Rome is all but working perfectly fine, with commuter traffic locked almost daily by the tiniest fender bender happening on the highway around it
Venice is likewise a mess, situation was so bas they built an highway to go around the existing highway that corrected it to the nearby areas, and the lack of easy mobility in the city center is fuelling a severe living cost inflation
Rome could have invested in public transport instead of building highways. No one would be stuck in traffic. Instead, they used public space for cars. The old parts of the city though which are walkable work perfectly fine.
Venice does have great ferry service and traffic in the city is almost non-existent due to lack of cars.
there's zero chance mass transit can accommodate people's needs, even if you somehow solve the shopping issue with local markets and fixed item prices, the job<>house graph will always look like a fractal set of overlapping stars.
cars is one of the most important social equalizer of this and last century. it allows people from basically all social status to move themselves, their family and their belongings at any time in full autonomy, enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places.
private cars win over public transit because it's a better product. the only way for public transit to compete is to mandate laws to make cars comparatively a worse product, which is fundamentally anticompetitive - once public transit become monopolistic, once the company owns a tract, they can abuse their position deciding pricing and timetables.
even in traffic, private cars offer a better experience: people are in their own space, under a roof from start to finish, with their preferred temperature and away from both obnoxious or influenced people.
forcing mass transit trough legislation will surely have some short term benefits, but also:
- more class divide between the richs, that will always be able to afford a car, and the poors who won't
- massive gentrification of well connected areas, while the poors get pushed out to where service is of less quality
- dependency of the poors to expensive third party services on any occasion they need to move themselves or their goods across a non serviced destination. rentals is not an option: rentals need a credit card, and guess who don't own one?
- dependency on public transit times. have an unusual work shift or need to visit parents? get prepared to wait in the open under the cold or rain. need to get your child out of school in a down hour because he's suddenly ill? too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours.
of course there's situation where mass transit gets convenient, like large cities where a significant percentage of the population shares the same source/destination points, at which point people will use it naturally on their own.
opposing private transit is going to destroy an important achievement of modern society, the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is. market, after all, need customer flexibility not to be captured. pollution is something to be solved with more efficient cars and better technology all around.
it'd be like discovering tomorrow that soap pollutes: some will want to force everyone to smell, some will create a better soap.
I think it's quite odd we nowadays think cars are the only possible form of transportation. We are not born with 4 wheels underneath our butt. The alternative is to build structures build for foot or bicycle traffic. Everything within 10k can easily be reached by either bicycle or foot traffic. By building infrastructure for cars, you create distances which are for cars only. They would otherwise not exist.
> enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places
That's only possible due to the external costs of cars not being accounted for. Burning dinosaurs and destruction of nature is nowhere to be found in cars. If you would price cars accordingly, we would start planning differently.
> once public transit become monopolistic
We already have the same monopolistic issue just right now with cars as the only means of transportation. Without cars, you're not able to move in large parts of the U.S. This excludes about 50%+ of the U.S. population (children < 16yo, people who cannot afford cars or cannot drive themselves due to health reasons).
> private cars win over public transit because it's a better product
Why are cars a better product? Commute and travel time are a huge economical factor destroying time. They take up loads of space and require infrastructure and maintenance paid by society.
> dependency on public transit times.
That's a political issue which could be solved. Most of the money spent nowadays is spent on parking spots and car roads. If you would spend the same amount on public transport, you could probably run a train every 5 minutes.
> too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. That's also how we design our roads. They need to accomodate peak traffic at peak hours. Otherwise they're an unused piece of asphalt.
> the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is
Again, not taking into account external costs. Road traffic kills ~ 1.2M people each year insuring even more which do have a massive impact on the health system.
> pollution is something to be solved
By solving pollution but still focusing on urban sprawl and keeping traffic as-is, we will do the wrong thing better. That's an achievement but not solving the issue.
Feel free to watch the interview mentioned before. It does clarify some of the points I just mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_x5Hor2MP8
[edit: formatting]
a) keep everything as is. Leave up to 80% of public space to cars (as in L.A. for example), destroy all social interactions which could otherwise happen in those places, increase commute time due to cities designed around long distances and destroy our environment.
b) buy a new bicycle and a good rain coat, use our feet, expand public transport, improve our wellbeing by doing some exercise, reduce obesity and diabetes, socialize in public space again and save tons of tax payer's money. Whilst saving the life of 1.2m people.
Which one sounds better to you?
A is a straw man. There’s no innovation there. We need to redesign roads so that they are invisible and uncongestible. We either have to do personal air travel, which we don’t have the power density for yet or underground which is looking more promising. All people moving cars need to be electric and self driving. A car should be like a universal elevator, just get in and push a button. That’s the best option, 0 time dedicated to piloting your body through space and you’re able to live anywhere and work anywhere.
there's a load of people, especially in big cities, that commute further than feasible with bicycle.
and no, people will not want to live within biking range from heavy industry.
Soviet-style housing planning is a good middle ground. There, most flats can enjoy silence (you only hear cars that belong to your neighbors and no passer-bys) and still the districts are planned for walkability and public transport.
Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
We should not build our apts for cars and align to them. If cars are loud and noisy and destroy our social life, we should focus on solving the car problem and not trying to build around cars.
Not the case in most of Europe IMO. The apartment buildings were built along very narrow streets to either fit inside perimeter of city walls or (later) because real estate was expensive. Due to narrowness of roads, these apartments are not very well lit and are depressing (you can't see the sky through the window, only the building across the street). Here in Poland, it basically wasn't until central urban planning by communists until we had cities which are livable, car or no car. This is reflected in real estate pries, where apartments in the old, historic buildings can be cheaper (despite often being right in the city centers) than in the (much denser) soviet conglomerates.
> Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.
Even cars at 30 km/h make plenty of noise (when accelerating to that speed). I'm not sure what you mean by "social aspects" of streets?
Not to forget: streets were used that way until ~80 years ago. We just can't remember them any different any more.
I still see some of that in my dense city with car traffic. Obviously, this now happens on the sidewalk and not on the street itself. The major difference is kids not playing on the more major streets.
well the '70s blocks in Poland do have quite some shared greenery, at least the southern part were I've been extensively, but I saw them also up north, even in the outskirts of 'special case' cities that have had their historical centers preserved or restored like Gdansk [1] or Torun [2] - that's what planner can do to encourages a local and social aspect to the local neighbors
but still it doesn't solve working places interconnection in a way that makes walking nor public transit satisfactory.
1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Danzica,+Polonia/@54.34153...
2 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Toru%C5%84,+Polonia/@53.02...
interestingly even factual, sourced post like this were victims to trolling; I though there were protections to anti social behaviour in place, but alas, here we are.
When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely.
When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8