Every other method of high-density transportation is also a "human amplifier" and vastly more efficient.
"Built for people" means that you aren't forced to have a car to live in a location. There are plenty of demographics that would prefer to not have a car if they could.
Removing the need for car ownership would be big step forward and communities that have this property are highly sought-after.
If/when I have children, I'm getting the fuck out of here. Many (most?) people do the same.
There are huge numbers of people here, so of course there are lots of children here. They're either super wealthy, or really not living up to my standards for quality of life. (I was not raised in a big city.)
If you see lots of children around NYC, consider the case of cars. I don't have a car in the city, and no one I know does. But there's clearly many cars all over, more than can really fit in the roads and curbs and parking garages. Having a car in NYC is a huge pain in the ass. It's not a great car experience. Same with children.
Also, after a while, those who can afford it (or those who can't but still spend) use Uber / Lyft / Gett / Juno / etc liberally. I haven't been in the subway for at least two months because I can't stand it anymore, and it's especially disgusting in summer.
No car ownership is no way to live your whole life. I feel trapped here. No, I do not want to go through the hassle of renting every time I want to get out of town either. As far as daily commuting, underground systems always suck especially for longer trips. I like above ground commuter trains of hiqh quality, and I like cycling when there's investment in infrastructure and shower / lockup facilities everywhere. Unfortunately not the case.
Precisely.
My wife was rabidly anti-car (living in the northeast) until one summer a friend went out of the country and left their car with us. The precise word she used was "free" - we were free to get groceries on the fly, we were free to go out of town. We just had an enormous number of options open up to us, as our travel overhead / travel radius improved so dramatically.
It was freeing.
I never had to argue with her after that; when we had the chance to acquire a car, we did.
I find this sentiment interesting because I have the complete opposite feeling that you have. In my view, NYC is light-years ahead of Atlanta (where I live) when it comes to walkability, bikeability, and public transit. I would love to live in a city like yours.
Given that Atlanta is nowhere near NYC in those regards, it's weird that I feel trapped every time I get in a car here.
I don't own a car because I feel free without a car.
This goes to show me that even though I think NYC, Portland, Minneapolis, et al. would be amazing to live in, there are many other opinions and sentiments. :-)
It might be more efficient on average, if you measure in terms of throughput. It isn't more efficient for individual people, who care more about latency. I don't want to turn a 20-minute trip into a 60-minute trip to improve throughput.
I do look forward to fleets of efficient self-driving cars as a better option; that could meaningfully replace driving. Trains and buses alone cannot.
The subway, light rail, and dedicated bus lane can be faster than cars, especially when you factor in parking. This is the case in many areas of many cities that do have appropriate infrastructure in place.
For example, I can take a dedicated bus lane into my city center in about 30 minutes, whereas driving takes at least 45 minutes during rush hour. It's faster for me to drive my bike to work than to take my car.
Furthermore, if you have mixed-zoning, you probably won't have to drive 5 miles to get what you need.
This isn't about making cars illegal, it's about reducing our dependence on them.
Now, how fast can you get from an arbitrary point in the city to an arbitrary point in the city at an arbitrary time of day?
There's a huge "but" there though. We rode the metro over 30 times in those two cities and never waited for a train for more than 3 minutes. Both cities have trains coming every 4 minutes at all hours of the day (as far as I can tell). That is something we would have to fix in most US cities that have public transportation.
I mean, it must feel like the third world here for a European visitor who comes to DC or SF (the two cities I'm most familiar with) and tries to ride the metro. 12 minutes between rush hour trains in DC and 20 or 24 minutes between trains in DC and SF outside of rush-hour.
When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be...why would you own a car, pay insurance, pay for a parking spot at home, pay for gas, and then pay for parking at a location when public transit is so convenient?
But I think you're glossing over a fair bit with your description:
> When you can pop into a metro that is ~5 minutes from your flat, be on the train in less than 4 minutes, and be within ~5 minutes walk of wherever you want to be
...assuming that where you want to be is within 5 minutes of a metro station on the same line that's near your house and boarding at that particular 4-minute interval. Most trips between two arbitrary points involve at least one line change, which then involves another around of waiting; depending on the nature of the change, it may also involve a walk between stations. That adds up.
I'd like to have a public transit infrastructure that's comparable in latency to getting into a car sitting in your own driveway, going directly to your destination, and parking in the readily available free parking at that destination. I'd love to not have all the wasted space associated with driveways, garages, and other parking infrastructure. But I don't see a path to that even with European-level public transit.
You mentioned Barcelona, so I pulled up Google Maps, and picked a couple of random points roughly 20 minutes apart (by car) within the city, one of them a major landmark / tourist attraction and the other a residential area. Here's the map: https://goo.gl/maps/VCzEJEn3q3k . 24-35 minutes by car, depending on traffic. 67 minutes by public transit, including 20 minutes of walking, one line change, and 40 minutes of transit.
Here's a second example: https://goo.gl/maps/MWGqrSMsFGp . Directions between an event center and a shopping center, both in downtown and near major transit lines. Much better case for public transit: 29 minutes by transit, with no line change. By car: 12-18 minutes depending on traffic.
At least in the longer wait to travel via transit, if you're used to the trip, you get to read or listen to music, and just watch for your stop rather than the constant vigilance of driving. But that doesn't make up for roughly 2x travel time.
But if you are in a rush and you know parking will be easy then yeah, jumping in the car would be fastest.
Self driving cars will lead to a death spiral of congestion. Because driving is even "easier", it will become more prolific and that will greatly increase travel times because cars simply can't scale, autonomous or not. And no, autonomous cars won't be legally allowed to drive bumper-to-bumper to save space.
Efficiency isn't the end-all of life.
