And you have the experience of using transit on what's generally considered a Top-5 system nationally! The transit experience elsewhere is often significantly worse than yours. We have "urbanists" here trying to block cars in our tiny little city, where a 10-minute car commute takes 90 minutes by bus (a bus which often does not run on nights, weekends, or holidays).
I totally support trying to be more environmentally friendly, and increasing density to do that, and making places more pedestrian friendly. But we really need to come up with some real, functional mobility solutions to do that. Telling folks to "walk everywhere" simply isn't a solution, for the same reason we haven't shut the internet off and told people to "mail CD's everywhere".
No amount of banning cars is going to magically make bad transit better -- we need to start building good transit first.
Cars are also a classic example of socializing losses and privatizing gains. Taxpayers build and maintain the roads, air pollution and carbon emissions affect the global climate, and pedestrians and cyclists are driven out of public space in fear for their lives, but at least you can get point-to-point between your house and Wal-Mart. There are ways in which driving will always be "better" for the individual driver, but only in a fundamentally selfish and antisocial way.
>For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars.
Yes, and setting dedicated right-of-way for public transit makes it faster, which should compensate for at least some of the reduced drivability in the overall navigability of the city. I think this counts as making transit better first (or at least at the same time).
When I lived carless in Chicago (2001 - 2006) it was only possible if you were childless and lived in a small number of densely populated north side neighborhoods (which does not include Hyde Park). Interestingly, the car sharing services are changing this — cabs generally avoided anything but same wealthy, dense neighborhoods. Uber and Lyft serve much more broadly. Anecdotally, in my neighborhood, the number of cars with a Lyft or Uber sign is astronomical - I once counted traffic for 30 minutes and 43% of vehicles that passed my residence had a car sharing sign in the window.
Between long-haul, low-friction car hiring services (Zipcar) and short-trip, low-friction car hiring services (Uber, Lyft) I think carless urban life in Chicago is vastly extended to everyone with a good paycheck and no children.
Eventually this will be solved when the new airport opens along with its own S-Bahn station. Any year now...
I'm a proponent of simply wiping out parking in most areas. That will incentivize people not to drive, therefore to walk/transit, therefore to value the transit systems and the design of their cities.
It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.
I get the idea behind it- "let's just start doing everything according to our desired outcome, and the parts that don't fit will somehow come into line on their own". It's very seductive but I've learned to avoid the temptation to think that hard problems can be solved in this way.
I feel like this is a problem-solving antipattern that I see over and over again and it just never works- not just in government, but in software engineering, in management, even in interpersonal relationships. People get frustrated that they can't change other people, so they decide to simply move everyone to some new way of doing things without any sort of plan for how to deal with the fallout. They think it will create an environment where the people who are negatively affected will spontaneously start conforming to the desired behavior due to some invisible hand of incentivization, but I've never seen this strategy applied in any context where it worked out. It's always just a rat's nest of unintended consequences and misery.
With the car problem, no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution. Of course, with the exception of a fascist overthrow of the state that tears down cities and rebuilds with central planning. The government can't just come and take people's cars away – you have a right to own a car (more or less). You don't, however, have a right to a parking spot, and it takes just a small city committee meeting to affect change.
That's not to say people won't get hurt by this, but it needs to happen for the good of everyone. Suburbia is bad for the earth and everyone on it. We need to start making some tough decisions... 30 years ago.
Yes there is - the city government that controls the parking spaces, also controls the transit system.
And again, it's far more realistic than hoping that a transit authority is going to find a buried treasure chest to invest in infrastructure while the public is investing more and more into cars.
If you want a real solution, provide tax incentives for companies to work remotely. If you eliminate commuters in those types of jobs that can work remotely, you solve almost all traffic problems.
Does an insurance salesman really need to travel to an office? 90% of that work is on the phone already and the other 10% could be replaced with video conferencing. I don't need to touch my salesman, I just need to hear what he's saying and read contracts. Unless your job involves handling physical objects, there is zero reason for a commute.
If you buy something that can't be carried, like a refrigerator, well, then you get it delivered.
Carsharing. Or a delivery service, which some supermarkets now offer already.
