4. Auto makers conspired to kill or cripple mass transit.
http://www.brooklynrail.net/NationalCityLinesConspiracy.html
One of the biggest is that people actually like living in suburbs, and they could afford to do so after WWII.
The promise of the suburbs is a detached house, with some private outdoor space like a back yard, in a quiet area: essentially what the rich had always preferred and been able to afford. That lifestyle became broadly available to the middle classes after WWII. It's hard to blame people for wanting that.
People still like living in suburbs. They still like owning cars. They still vote against new transit projects for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that they don't want to pay taxes to support a system they would not use themselves.
So I just don't buy the idea that the National City Lines conspiracy caused our current automotive culture. I think we would have ended up with the same car culture anyway, because huge numbers of people wanted to live in the suburbs.
You can do that and still have density. Things were built like that pre-WW2; see street view of this Toronto, Canada neighbourhood:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...
Those houses (actually land) are very expensive now, but that's because urban living is now cool again. Up until the late-1990s they were quite affordable because all the Cool Kids wanted to live in the suburbs: downtown was mostly for immigrants post-WW2.
There's a bus line to the west of there (Parkside), a streetcar line to the east (Roncesvalles), and both of those connect to a subway line (Bloor). And one doesn't have to give up their car: it simply becomes optional for day-to-day stuff instead of being a necessity.
There's no reason why post-War suburbs couldn't have been built this way. The above neighbourhood was a suburb of Toronto and folks commuted via streetcar "to the city".
For slightly smaller sized homes, but still with backyards and laneway garages, see the next street over:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
After high school I moved to the inner city and stayed clear of the suburbs.
Today I'm in a walkable century old dense neighborhood in a small regional center, but have to drive to get groceries. The car can stay parked for a week.
That's less car-centric than America for sure. But Americans have a misguided notion that all Europeans live in quaint pedestrian-friendly town centers that look like Prague or Copenhagen. Mostly because we tend to spend our European tourism in the dense centers of the capital cities.
[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/news/increase-paris-cyc...
My worst pedestrian experience was Salt Lake City, where the footpaths stopped suddenly and without apparent reason in the middle of the residential area I was staying in. I had to backtrack and guess a lot.
Sure, the sudden absence of footpaths can happen in Europe too (I’ve seen it in Λάρνακα, Luxembourg, and Hochstadt, though never to the same extent), but for the most part even tiny villages in Europe have better public transport and pedestrian access than the various American cities I’ve visited.
In the US there are many places where the next supermarket is twenty minutes by car away and literally impossible to reach on a bike without getting run over. In contrast, even in the smallest town I've lived in, with just 20k residents, there where three supermarkets and two specialty stores in walking distance.
[C I T A T I O N N E E D E D]
I enjoy an hours walk with the dog daily, solid lifting program, about 20 miles a week of cardio, and a vegan diet.
Doctor thinks I'm the picture of health.
This is a not a living style that we can afford for everyone. Great that you enjoy it, but enabling it for everyone is simply unsustainable.
Right now you are offloading it's cost externalities elsewhere:
Cost on Your Health: More driving = less walking = decreased life-expectancy. More driving = more air polution = decreased life-expectancy
Cost on the planet: More driving = more greenhouse gases = global warming.
If you want to learn more: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/812199726/why-sprawl-could-be... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reducing-street-s...
More driving does not exclude a healthy walking routine.
More driving != equal more net green house gases. Yes the ICE generates greenhouse gases, but check out the carbon footprint of a battery supply chain for an EV sometime, or that of the MTA, MBTA, logistical supply chain of supplying the ENTIRE nyc 5 boroughs.
Bottom line, I'm willing to engage a deepdive discussion with critical eyes, not endure a superficial antisuburbia smear campaign while being namecalled.
Walking More driving means your natural walking related to commute and errands goes to 0. There is a reason american states have a huge obesity problem compared to lots of european countries.
Cars Are you seriously comparing the carbon footprints of a personal car compared to the metro?
More driving means more green house gases. This is not about what vehicle you use, it's about the fact that urban sprawl requires a vehicle for even the most basic errands. This is unsustainable.
Not to mention do realize people can live in cities where they walk to work, walk to the grocery store, walk to gym, and walk to a restaurant?
I really fail to see this as a reasonable expectation of dialogue and exchange of ideas if you're so cemented in your views.
That is quite a generalization. Some suburbs can be like that, with houses for miles on end and nothing else. That seems like the exception though.
