On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
You then can live in a bike friendly city.
It is an indication that walk-and-bike interests are making good progress, and I'm glad to see it.
There's no good reason to phrase the question like that instead of filter the answers after the fact. The only reason is to get people thinking in a certain direction.
Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
Even Seattle and NYC had parts that were very walkable, especially compared to LA.
Highways exists. There are two options. First, they divide country into two parts you cant cross on foot without taking long hike. Or, you build tunnels and bridges.
And that wasn't even the student part.
Go to SoDo, or parts of South Seattle, or North Seattle, and it’s much worse, and that’s just “Seattle proper.”
I guess people are being anti-car extremists in this thread, but still. SoDo? Land of concerts and events and dispensaries?
Not to mention plenty of cyclist deaths from people who have to cross SoDo to get where they’re going.
Bell St. is a park (albeit paved for vehicles), and it finally received signage about local-only car access:
https://mcusercontent.com/b6749cc9930b55a313056721e/images/2...
That image is from the latest Belltown United newsletter - https://www.belltownunited.org/
I'm a proud Belltown Community Council supporter/participant.
(BTW, I am lumping in biking with "walkable". A better term is "active travel")
Slef driving would probably make the car problem worse.
But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.
In the US? Sure. Now imagine a place where there are hundreds, thousands of cities that walkable or better, and you don't have to be a gazillionaire to live in one.
Based on my recent visit to New York, the main traffic issue I saw was really bad light timing. This trains both pedestrians and drivers to ignore the traffic signals.
If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars is one of the worst developments that could occur.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
2 - driving time is only half of the time you spend in a car. in Milan I could drive to work in 15-20 minutes, compared to 25-30 using the subway. good luck finding a parking spot though. they're either forbidden, very expensive or non existent. Not counting that many areas, like where my office is, are restricted traffic zones, getting a permit is really hard for non residents and fines are very high (very common in many medium to large cities in Italy). I gladly use the subway and read the news while commuting, so I don't even need to drive myself.
I'm really sorry for those that drive to work everyday, it must be hell, I don't understand how they can withstand it.
None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo?
The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.
For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence.
Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years.
However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable.
Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere.
A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.
And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.
Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this:
1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent.
2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there.
3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with.
It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work.
And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
"The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today"
Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently.
The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.
And even within the city, there are less-walkable areas, although for the most part there is bus coverage and sidewalks everywhere.
Couldn't have been since US cities (at least on the east coast) predate the very existence of cars.
> But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm.
Yep, the entire concept of jaywalking was invented for the convenience of car owners and the car industry, and pedestrians were alienated from the street surface.
> But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem?
Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases). And streetcars generally keep to pretty low speed (bike range) in pedestrian areas.
You can see what it looks like in low-speed / pedestrian streets of europe, where streetcars are pretty common e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXrGbZ6LKzs
> Much less so, horses would not trample people unless spooked (and they don't have anywhere near the acceleration or speed of a car, especially as mass increases).
That's what one would expect, but surprisingly that might not be the case.
I haven't been able to find a lot of articles about pedestrian deaths from horses but those I did find tell of rates comparable to cars.
1900 pedestrian horse fatality rate in NYC for example were higher than the 2003 car rate [1]. In England and Wales cars are more deadly than horses were but not by much [2].
The BMJ article notes that direct fatality rate comparisons might not be appropriate because treatments have greatly improved since the horse and buggy days. Horse rates would likely be lower if current treatments had been available back then, and car rates would likely be higher if we only had 1900s medical systems.
[1] https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...
[2] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/31/cars-and-horse...
Isn't it also for the safety of pedestrians? It's not a good idea to walk on the train tracks either. It seems like the "entire concept" of not walking in front of heavy, fast moving objects may predate automobiles.
Hence the philosophy that is followed in the UK, where there is no such thing as a "jaywalking" infraction. People have had a right of free passage along public highways (English law definition [0]) and general rights of way (Scotland [1]) for centuries, and this right cannot simply be taken away just because now there happen to be heavy fast moving objects that are allowed to use some of them. You are free to walk on and across the road at any point and time whatsoever, as long as you do not cause a danger to other users.