I'm well aware that other people need cars, but I'm concerned that there is one group of people that get the benefits of cars (people enjoying the calmness of their suburb which then commute into the city for work) and another group of people which gets all the costs dumped on them (people living in cities who have to live with the noise and air pollution and missing space for pedestrians).
In which reality do you live, wherein cars are totally fine?
This is debatable. In some countries there is an old tax for all car owners. They take the money specifically "for your right to have a parking spot for your car". But after you pay the tax, surprise, you realize that there is not a single remaining place with free parking in the entire city... by design. So of course, you are obliged to pay again. The car owner is taxed two times for the same service. Cling, mo' fresh money.
The planned scarcity of park spots is also a source of power and a weapon of mass destruction of high quality employments. If you restrict the access and monopolize the park spots, you can force easily the small bussiness in this areas to flee and make the whole neighborhood into recession. A handful of big bussiness that can build its own private parkings (or, even better, are strong enough to convince the local government to build a big parking for them) will quickly take all.
More likely they will just leave the cities.
Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.
You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.
There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources.
Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom.
0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/
1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...
People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation.
My argument here is that policy should be at least net-neutral on quality of life.
If you "simply wip[e] out parking" and don't do anything else, I claim that's bad policy because it reduces quality of life.
If you wipe out parking AND deploy electric buses or whatever such that people's lives at least don't get worse, then I'm with you.
>There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is.
Except, of course, the transit agency, which has to actually have the funding and the competence to step up its game to not only stay neutral under increased demand, but also improve enough that drivers' quality-of-life is flat.
Local services are also funded by local economic activity, which generally requires that people have viable transportation.
> before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.
Which do you think is better for consumers: a whole bunch of hyper-local monopolies, or citywide competition and economies of scale? Economics provides very little support for the former.
I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and we haven't moved fast enough. If we continue to build our cities for cars, then we will continue to need cars.
Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.
And yes, higher prices hurt consumers, as in they damage the one facet of an entire human being that's responsible for purchasing things. But there are many other facets of a human being that would be much better off with fewer cars around them, and I dare say that many of those facets are more important to preserve than ease of consumption. The human race survived for many thousands of years with nothing even resembling an automobile, and now after 100 years you're positing that we simply cannot go on without them?
Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.
It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!
IMO the "solution" is necessarily holistic and incremental. Create a fast intra-city link, and you've effectively increased the density of the two areas joined by the link. If you think about space in terms of time required to go from point A to point B using a given subset of transport methods[1], fast point-to-point links warp space and cause it to overlap. Density is the lifeblood of cities, just as lack of density is what hollows out cities. Increased density means employees and consumers can live closer to businesses and entertainment. Increase the density enough, and private transport isn't required as much.
Anti-car policies aren't going to increase this time-to-destination-as-a-measure-of-space density much. In fact, without something to replace them, they will decrease effective density.
[1] See e.g. https://petertrotman.com/special/london-underground-travel-t...
The best way I can think of to get people to divest from cars in a fair, gradual, legal, cheap, and realistic way is to eliminate parking over time.
And that's exactly what's wrong with this idea: in a democratic society such taxation changes would be temoporary at best - people would just vote for politicians that would change it back during the next elections.
On the other hand, gradualy increasing quality of public transportation by investing more money in it would be something that noone would protest against, and once public transportation is equaly or more convenient than car travel people would switch on their own.
We've already had shitty mobility for multiple generations. We can and should build transit much more quickly than we are today, and we could if we were actually willing to commit to redesigning our cities.
People want to live in walkable towns and cities. People have done so, happily, for much, much longer than cars have existed. Set aside the environmental and economic concerns: studies of show that walkable communities are much more conducive to human happiness. The world of freeways and suburbs that we live in isn't a natural human pattern of development; it's a futuristic dream from the 1950's that turned into a nightmarish reality. Half a century of irrational exuberance over the invention of the automobile is a mistake that can and should be rectified.
In Chicago it is actually faster to commute by public transit from the suburbs ~20 miles away then from the neighborhoods ~8 miles away because the commuter rail service (Metra) is so much better than the urban transit service (CTA).
Public transport makes it really difficult to carry any amount of cargo. Ever tried to bring grocery bags into the subway in NYC during rush hour? It's impossible. Now do that with a kid. Now do all that and end up at one of the majority of stations without elevators. No matter how 'good' NYC's public transport it, it still sucks if you are in a wheelchair, with small children, carrying any amount of cargo and traveling at anytime other than 12am.
