The "tourist" vs "working" views of a city to the side, I think the big solution isn't revamping existing cities at first, it'll be creating pockets of new development with different goals.
And there's lots of weird things that affect American suburbs - minimum road width is often tied to service vehicles (specifically fire and garbage trucks); these could be overcome with some thought.
I've often wondered if a "carmpromise" city could be built - let's assume a ten minute walk is half a mile. Imagine a strip of city a mile wide where cars are effectively banned. Parking garages at the edges provide car access for those who have them, and the rest is entirely built around walking/biking. Perhaps a tram line runs through the middle. Then those who want cars (basically everyone) can move in without fear, and if some? most? eventually realize they're not using them they can save money by eliminating them.
We have fire and garbage trucks in Europe too and we manage to build small scale streets in the suburbs and rural areas without compromising on emergency services. The key difference is we plan these streets for the expected amount of traffic which will be a couple cars per hour at the top and have regular intersections with other streets where, should there be the rare case that a vehicle comes up towards you, there is enough place to act as a bypass. Americans seem to plan all streets as if they would be used at capacity 24/7.
To be fair the streets date from before the invention of the car, so maybe it’s something else.
If we reserved a few roads in Manhattan for busses, large commercial delivery vehicles, and people with disabilities, and left everything else for bikes, scooters, and pedestrians, transit would be faster and more pleasant for everyone.
I don’t either. I think the suburbs themselves are what is wrong. Having 2-3 cars is just the adaptation for a moronic building style.
From where I live now it’s hard to fathom why any family would need two, or even three cars. Those suburbs that made that a necessity must be considering utter failures.
Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?
I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?
In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.
> there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance
That’s very nice and quite rare, especially for newer suburbs. Some of the older ones had a little Main Street or some grandfathered in stores and shops. Prices are extremely high accordingly compared with other suburbs.
I'm still curious where all these suburbs are that have nothing but houses for 3 miles or more?
Was trying to find some examples and looks like Mesa,AZ is the worst in this sense in the USA:
https://www.planetizen.com/node/92835/americas-largest-subur...
Looking at it in google maps it is indeed sprawling with houses. But I couldn't find a spot in the various neighborhoods where one would be more than 3 miles walk away from a supermarket. The worst I came up with was 2 miles to a supermarket. But then I zoomed in and saw a restaurant only 1 mile away.
Not a thorough research for sure, just spent a handful of minutes on it.
But assuming the article is correct and Mesa is the worst of the sprawl and given I didn't find it easy to find houses more than 3 miles away from (food) businesses, I'm thinking the OP statement that "In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area" is quite an exageration.
Am I wrong? Can anyone name a handful of these neighborhoods?
That doesn't look like suburbs, although there are a handful of housing developments. But these are not in the outskirts of an urban area like a suburb, these are more rural and not attached to any city.
Yes, sure, once you go outside cities into semi-rural or rural regions, it's easy to be way more than 5 miles from shopping.
In a truly entrepreneurial society, anyone can operate a small business open to the public right out of their house. Not so in the US states/counties I've ever been to.
Letting "the market" do whatever it wants will only lead to one thing, and that is greedy people scalp up the cheapest land they can find (usually, in quarters where poor people live) and build extremely polluting stuff there. Zoning laws exist to guarantee even the poorest of the poor at least a basic standard of protection - although I do admit that there exist a lot of cases where zoning laws are abused to protect the interest of the elites primarily.
Fun fact: Back in early Roman times and for a long time until the 18th century, that also had a public health aspect - burial sites, slaughterhouses and similar businesses were banned from the inner city and, if there was a river, placed on the downstream end so that the risk of pollution was reduced.
Why be so authoritarian? It's one thing to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm not going to use them", but it's another to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm going to take away everyone else's choice to use them".
It's not a matter of one side being authoritarian, there's conflicting interests.
Cities can be changed: in Utrecht, Netherlands they removed an entire motorway to restore the old moat and a more pedestrian / bicycle friendly environment ( https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov... ). Many cities ban cars from the city center, restrict them to 30 km/h or one way streets, or make parking prohibitively expensive.
People come to cities because of all the other people there, not because there are so many parking lots.
Wait...these are rights now?
Who do I sue for not having any of these?
If I'm going the speed limit, and a pedestrian on the sidewalk 6 inches away from me (because someone decided that narrow lanes are better) decides to step in front of me, not at a crosswalk, avoiding an accident would require me to have a negative reaction time. Are you saying I'd deserve to have my license seized in that case?
Which she presumably had to do to avoid the oncoming double stroller without diving into the pile of trash bags awaiting pickup.
I disagree with the GP, this isn't merely about penalties for drivers. We've allocated an inordinate portion of available space to large metal vehicles carrying just one or two humans each, and left the scraps to be shared between all pedestrians, skateboarders, outdoor restaurants, parking meters, trash bags, trees, and all manner of other things. Because of course, you can't put the trees in the middle of the street, what would all the cars do? And then the pedestrians also spend 20% of their time waiting at traffic lights that are only necessary because cars are death machines that can't stop quickly enough.
The fact that avoiding an accident "would require [you] to have a negative reaction time" is exactly why cars are inappropriate for busy city centers.
