I think that's a very hyperbolic prediction. I think elevating the automobile to the detriment of other forms of transportation will be viewed as a mistake, but the automobile itself is no more a mistake than the horse and carriage were.
> My dream is that one day most streets in Manhattan will be closed to car traffic and replaced with green space full of trees, flowers, children playing, and usable public space.
When was this ever true in Manhattan, and why do you think it would become true just by getting rid of cars? Crowded city streets predate cars by centuries.
It never was, but the car problem always existed because roads needing to be clear for horses caused the same prohibitive issues of using streets for pedestrians.
> why do you think it would become true just by getting rid of cars?
It wouldn't be just getting rid of cars, its what you do with the space once you get rid of them. Added greenery, protected bike lanes, a lane or two for trains/buses, and you get a ton more pedestrian room. Suddenly people could want to be on the streets of midtown manhattan maybe, save tourist spots.
I suppose if you made say every 20th street open to one way single street traffic (so 20th goes west, 40th east, 60th west etc), and every even avenue open (2nd south, 4th north, 6th south), that could work
That said I don't believe a city without cars will work unless it's planned for that before building. Basically all everyday logistics would have to be underground. Obviously it would only work for very densely populated areas.
I'd like to see something like that though. Small densely populated areas connected by trains/metros and surrounded by forests.
We could say the industrial revolution was a great disaster as if disrupted how people worked, their relationship to labor, capital, etc., but it also enabled us to get where we are today.
Probably not what they are going for, but uptown was relatively undeveloped until surprisingly recently in historical terms.
Also there are lots of famous photos of kids playing on Manhattan streets from circa the '30s and earlier.
In London, building a new tunnel for crossrail involved threading a TBM through a gap with 80cm clearance (that's less than 2 cubits).
The deeper you go, the wider the problems above, the more existing infrastrucutre is effected, not to mention the issues of how to return to the surface.
Build decking over all the existing surface streets, only allow electric vehicles on the (current) underground streets, don't allow anything larger than a pushbike on the top.
What about all the businesses that occupied the old ground floor?
This multi layered fantasy seems to have been around since GM's world fair exhibit in 1939 at least [1], but I haven't seen it work.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_F...
In the end you still need roads. You don't get to convert all of that space into a park even if you ban cars.
Not all the car space maybe, but lots if it.
You don't need parking spaces anymore. No more than 2 lanes for most roads ... that sums up very big.
There are numerous city centres in the UK which use this method. The central portion of Canterbury, Kent, is a great example.
There are significant benefits to this approach other than not having to use roads, but of course the tech isn’t there yet
An entire building is less feasible unless it is small, but it could be done using modular components
Plus I don't really want my town to sound like the set of Apocalypse Now.
This is the hypothetical that GP responded to by saying it's not realistic...so you're acting like he was the one who constructed a straw man argument when he was making a reasonable point directly relevant to what another poster said.
If there's any hysteria in this conversation it's from your unreasonable response.
This might require restoring or even constructing a jetty or small siding. Any cost is balanced against the disruption and danger of taking many large vehicles through residential areas.
No need to wait that long, the regret is felt already. Sydney ripped up its extensive tram network in the 1950s and 1960s to improve the roads for cars. Remnants of the infrastructure remain: cuttings through rocky, hilly areas in particular. My mother (in her 90s now) talks about taking the tram to Bondi.
Melbourne was smart enough to keep their tram network.
That has all disappeared and the Manhattan economy is essentially services for residences, entertainment, media, finance, government, hospitals, etc. Production of goods is minor, and distribution and warehousing have mainly moved out, e.g. Fulton fish market.
So Manhattan becomes a forest of towers mainly for residents and offices, with some more specialized buildings for hospitals, conference centers, sports venues, etc. But there is even little need for retailing space, since the distribution centers for online retailers serving Manhattan can be in the outer boroughs or NJ.
In this scenario the transportation system boils down to distribution of food and other goods to the towers and the collection and removal of garbage, plus mass transit intra island and to/from the hinterlands for commuters to the office towers, as well as mass transit to/from airports for the tourism and business travelers.
Manhattan is probably ahead of other cities in becoming a pure center of goods consumption.