Public transport has its place, but to suggest a car-free world is madness -- unless we have cargo carrying robots bringing stuff to our doors.
I will say Zurich does a good job -- their trains are super easy to board, they are spacious and uncrowded. The platforms are wide and easy to navigate and have no stairs. Still, even that doesn't solve the problem of cargo. One could use Amazon, but that requires a truck to deliver things, which requires roads and unloading zones.
Some good reading on the matter: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062
Removing minimum parking requirements is reasonable, but it should be done in such a way that developers can't offload their tenant parking to public property, i.e. by also making the surrounding streets no-parking.
I live in an apartment with no parking. However, some people in my neighborhood like having cars. Fortunately, the solution is simple - they pay for monthly parking at the garage around the corner, and I don't subsidize people's parking in my rent.
I think one thing everyone is missing is that having the freedom to have cars has an economic benefit that is not easily factored in otherwise. Like in this example, if the location makes in more difficult to have cars, then it's likely that the rents here will have to be lower to attract people. Or in the other example where someone was car-less in Chicago's Hyde Park area -- over a period of time he seems to have optimized to reduce going out because it was a chore. Maybe that is a good thing in the long run :-), but it sort of indicates depressed economic benefits for everyone.
This might have been true sometime in the seventies - but its entirely a moot point now. Public transportation has nearly no future in the US since self-driving cars will pretty much solve this with 10-15 years and so much better than public transport has or would have.
When I need to get to the work, pick up groceries, transport two 30-inch displays across the town, etc., I simply do not walk out to the street, pose for a photo, smile, camera flash and go back to the building.
Transporting somewhere in terms of congestion is 'space integrated over time'.
First and obvious nitpick - there is single person in each car and absolutely no cargo.
Then, if it really worked like the picture suggest, the tram would need to: a) transport each person directly between their endpoints, b) do it in the same time as a car would do, c) be full to its capacity all the time.
Given all these conditions, the cars in the picture (disregarding the single person occupancy and cargo) would really equal to the single tram.
But that is not the case:
a),b) In a car one can drive the shortest/fastest route between his desired endpoints, in the tram/bus one needs to follow the lines. There simply cannot be a complete graph of public transport lines going from every possible start to every possible destination, so you need to run up some extra distance to a 'hub' and switch lines, adding time. And even if there is a direct line, it typically goes as it can serve more people. One example, suppose you have a city with predominantly commercial and industrial parts in the centre with majority of the jobs and predominantly living parts in a star shaped pattern on the outskirts. If you happen to travel from one living neighbourhood to another (e.g. you work there, you are visiting a girlfriend, sport venue), the public transport will take you through many many stops around the centre, while in individual transport you can go between the quarters directly skipping the center completely and getting there a lot faster. There simply isn't enough people to fill a tram/bus between non-major stops in a reasonable intervals.
c) Unless you have 100 % mixed jobs, industry, commerce, leisure, education, everything on each stop and unless you have this with perfectly balanced population density end-to-end, you won't have fully occupied vehicle. In order for that picture to be true, the tram would need to fill itself on its very first stop and on each stop, equal pax would need to enter/leave. Fiction. I live at the end of the tram line and in order to get my seat in the happy photo of a full tram in the picture, then the tram must first arrive almost completely empty (in the morning, everyone goes from this living neighbourhood to the jobs in the centre and back in the afternoon, reverse flows are minimal) to pick me up. Then, the tram continues quarter- to half-full for several stops until it really have at least [# of seats] pax onboard.
To sum up: I) tram takes twice the time because I have to route around with the majority of the flow instead of going direct route, II) it has to arrive almost empty to pick me up, III) it isn't full to [# of seats] for significant part of the journey.
So for me as a single person, count not one, but 4 to 6 seats to achieve the same 'space over time' density. If I pick up my colleague on the go or drop him of, count approx. 8 seats. Two colleagues, 10 seats.
Suddenly if all the cars in the picture doesn't conveniently fit into a single tram, but in several of them spaced apart, it isn't so nice propaganda...
