> A few spots are left, converted into parking for disabled drivers or EV charging, and some streets are open for delivery trucks for a couple of hours in the morning. Emergency vehicles still have access.
Nobody who has thought about this issue for a bit is suggesting that we ban cars like we banned chemical weapons. Simply that the number of cars can be cut by a factor of 5-10 easily, leaving behind only those users who actually need the car, and not using it as a convenience at enormous unaccountable externalities.
Not to mention that the the health of many (but not all) is destroyed by absolute minimum exercise needed in car centric cities. When everyone starts walking 5-10K steps everyday, many mobility related ailments are avoided or controlled or managed sufficiently.
If you are reluctant to harass legitimately disabled people, some amount of abuse would slip in. I think unless the abuse is so rampant that legitimate users get denied access (e.g. so many fakers are parking in handicap spots that the real ones have no spot) ignoring most of it as the inevitable price of not making lives of legitimately affected people yet harder is the right way to go.
man sometimes you just have to let externalities happen in the name of not screwing over the 99% of people who do it by the book
I don't see how this would be any different.
That being said, IMHO it's better to tolerate a moderate amount of abuse than going over the wall with enforcement.
And then you see the people who really need it and would make a difference if they didn't get those very front spots taken up by these folks.
I just have some anti-American culture hate going on right now (I am an American). You can just feel the entitlement coming off some of these people.
But you can't see that the person gets fatigued and suddenly can't walk very far. (And we are talking about fatigue that makes folks nearly pass out, not just mere tiredness) Or they have a history of numbness and trouble walking and keep a cane at their desk for this reason.
Like others have said, you cannot tell from the outside. This isn't freaking "entitlement". If you want to hate American culture, there are plenty of other areas to do this that doesn't make one crap on sick folks. I'd suggest focusing on letting folks go without health care or letting folks starve, but there are plenty of other choices.
The nicest accommodations are those you don't even have to ask for.
While I want able-bodied people to take the stairs, I think it's great when we can afford enough elevators that nobody cares. The situation where they are rationed, whether by needing a special key or just by a sign & dirty looks, is always less pleasant. But when it comes to cities and transport, this is genuinely hard, as cities with so much parking that it's free for everyone are radically different to mostly non-car cities.
Yours is not that case. You have a medical need, as do many people. But it's still reasonable to move away from the mentality that's common in the US of viewing road use and car use as a human right, and towards one that's about explicitly opting into or out of trade-offs about how best to make use of limited road space and government funds. Specifically: if we're going to subsidize road use, should we subsidize all of it, and if so, all of it at the same rate? I think you make a good case for why people with mobility restrictions should have access to such a subsidy, but I don't think it follows that because they should, everyone should. Maybe people who are able to take the bus or walk should have incentives to do so, or disincentives to not do so.
SF isn't even an anomaly here- look to the coastal mountains above Palo Alto. Lavish houses on large plots of land. Yeah, they are expensive, but you ain't getting no mansion and ten acres in the heart of SF for a paltry $50M.
If you really have a desire to 'stick it to the wealthy' while still enabling all to use the roads, sell access to HOV lanes at some extremely high cost and use it to pay for improvements to the infrastructure as a whole. I honestly think that this is a much better plan than the current (ridiculous) trend of offering HOV access to hybrids and EVs, because getting people into hybrids and EVs does nothing to ease congestion, which is the purpose of HOV lanes. Charging an extremely high tax for single-occupied HOV use would provide additional money to build improved infrastructure for all users, which would achieve the HOV goal of reducing congestion and pollution (because for traditional cars, congestion = horrible MPG).
PS - hybrids and EVs don't make sense in all areas. I have a Fusion Energi which has a plug-in range of about 20 miles, and I live in Michigan. I bought it because I wanted to be able to eat lunch in my car without idling the engine (to save wear and tear), but in general, hybrids and EVs are a complete waste of time in the midwest. 1/3 of the year is spent in arctic conditions below 30 degrees, and another 1/3 of the year is spent in sweltering 85+ degree temperatures ... and in both cases, hybrids and EVs don't do notably better than gas cars (first hand experience here).