That being said, it's quite clear that the automobile in it's current form is highly space inefficient. The 4 wheeled structure has not undergone any change since the dawn of chariots. I think a change is coming, not sure when, perhaps with the advent of flying cars from Sebastian Thrun.
I think this is a cultural artefact of a car-centric society.
Cars are not really viewed in this way in my culture (Denmark). They're just another mode of transportation, nothing special about them compared to bicycles, busses, trains, etc. People go with what is most convenient. If you need to get some office work done remotely, then being a passenger in a train saves more time than driving a car. If you want exercise built in to your commute, bicycles are better. In an urban setting, cars are in fact seen as a hassle. They're mostly loved by people in rural areas.
I don't deny that cars have their place, but the kind of exploration potential that a car offers (relatively infrequent, longer distances) can easily be served by rented cars. There is no reason to own a car just to go on infrequent car trips.
I didn't gloss over it, it just wasn't relevant to the point I was making. The topic is banning cars in cities, not banning them in general.
Anyway, I don't see a reason to force rural people to not use a car. There's plenty of space out in the country, so let them have their cars. Obviously, we need to transition all cars away from combustion engines in the near future, but that is a separate issue.
I live in central Europe and there is actually quite opposite debate: people are moving to cities in large quantities, so rural areas are becoming emptier and poorer every day. Not everyone can and should live in a big city.
That's crazy overstatement. Railways are not built for cars. Water pipes are not built for cars. Airports are not built for cars. Power plants and transformers and power lines are not built for cars. Dams are not built for cars. Ports are not built for cars. Houses are not built for cars.
How many dams have helipads? Not many, how many can be driven over? That railway bridge? Sized to allow car traffic underneath.
Many airports have about as much car parking (or more) as runways measured by footprint, same for many power plants.
Houses either have a garage or can't be legally built without parking in many jurisdictions, how many of those require helipads?
This is not how we got here. The reason most cities are built around cars is because of a long and successful campaign by special interest groups to remake cities (human living in general, even) around the automobile. I never chose for things to be this way because of how much I like cars (I don't). Almost no one was ever given a real choice for things to be this way. It just happened because it was profitable and because corrupt governments did not force external costs to be paid for by those making the profits.
There will certainly be some city centers and other areas closed to car traffic (although probably not most of Manhattan - delivery vehicles are a significant part of the traffic).
I'm one of the people looking forward to the day when I can move further out of the city. I don't care if my commute is an hour or more if I can work or sleep or do other things while the car drives me.
My guess is that you are wrong. At least what comes to driving in cities. As the (current) main problem of cars in cities is not accidents, emissions, lack of convenience or even cost. It is the massive amount of space one car takes[1]. And self driving tech is not going to do anything to solve that. If not the opposite, when empty cars are driving around looking for a parking spot.
[1] https://permaculturenews.org/images/bus_car_bike_compare.jpg
And even where there aren't commuting clusters, the fact is that cars will actually obey the laws, meaning pedestrians will finally be free to cross at unmarked intersections, and cyclists will be able to share the lanes with cars.
A small island nation. Traffic still gets pretty bad but it would probably be a lot worse without this policy.
When cars stop colliding with each other, safety standards can be relaxed. Get rid of heavy bumpers and structures added to withstand 50 mph offset crashes. The cars become very light weight which lets you decrease the size of the drivetrain and batteries. You end up with something closer to a fancy golf cart than a Camry and they will cost less than $10k.
Your 99.9999% argument doesn't sound right to me. In the US at least, we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to cars. We could eliminate thousands of deaths per year by simply limiting the top speed of all cars to 25 mph. But we don't because we are willing to accept the risk that comes along with 85 mph speeds (in Texas) for the convenience.
For poisons, absolutely. "Nearly all poisoning deaths in the United States are attributed to drugs" And we handle drug dangers very badly.
For heights, I don't know. Your link says falls which is not the same thing, especially when the elderly are involved. I couldn't find what fraction of those involved heights.
A new Camry already most likely costs less than $10k to manufacture. Bumpers and frame aren’t expensive to manufacture, precision components are. The material and manufacturing savings you suggest would reduce the sticker price by $1-2k at best.