Plenty of suburban neighborhoods have walkable commerce nearby. I have never lived in a city. And yet, I've never lived in a place where I couldn't walk to at least a supermarket. Currently I live in very suburban (borderline rural, really) area and nearly everything I could need is within a 15 minute walk (multiple supermarkets & pharmacies, hardware store, clothing, restaurants, movies, medical, etc.)
The no.1 factor is single-use zoning. This means people live in a certain zone, and commerce happens in another zone. No amount of personal anecdotes will affect this fact.
One could say "There are suburban areas where every trip requires a car" and that's a true statement. The generalization is not a true statement.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Beauty is in the eye if the beholder
(You could try to find people who moved from one place to another, and ideally limit it to those whose reason for moving had nothing to do with their preferences... and poll them. I don't know how possible that is. It likely also makes a difference at what age they moved.)
I occasionally wish I had a car (say for a weekend getaway) but it’s rare enough that I’m happy to live with rentals for those occasions.
I have 3 major grocery stores (Safeway, QFC, Target) within 15 minutes walking from me. And at least 20 bars and restaurants within the same distance. Public transportation to downtown takes about 35 minutes, which isn't great, but it's okay. Uber works well if you need to be faster.
Wedgewood, Fremont, Queen Anne & Freelard all successfully resisted the mass redevelopment that Ballard has seen, compared to 15 years ago Ballard looks completely different while the aforementioned neighborhoods have not seen that same level of mass demolition.
I really don't mind the short jaunt to the Fremont bridge, but it does add some extra travel time. Never ride on the Ballard bridge; it just doesn't have anywhere for bikes to be. The sidewalks are too narrow and unprotected from traffic, and the primary traffic lanes are going 40+ mph. That whole thing needs to be replaced for the 21st century, although there may be some resistance as it's a nationally registered "historic place."
Depending on where you live and where you're going, crossing the locks is a great way to bike downtown. Also sometimes the Fremont bridge route is going to be shorter. I hate riding my bike over the Ballard bridge, but I'm not sure I'd call riding on it "risking death".
Bike access within Ballard is pretty great since the hills are a bit more manageable than in other parts of the city.
All that aside, it's pretty easy to live in Seattle and not have a car, being able to walk to groceries, bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
I would highly encourage avoiding the Ballard Bridge. IMO it's very dangerous.
Walkability in Ballard is pretty good. We're within 15 minutes walking distance of QFC and the bar/restaurant area south of Market. That said, I prefer to drive to the grocery store so I can go infrequently and buy more at once.
LA has no unified bus system. It has multiple ones and its super confusing. Each bus makes a stop nearly every minute, making every ride impossibly long. Lack of bus lanes make for shitty traffic stuck trips as well.
It's the same in London. That's why for longer rides you take the tube. Buses are for shorter rider or from getting from/to tube station.
Let’s us Stockholm as an example: 100 metro stations and 170+ suburban rail stations, 60 light rail stops, on 2.3 million people in 6,519.3 km2 (2,517.1 sq mi).
San Francisco (Nine county, Bay Area), 33 metro stations, plus 87 additional metro stops about 200 station (ACE, Amtrak, BART, Caltrain, SMART, and VTA), on 7.75 million people, In 6,966 sq mi (18,040 km2).
The station density is nearly 2.5 times higher and on less than half the population.
Data from Wikipedia.
San Francisco is only about 7 miles wide. You can walk from one side of the city to the other in about 2 hours. When I lived there, I walked almost everywhere. The only times I did otherwise was when it was a really long walk (over 45 minutes), or I needed to be somewhere fast. The bus will not get you anywhere fast, it's only about twice as fast as walking. I think that's why a lot of people use Lyft. The buses are actually quite nice inside imo, they're just slow. Plus the stigma that only poor people ride the bus.
The reason is usually because americans seem to assume that everyone is an american, so it is to clarify that I have a non-american perspective.
The Power Broker, Robert Caro
The times I've commuted into a city, I had to pay for parking, usually in a private lot. I suspect it's like this in most big cities, and in smaller cities where people still commute, parking is probably private lots owned by the employer, not street parking. Picture a standard office park.
In places with free street parking (or public lots), I suspect the population is sparse enough that the added land cost for parting isn't a big deal, most people have cars, and most people support having parking.
This is not true in Manhattan, which (to my knowledge) is the most densely populated borough in the most densely populated city in the US. Almost all street parking in Manhattan is free, with small carve-outs for meters on high-traffic blocks.