Note that this doesn't apply to motorways (≈freeways) though, as these were expressly constructed to carry automobile vehicles and are therefore legitimately of limited access.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_in_England_and_Wales
No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the pedestrians. It made collisions between cars and pedestrians the fault of the pedestrian by default, and excluded them from the road surface.
> It's not a good idea to walk on the train tracks either.
"High speed" train tracks take very little space compared to the road network criss-crossing cities, and thus the exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
Pedestrians are not excluded from tram tracks.
>No, since it puts the onus of their safety of the pedestrians.
This does not mean that it is not for their safety.
>"High speed" train tracks take very little space compared to the road network criss-crossing cities, and thus the exclusion area is essentially nil by comparison.
Train tracks don't take you to as many places as roads.
> Pedestrians are not excluded from tram tracks
Yet, they are expected to avoid them and the tram has priority, and many tram routes are protected from pedestrian crossing by barriers. Pedestrians aren't excluded from roads either, it is just that safe crossing points have been established. I know in many places, such as Wien, trams are not obligated to stop at crosswalks if people are waiting.
It's not that important, but the idea that "entire concept of jaywalking is for the convenience of car owners" is really not accurate. No need to overstate that to make your other points.
Imagine a car entering a shopping mall: it will go at a very slow pace as it’s in a place primarily for pedestrians, and hitting kids running around will be 100% the car’s fault it was going any faster.
Putting the burden on the car gives more safety to pedestrian. The reverse (putting the blame on the people for entering car’s way) doesn’t help in that respect.
PS: for instance entering train tracks is not “jaywalking”, and I think you’re focusing on a similar aspect, but for freeways and car dedicated roads ?
In the centres of many European cities, cars must yield to pedestrians, or are excluded completely.
“Jaywalking” as a term is derogatory; you can look up the etymology, if it were invented today it would be called “stupidwalking” or some such.
It was pushed hard by car companies, and they lobbied to make cars the primary user of the road within cities. So a pedestrian choosing to cross would by default be in the wrong, unless in the “correct place”, instead of the opposite.
The pedestrians were there first though, and it's not clear how to balance the needs. After all we do have the concept of isolated car travel for safety, it's called a freeway. Much like a rail system, they are useful and pretty safe for point-to-point travel mostly outside densely populate areas.
The contentious bit is that all other surface level infrastructure should be primarily shaped to fit the needs of cars at the expense of everything else. For a not-so-practical example, if city traffic was strictly limited to 10mph or less, vehicle pedestrian interactions would be much more safe...
In a venn diagram "pedestrians" and "car owners" would be nearly a perfect circle. Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
Nonsense. The ability to walk doesn't a pedestrian make" in the context of the discussion, and having to walk from the parking lot to the store and back isn't a pedestrian activity.
> Singling them out as opposing groups with conflicting interests isn't helpful.
I didn't decide of the historical events of a hundred years ago mate.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
Even worse, completely ahistorical, nonsense. Long-term infrastructural decisions are rarely decided directly by voters (as Robert Moses knew and leveraged), and furthermore can often be swayed by short terms concerns.
I live in a city where almost 40% of households do not own cars but our public space has been massively reconfigured to prioritize car owners, not just with traffic lanes and signal priority but also huge subsidies for car storage at the expense of other potential use of public space.
Despite this, any time someone tries to make something better the public planning process will inevitably have car owners loudly complaining about being discriminated against if something will remove even a single parking space or suggest that they pay market rates.
Only in an environment where public infrastructure is designed to require a car for social participation. The venn-diagram is substantially less circular when public infrastructure accommodates and encourages other modes of transport, like walking and metros.
> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case. Consumers and voters (another near perfect Venn circle) have expressed their preference continuously for nearly a century.
Again, only true if you ignore the wider context. US infrastructure policy for the past 50 years has basically made car ownership an absolute necessity. It doesn’t matter what one’s personal preference is, if you wish to participate in US society, you must own a car.