As an additional aside, until we build more nuclear plants, and/or provide infrastructure to charge EVs during the day, they are kind of pointless. Solar power is not available at night (when most people charge EVs), so the electricity ends up coming from hyrdocarbon fuels plants. The conversion and transmission losses associated with going from Thermal->Mechanical->Electrical->High Voltage->Transmit->Low Voltage->DC->battery are so high that EVs really are currently not better than gas vehicles in much of the country. In areas where the waste heat from the gasoline is used to provide cabin heat, EVs are significantly worse in terms of overall energy use (especially those that use resistive heating for cabin heat).
Not to forget that the escalating climate change tax on petrol was paused some years back.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/23/uk-has-b...
Taxing something less is not the same as subsidising it and it is disingenuous to claim that it is. Is the government subsidising you by taxing you less than some hypothetical percentage?
Also, uber and Lyft would get to decide the prices, that could cost much more to the city.
I think a public transport has to be public, ie publicly owned.
And wouldn't it be better to have the same thing but public (so that benefits are used to actually improve the service, and not pay dividends)?
Another way to think about it: you can view drivers paying for transit as a subsidy, but you can also view it as paying for decreased traffic, from which they directly benefit.
Don't forget a fee for the air and noise pollution they cause.
Though, one more thing I'd tax is noise from music bumpers. Those people drive me up the f-ing wall. I challenge anyone to think about how much damn awful music pollution is. Then come back in a year, after seriously considering it - if you've become the crazy old guy at the end of the street waving his cane (like me), then you know it's a problem.
Most modern freeway builds include noise mitigation in their designs. This cost should be passed on to the freeway users via use fees.
Some quotes from various sources:
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-air-pollution-repo... - "Los Angeles remains the nation's leader in harmful ozone pollution from car tailpipes emissions ... but the report said the nation's second-largest city also achieved its best overall air quality score of all those years."
https://www.livestrong.com/article/156537-facts-of-car-pollu... - "The American Lung Association reports that 30,000 people are killed by car emissions annually in the United States alone. Air pollution also causes numerous respiratory and cardiovascular problems and may exacerbate pre-existing conditions such as asthma. More than half of Americans live in areas that fail to meet federal air quality standards at least several days each year."
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/motor-vehicle-pollution - "Motor vehicles give off more than half of all carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions in Minnesota. These emissions, including microscopic particles, can contribute to breathing and heart problems along with an elevated risk of cancer."
https://owl.cwp.org/mdocs-posts/elc_pwp6/ - "Metals can follow many pathways before they become entrained in urban stormwater run off. A recent California study sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Nonpoint Source Program suggests that cars are the dominant loading source for many metals of concern, such as cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc."
I drive a PHEV in Michigan, and for around 6-8 months a year, its mileage isn't any better than a standard 4 cylinder due to poor hybrid performance in extremely cold or hot temperatures. You get into the car, the BMS determines that the battery is either baking or freezing, and scales regen/assistance back to minimal levels. You essentially end up with a gas vehicle with an expensive start/stop system (and below about 10-12f, they actually often idle even when stopped to maintain engine temperature).
> Let users of cars pay for the
> infrastructure they use (through
> gas and plate taxes),
Automobile use is insanely subsidized by our society.
What helped me a lot was getting an e-bike that I'm able to cruise around town at 20mph (32kph) in. I understand that this particular solution doesn't apply to you, since arthritis is triggered by joint movement, whereas my pain is triggered by impact on the damaged foot and ankle (and e-biking is low impact).
But this experience got me thinking a lot about small electric vehicles.
One could imagine a city center where most people walk or bike, and people with a medical permit could drive around in speed-limited, electric golf carts, which are fairly compatible with pedestrian-only areas. Perhaps the city itself would staff the golf carts with drivers who were summonable via app.
So people like us could drive to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city center, and then there would either be rentable golf carts at the garage, or golf carts able to be summoned to go into the city center.
