Okay that being said… our cargo bike has replaced 90% of our “last mile” driving here in the city. We take the kids to school on it, we do grocery runs, we take it to the park, out to dinner, just about anywhere we can. In the first two years we’ve put at least 2k miles on it.
When we first bought it, I thought “okay when my wife rides the ebike with kids, I’ll just ride behind on my road bike.”
It took all but a week for us to go buy a second ebike because of how failed my idea was. The guy at the bike shop, same that we bought the cargo bike from, laughed and said that happened all the time.
While we have always been big into bikes, we’re on another level now. I always feel sorry for the poor suckers at the park who ask me how we like the bike who have to listen to me rave about it for 20 minutes when a “we love it” probably would have been enough.
I value my time and safety, so I live inner city, near a park and river I can ride to almost anywhere along.
Side streets and alleys are great - too slow for cars, but you're probably cycling at 10-15 mph, which is fine. Parks can be great - a shortcut with no cars and beautiful scenery, while the cars have to go the long way. Campuses, plazas, etc. etc. Even sidewalks when empty or nearly-empty can work to bypass traffic or go the 'wrong' way.[0]
[0] Second to riding, cyclists love to lecture others on how to ride. And a favorite outlet for their obsession is sidewalks. They don't discuss or consider the reasons or merits, they just have found an easy outlet for self-righteousness and repeat the same phrases over and over. Just remember that sidewalks are for pedestrians first; you are a visitor. Give them the right of way always, let them know when you're behind them (e.g., 'on your left!'), and give them plenty of space (trying walking when a bike buzzes past in either direction - from behind, you can't even hear it coming). Defer to their safety, real and perceived. It's easy. No problems at all IME, except self-righteous people over-excited at an opportunity to lecture someone.
Not if real estate in cities remains as expensive as it is now. That's one of the main reasons why so many people move out and choose to spend so much time commuting.
Cars are just a means to an end, which is not living in a one-bedroom apartment as a family.
I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so going somewhere more expensive is out of the question.
I posted this after being told it would take me six months to get my 3 year old to a pediatrician. https://np.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/11luo2b/how_can_i_s... - when she stopped growing.
This country is unacceptably bad. I look forward to leaving.
These 2 things are not the same.
If I had my choice, I'd rather ride horses every day.
If I'm gonna move slowly, might as well do it in style.
I live in a city despite working remotely since the pandemic started, not because of proximity to the offices I might have to go back to, but rather because I can walk a block to buy groceries. I know people that live <.5 mile away from a Safeway in the peninsula that drive there because the streets are not very pedestrian or cyclist friendly.
What's different now is ebikes/related which allows those three minutes to be done via bike. Dean Kamen claimed that cities would be redesigned around the Segway. He was too early, and only half right, but I think his claim was more prescient than we give him credit for. Ebikes, as we're hearing about here in London, really are enabling a new kind of city design that takes advantage of this semi-new technology.
I think the best way to judge the quality of schools by the opportunities the student's have as a result of going through the schools. The Westford, Newton, Wellesley schools are for winners of the birth lottery. Leominster, Townsend, Athol are for us birth lottery losers.
How much of that is the quality of the schools and how much of that is just richer parents who can/will pick up the slack in the event that the school system doesn't do the job as well as they want it done?
If stats on median and per capita income are to be believed then the kid from Wellsley has a huge leg up on the kid from Athol even if you assume they get the same education.
Now, I'll concede that most cities in the US aren't designed this way. I'll go further and say that most cities in the US lack the density to deserve being called cities, they're just large swaths of adjacent suburbia with a tiny downtown district that most people drive to in order to access, which has huge implications on traffic and parking.
What recent changes in society has enabled us to see is just how much we were sold a crock of shit while on our way to buying 5-bedroom McMansions with expansive yards for hosting dinner parties. If the cost is a one hour each way commute, people are starting to see it's not actually worth it.
So I agree/you're right - real estate prices have to fall dramatically in order for things to be accessible to the non-rich households who aren't on dual tech worker salaries, and who can't afford a reasonably sized (2+ bedroom) urban apartment. But for better or worse, HN skews affluent, so there are undoubtedly readers here able to afford a 4-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer neighborhoods of San Francisco where you'd want to raise a family. Pretending otherwise does no body any favors. The only question is how do we get from where we are today, which is that it's unaffordable to all but the upper-middle and upper class, to a place where is affordable on a single wage earners salary? The only answer to that is to build more housing. Stopgap measures like rent control don't work. It may be anathema to some, but part of that may include the government stepping in to make that happen.
Ebikes allow us to get from here to there, as an ebike allows a slightly more sprawling city design, due to the added range enabled by an ebike vs walking+non-existent public transportation, which means we can get a lot of mileage by repainting and modifying existing roads to add bike-safe infrastructure without ripping out and replacing buildings, which is basically impossible.
Unfortunately even commie blocks nowadays are either becoming too expensive or get "densified" - new blocks are built in between them, often without much of a plan.
This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This bothers me because I'm in the market for an apartment and it's becoming a race against time due to rising prices.
> This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This is always the question. If even half of them are getting rented out, then at least new units are adding to the market and helping to battle rent... but it seems like governments are so crippled in their ability to know for certain how many people live in how many units.