For concrete examples of these policies, look at US zoning policy. It basically requires that only single family homes are built, and makes it almost impossible to build new dense housing. Despite the fact that historical sense housing in walkable areas is currently some of the most expensive real estate in the US, showing clear and strong demand for such housing.
Further US road policy prioritises automotive speed above all other factors. Pedestrian accessibility, or accessibility in general, pedestrian safety, is given little to no thought at all. An approach that is now rearing its ugly head in the US pedestrian fatality rate, which is far high than almost any other developed nation.
US zoning policies are the way they are because that's the way the people in those cities wanted to live. Have you been to a city council meeting in a US city where they've discussed zoning changes? Tons of local people will come out against denser housing and against public transit and against protected bike lanes, and then there's usually only the builder from out of town or the transit authority arguing for it. Single family housing in far flung suburbs is built out so much because that's what a lot of voters want.
This is true in almost every city in the world. But not because that “what the people want”, but rather only those who hold very strong opinions ever bother to turn up to planning meetings. Most people only have strong negative opinions about public infrastructure, especially public infrastructure that’s seen “take something from them”. Public infrastructure that works well is mostly ignored, with the vast majority of people being entirely indifferent to changes to the infrastructure. Unfortunately it means that making any attempt to improve infrastructure, where that improvement isn’t “more of the same please”, is difficult because the only people who hold strong opinions are experts who have studied the problem, and people that hate change. Which, as it happens, is exactly the mix of people you say are in these meetings.
If you want to get a real understanding of peoples views on walkable areas, bike lanes etc. you need to build it, then survey the locals a year or so after the work has completed. Only then can you remove the selection bias seen in city meetings, and also remove peoples initial dislike for change, before they’ve had any opportunity to realise the positives brought by that change.
It turns out, that if you actually do all that leg work, most people like being able to venture outside and do things, without getting in a car and driving first.
I'd argue we need more people showing up to these kinds of public planning meetings who do want these things which are supposedly incredibly popular online and actually vote for candidates who say they'll do these things.
In the 10s and 20s where the phrase was popularized by automobile interests in the US the car ownership rate was ~8%.
Why make up a history when there's a real one? There were real people that did real things to push a reluctant culture in a particular way. I think you're using Panglossian reasoning here.
Orr it could actually be that they paid for advertisements and politicians just to do that. If you don't want to read about it, here's a video that explains it:
Horse manure was a huge problem on city streets. (Trams we’re originally horse-drawn.)
> According to the 89th Annual Report of the Board of Health, nearly 500 tones of horse manure were collected from the streets of New York every day, produced by 62,208 horses living in 1,307 stables.
https://www.nyhistory.org/community/horse-manure
Edit: A more in-depth article https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2021/02/the-unpleasant-side-...
https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/image...
As you can imagine, average speeds for every vehicle in this situation was very low. Downtown LA was notoriously congested, and the city for a long time had a height limit imposed where no structure could be taller than city hall, to ensure congestion didn't get even worse and to encourage more sprawl. This eventually put pressure on the city to replace these streetcar routes with bus routes, since its much easier to navigate a bus in this environment than a streetcar that cannot easily detour and has tracking that is damaged constantly by other traffic. The highways were planned (and still do with bus and some rail in LA county) to carry transit as well as car traffic, and to disperse the population from concentrating so much in these early congested regions. They were also used to permit infilling of the gaps between these population centers (e.g. hollywood and downtown la were once separate municipalities with some distance of rural space in between).
Well, the article is more saying the average person in cities was car hostile but it notes that authorities starting trying to force people to adapt to cars quite early by enforcing "jay-walking" ordinances and similar things.
But in a way that's worse because it means they used to have this privilege and it has been taken away, and cars-first has become the norm.
But the roads would have been used for something, at a guess, was it trams and horse carriages, and that these didn't pose much of a problem? I've been to towns with trams in the middle of roads and it's normal for people to just walk around it or near the tracks without problem. But I am a stupid tourist so I kept my distance.