PS: I lived in a socialistic east-bloc non-SSSR country. In order to have a car, you had to be privileged/bribe/camp on the waiting list (literally camp in front of the state-owned car dealership). The public transport was wonderful, there were railway tracks going to every forgotten small village, bus lines everywhere, intracity transport roared through empty streets. The catch? Be any small fraction different that the 'major' flow - morning shift, evening shift, night shift interchanges between industrial jobs/housing areas/villages and you are out of luck, you either got blackmarketed a car in any possible way (e.g. train drivers), drive bike through the harshest freezing conditions or go with the flow and forgo anything else than 'buy groceries at corner store' (with regulated flat prices regardless whether it is 500-ish person village or capital city), 'go to job early morning', 'return from job in the evening' (nevermind that job was compulsory). Think Venezuela in recent HN.
Making using a car more and more miserable without improving public transport is, in reality, beating everybody into the averageness of 'you need to go from this stop to this stop at this time', otherwise sit at home or in walking distance. I been there, seen the carless variant and the free carsupported variant and it is a lot better even if you have to sit out through a traffic jam.
TL;DR: The public transport excels at only one thing - very major traffic flows in peak hours. Sucks very much at everything else. Self-driving car can be a nice hybrid - offering full occupancy of vehicles traveling at minimal distances between them (coordinated braking) in peak times, while still functioning nicely outside of major flows and allowing complete freedom outside of the peak hours.
This needs a citation. There are lots of cities in the US where public transport accounts for a minority of transit.
You have so far failed to make any argument and only made a provocative comment linking a totally non-informative picture. Have you ever ran errands by bus in a city like GP was mentioning? It's a huge and ineffective waste of time. Suppose GP makes $100 an hour and produces $400 an hour of economic output but you are arguing rather than pay $15 and save a 50 minute trip, he should 'bite the bullet' and be forced to take public transport (by regulating cars off the roads); for what purpose is that again?
I do, on a weekly basis. Not a big deal. Nor are owned and operated cars necessary or cost-effective for weekly errands.
Actually, the most populous 48 urbanized areas in the country constitute over 50% of people. Let's continue to design our cities such that you can't live in them without a $8000/year recurring cost (average cost of car ownership). That will certainly help the people who don't have relatively infinite resources at their disposal.
My comment was also specifically referring to cities. I guess people in less car friendly countries are just totally incapable of vacation or employment eh? Who'd've thunk.
I now live in Brooklyn, NY.
Hyde Park is an extremely poor example of a walkable neighborhood. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, however, is substantially more walkable.
I would argue orders of magnitude, but walkscore.com says it's 76 vs 99. Perhaps the scale is logrithmic?
What I take issue with is the position advanced in this thread that raising the hassle of owning/operating a car in places like Hyde Park is a good idea, that it will somehow transform those neighborhoods to be more like New York.
Also, Chicago is a designed garden city, enforced by zoning. It's largely and intentionally built up of huge residential arrays of city blocks, a half mile to a side, separated by boulevards where all businesses are packed. So, if you live in the middle of one of these blocks, it's 10-15 minutes of walking to see any business. If taking away drivable areas were accompanied by changes that allowed businesses to be built within those areas, like corner stores, I guarantee that groceries wouldn't be a half-hour away.
edit: that's what I get for reading comments before the article. Chicago is perfect for superblocks. It pretty much has them already.
Taking the cars away from places like Hyde Park won't magically make it one of them.
> I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends
I don't actually take a lot of Ubers because my area is so well-connected by transit (and dense with commerce), but at least in my case, the idea that Uber is "expensive" as a transport option pales in comparison to the massive cost of owning a car (and paying for parking, maintenance, insurance, etc). Is this not the case for you?
Even with how walkable and transit-friendly my situation is, Uber and car rentals are still a necessary (though occasional) component of my overall transportation budget. Relative to living in a car-oriented area and owning a car, I still end up paying volumes less (as well as having a far, far better transport experience overall in terms of time, convenience, and health).