Sadly, I don't think this will last if current trends continue. The town next to mine has a ton of duplexes but it's all zoned single-family now, so you couldn't build those today if you had to.
Real estate in cities being expensive is evidence that people really want to live in environments like that.
Will be interesting to see if other municipalities try to build similar housing and work environments (more walkable, less parking lots) to attract the people looking for a city life style.
Conventional UAS-attached car seats are just too bulky and troublesome to be installing and uninstalling all the time in cars you only rent for a few hours at a time.
But yeah, if your kid is too small, it's a hassle to to carry around that bulky infant seat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8
In Amsterdam if we see adult cyclists with a helmet we'd guess it's probably a tourist or new expat. For children most parents only bother with helmets until they're six years or so.
(Although he does still say kids should wear them).
If you can go slower like a Dutch commuter, then you can also ride like them, using a step-through frame and a lower saddle. That keeps your center of gravity down and allows scooting starts. All of this adds up to a substantially smaller risk of going head-first in a fall.
For me a good life means dark skies, green trees, a chance of dying every time I go for a hike, and a garden in my backyard.
If you are a city person, that's great, fantastic and I hope that you can stay there but if you have to move out to suburban/rural spaces, don't bring the city with you. Leave the light pollution, the noise, and all those urban attributes in the city.
"The noise"... are you advocating for a rural setting without cars here? Most of light pollution and noise in the cities comes from cars and car infrastructure.
While I love cities, I think that's not really the story. Cities would light up their streets with or without cars. Could you imagine if New York, somehow sans cars, with pitch black streets at night? The crime fear is way overdone - cities are very safe these says. But I think I still prefer streetlights.
Sold where did you go
What does that refer to?
Or relatively, you live in a suburban bubble? Different lifestyles, different modes of transport.
We love our farmers. Keep the fields going. But this business with allocating half-acre lots per 4 people (lots which are empty for literally 1/3 of the day) has got to end, or else local utilities should stop servicing those far-flung places. You want to be without the burdens of living in a society -- fine! Figure out water and power for yourself. It's easier than ever and there's still federal- and state-level rebate programs for renewables.
So many people don't seem to realize that without suburbs you don't have farms.
Suburbs and farms produce all the things that cities rely on. You don't see heavy industry in the middle of a city.
So we actually wanted to do your plan then cities should cough up way more money than they currently do.
This strikes me as a bizarre take. What do you consider a "suburb"?
Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely.
Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as the demand for housing in a city rises.
German planning law specifically aims to concentrate development as much as possible, to limit encroachment on agricultural lands and nature. Doesn't always work out, but we have very little of the "urban sprawl" that is so characteristic of U.S. urban planning.
A farm in Germany is how far of a drive from the nearest city?
In the US you could drive 10 hours from a farm to get to the nearest large city. Suburbs and tiny cities are what farms need to survive.
Hmmmmm. And that labor does?
Please think about this a big more - cities do not have industry or agriculture in them. They need those suburbs to provide that. You can't just dismiss it as "cheap labor" - what exactly do you plan to eat or buy?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/suburbia - "the outer parts of a town, where there are houses, but no large shops, places of work, or places of entertainment"
And those business are closer to the rural areas than the cities are.
And also, there aren't really any places with just houses and no places of work, that doesn't really exist.
this is exactly what suburbs are.
You live there, nothing else. You wake up then you drive to work somewhere else
The "suburbs" are generally Single Family Home (SFH) zoned areas (the name of the zone differs per-city) defined by a requirement to have a single dwelling, a large minimum lot size, large setbacks, and low maximum FARs. Nothing mandates that SFH zones need to be adjacent to agricultural areas. In fact most zoning codes detail a long list of uses allowed within the zone and a buffer between zones. For example, most zoning codes require a larger buffer between industrial or agricultural zones and residential zones. By definition how much "closer to the rural area" suburbs are is defined purely by how much SFH housing there is, nothing more.
The reason why most US suburbs abut dense inner cities is that historical US city development occurred densely before the automobile and then postwar development happened according to zoning codes which carved most new residential areas into SFH zoned areas. Cities were grandfathered into the new zoning codes. The codes themselves developed slowly and only started mandating huge minimum lot sizes in the last 30 years or so. This is why suburban development tends to form around a city.
They keep ignoring that without those suburbs you won't have rural farms. Without those suburbs those "productive" cities will have nothing to eat, and nothing to buy.
They measure productivity in terms of dollars - but all cities do is services, they don't produce goods. That's left to those places Strong Towns hates.
If people actually implemented what Strong Towns wants, people would starve.
Try the math again, but completely exclude services and let's see where you end up.
The video says that Canada has laws which stop cities paying more than 25% of revenue on debt payments, so they are much less bakrupt than USA cities. Do you think all Canadian cities have starving people with nothing to buy, and failed farms?
What about European cities which aren't suburban car dependent sprawl and still have food?
What about the explanations in the video (and the related ones on the channel) on why the suburbs are so expensive - you can't handwave away thirty six billion dollars of due road maintenance in a single city with "rural farms need it", even if true it's unsustainable.
> "all cities do is services, they don't produce goods."
All that needs is one counterexample: London has the largest diesel engine manufacturing site in the world - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_London#Manufacturin...
Yes, fintech nonsense has eaten London, and services are its most profitable sectors these days, but that's not /because it's a city/, it was a major manufacturing center and a city.
