). I'm sure some newer cities are like this, but older cities tend to grandfather in older buildings and public transit systems. I don't see this happening anytime soon. Would love to be wrong, though.
- k__ 11y agoIn Germany they just seem to replace "owned" cars by "rented" cars in the bigger cities. I'd love to see what would happen if cars were prohibited in bigger cities and what big money would do to public transport and bikes. But since Germany is a car country, this will probably never happen.
- Eye_of_Mordor 11y agotl;dr increasing urban density => decreasing car use Truth is, more cars are being sold than ever before, but even this is levelling out. Global bicycle production per capita, on the other hand, has halved since the 1970's
- docs101 11y agoCoincidentally a new documentary is out in the UK this coming week on the exact same topic: Bikes vs Cars.