This really made staying independent possible, for the months it took before I could walk properly. Sure it was slower to drive to the supermarket & park underground there, instead of walking... but much quicker than waiting for someone else to have time to help.
I agree that solutions other than a traditional car would be possible. But right now, thinking through other places I've lived fine without a car, they would all have been hell.
After the first week I broke down and just took cabs everywhere. Perfectly practical, but only when somebody else (in this case, my employer) is paying for it.
In defence of the transit, it has to be said that (in a city that size) those cabs could not work without it. The roads are only passable because 90% of people aren't on them.
Which is to say, the fares have to be out of reach (as a daily expense) for > 90% of people. I imagine most employers would balk at the cost of catching cabs everywhere in Oslo.
Oslo, and European cities without or with much less cars, have tons of people with arthritis as well and they're doing just fine. A walkable city will be even more welcoming for things like powered wheelchairs, healthier to breath for everybody, and will have low cost (and in some cases in here, free) mass transportation.
>Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans.
Yeah, because nothing says compassion like car ridden cities, and urban areas designed around driving.
Also, I'd like to point out the economic disadvantage that comes from having to own a vehicle to drive to certain jobs. I've had to turn down jobs back in the day because I couldn't save up enough to purchase a vehicle and maintain it as well. You end up losing a lot of personal time waiting on buses. I remember having to get up at 5:00AM to catch a bus a mile away, and then getting home around 9:00PM too tired to do anything else but sleep and repeat.
I don't think I world make it through the traffic and all the red lights in the same time. Finding a parking spot would take a significant amount of time again.
Nowhere near 90% of cars in city centers, where all these bans are taking place, fit that description.
Most people do not need to drive. It is a selfish, ultimately stupid choice they have made.
I'm not generally opposed to people owning cars and using them. I'm opposed to people offloading the costs and space requirements of their private property onto the community.
All in all, a car free space can be far better for the disabled than what we have right now.
“Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!'... [...]
Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason.
Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous.
For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.”
Also detailed in this book is destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities by the common policy of appropriating their land for roads and highways. The lasting effects of these practices is plainly obvious in so many US cities and will not go away without active efforts to reverse the damage. In comparison, disabled-friendly infrastructure is frankly more easily solved.
That is not logical. What is logical, is that if car usage was heavily reduced inside urban areas, it would leave more space for the few cases where cars and lorries are actually needed.
It is a variant of the old argument "but without cars and lorries there would be no food transport" (or ambulances, constuction, or something else where it is easy to see the benefits). That has always been a false premise. The biggest problems with cars in urban areas in cogestion. Fewer cars would mean more space where it's most desperately needed.
What do people with your condition in Paris or Rome do? Most of Europe isn't designed around cars the way the usa is.
The only American cities where "it was designed for cars" is an excuse are those built largely after the 1940s, when cars (and air conditioning) became commonplace: LA, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, etc.
> you NEED a car to reasonably participate
> in most parts of society.
So, I'm not exactly sure how much the car culture is actually working in your favor. The alternative (public transportation) means parking lots can be smaller and closer to the actual destination.
All that being said, Oslo is NOT a good city to live in if you need a wheelchair or crutches (which I do, with unfortunate regularity). 500 meters might as well be 100 kilometers if you are on crutches in the winter. Even if where you are going is right next to a train stop, the stops are not very accessible (long ramps way out of the way etc). The curbs do not consistently have ramps at crosswalks. The sidewalks are often covered in ice in the winter. There are stairs everywhere. Even with a car and being able to park near your destination, you still dealt with these issues.
So, I guess my point is, Oslo making the city center mostly car free is not what makes it unfriendly for people with mobility issues. Taking public transportation is still better than parking and walking wherever. But it still sucks if you have crutches.
Also it sounds like a mobility scooter is kind of what you want?
You are fortunate enough to be able to afford cars and think that we should continue to design around what works for you. That simply benefits you - and not the handicapped, disabled people who use public transit every day.