The North American suburb, which is what we're discussing here unless I misunderstand, more or less came about in the post-war era. It would really be an extraordinary claim that farms and heavy industry couldn't exist in North America until the 1950s...
I'm pretty sure it was discussed long before the Internet.
That distance is more than the radius of the largest city in Europe -> it's 25km from Heathrow airport to the Buckingham palace.
I don't think having a car is a big problem, I think we could hand out free e-bikes to every family and reduce amount of cars of the roads, because for ~50% of journeys, they make sence.
Now if they mean they go 40km to take the kids to school every day, that's a different matter.
All your usecases could be served with a rental. Where I live I can rent cars on hour basis with an app. Need to haul something big? Rent a van for a few hours. Want to visit family in a remote city? Rent a sedan for a day or two. Need to get a cat to the vet? Rent a small city car for two hours.
Consider the cost of ownership with maintenance, depreciation, loan interest (if applicable), and insurance compared to renting. Depending on the frequency and distance of your long trips you may actually save money by renting.
Daycares vary in size. You can opt for institutions that watch after 30 kids at a time, or ones run out of houses, but one way or another if both you and your spouse work for a living, you need someone to watch your kid, and it will probably require daycare and by extension commuting. If you live in the suburbs, you drive.
There are literally millions of decent analog bike frames bouncing around in various corners of <your city here>. Getting one up and running, and strapping a seat to the front and back as you have done, would be about 10% the cost of a new e-bike, and maintenance would be negligible.
Plus, you get to eat whatever you want guilt-free!
Doubly so if you're doing any hills with a passenger on board.
Sweat/stink is what they're avoiding.
I am dismayed at how much people spend on plastic coffee pods just to avoid making a proper coffee!
Before I got an ebike, I didn't have confidence of riding on the road proper- > now I know I won't be slowing down to 5 MPH on an uphill, with someone behind me honking incessantly or overtaking dangerously.
I installed nice bright lights powered from the central battery, mirrors and a horn. This makes a world of difference.
I'd like to point out that the carbon footprint of a used bike is a negative number and the out-of-pocket cost is laughably low. I love when people can reduce their emissions by replacing a car with something with much less impact like an e-bike, but those are the exceptions statistically speaking, and it also doesn't delete that car from existence but rather brings about more demand for mining and materials. Buying used e-bikes is also a fine option.
No need for ebikes but child seats should be used on reenforced frames such as what the Dutch call "Moederfiets", you can also use a 'Transportfiets' frame.
You are adding an extra 5 Kg to your front steering tube and another 20 kilos to your back cargo loader. That is not what most frames were designed for.
Secondly things like double leg kickstands and steering stem lock are really important to load kids in and out of seats safely, which again don't exist in 'normal' bikes.
My point is you don't need an ebike but you should definitely not be using an off the shelf thin frame to carry kids around everyday.
Yes, you shouldn't use a department store bike. I (mistakenly?) assumed this is obvious to this reading crowd.
You sound like you have never worked on a bike before. It is not difficult to add different kinds of kickstands to existing frames. I believe you are quite under-informed on bicycle capacities.
My point is just that if you planning on replacing a car with a bycicle there are already solved problems for kids transportation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821...
E-bikes could actually improve rural life as well (the example I read about was Spain). If you live 10km outside a village and can do your normal shopping by bike instead of car, that can really make an impact. Won't work in really sparse areas of course.
My bike is an urban arrow, so one of the bigger two wheelers. ~7500€ new with all possible add-ons and a €150 annual insurance that covers the bike in full if ever stolen or damaged in an accident, so I also feel safe parking in rough areas with it.
60,000 people on a 4 year waiting list for on street bike parking:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cyclists-bike-...
All of this stuff exists but the bike industry can't put 2 and 2 together.
Here is a link to a folding handlebar stem that is sometimes in stock: https://flatbike.com/product/thinstem/
Transport capacity is still great and the bigger version can seat two passengers, but the kids need to be old enough to sit and hold on themselves.
On some brand I quickly googled[1], the bounding box that covers all of their models for electric bakfiet's size is 253cm x 95cm (with no individual bike being both that long and wide). Comparing them with a Fiat 500 and a RAM truck[2] (just for kicks), that bounding box is 1 meter shorter in both dimensions than the Fiat. And their classic model is 228cm x 63cm.
[1]: https://www.bakfiets.com/bestanden/documenten/618-22bakfiets...
[2]: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/abarth-500-2008-3-d...
I've read that in the Netherlands, they aren't as common as you'd expect, because kids just ride their own bikes almost as soon as they're able to walk, because school, sport etc is nearby and on a safe separated bike path network. While younger babies are carried in those little seats that mount on the handlebars or racks of regular bikes.
I don't think ability to be carried up stairs easily is a good criteria for the practicality of any bike though, or it rules out many ebikes too. Just need secure parking at the ground level.
Magical thinking will not make it so. My partner and I moved further away from the city where she works because we wanted to move in together and we can't afford rent or property where either of us used to live.
I work from home so most the time my car sits charging the driveway. However, all of my doctors are at least a half-hour drive away, my dental clinic is a 50 minute drive, my hobbies are anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour half drive away. The rest of my family is an hour away so no amount of moving will change these things without making the rest of them worse.
But bicycles will work fine for 10% of my travel except for there being no infrastructure supporting bicycling.