Now what happens when those 177 cars are going to 100 different places?
The buses can have 20-40 stops in those 4 miles, mind you. I don't mean it's all due to traffic.
The problem is when those 200 people want to go to 100 different places spread throughout hundreds of square miles of evenly low density suburban sprawl like a modern US metropolis.
Absolutely. But there will always be people who want to get to locations spread all around even a metropolitan area (as well as further-flung locations around that area), and while it's possible to build a public transit network to get them there, with enough throughput to cover the volume of people, the latency will still be worse than a point-to-point trip directly from point A to point B.
I think this is probably why the question in the original article, "What should a city optimize for?", is really the MOST important one to answer.
If your goal is to keep housing costs low, for example, then presumably you'll want to optimize for space (based on the prevalence of suburbs, this seems to be the presumption reason for high housing costs). Since cars amplify use of space (parking, roads, gas stations, etc), then it follow that despite their other benefits, you would want to minimize vehicular traffic to mitigate this effect.
In other words, I think when people say things like "people should make cities that are for people" what they might be trying to imply is "people should make cities that are not for cars, because there are other things that I think should take priority".
Not really - I didn't say "get rid of all the cars". He's creating a false dichotomy. Cars are fine for many things, but shouldn't be the top priority, but one of many ways of getting around.
For people. What's the point of even building something for human habitation if making it a good place for people isn't put first?
> A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
For sure, cars are very useful, particularly for going long distances or carrying lots of stuff or people. But there's other things that they're bad at: most notably, they're far less space efficient for the average case when there's just one or two people in each car. Because of that, as a city gets denser, you have to start moving people over to other, denser forms of transportation.
You're always going to have some cars, if only for business deliveries and emergency vehicles (and maybe the handicapped), but it's possible to cut the number of car trips way, way down.
Speaking as someone who has children and bicycles with them I find that other peoples' "very very useful" tool is something that detracts from my quality of life and prevents us from doing things that we value and prioritize.
Obviously there needs to be a balance between these two extremes: On the one hand we have the current situation where you are subsidized to drive your brood of 18 to the Bulk Mall of America and on the other lies my set of preferences which involves the distribution of goods to local outlets by a smaller number of trained drivers/robots.
Many cities absolutely do prioritize cars over people - huge roads that are unsafe for other users, mandatory parking requirements, and tons and tons of neighborhoods that are predicated on the idea of using a car for pretty much all transportation.
With a car, in a place designed for cars, I can go from ideation to grocery store or department and back inside of half an hour.
In a place "designed for people" where neither homes nor stores have parking, such an errand consumes an entire afternoon. (Walk to bus stop, wait for bus, take bus to train, wait for train, ride train, walk, etc. Though I suppose it's easier if you can afford to live a short walk from the train itself).
The dramatically slower pace of life, turning any outing into a huge ordeal, is definitely not a good thing. Give me Manhattan-quality public transit or let me use my damn car.
"Park 'n ride" is a seriously underrated idea. A small, urban core where the jobs, businesses, entertainment, etc. is, blanketed in dense and frequent transportation, with trains out to the affordable residential neighborhoods, and plentiful, cheap parking at the neighborhood train stations. Chicago does this nicely.
Because in Chicago I think that describes about 10 blocks (a few hundred staggeringly wealthy people in the most lavish of luxury condo towers). The rest of us have some tiny, price-gouging convenience stores nearby but have to go ~20 blocks for a real supermarket, 4-5 miles to downtown for a Target or Macy's. Taking the train is less of a hassle than parking in the Loop, but it's still a hassle.
- expensive? - few products? Something else?
If pricing is an issue the question becomes,
How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
A problem I have thought about quite a bit as my dad once owned a small corner shop He had to close it as the chains make it impossible to compete on price with bulk buying discounts.
I believe what happens is due to the layout of our cities we end up with large chains, malls and big box retailers. It's a virtuous cycle...
> How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?
Is the problem that they can't compete, or that they don't have to? When driving isn't the main method of getting around, but instead walking augmented by potentially high-latency public transit is the main method, the cost to the consumer of small distance differences between notionally "competing" institutions becomes quite high, which means that they have less need to actually compete with one another: they have captive hyper-local markets with effective moats.
Cultural attitudes about apartments and raising children are just that - cultural.
Inner city problems are another kettle of fish.
http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...
That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished deaths almost daily. Enough of it.
Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the man.
It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers.
Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work, you or someone in your household is going to need a car and it's going to eat up an uncomfortable portion of your income.
There are a lot of places where it's impractical to do so, because it takes too long, and so people mostly don't. That's despite the fact that walking or biking would increase throughput, because throughput isn't all that matters. I would even argue that it isn't all that important.
Some people want their car-centric lifestyle, and hey, that's fine too (as long as they're paying for it); I think the problem is that it's simply not a choice for many people due to the central-planning style zoning regulations entrenched in much of the country.
Where you literally can't? No. But where current infrastructure has made it hugely impractical to? I'd say that's most of the country, especially suburbia.
"I would even argue that it isn't all that important."
If you're ok with driving everywhere, then no, you wouldn't think it was. Not everyone wants to do that, though. And making things friendly for cars tends to make it harder for walking and biking.
I don't understand why everyone is coming out of the woodwork here to criticize my car-centric viewpoint and tell me how great biking or walking is. I guess it's Yet Another Example of how people on the internet can't handle the concept of disagreeing with a single point.
Through-traffic should be invisible (underground).
Local traffic should be mostly segregated from foot traffic. If there's a block, the "front" of things should be entirely pedestrian / bike with vehicle access in the rear (the alley - but likely larger in this case).
I wish people would stop with this drivel.
There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people.
A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.