Hyde Park is very far from perfect, but its problems are entirely the fault of people with attitudes like yours. You could have bought an apartment close to the shops you'd like to frequent, or bought a bicycle (and now, bike share is a legitimate option). It takes 10-15 minutes to get downtown on Metra, but you probably couldn't be bothered to read a train schedule. And indeed, the problems with Metra—namely, long headways outside of peak hours and lack of fare reciprocity with CTA—would be eminently solvable by a consituency who values freedom from cars. Instead, we have people like you, who will exacerbate our issues by demanding more parking (and hence, necessarily, less density, less walkability, less transit, and less vibrancy). The assumption that everyone will drive engenders opposition to new development, particularly the type of mixed-use development that makes things easy for people on foot.
I'm always dismayed to see this kind of thinking on a site called Hacker News. A true "hacker" would look at the problems of urban living and try to unearth the real causes instead of falling back on the same old kludge everybody uses, buying a car. If you did, you would see that the kludge itself has become the dominant problem.
You feel entitled to easy access to the city, the sort of easy access that is currently offered to drivers and prohibited to anybody else. You're coming from a place of enormous privilege. Living without a car in Hyde Park is, despite your protestations, easy. Living, with or without a car, in most of the rest of the South Side is incredibly difficult. Many people on the South Side are too poor to own a car, or are driven into poverty by needing to own one to access their jobs. By choosing to drive, you are actively making life harder for the majority of South Siders, who would benefit greatly from better transit access and jobs and shops they can safely walk or bike to. Buying a car bought you a bit of convenience, but make no mistake: the system you have bought into immiserates, maims, and kills. We need to think beyond our own immediate comforts and decide to build a city that is safe and accessible for everybody.
It varies depending on your level of fitness and the local infrastructure, but a bicycle also does wonders to shorten journeys of a few miles.
Maybe a problem global warming can solve!
It's how the city was planned.
European cities have small, walkable centers, the mid-density around that, then instead of suburbs, they have a lot of higher density hamlets around them.
Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain.
So - even for Frankfurt, which has a bunch of US style high-rises in the middle ... you can comfortably walk many places, and bike almost all of them, any time of year.
Combine that with widespread and completely integrated public transit (without goons, slubs and idiots ruining them) - it works extremely well.
Most North American cities are designed for cars: long blocks, no walkable 'high streets', very wide streets, less density, less public transport ... and often a harsh winter which makes it really uncomfortable for 5-ish months a year.
It will take more than bike lanes to change the nature of culture.
As someone living in the Nordics, that's news to me.
On the down side, the slippery cobblestone sidewalks are only big enough for one person, there's a lot of dog "doodoo" on them, and parking is hell (so they tell me). In fact most people in residential neighborhoods just park on the sidewalks (partially if not fully), as well as double-park. People pay parking meters and often even a homeless parking attendent as well.
Luckily, the public transport (metro, bus, train, ferry) is quite good and reliable. I believe the govt was considering adding a downtown tax for cars entering the city center but I forget if that's been enacted. There was also something similar regarding older cars due to being less environmentally friendly.
Growing up in the suburbs without a car, I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago).
I'm on the opposite corner of the neighborhood from the business districts, so a little errand like CVS or the grocery store is around half an hour by foot each way. The bus or shuttle is usually a wash, given the time spent waiting for it. A bigger errand like Target or Macy's is a special occasion, taking about 50 minutes each way (walk to bus, wait for bus, ride bus, wait for train, ride train, walk from train station, or sometimes take yet another bus). A downtown or North Side restaurant, once you get tired of the local ones, is a similar ordeal.
Feeling trapped in the neighborhood was mostly an annoyance. I adapted by buying most things from Amazon (Prime is well worth it) and carefully planning shopping lists for brick-and-mortar stores. After a while I got tired the local restaurants, so I pretty much stopped eating out. I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends, but generally spent as little money as possible when doing so. Still, it grew more annoying over a few years.
The turning point came when I realized that it took about as long to get from my apartment to the downtown train station (about 7 miles) as it did from that train station to Milwaukee (90 miles).
I bought a car recently, and my quality of life shot up dramatically. Distances that used to be a big deal are now nothing. Even if I'm going somewhere without cheap parking, I can drive directly to a train station instead of taking the bus. Life moves faster. I get to enjoy the city more often.
If the CTA would run more frequent, smaller vehicles on its routes I would easily go carless again. But instead it sounds like the approach is just to degrade the experience of owning a car until it's as bad as public transit, rather than the other way around. When that happens, it's off to the suburbs, I guess.