The bottom line is that the extra tech needed to make a car self-driving isn't very expensive, and the hardware costs are continually falling. The big problem is just software, which as we've seen with mobile phones, becomes very cheap when deployed en masse.
You have a point about the 9s, but given that our current (American) society places almost no emphasis on safety, and will happily let you drive around any piece-of-shit car you want in most places regardless of how unsafe it is, I have a very hard time believing society is suddenly going to demand 9-9s reliability from AutoCarOS.
That is a legitimate concern, but the kind of photo you linked to that is often used in advocacy is horribly misleading.
In reality, if cyclists rode anything like that close together, there would be accidents all the time because no-one would be able to make turns or travel at different speeds. The general advice to drivers here in the UK is that you should allow as much space around a bike as you do when passing a car, and authorities have conducted public education campaigns on this and even prosecuted drivers for passing too close. From a safety point of view, that advice is clearly sensible, as passing too close to a cycle is quite dangerous, particularly at higher speeds. But you can't have it both ways by claiming cycling is safer and healthier with that sort of space allowance but also that cycling is as space-efficient as it appears stacking bikes up close together like that. In reality, a bike is much smaller than a car, but in terms of proportions, a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it.
Buses are similarly very misleading in that sort of photo. That is partly because unlike typical car journeys they follow circuitous routes that may be 2-3x as far and as slow to get a single passenger from (somewhere near) A to (somewhere near) B. It's also because unless you're looking at an area with very high population density or very high usage routes/times, most buses don't travel anything like fully loaded but still take up the extra space whether they have 50 passengers, 20 passengers or none at all. If you're going to show a full-size car for each individual travelling, as these photos invariably do, why do they always show a single bus at exactly its maximum capacity? If you showed both at average occupancy levels, the photo would look very different.
This is without getting into the traffic modelling where you find uniform traffic speeds are much more efficient, but while cars can achieve something close to that on clear roads, it is heavily disrupted by both relatively slow-moving cycles that you might not be able to overtake and stop-start buses that might block a traffic lane while allowing passengers on and off.
There are very practical questions to be asked about why we still drive around in vehicles with space for 4-5 people and luggage capacity for going on a two week holiday even if we're travelling alone and lightly loaded, but a lot of the anti-car arguments made by pro-cycle and particularly pro-bus advocates using the kind of photo linked above are rather disingenuous.
2. I don't want cars to pass me within a few feet. That doesn't mean I feel unsafe when riding within that same distance of other cyclists. The relative speed is much lower, the mass is much lower, etc. Similarly, I will happily ride much closer to an immobile object (e.g. a curb) than I would like someone to pass me at 40mph. So I think the space taken up by a moving bicycle is larger than the bike itself, sure, but absolutely no way is it anywhere close to the size of a car plus following distance plus safety buffer.
Right. But proportionately, that distance becomes much greater than the size of the vehicles themselves very quickly as speed increases, which makes the comparison based on vehicle size that we see in the photo almost entirely irrelevant in practice.
> a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it.
Here is an example photo from a recent organized bike ride in my city:
https://images.app.goo.gl/S1Nh8d7zqfSEzqmH7
Here is another:
https://images.app.goo.gl/6hh7NAMtEFPZZyKA9
It's quite hard for me to square these images (not to mention my own experiences riding bikes) with your assertion.
That is true to some extent with experienced cyclists following much the same route (which is the situation for most mass rides).
It is not true at all with a diverse variety of cyclist skill and experience while everyone is trying to get to different places.
cyclists generally have much better spatial awareness than cars.
Citation very much needed. As someone who has lived in and around a heavily cycling-friendly city for a very long time, I see little evidence to support this. Indeed, I can't remember the last time a motor vehicle randomly pulled out into the road right in front of me or swerved across my normal driving line without warning causing me to take avoiding action, while I'd measure instances of cyclists doing this sort of thing in units of infractions-per-week even infractions-per-day.
The advice about giving cyclists space only applies if you yourself are in a car. Cyclists can ride extremely close to other cyclists and remain totally safe. That photo of Copenhagen illustrates the point very clearly. This works if roads are cycle-first, which is a major rarity.
