Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Picture

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:25PM (#21186648)

I’ll add another angle. Cars enable social mobility, particularly for people of color, who as a group make less money than white and Asian people and are less likely to be able to afford the skyrocketing price of housing near reliable transit. One of the biggest demographic trends of the last couple of decades—more significant than young white people moving back into cities, which Citylab spends a lot of ink writing about—is people of color moving to the suburbs or car-dependent southern cities: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census....

Here in the DC area, while DC gentrifies and pushes out middle class people and families with kids, the predominantly African American suburbs of PG County are growing. The same thing is happening on the other side of DC in Fairfax county and Arlington county with Hispanic families. For these folks, cars enable a huge increase in quality of life that would be foreclosed otherwise. (My cousin, whose family immigrated here from Bangladesh, grew up in a small apartment in Queens. I remember visiting back in the 1990s and think it looked post-apocalyptic. Now, her parents have a nice house in Long Island. They’d never be able to afford anything like that near a subway station.)

I don’t think this is intrinsic to societies generally. There are lots of reasons why housing prices are out of control in US cities, and lots of reasons why people of color are underrepresented in the kinds of professions, such as programming, that enable people to afford housing near transit. But that is what it is. Until we fix those problems, urbanist snobbery will have problematic race and class undertones.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by CydeWeys on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:36PM (#21186734)

These people would be better served by building increased mass transit to accommodate them, as car ownership is expensive and beyond the reach of many people who don't have much.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Monday October 07, 2019 @06:46PM (#21186809)

We’re talking about middle class people. They can afford cars, more than one in fact. What they can’t afford is $1 million+ on a house in DC in a decent school district near good public transit. (Indeed, the “can’t afford cars” urbanist trope applies to almost no one. Even among people who are under the poverty line, 80% have access to a vehicle. Driving is one of the most egalitarian institutions in the US.)

Building more mass transit won’t fix the schools, and mostly just seems to facilitate gentrification. It costs billions of dollars to extend the DC Metro these days. That means anywhere remotely desirable that gets a new metro line becomes totally unaffordable for middle class people with families. The structural cost problem has huge knock on effects. If building rail here cost what it does in Europe, you’d be able to build five times as much. If we had five new lines in the last decade, instead of just one, maybe rents near subway metro wouldn’t be skyrocketing. But that’s not the world we live in.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by lonelappde on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:14PM (#21187374)

Meanwhile, on the world of facts and data, we see that car commuting is a privilege of the wealthier classes.

http://cityobservatory.org/why-do-poor-school-kids-have-to-c...

Land near metro got expensive (very recently! U St used to be (ugh) "ghetto") because it's GREAT and wealth inequality means rich people can bid up its price. The answer is to build MORE of this great thing so there is enough for poor people too.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:52PM (#21187602)

> Meanwhile, on the world of facts and data, we see that car commuting is a privilege of the wealthier classes.

98% of all commuting is by car. Driving is one of the most egalitarian and universal experiences in the US. There is a small minority of urban poor reliant on mass transit, but that doesn’t even account for the majority of poor people. Meanwhile, rail transit is heavily used by higher income people. (Median income for DC metro is $115,000.)

> The answer is to build MORE of this great thing so there is enough for poor people too.

I agree. The problem is that at current prices, a new rail line is a once in a generation project. Metro’s 2040 plan doesn’t even contemplate a new rail line.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by CydeWeys on Monday October 07, 2019 @11:33PM (#21188480)

Source on the 98% figure? That strikes me as very, very wrong.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @06:33AM (#21190680)

https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by CydeWeys on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @02:00PM (#21195097)

That's about passenger-miles, not commutes by person.

The statistic I'm seeing is that 76% commute to work by driving themselves. Another 9% carpool, and then the rest walk, bike, bus, train, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by matchbok on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:08PM (#21186953)

This is all fair, as someone who just started the DC housing search. In a perfect world the metro would have 3+ new lines to augment what we already have and infill the city. Perhaps the Purple Line is a good start.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:37PM (#21187165)

The Purple Line isn’t a “start” because it’s not going anywhere sustainable. The Purple Line will cost the same amount of money as it took Copenhagen to build a fully automated ring subway beneath beneath downtown (of a similar length). If that’s the price to build above ground light rail that isn’t even grade separated, then there is no hope going forward of new lines to middle class neighborhoods that don’t result in rapid gentrification.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by matchbok on Monday October 07, 2019 @07:55PM (#21187269)

Sustainable how?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by rayiner on Monday October 07, 2019 @08:50PM (#21187579)

$6 billion to build 16 miles of light rail, is not the first step in a sustainable program of building transit in the suburbs. It’s a once in a generation boondoggle.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Street by Street, Amsterdam Is Cutting Cars Out of the Pi... by matchbok on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:57PM (#21194333)

I mean, that's just the cost of construction in the US, sadly. I'm not sure what the alternative is - not build it and allow more sprawl?

[ Parent | on HN ]