You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
> You're advocating for a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
Come on, stop putting words in my mouth. We're talking about city downtowns not the whole US. I'm for restricting car use there, which you claim is authoritarian. I proposed an alternative, one used in the Netherlands, to put the onus of harm on the less vulnerable party and balance unfair externalities. You complain that this is "guilty-until-proven-innocent". If you want to rules lawyer your way to a car hegemony be my guest, but I'll continue to advocate for decreasing the unbalanced harms to non-car drivers on American streets.
> Come on, stop putting words in my mouth.
Here's what you previously said:
> any accident with a cyclist or a pedestrian results in immediate license seizure
> and get it back after police/judge agrees that it isn't your fault
Are you saying you don't consider that to be a guilty-until-proven-innocent system?
That's because not being allowed to drive is a really harsh punishment. Harshly punishing innocent people is even worse, which is why I assumed you meant guilty-until-proven-innocent.
> it seems like the equivalent of a “but don’t leave town” warning
Not being allowed to drive doesn't keep you from leaving town, but it does severely reduce your ability to participate in society. Now you can't go to work, drop your kids off at day care, or bring home groceries.
> preventing you doing further irresponsible driving is justified prior to the conclusion of the investigation
That's exactly what guilty-until-proven-innocent is!
We can’t expect the status quo to change without some way to force it off the car dependent pedestal it’s perched on. Lawfare might be the best way. If it inconveniences people they might drive different or stop driving so much and then eventually we get urban change.
I live in Canada and currently just have a hybrid, but it does limit me in what areas I can drive to for climbing
The solution is someone like you who does outdoor stuff may shell out for a 4wd vehicle. That’s OK!! You just park it in your neighborhood or in your garage like everyone else. The majority of people who don’t do these activities just walk and bike around and probably take their hatchback to visit someone once in awhile or pick up a larger piece of furniture.
- Frankenjura - Elbsandstein - Margalef - Siurana - Chulilla - Albarracin - Finale - Osp - Kalymnos - Leonidio - Ceuse - St Leger - Gorges du Tarn - Les Calanques - Buoux - Fontainebleau
As for multi-pitch climbing: almost everything in the Alps is accessible with a normal car and the customary approach (or a cable car).
It's been a while since I climbed in Italy, but I remember it being pretty similar.
Admittedly, the limited climbing in Germany I did had pretty good parking access.
I suspect there are many European countries whose climbing access is more like Greece though.
Obviously for electric the range would be pretty limited (afaik) with the current tech, but I'm sure even that would have a market.
Of course, most of Squamish is accessible, and Skaha, so yes, there's tons of climbing, but the "well-traveled" areas are realistically <50% of all potential climbing, and not the same experience as climbing remote.
“It’s because they have walkable space and public transportation.”
Or they realize that most public transit here is unreliable junk. It's almost never on time. This isn't a huge deal until you have to catch a connection/transfer and being late by 5 minutes mens you have to wait another 30-60 minutes for the next one. Or that they completely shut down after something like 1am. Oh, and I good luck to people not losing their job when the system goes on strike and you can get to work for a few days.
I would love to have great public transit. Much of these issues are policy or design issues. The policy issues need to be addressed. If only there was some accountability to the public...
Just for a fun story, my car broke down and I had to take public transit for a month. It was easier for me to walk 2 miles (no real sidewalk for most of it and busy roads) than to rely on the bus schedule. It took me 1.25 hours to get to work using two trains and a bus, when in the car it would take 20 minutes.
So as much as we want good public transit, we can't suddenly start using it if it doesn't exist. People have basically given up on it when schedules are a joke and the whole system can shut down for days or weeks.
Separately, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to run busses every five minutes—which is what you really want—you need enough bus riders to fill all those vehicles.
Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it. You want buses to be a pleasant alternative to driving -- since you already have a walk at the beginning and end of your journey which takes time, it's nice if your bus can get priority over car traffic.
And from there, build up the areas with good bus service more and more, add more buses as needed due to population growth, lengthen lines, add new lines gradually as people see the success of the first ones. Incremental implementation is the trick.
Counterintuitively this even is useful for people who have to go by car. A bus has a lot higher density in people transported. By making it attractive for people to use the bus they don't take away space on the road, which can increase the flow of the remaining cars, even if road space is reduced.
For people to use the system, they have to trust the system. Depending on the city, rail infrastructure can get you close enough to walk to many places. The stuff that crushes trust even then is the rail lines being off schedule and strikes. Safety can be a major concern too, like the woman who was raped on a SEPTA train recently (WTF). These should be simple asks. Maybe we just need to charge/tax more so they have more money (or maybe we need better people making the decisions with that money).
Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us.
And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.
Yes but not in the way you’re describing. Apartments would be part of the single family home neighborhood. Which is good. People who are single for example can live in the community and meet people. Which brings me to the next point:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/9b/26/379b266652e0a2013c0c...
> Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people.
Right. Because we choose to live in suburbs and make it so we are this way. We could just, ya know, not do this? It’s like saying well I’m not using Google because Ask Jeeves has conditioned me to use a crappy search engine. Well… just stop then?
Or music at 3am. Or anything.
When I bought my first house, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I could finally relax.
It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.
https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/community-and-safety/pets-an...
Regardless, police don't handle noise complaints where I live. Presumably they don't want to bother with the paperwork.
If you want to live in a box and own nothing, go ahead. I can't imagine going back to living on less than 8k sq meters. The growing population is a virus encroaching on man's ability to own his kingdom, not something to be applauded and smiled about.
We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.