The city also has a semi-official policy of allowing commercial traffic to ignore parking laws[1]. In practice, that means trucks parked on sidewalks, with pedestrians exposed to car traffic on the streets.
[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/08/20/delivery-companies-pr...
Of course they support it, because it doesn't effect their wallets. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a cost to it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
But this is still subsidized because regulations mandate that buildings have lots of parking. These regulations are typically quite extreme with requirements intended to support the 99.999% demand case (think peak hour of black friday) conditional on a parking price of $0. Most developments build the minimum amount of parking they can by law suggesting this isn't a free market outcome.
So if you want to have business you have to provide tons of parking and make up for it with higher prices for your goods and services. This subsidizes vehicle driving over other modes a transport. Especially so because giant parking lots make it harder to reach the store front by foot.
Google Donald Shoup for more context.
If the break even target is 10 years with no interest accrued, we are talking about $5.47 a day in revenue needs to be generated (plus the overhead of managing the lot itself).
How many paid parking lots do you see that are full on a regular basis? Are they really generating revenue even half time?
Even cities with world-class mass transit, e.g. Tokyo and London, are full of cars, and taxis are still a better option for some trips -- even though there are also surface trains, subways, and buses to choose from.
In those places, step 1 has already been solved: convince the population that mass transit is desirable and should be well funded. London even charges congestion fees for cars. But they still can't achieve car-free cities.
There are major axes to accross the city with constant traffic and most bigger blocks are accessible by car (even just for deliveries). But there are pretty large areas with no car entry, and small residential parts are often shared car/bike/pedestrian zones were cars are not privileged.
I also think the goal shouldn’t be car-free, but to have clear separation of the “liveable” space with shops, parks, administrations, schools etc., and the “transportation” space with the trains, cars, cans and trucks. Speaking of Tokyo it often layers the two, with lower level streets/buses/truck roads and upper level walkable space. Seems to be the best compromise, albeit more expensive to build.
I've found Tokyo had surprisingly few cars for a massive city with high population density. Also, virtually no street parking, which makes the cityscape much nicer, and many side-alleys that are largely car-free.
But I agree the majority of locals don’t drive.
Anecdotally last time I was in central London I counted the vehicles going past parliament. About 1 in 10 was an unmarked car, the rest were commercial vehicles or taxis
That's mostly islands, here are a few cities: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/car-free-cities-of-the-w...
I'm trying to find the city in Brazil (I think is is) where they recently went car-free.
Funny, those are 3 of the main reasons I live way out in the nearly-rural suburbs instead of in downtown San Francisco.
It seems like some of us have made that trade, just not in the direction you're hoping for.
And this is precisely the problem: automotive culture presently represents a massive subsidy to rural and suburban areas at the expensive of urban dwellers.
I can't possibly blame people for making that trade. But the observation is that it's sweetened by externalities that ex-urban areas don't have to bear.
Isn't this kind of leap? I've lived plenty of expensive places (e.g. downtown San Diego, Boston, Los Angeles) that had free/highways close to expensive property. What is leading you to believe highway construction targets the poor areas, other than those real estate markets are already depressed (which is possibly why poor people live there)?
Remember this happened in the 40s and 50s. Plenty has changed since then, including the gentrification of poor areas near highways. But that doesn’t change the history of the US highway system.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/role-of...
No. Here are two specific examples:
1. The Cross Bronx Expressway, which basically created the South Bronx[1]. "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro is one of HN's most frequently recommended books, and covers this subject (as well as other racially-motivated planning projects by Robert Moses) extensively.
2. I-65 and I-165 in Mobile, AL cut directly through the historic "Africatown" neighborhood[2]. Residents regularly complain about both automotive and nearby industrial pollution, encouraged by ease of access by the highway[3].
Most of these effects are more visible on the East Coast rather than the West Coast, since the East's older and denser cities had fewer "paths of least resistance" when building the Interstate Highway System during the midcentury. But it wouldn't particularly surprise me if the areas that are now expensive in the cities that you mentioned were originally cleared for highways under "slum clearance" or similar laws.
Edit: This is anecdotal, but I figured I'd mention it anyways: I grew up in Manhattan, and virtually everybody I grew up with has (or had) asthma. Some of that is to be expected from other pollution sources (in particular, NYC used to burn very dirty heating oil), but I also went to public schools that were directly alongside major state and interstate highways.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Bronx_Expressway#Urban_d...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733996699/alabamas-africatown...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...
Portland's I-205 has much the same story, my father lived through that terrible process where many of his friends had their homes razed to build yet another freeway.
