You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)
In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.
The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.
Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity.
Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world.
That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.
I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.
So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...
Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.
“Do you have examples of cities that are literally utopia? No? Checkmate, urbanists!”
And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s.
The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.
This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.
Yes!
> with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong.
YES!
> They would be, if not for the car.
...what?
They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have single-family zoning in 95% of their inner core land area. Not "have single family homes", sure maybe Tokyo has that. But zoning that prohibits denser development in such a way that most (yes, most) current housing in those areas is too dense to be built today under current rules. (This last part is true even of NYC.)
The US went hardcore anti-density in the 70s. And sure, that has something to do with the car.
The reason we zone this way is because people are unable to imagine their lives without being able to drive around. The very first thing people say in my town when an apartment tower goes up is "where am I going to park? Do they have a plan for moving the parking spots that this tower displaced? Traffic on tower St. is going to get so much worse!"
If the expectation is that everyone owns a car, upzoning is a huge problem -- it actually is, because everything that scares a car brain ("I can't park!" "It's going to be loud!" "This will increase traffic!") is actually true. Rather than limiting cars, of course, we choose to limit zoning. Which is actually quite a logical thing to do if everyone is to own a car.
If you get rid of cars you get rid of collectors, arterials, onramps and offramps, turn lanes, parking spots... Those are things that are fundamentally incompatible with a major, dense, vibrant city. You can easily fit 50,000 people, their workplaces, senior care homes, schools, and restaurants into the land area of a 4 way cloverleaf that is designed to service 50,000 round trip commutes by car.
To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)
But in the US, at least, the underlying argument is about class, and race. If you haven't already, it might be worth reading about redlining, the historical practice of outlining which neighborhoods were "safe" to issue mortgage loans in because they were white and not at risk of non-whites moving in. This was about race, primarily.
Redlining became illegal starting in the '70s in many places, and its replacement was exclusionary zoning---a practice that continues to this day that relies instead on race's strong correlate, wealth. Apartments and other similar higher-density arrangements are much more affordable--and as a result, accessible to racial minorities (and the crime, etc. that racial minorities were "associated" with).
All the modern arguments around traffic jams, neighborhood character, transit, etc.---these are all modern-day variants of the same old arguments, because again, who can afford a 1:1 ratio of cars to people-in-household to get around the low-density suburbs?
So when you hear people say "I can't park! It'll be loud!" consider if they're really saying "I don't want those other people who rely on transit in my neighborhood", but using the words "there won't be room for me to park!"
Building subways is impossible for no good reason nowadays. But it's quite easy to put light rail, bike lanes, and BRT in. People find a way to get around.
You don't need to take cars by force; you just need to let market forces do it. That starts with getting rid of parking, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning requirements for new development in areas of town that are underdeveloped (it's not hard to find these areas in even medium sized American cities). If people really do want cars in those built-up areas, they will rent a monthly space. It's a funny thing though, people seem to re-evaluate how valuable a car is once they have to pay $400/mo for a parking space.
If what you say is true, and everyone truly must have a car, rents will fall in those areas to compensate (developers, not having to deal with onerous parking and setback requirements, still turn a profit). In practice, this does not happen, because places without cars are nice places to live. They appreciate and attract investment, which puts money in the city coffer to improve transit options.
It does not take much land to do this. An area the size of 10,000 single family homes -- often a single neighborhood. In San Diego that's Midway, in SF it's Berkeley and the Sunset, in NYC it's Staten Island. These places all have developers who will break ground in months on collectively hundreds of thousands of new housing units if they are allowed to do it and earn a profit.
It is not fundamentally hard to do this, at all, if you can picture in your mind a human being not owning a car.
The fear was real :(
I love taking the Tokyo subways whenever I visit. I make it a point to avoid the NYC subway if at all possible.
It's always the same answer.
Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.
It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.
# Service accurate enough to set a clock by.
# Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom.
# Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue)
My main point is that “move the jobs” in a sufficiently large city is not generally a working way to reduce commute times.
The Bay Area is extremely special. It's the only place to go to get a good job! There are probably 500,000 people who would move in next week if we had the apartments to house them. That is absolutely not true of Stockton.
Someone who commutes to SF from Stockton isn't a resident of Stockton. They're a resident of SF who is priced out!
Personally I wouldn't want to live in SF proper even if it was cheap. Most of the city is kind of a shithole and the governance is atrocious in a way that goes far beyond just failed housing policies.
> you don't SIT on the train
> at all in rush hour!
Tokyo (I heard)
Mumbai
Also can be done in today s time:
About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.
Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
and if you're not? Not all bad health is a character failure, you know. Some people just have diseases like multiple sclerosis
in the public vs private transit discussion, all I know is that I've never been harassed by someone else in my car on the way to work, but the subway was a different story, and I've spent a lot more time commuting by car than train
Priority seating
It isn't.
It's about changing incentive structures over the long-term, so more people choose options which have a better set of societal externalities.
I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home.
2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park.
3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed.
In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.
What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.
Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.
First, there's traffic, and there's parking. The claim you're making is that the lack of need for parking in dense areas creates traffic while the SDCs go to park. That may be true, but if the SDCs are delivering say, 5-9 people to work every day between shared rides and multiple trips, the fact that one SDC then has to make an extra drive out of the business district, at the end of the morning rush hour is not that significant.
The hope is also that SDC driving behavior is also a lot more consistent and predictable, leading to more smoothly flowing traffic. Sometimes a few crazy drivers, or worse, drivers that cause accidents, can foul up traffic massively. I'd expect that this would be reduced in a mostly SDC world.
Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.
I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash
Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing.
Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america.
I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.