In fact I’ve met so many Londoners who never even bothered to learn to drive.
In my experience, it’s generally American cities that require a car rather than European cities. Generally speaking of course, you get good and bad city designs in all countries.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and used to spend my 20s travelling the length and breadth of the U.K. and Europe. I even had a long distance relationship at the time too. A long distance relationship that worked because we are now married.
Sometimes I might have to plan a journey in advance (to figure out the route) but there were plenty of times I just went where the wind took me (proverbially speaking). And frankly even after learning to drive, smart phones weren’t invented yet and satnavs were luxuries, so you’d often still need to plan ahead even if you could drive.
So no, driving needn’t be an essential life skill for everyone. And that doesn’t mean they have a limited perspective either. On the contrary, if you cannot imagine life without driving then it is your perspective which is limited.
Huh?
Other countries might not even allow you to apply for a learners licence unless you have a specific visa.
So if you’re a young adult and travel a lot, it might not even be possible, let alone practical, to earn a license.
Which is precisely why I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and ready to start a family.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Driving_Permit
That scenario adds up, it just wasn't what I thought when I saw "short periods".
Sure, some of them will drive. But I’ve also known plenty of people who cannot drive because they spend their time backpacking or who work a couple of years in one county then move to another.
But a couple of years is a huge amount of time. If you put in just 4 hours a week you'll be done in no time. Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around. And the vast majority of what you learn stays relevant when you move.
Sure, if you put 4 hours a week into any activity you’ll soon get good at it. But the crux of the issue is whether that activity is seen as a priority or not.
> Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around.
They didn’t care because they were moving around a lot.
And frankly it doesn’t really matter what the reason is. Regardless of whether it is a practical or preferential justification, the end result is the same: plenty of people manage just fine without learning to drive.
I find it weird that this concept is so alien to some people. But I guess that’s a good example of the diversity of the readership on here.
This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true. It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
But you’re not going to have a car if you haven’t already learnt to drive.
> This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
They don’t get licenses because they’re travelling.
Time is finite, not everyone wants to use it learning to drive.
> It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true.
It was literally the reason I learnt to drive so late in life. It was the reason many of my friends either learnt to drive later in life or still don’t even drive now.
You might not relate to us but that doesn’t make it untrue.
> It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
It does if you don’t have a fixed residence. What address are you even going to put on your provisional license?
And if you’re going to spend 2 years max in any one place then you’re there to soak up experiences, not spend it learning to drive.
Look, I get some people see driving as a priority. But not everyone is programmed that way and not every place on earth requires a car to get around. You say this isn’t an alien concept to you yet you fail to accept that people like me exist. So I don’t really know what I can say further
Like, come on, if you're somewhere for two years it's not the 25 hours that make the difference.
And sure put the address you've been at for an entire year.
It's not a "whole lot harder". You personally didn't want to, and that is fine.
"be hugely costly and still only result in a license that isn’t immediately transferable to other countries (eg you have to hold a license for x years before you can drive abroad and/or older than x years old)"
So I'm going to ask again, what kind of countries issue you with a licence that isn't immediately transferable to other countries? You can get an international driving permit literally the same day you pick up your regular licence, there is no time limitation on that - or if there is where you live, please educate me so I know better.
So you couldn’t pass your driving test then immediately drive abroad.
Edit: I cannot find any detail on that so maybe this isn’t the case any longer. Learn something new everyday :)
Woodworking and the wiring of houses are also basic life skills, I imagine. I'll try to learn them when I get there. But so far, I've never wanted for the need to drive a car.
Traveled all over the world. Lived in 8 different cities. Never needed a car.
I am confused what you think you need a car for?? It is such a strange stance. Where have you gone that I can not go? Public transport exists. So do private tour buses.
The further away from city suburbs, one might get a lucky 1 bus per hour if at all.
My wife grew up in the suburbs of an even smaller city. It took about 10 minutes to reach that city center by bike, but almost everybody drove because the road connecting the suburb to the city center feels very unsafe on a bike.
Many cities are only city in name, and in practice more towns aspiring to be cities, specially in southern and eastern Europe.
Here is one anecdote, Portalegre might be a nice city, as Northen Alentejo capital in Portugal, yet those 20 km on average from the neighbouring villages aren't that nice to do on bycicle specially during Summertime with temperatures up to 45 degrees celsius. And if you're thinking about taking a bus, better save money for a taxi, unless you're willing to spend the whole day in the city, as there is only one bus into each direction connecting the neighbouring villages to the city.
Besides, your statement was an absolute so the GP only needed one of example to disprove you yet gave you two.
There are plenty of cities in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia,... where it doesn't hold.
You know, those that people from the cities you listed love to rent cars for their vacations, and enjoy what many locals can't afford.
And no, they weren’t all capital sized cities.
I also don’t understand what vacationing has to do with anything when I was talking about expats.
Plenty, it shows not wanting to endure the actual pain locals have with local transport system, if one exists at all.
But this conversation is about people who don’t drive. Not people who do.
You’ve warped the discussion so far off it’s original topic that your entire premise here is now just one stupid straw man argument.
To get back on topic: nobody is disputing that there are people out there with driving licenses (well durrr!). It was to explain why some people (ie not all) are content without learning to drive.