The bus complaint is valid, but not really relevant. Cars are only a problem in high traffic routes with a large need for passenger throughput. Buses on those routes tend to be well utilized. If you are living in a place that doesn't have that quantity of people passing through (more rural areas) then cars are totally fine. They likely shouldn't have used a full bus, and I acknowledge that this sort of photo isn't perfect, but the point they are trying to make is entirely valid.
The argument about uniform traffic speeds is mostly irrelevant for exactly the same reasons I listed above. With clear roads, there is no problem. The issue is that, in busy cities, clear roads are an impossibility, even in cities that were built with automobile traffic as the clear first priority for transportation.
In situations where car traffic is not a problem, it's not a problem! We can leave it alone. Automobiles are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the only valid option for transit outside of urban areas.
The car free movement is fundamentally about cities (particularly city centers), where cars are inefficient, are expensive, are dangerous, use up in inordinate amount of space, and are a major contributor to pollution (which is a particularly large problem in such areas). In those sort of situations, there is simply a better way.
[1] https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2015/10/copenhage...
No, they can't. The risk of a careless cyclist swerving across the path of another cyclist is little different to the risk of a careless cyclist swerving across the path of a motor vehicle, except that in the first case the innocent party is much more likely to be seriously hurt. The point of the official guidance to allow as much space when passing a cycle as when passing a car is because the cycle is more likely to be unstable, not because the overtaking car is.
Cars are only a problem in high traffic routes with a large need for passenger throughput. Buses on those routes tend to be well utilized.
Several decades of experience living in my current area suggest otherwise. For example, one significant problem is asymmetry: if you go one way on a journey by one mode of transport, you may well need to make a return trip later using the same mode of transport, but just because it's busy and there's a frequent and well-utilised bus service in one case, that is no guarantee of the same (or indeed any bus service at all) for the return trip. This can simultaneously result in both hugely wasteful journeys by almost-empty buses in some cases and impossible journeys due to inadequate bus service provision in others.
If you are living in a place that doesn't have that quantity of people passing through (more rural areas) then cars are totally fine.
But people living in rural areas often travel into or via nearby towns and cities. Indeed, it's entirely possible for the majority of congestion on the roads of a town or city to come from this source. Unless you provide adequate public transport alternatives for not just those travelling relatively short distances within that town or city but also those travelling into and/or out of the central area, you don't really offer a practical alternative to car journeys.
Likewise, people living in big cities need to travel outside the city sometimes. Unless there's reasonable public transport for their entire journey, including reaching any long-distance transport in their home city and getting around wherever they are visiting, again you're back to needing an alternative that can do the whole job, and if that means a car then you're driving it within your home city as well.
The issue is that, in busy cities, clear roads are an impossibility, even in cities that were built with automobile traffic as the clear first priority for transportation.
Again, that is not necessarily true. When you reach critical mass, it becomes true, but there is often a wide band with some degree of congestion but not approaching gridlock. Within that band, it is entirely possible for journeys to be significantly disrupted and therefore lengthened by the effects I mentioned. We see it almost every day in the city closest to me, for as much as an hour or two either side of peak periods, or during lesser peaks like weekend shopping or before and after some local event with a lot of visitors.
The car free movement is fundamentally about cities (particularly city centers), where cars are inefficient, are expensive, are dangerous, use up in inordinate amount of space, and are a major contributor to pollution (which is a particularly large problem in such areas). In those sort of situations, there is simply a better way.
Yes, mass transport is effective in scenarios where there is sufficient demand to make it worthwhile, and for local journeys within dense populations at peak times that may well be the case. I don't think anyone seriously disputes this.
The problem I have with a lot of the anti-car advocacy is that it treats transport networks as some sort of boolean system, either "congested" or "not congested", but in reality the degree of congestion tends to follow a much smoother curve with peaks at various times throughout the day. If you draw a straight horizontal line, across a chart of congestion against time of day, at the level where critical mass is reached and gridlock is inevitable, in many places there will be a lot of the time when the curve is below that line. At those times, alternative modes of transport may be less attractive in terms of potentially relevant criteria like efficiency, reliability/availability and environmental friendliness.