I've heard this before... and maybe I'm not qualified to speak, as I'm not yet the age where I really have to worry, but from what I know of current technology, I can totally go out and buy a walking speed electric wheelchair that is safe to operate even after my vision and attention degrade... but self-driving capabilities in cars are still quite some ways off.
Personally, my body would have to degrade a lot before I needed that wheelchair to make it a few blocks; but my attention and vision? that wouldn't have to degrade as much before I would not be able to safely operate a car.
This is actually something I've thought a lot about; I mean, I personally am bearish on self-driving cars, and if we don't get self-driving cars? I think I might need to plan on retiring to New York, as that's probably one of the few places I can count on aging without being expected to drive.
Seriously, we can come up with something other than 2 ton vehicles.
Hundreds of millions of people will live better lives if we can build our cities without needing cars.
The parking spots aren't just for people with wheelchairs. My grandmother got one when she had to use a walker.
You deserve it!
With that said, I would really hate to not be able to take my car anywhere I need to go, because a good day can turn bad quickly. In fact, it is among the many reasons I am glad to have moved to a rural area.
the difference between newer cities built for cars and old pre-car inner cities is quite extreme in that regard. i've got a supermarket 150m and a smallish shopping centre 500m away, which might be too far for you, but an elderly or visually impaired person could still get their shopping done on their own.
the shopping centers at the edge of the city - which are pretty much only reachable by car and you seem to depend on - have a disastrous and self reinforcing effect on inner city QOL (at least that's true for all the smaller cities around here, where cars are required to get around), as they cause most of the small local shops to die off, increasing the distance you have to walk to get to the remaining ones. removing cars from the equation brings those back, which also means the distances are getting smaller. that said, i doubt i cover a much smaller distance on foot when i drive out to the big shopping centers at the city pheriphery, as the distances from most parking spots to the destination inside a huge box store are at least as big as what i'd cover walking to my usual local shop.
of course this doesn't help you much if the distances are to big no matter what - i could see you getting around on a motorized scooter around here without problems though (as a few of my neighbors do).
so, from the perspective of an european inner city dweller, getting rid of cars would be much more inclusionary than the other way round.
As other people mentioned, there'd be workarounds for people with mobility issues for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Calgary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary
I suppose there are pockets of high density that aren't counted for. Also Calgary is probably unusually spread out for the given population compared to larger cities like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.
A car can fairly be seen as a grossly overpowered wheelchair with an extra ton of metal or two.
i can't imagine taking a car to get to a bodega on the other side of the block or across the street is easier than just walking to the bodega directly.
Just consider the trip to the Wal-Mart. I haven't lived in North America for a long time, but in my recent trip to Canada to visit my parents, we went to Wal-Mart. Look at those sprawling mall complexes with their massive parking lots. We had to drive from parking lot to parking lot, just to visit another store!
And the Wal-Mart itself was this behemoth structure with football field after football field of space under its roof. I mean it's half a kilometer from the frozen pizza to the checkout line. If you can't walk 200 meters, you can't shop in Wal-Mart without using their motorised carts (which are admittedly very cool).
Imagine a completely different situation (one which I thankfully live in every day). Imagine that you had stores that were close to where you lived. So close, in fact, that you could walk there if you were abled bodied. But if you were not, you could take an electric bicycle (which many elderly people use where I live) or even an electric cart similar to the one that you can find at Wal-Mart (these are really rare where I live -- most people are quite happy with their electric bicycles, but I've seen them frequently in the UK where I used to live).
Imagine that instead of several square kilometers of parking lots to contend with, you had hundreds of small shops. You had butchers that are just big enough to house the meat it sells. You go up to a counter, which is less than 10 feet from the door and you get your meat and -- lo and behold! There's the cash register, not 3 feet from where you are standing.
I could go on, but the biggest thing that makes this hard for people in North America to imagine is that it is so different. The lifestyle is completely different. Instead of going once a week or once a month to some massive discount store and buying a van full of goods, you go every other day and buy enough to fit in a basket on your bike. It seems like a lot of time, but instead of driving for 30 minutes to the store and spending 20 minutes fining a parking space, you walk 5 or 10 minutes to the store. That's what it means to build cities that are good for walking.