I live miles out of from London and get the train in. Almost nobody I work with live in the city and none of them drive in. In fact you wouldnt want to drive in London.
This has been true for so many European cities, Cambridge, Chelmsford, York, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, etc. all are very accessible for non-car owners.
Anyone who claims you need a car to live in a European city is someone who hasn’t experienced many European cities ;)
It is no accident you only listed capital sized cities.
I’ve noticed this trend you have of defining things in absolute terms despite the evidence being transparently not. Which I normally make an effort not to reply to your silly comments however on this occasion didn’t check who the commenter was before responding. Which is basically a longwinded way of saying I’m not going to continue on with this absurd exchange any further.
Just don't pick Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Barcelona, Rom, Napel, Milano, Athens, Zagreb for the actual experience.
Here is a suggestion, country side in the middle of the country, or one of the Mediterrean or Atlantic island.
But I suspect that’s intentional behaviour. You don’t want people to agree, you are actively seeking out an argument. Because if you wanted a sensible discussion you’d see that our two points were complimentary rather than contradictory.
How exactly would you change London to be more like tokyo? As the simplest question - which areas of London would you demolish to make room for high density Japanese housing? Alternatively, if you're going to build wide, how would you connect those areas with the centre, if building new metro lines is pretty much impossible in London for historical reasons?
"London's issue is political will, because too many wealthy and politically connected people currently profit from the current status quo"
That just sounds like saying "it's the elites fault, dude". Like, sure, but please propose any actual solution.
You don't need your neighbors permission to build, everything is basically by-right where you follow well a well defined housing code vs. needing special approval for every little thing. Just get out of the way and stop needing a license to do anything and you will see how quickly the market will sort it out in London. The people of London will decide THEMSELVES, what to demolish or not once given permission to do so, no central planning needed.
But it doesn't because the current system benefits those elites. Any time large amounts of special permission is needed to get anything done, creates the space for corruption in which a bureaucrat can benefit through bribes of one form or another.
What your basically acting like is acting like you can't exercise and eat right to lose weight while you have no mental issues, financial issues, health issues, disability or age issues blocking you from doing the basic things. London has the money, ability and ground where all this is possible. It's a form of learned helplessness in front of a system that has given you no way out.
Perhaps the real London elites are the clay underneath the city which makes tall buildings more expensive.
Yeah, maybe some elites will get to renovate their houses. Who cares. Large apartment buildings would get built with huge numbers of units to help drive down rent.
Didn’t they open a new one last year?
- Ask for 90% of the buildings to be less than 120% of the average price.
- Have lottery system for lot allocation
- Make it easy for groups and communities to buy lots
- Cap the lot prices per sqf
- Evaluate the projects on the community impacts vs $$$
See also this to understand how capitalist architecture makes everyone miserable: https://youtu.be/VoYZlyBHyQM
When buying a car you have to prove you have access to a drive way
that's step one
The problem is that housing in Tokyo is very small, and most Westerners (particular Americans) simply can't fathom living in it, and it would never be allowed to be built there. Westerners need to change their expectations.
40% of the housing problem is whatever the fuck is going on in the banking system -> it enables us to commit all of our life savings for the rest of our productive lives to pay for a roof over our heads. It's like a hostage situation with the highest bidder.
> You would probably have to demolish large areas of London and replace them with high-density housing to match demand - but obviously that's never going to happen.
So true, my friend is not even allowed to raise your roof by 20 cm to create an extra room in the loft.
The planning system here is so crazy, I am confident it's like 40% of the problem.
Not to say that there isn’t something else going on.
How can Berlin, a city with ample free space and free buildings still see a massive increase in housing prices if it was a simple issue of supply and demand? There's undoubtedly something else much fishier going on.
Here in most places it is because supply is suppressed by government policy and the planning and approval process. Want to add a room to your house? That could be 10's of thousands in planning fees if it is even allowed and it still could be denied. Want to turn your laundromat into an apartment complex? Denied: the proposal will cast shadows across a lot where the city is thinking of building a playground for a local school[0].
Overall its very much in the interests of those who own property to keep more from being built and they naturally act for those interests.
[0]Not hyperbole - this is an actual example.
Nah. There's still a lot of fairly low-quality, low-density housing in areas near the centre of London. In fact, just about everywhere you look there are residential towers under construction: there must be hundreds of them going up right now! There is still plenty of scope to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of housing in London without sacrificing open, green spaces.
Live somewhere for at least 35% of a year (more than 1/3rd), then most of that tax goes away since it's a 'primary residence'. (35% to allow for moving as well as possible 'sunbird' / 'winter/summer homes', while still catching anyone who treats housing as an 'investment' (a tax upon the poor))
So the end result, the poor pay more?
Instead, what Vancouver did was simply tax empty housing.
Why is that framing preferred over "landlords, who reduce housing supply by keeping properties off the market"?
If you want to get to the root of the problem, look at the development process. Start with your local zoning laws. It is insane how tightly prescriptive they are, usually, and they generally have lots of density-limiting provisions like mandatory parking, maximum floor to area ratios, maximum heights, minimum setbacks, etc.
And then there's the planning/approval process.
They don't reduce housing supply for living, but they do reduce housing supply for owning. Normal people being able to own the house that they live in seems like a reasonable societal goal to me, but the current economic climate is making that harder and harder as houses move into the hands of landlords (private and commercial).