That's expecting way, way too much in America.
Right now I live in a suburb of Austin. I rarely go to downtown as all the places I go during the week (work, my kids' school, movie theater, grocery stores, restaurants, doctors) are out here as well and parking is plentiful.
Oh, they will not use tires? Which leave smalls bits of plastic everywhere they go that get washed into our waterway as micro-plastic.
While I share that dream, and rarely ever need a car myself, I cannot currently imagine a better alternative to having a personal car in your home for the following situations:
• The most obvious: People who need to be chaperoned: children, the elderly and people with disabilities.
• The next most obvious: Medical emergencies where you don't have to (or don't want to) wait for an ambulance.
• Privacy for groups of people, with group activities (e.g. playing music, making out) confined to the automobile's enclosure.
• Following on the previous point: Going out with the whole family as a single unit, with provisions for taking care of infants etc. right there.
These can be solved if/when fully automatic on-demand cars become widely available, that anyone can request anywhere anytime with a tap on their phone and don't require passengers to learn how to drive. (But I'm afraid they'll be a huge privacy leak, with companies scrambling to record everything that happens in their cars.)
Almost everything else, like shopping, can already be taken care of with current technology and services just fine (e.g. home delivery.)
Until we get Star Trek teleportation.
Interesting you pick that as your first point, as this is an argument for the opposite.
The 3 groups of people that can't drive, are these 2 and kids.
Ah sorry, I should have explicitly stated that they need others to drive them around. Taxis and public transport are usually not convenient for them.
Theres a woman near me with some kind of mental impairment that gets picked up and dropped off by a mini bus with a lift on the back, so the model obviously exists in some form.
Plus it doesn't rely on a support network that may not be there.
- If you keep some (inverse of most) streets open to a small amount of traffic (Like Barcelona's superblocks [1]), the elderly and those with disabilities are still mobile.
- Why is privacy needed when travelling? Do you require a private enclosure around you when you are walking? I've met many interesting people from all walks of life while cycling and on public transport that I wouldn't have had the chance to meet otherwise, just like I meet people when on foot. Car free streets provide many more interesting street restaurants/businesses for such activities you describe.
- Travelling with the whole family on a train or cycling is pretty good. For example, in Sydney the seats of most of our trains flip so you can have up to 6 people facing each other.
Though I am excited for self driving cars because we won't need so much parking!
[1]: https://theconversation.com/superblocks-are-transforming-bar...
If one is choosing to live in a city, they are willing to be surrounded by other people in their daily life.
I don't think anyone is advocating banning/reducing cars in suburbia.
Children don't need to be chaperoned. In Japan, children as young as 4 go on errands to the local store to buy things for their parents, and children as young as 6/7 walk themselves to school.
>• Following on the previous point: Going out with the whole family as a single unit, with provisions for taking care of infants etc. right there.
A family can easily walk together in a city, take a subway together, etc. People in other countries seem to have no trouble carrying "provisions for infants" in a bag with them.
>• Privacy for groups of people, with group activities (e.g. playing music, making out) confined to the automobile's enclosure.
I don't see how privacy when making out is some kind of urgent need in society. Get a room. Or go to a public park. Seriously?
This is what I meant by my reply to the other comment: Not all cultures/societies are the same.
It also happens to be the explanation for the other points.
Cars came and every other one died and there was a store every ten miles.
Then they paved the road and it was every 30 miles.
And then the interstate when in and only the major towns every 60 miles apart survived.
Our species will not survive much longer.
Perhaps a few frolicking unicorns as well
This trend to “ban cars” is one of the silliest and dumbest ideas I’ve ever seen. Just because you don’t like cars doesn’t mean they aren’t often the best option for many people. Banning them and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t change that fact.
Automobiles are dangerous, kill thousands of people every year, contribute significantly to pollution, and cause health problems by discouraging physical activity. They're expensive, inefficient, and cause more harm than good within major cities IMO.
My dream is that one day most streets in Manhattan will be closed to car traffic and replaced with green space full of trees, flowers, children playing, and usable public space.