I write this with the full knowledge that my words are not good enough to explain this concept. Even my parents don't understand. When I stayed with them, I discovered that there was a shopping centre only a 20 minute walk from their house. I started walking there to pick up small things for dinner every day (hey 40 minutes of walking a day is not bad). They thought I was insane. Why would you walk to the store when you can drive? Why would you spend 40 minutes when you could send 10? They couldn't understand that the walk was the point.
And so, while it is unreasonable to expect North America to become Asia or Europe suddenly, I think there is a lot of things that can be done to improve the situation dramatically -- like rezoning areas so that shops can be build where people live. Things like mandating that parking lots have pedestrian paths that allow you to walk to the store without being driven over by a mini van. Things like having down town cores which are already mixed use to have walking only areas. Things like building safe public transit. Things like not approving large box malls in the middle of nowhere surrounded by seas of parking lots and no access to public transit.
Do you think there are people with arthritis and disabilities in Europe?
So many city centres make cars a nightmare, but they are infinitely better places to live than the US.
Not to mention our healthcare but that's another thread...
we should reduce car usage for energy, pollution, life quality
but let's not be extremists
It makes them heavily dependent on able-bodied drivers (family members, taxis, hired helpers, ...) to move about.
Children are much more independently mobile in cities with good transit. In car-centric suburbs parents or other caretakers are responsible for personally carting their children from place to place, with huge negative impact on children’s quality of life. Children end up sheltered, over-scheduled, over-controlled, and dramatically delayed in learning to live for themselves.
It is for good reason that many college campuses and retirement homes are organized as little self-contained car-free villages.
In my opinion car-centric suburbs are optimized for healthy, wealthy 30–50 year-old full-time workers, and increasingly hostile as people get further from matching that.
My parents have a car but mostly walk around town.
Would I be right in thinking that you come from a car centric area where people don't walk and this lose their ability to get around at a younger age? Perhaps you have difficulty conceiving of life in a pedestrian friendly city.
If so, I don't blame you, there are almost none in the us.
The solution, of course, wasn't to figure out how to get him behind the wheel. The solution is weaning communities off of their car dependence.
But what of Rome, and Paris? Do people with your condition live in them? Those cities aren't built around cars, yet have millions of people from all walks of live.
If we make cities built around cars, and people don't walk, then people get more health problems and die younger. That has to be considered alongside cases like yours.
Also, think of the people who can't drive and for whom getting someone else to drive them is too expensive. That’s a lot of elderly.
Cars kill a lot of people every year. We need AI cars before something changes there, and when that comes, the conversation on exclusion will be very different.
Cars and the point-to-point transit that they offer are a GODSEND for me and many other people who are somewhat mobility restricted, but not so bad that we need wheelchairs or crutches. They enable me to live a very normal life that would be impossible in a heavily pedestrian optimized environment. The fact that you don't even consider some of the alternatives as viable - automated shared cars, electric cars, strong hybrids ... all of which solve the problems you identified (wasted space on parking, pollution, etc.) leads me to believe that you actually just hate cars, and not any of the (solvable) problems that are caused by their current embodiment.
Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans.
EDIT:
To those who are saying that we'll still allow those with disabilities to have cars: many states require that you be able to walk less then 200 feet to get a disabled plate. On most days, I can walk at least 500 ... so by almost all standards, I do not qualify. However, walking 5-600 feet doesn't get you far enough to survive without a car. If the world were to go this route, we would have to reconsider what constitutes 'disabled'.
Another thought that surfaces is that with my 36-37" inseam (I wear 36" pants because that's as big as they sell, but they're really still too short), I do not fit in most public transit, and most cars. Thankfully, because cars are privately owned, I can pick from the 2 or 3 models that I actually fit in. A public transit world is a world that marginalizes peoples who are in the last 5-10% in terms of height/weight.