Links to read below. #2 specifically has moving images/graphics.
They're currently expanding... to be fair they will add a small amount of benefits to 'bridge the gap' like a small park over a new small lowered section (but i think like only a couple blocks wide).
But it's still an expansion and the construction is bringing even more problems & nuisance.
Plus mostly young, mostly white expensive new construction apartment buildings have been creeping north and displacing a lot of historically black low income families. I think infilling and repurposing some of the old warehouse type space is good but the inequity is undeniable.
https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.22/in-denvers-latino-neighborh... https://denverite.com/2016/10/08/air-quality-legacy-issue-el... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/us/denver-interstate-70-e... https://www.denverpost.com/2019/06/30/asthma-elyria-swansea-...
https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article237167884.html
Many other examples:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/role-of...
https://www.dispatch.com/in-depth/lifestyle/2020/12/03/black...
https://catalyst.independent.org/2020/04/02/how-the-u-s-gove...
https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/06/bitter-history-behind-hi...
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/top-infrastructure-officia...
https://marketurbanismreport.com/blog/urban-renewals-shamefu...
etc
It's that joke about how real estate developments are named things like "Shady Grove" after whatever they destroyed to build it, but taken one step further.
Cut down the trees and name the neighborhood after them, then cut down Oak Street and name a highway after it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Avenue
Fun tidbit: there's a house along the road that is not what it appears to be:
-Boyle Heights was a predominately Latino community in east LA, which had the East LA interchange built right through it (I-10/I-5).
-Communities along what is currently I-105 were opposed to the construction since the 1970s for the typical NIMBY reasons, and these communities were predominately Black.
And the reverse:
-CA-2 was supposed to route from Silver Lake to Santa Monica via Beverly Hills, but community opposition prevented the freeway from being built and is why there's large parts of LA (mid-city/Melrose) that are far away from a freeway.
-I-710 was intended to connect Long Beach to Pasadena, but the city of South Pasadena protested heavily in preventing the freeway from being built and closing the gap. This litigation occurred up until the late-2010s when the CA State Assembly and Governor Newsom ended the 710 project once and for all.
This has nearly nothing to do with automotive culture and everything to do with the system of governance in the US. In local politics in the US, your level of representation is roughly equal in proportion to your property tax bill every year. If you're renting, or otherwise in a situation where you don't directly pay (significant) property tax, your voice doesn't matter.
The rest is pretty much true, but would be worth noting that the only options for the US are for every city to have extensive sprawling underground metros interlinked by high-speed rail, or to have most people own a car and have highways everywhere. Any middle ground or half measure is untenable in our current society without causing direct, real, dire consequences to the very people you're trying to champion.
We have a much larger field of candidates running due to this program.
Disastrous foreign Mid East policies to secure oil.
3) as a cyclist who transitions from commuting by bike in the summer to car in the winter, it is astonishing how my psychology is impacted by driving in the two modes. I am so much more impatient and angry from driving.
There is just a nasty psychological feedback cycle of the obvious pure potential of the automobile as a time savings device and the visceral feeling of losing that when encountering any traffic or obstacle.
At least I get the cycling part to enlighten my perspective. Most americans are car-encased permanently and oblivious.
It is an issue, and I don't want lots of cars even if electric, but if you are weighing them as having similar air pollution, it's probably fearmongering, or fantasyland where cars don't have deteriorating emission control.
[0] https://sdotblog.seattle.gov/2020/09/30/washington-states-ne...
One of the ways we recognize the externalities of our automotive culture is by making jaywalking illegal.
You mean the law in one municipality that hasn't taken effect yet, and that took months of LEO-adjacent protests?
We're slowly getting better, to be sure. But I don't think anybody should be content with the rate of progress.
nineplay's post seemed to me to suggest that they believe that jaywalking being illegal is in itself a way to deal with the externalities of the car culture - it seems they are happy with jaywalking being illegal. I would guess that is why they also got the down votes.
Your reply seems to be written as if you thought nineplay was praising people making jaywalking not illegal, which I believe is the wrong reading of their post.
1. The construction of highways through poor (read: minority) urban areas, causing mass respiratory disease and premature deaths[1].
2. Allocation of free public space (car parking) to drivers, effectively subsidizing (disproportionately suburban) commuters at the expense of residents.
3. A general culture of entitlement to the road among motorists, resulting in tens of thousands of pedestrian and cyclist injuries a year with virtually no legal (beyond costly civil) recourse.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/nyregion/29asthma.html