Yes, the world needs some amount of rented housing, but a huge percentage of people renting now want to own, just to have stability and control over their living environment.
Also, re-property costs. It’s mostly speculative. If we banned foreign non-resident buyers and disincentivised buy-to-let landlords then prices would be much lower.
To answer your point to "live further out" as in actually pay enough for housing that it covers the ticket costs you're talking about Birmingham and beyond hour commutes.
Land cost can be brought down by building furthere away from the center or in the countryside -> have smaller villages or towns outside of london.
As for building costs. How about we talk to developers and ask them what the biggest building costs are? Often times, it's regulation, regulation regulations. Get rid of all the ones that are causing high prices: at least this should be done in certain areas to allow those who want low cost housing some options.
200 years ago, Henry david thoreagh built a cabin for 28$. That's about 3000 dollars in today's cost. and back then the average person was able to pay off their house in just 10 years! The average house cost about 800$ which was about 800 days of unskilled labor (1/5th of what it is today if you include prop taxes) If it could be done then, then why can't it be done now? why has our standard of living dropped so much, that it's actually considerably lower than it was 200 years ago?
Our standard of living had massively increased since Thoreagh's shed, in part because of regulation requiring it. I'd be surprised to learn you can't build a shed for $3000.
I’ve never seen this not be the case.
Are European cities organized differently or something? I’ve never see affordable living within biking distance of a business district, in the US. Prices are usually double.
US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parking, which means less space for homes and businesses, which means things are farther apart, which means people need cars.
It’s a negative feedback loop.
Of course, failure is subjective: car-based cities have been essential for the car industry because many inhabitants are completely dependent on having a car.
I think that’s more likely “and rebuilt according to the old plan”. Very few German cities escaped with limited bombing damage.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/:
“Of the 54 largest cities (>100,000 inhabitants) in Germany, only four survived without significant damage: Lübeck, Wiesbaden, Halle and Erfurt.”
Eg, in many US cities, it is illegal to have a bakery on the ground floor of an apartment building.
Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all.
The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back.
> Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
That is patently false.
Though, the reason why 1940 - 1970 is so important is because it is post-war and a lot was rebuilt in Europe while at the same time there was a lot of growth in American cities (the baby boom; federal investment in roads, etc..), and both European and American Urban growth and reconstruction were heavily influenced by "Modernism" [2][3]. "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams." [4]
Modernist Urban planning ideas started in the 1910's and on, but it wasn't until 1940 that there was the mass of opportunity for rebuilding and the funding to implement those ideas. "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." [5]
A key difference is that US civil engineers still are quite influenced by Modernism. For example, US traffic engineers continue to optimize for the throughput of vehicles on city streets rather than the throughput of people [6].
On the other hand, around the 1970s affluent European urban planners pushed back on "Le Corbesier" style planning and "Modernist planning fell into decline. "By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] ... Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries" [7]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-pa...
[2] https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-cit...
[3] [How a Controversial European Architect Shaped New York](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-...)
[4] [Story of cities #36: how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...)
[5] http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf (page 3)
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-l...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... - "Reaction against modernism"
-----------------------
Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made. I would find it interesting where these are patently false:
> "Modernism: In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. [....] He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. "
> "Reaction against modernism: By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59]
> Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[59]"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode...
"Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." (page 3)
"A significant individual embracing these values was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Beginning his practice in the late ‘10s, he wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s." (Page 4)
"Following a 1926 US Supreme Court decision to safeguard property values from noxious land uses and neighbours, zoning became accepted as the principal planning tool (Hall 1988). The result was the strict separation of work, home, marketplace and social life. This move to create areas dedicated to specific purposes, and to remove uses that conflict produced single-use central business districts, uniform housing tracts, and dispersed shopping centres and recreational facilities." (Page 6)
"Transportation policy during the 1950s and ‘60s focused primarily on increasing vehicle capacity on roads. Analytical tools considered highways and cars only, while ignoring community design and public transit considerations. Instead of deciding where development should go, engineers just looked at projected traffic trends and designed infrastructure in an attempt to accommodate them" (Page 7)
"Inherent in the modernist project was a belief in the ‘tabula rasa.’ As a result, enormous areas were cleared with completely new environments inserted. Again, Le Corbusier led the drive with his unrealized 1925 proposal to demolish historic Paris north of the River Seine (except selected monuments that would be moved), and to replace it with eighteen 700-foot towers (Moe and Wilkie 1997)" (page 12)
Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe. There is no such case of large-scale reconstruction of any European city around cars except the war-affected ones (and most partially), and all your excerpts just confirm that. They talk about how (the part of) a generation of European architects adopted modernist car-centric ideas - not them actually getting around to implement them. Its Le Corbusier proposing to demolish part of Paris in a furtive attempt, or him planning a high rise somewhere and whatnot.
Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Normally so. Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend. Leave aside the reconstruction. This is why the 19th century reconstruction of parts of Paris is the sole incident of this.
All of this, before the fact that most European cities do not have space - nobody can imagine demolishing an entire city to rebuild it with less density so that more cars could be used in sparse urbanization. Europe does not have that much space.
> Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
You stated that there was not a lot of urban planning in most European cities as they grew organically. My point is that many (over their _entire_) history were rebuilt many times, and in some of those instances with explicit urban planning. The example of Paris is to simply demonstrate this, not only was the city rebuilt several times, but once for the sheer sake of urban planning. This contradicts your statement: "There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done", Paris is _one_ (extremely prominent) counter-example.
>> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
> They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe.
I don't think that is correct, and hence it does not at all invalidate the argument. I'm not sure if you read all of the important quotes and the references. With the benefit of the doubt, I think proof by contradiction can demonstrate this. If modernist urban planners had no sway, and were not at all influential, then these quotes would make no sense (these are referring to Europe & North America):
- "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century."
- "Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. "
To further explore this point, (and this article I really encourage you to read in its entirety): https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...
> “There were these big freeway people, and then there were the counter streams that happened between 1960 and 1970 ... One group was pushing cars out of the city, while others were trying to push them in.”
If Copenhagen was _not_ built as a modernist, car centric city (during the 1950's-1960's), then why would there be a group pushing back against car centricism in the 1960's at all? What would they have been pushing back against? Were they pushing back against how cities were built an ocean away in North America? No.. they were pushing back against how Copenhagen was rebuilt with car-centric, modernist urban planning. I mean, the title of the article is: "how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'"
> Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Not quite, the excerpts show that there was a lot of influence back and forth. European city planners went to the US and were influenced, and vice versa. Corbusier even designed several blocks of NYC, and the influence was reciprocal, see quote:
- "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams."
> Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially.
Considering the war effected huge regions of Europe.. that would have been: nearly all of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, a third of France, and countless more as large areas were flattened several times over. Practically every German city alone was carpet and fire bombed many times. Hence, these are very, very large reconstructions, all at a time when Modernist urban planning was the dominant style of urban planning.
> Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend.
I agree... to some extent. There are counter examples. The idea though that an entire city would be demolished is a straw argument. That is not to say that significant sections were not redone. Though that is still not entirely germaine, as the post-war gave this opportunity to rebuilt _entire_ cities, and huge sections of other cities. Further, there was also outward expansion during this time when there was a lot of new construction. EG: "These large housing projects, known as the "Grand Ensembles," were constructed by the French government from the 1950s through the 1980s to help ease the housing problems that were prevalent throughout the country. Many of these high-rise buildings and communities still exist today" [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/high-rises-of-the-parisian-s....
I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this. Again, that is not at all saying that all of Europe was rebuilt in the 1950s-1960s willingly and entirely to be car centric. But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europe (and Europe by-and-large stopped their new constructions in that style around the early 1970s while the USA by and large did not). There is even a mention in one of the quotes of a lot of that construction having been torn down.
I'd say Warsaw, Prague and Paris are all great examples. Warsaw was completely rebuilt and downtown is car centric (looks very much like an American city). Prague was somewhat unscathed and has a very historic layout, Paris is a mix of reconstruction and historic urban planning. The point remains that there was a pretty specific car-centric urban planning style that dominated in Europe in the late 1940's-1960s.
All that is to say - European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric. It is really notable that stopped being the case and is an example for US cities - that they can also transform away from being fully car-centric.
That's where you go wrong. There isnt 'urban planning' in Europe because there isnt any space to plan anything. What could be called 'urban planning' in Europe is laying out subway tracks, maybe demolishing a run-down shanty neighborhood to build apartments. Thats it. Naturally there is no way to plan anything around cars. The most you can do is to eat up a little sidewalk in the biggest avenues in the biggest cities to make one more lane for the main street. And that's what was done for ~80 years.
> I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this
They dont. You moved on to 'urban planning was like that' argument from 'built like that'.
> European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric
Repeating it wont make it so. It wasnt, and still isnt. Aside from some part of Germany that rebuilt its destroyed cities and built autobahns, entire Europe was about tiny cars and tiny streets, leave aside any phenomenon like suburbs.
You cannot extrapolate from 'Le Corbusier and his friends liked cars and wanted to demolish cities' to 'city planning was like that'. If city planning was really like that (if it actually existed that is), then Le Corbusier and his friends would get their way and entire cities would have been rebuilt.
Sprinkle a bit of mixed used zoning, bike infrastructure and public transport on top.
I live in the outskirts of a city of almost 300 000, and can be in city center by bike in 20 minutes. I'm at work in 10 minutes.
Copenhagen: • City 183.20 km2 (70.73 sq mi) • pop 1,366,301 • Density 4,417.65/km2 (11,441.7/sq mi)
Kansas City, Missouri: • City 318.80 sq mi (825.69 km2) • pop 508,090 • Density 623.31/km2 (1,614.38/sq mi )
It blows my mind that people here put Europe as some kind of affordable walkable alternative. Some places are indeed walkable, but affordability is utterly atrocious by US standard.
Absolutely! My wife and I have a 6yo, and we take him everywhere on the back of our Kona Minute.
He's big for his age (65lbs) so we're looking to move to a ebike sometime this year, but up to now it's been great! Literally the only time we need to use a car is when we go out of town.
Let's hope not all will want to live above the supermarket they work at: https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness
Powered walkways/escalators/elevators everywhere, metro came every 2-3m, shopping/city offices/food courts connected to it all and you did a LOT of walking.
That was the closest to Trantor I'll ever be in my life. Sigh.
My sister lives in Berlin, has a very young child and just bought an electrified cargo bike. She is not a bike rider, never has been, but loves it. Great alternative not only to a car in a crowded city, but also to crowded public transport if you are transporting a small human.
I used to take my kids all the time on my e-bike with a burley bike trailer. Now I have a 13 year old and a 10 year old. I'm pretty sure the middle schooler would get made fun of if his friends saw him showing up to school or soccer practice in the cargo bucket of my bike.
For people that have hit that milestone before me, what do you guys do for your older kids?
He also has a bike and he’s a pretty strong rider for a kid, but it’s still a bit much for him to keep up on longer trips, so the scooter helps there. I expect in a couple of years or so it will break or he will outgrow it, but by then he should have no trouble keeping up on his own bike.
I used to have a burley before the cargo. I think the cargo upright position makes it feel a bit more grown up. Plus, it is so fun.
The highschooler absolutely refuses to ride the back of the cargo, and insists on being driven by car. It takes so much longer with all the traffic, but he is willing to suffer to avoid looking uncool.
Also, do you really consider 11 and 13 year olds brave for riding a bike? I'd say that is a pretty normal thing to do at that age.
You can ride with them on a few practice runs on a weekend and then continue to do so on a weekdays. Once you're both comfortable with the route and their ability to navigate it safely you can cut back on how much of the route you do together or just let them run it on their own. That last bit is a call to be made based on a lot of factors including your kids desire to ride with you.
My nephew (12) cycles himself to school, but the infrastructure supports him doing so.
There's a certain joy in being propelled by your own muscles. But of course it depends on the distance.
This very much feels like "in addition to" rather than replacing a car, at least in the US. My wife and I (without kids) tried living without a car in one of the largest, most walkable cities in the US and it was doable, but it's just soooo much nicer to have a car. Coordinating rentals or even ride shares are a lot more tedious than jumping in a car and driving, and even if ride shares are cheaper than car ownership, I would often find myself not doing things because of the cost of ride share / car rental / etc. Further, I would have occasional ride share drivers blow me off when I really needed to be punctual, and I also had some fraudulent experiences with car share companies (upcharging me for services that I've explicitly declined and not correcting it via customer support channels).
There's also public transit, but that takes wayyyy longer to get around and it's also really dirty, crime-y, and otherwise uncomfortable at least in the cities I've traveled around in.
Lastly, cycling is probably always going to be less safe than getting around by car (we can and should improve cycling safety, but I don't know that we're ever going to get to parity with driving) and I don't know that very many people are going to want to subject their kids to that risk as their primary form of transit. I probably wouldn't, realistically.
I think you're biased towards where you live. Where I live, cycling is definitely not considered risky, there are plenty of bike paths, and many people do indeed let their children bicycle as their primary means of transportation. One of the benefits is that the children can get around on their own and be more independent.
And yes, 30 years ago there were far fewer bike paths here. So things can change.
something like 70% of total distance traveled is by car (https://www.statista.com/statistics/449436/netherlands-modal...) and yet there are fewer annual motorist fatalities than bicycle fatalities (207 cyclist fatalities versus 175 motorist fatalities in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...).
EDIT: cycling in the netherlands is about 685% more dangerous than driving per https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/31/decline-in-road-fatali.... Of course, this isn’t a like-for-like comparison since the distance traveled by car skews more toward the more dangerous highway miles while cycling skews heavily toward the much safer local/city streets—if you account for that, the difference becomes even more pronounced.
In my city, it's not if but when you'll get hit by a car on a bike. Yet I see parents increasingly think it's okay to haul their children on their bikes.
Cars regularly mount pavements/sidewalks as well, and kill pedestrians who are not even in the road.
The correct response to "cars make cities unsafe for everyone" is of course to ban all but the most essential cars from cities. It is not to suggest that the _other_ forms of transport (including walking on the pavement/sidewalk!) are so unsafe as to be irresponsible, in the presence of cars.
And also "cars bad" too. Lots of people making left turns across the bike lanes without checking their mirrors (probably happens once per thirty minute ride), people executing half a left turn and then blocking the bike lane to wait for pedestrians, people parking in the bike lane. It's been 20 years since I had a car wreck so I can be reasonably sure when I put my kid in their car seat that it will be an uneventful trip. City biking is always at least a little eventful and there's a lot less protection though. If society has given me a nice lane to ride the bike, is it still society's failing that my fellow occupants of the lane act the way they do?
But it isn't. End of story.
Happy to support people who want to make biking safer. Happy to support politicians who want to build protected bike lanes.
But you can't just make up a fairy tale land and pretend it's safe. Bring yourself back to real life, and your children are in danger.
The newer style of cargo bikes can for many families replace a car. Have two kids seated in the trunk of the bike and drop them off at kindergarten, then continue biking to work and pick them up on the way home.
Those are a bit on the pricier side, though. Still cheap compared to a car, but people often look at them as something "extravagant" or "in addition" to a car. But they can be a replacement for most car use, and then just rent a car for other more seldom occasions.
And to avoid the initial big purchase, not even sure if it's something for you, there's a startup where I live ( https://whee.no/ ) where you also can rent the bike on a monthly basis. Really recommended to see if it suits your lifestyle.
Lastly, I also think this kind of easier movement will change how people live. You can no longer expect to move out of the city and still get a short way to everything by using your car, making life miserable for everyone else (noise, danger, pollution, too much asphalt). So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.