I have a very loose mental framework for thinking about cars that I think is helpful:

If you look at space taken up length-wise in a lane the length of the average car in the US is 14.7 ft. For a person standing on a sidewalk the average person's foot size is ~10 inches. Let's hand wave the math and say cars are 10x longer.

Very loosely our built environment scales 10x to match that new scale. Roads need to be 10x bigger, parking lots take up even more space.

The ultimate result is not that there are far more unique destinations available to the average person, but that they are further away, bigger, and costs are far higher.

Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded.

It's a clear example of the tragedy of the commons.

"Before car usage approached 100% it would have been a tremendous gain to be one of the early car owners. The environment would have been built for a smaller scale and you would have been able to traverse it rapidly. For day to day life in well-populated areas that advantage has substantially eroded."

Actually, no. The early car owners had it terrible, not only were they expensive and broke down often, the roads were often little more than mud-drenched dirt tracks, with impassable bridges and cities choked with animal and pedestrian traffic. No stoplights or traffic laws, extreme chaos and very slow going. You can read some of the early coast-to-coast stories for how challenging it was.

The excellent vehicular infrastructure we have in the USA today is due precisely to the car usage being 80%+. With the mass adoption came freeways, stoplights, graded roads, drainage, bridges, all of it.

The problem with your argument is why would people buy cars if they were so terrible? While the infrastructure was obviously worse than today clearly they afforded tremendous advantages which motivated their adoption!

In the early days that advantage was the ability to rapidly traverse relatively developed areas with more convenience. Over time infrastructure and adoption chased each other, but now the most populated parts of the US are developed to the point that there's little way to ease congestion with more road infrastructure. The only way to grow is to sprawl into new cities.

For a long time in population centers the pattern was new car infra. -> more driving convenience -> more cars -> repeat. In cities that's running into bottlenecks.

Today people primarily buy cars out of necessity, but in areas where most people live congestion and a more sprawling environment has diminished much of the time saving advantage.

It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.

In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.

People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.

In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.

That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.

However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.

Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.

You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.

If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.

The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.

A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.

A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.

The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.

The biggest advantage for cars is that they lack any fixed schedule, route, or stops.

Other common modes of transport that lack fixed schedule, route, or stops: - biking - micromobility (scooter-share, etc.) - walking - dial-a-ride transit options

But they have other cons as well. You need to have good bike lane infrastructure or to be confident taking the entire lane, whereas most everything is already created around the car or increasingly being created around the car (in the case of the developing world beginning its nascent highway networks). You have to have fair weather or be able to pack around gear like rainpants wherever you are going. You probably make use of the cargo capacity of your car once a week when you buy groceries and goods from stores that tend to size their products around that sort of interval of a trip. I ride my bike plenty but honestly when I go to the grocery store three blocks a way I am usually taking the car, because its easier when I realize oh crap I need milk, I need a gallon of vinegar, I need paper towels, I need toilet paper, I need olive oil, and that alone will overload the panniers and be nigh impossible to get on the bike, especially the paper products and their awkward bulk. I haven't used my panniers for groceries personally since I broke three eggs in a carton with them once. I either walk and grab a small handful of things or just take the car most times.

Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?

I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?

> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.

The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.

Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

This is such a weird line of inquiry.

Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.

Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.

If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.

I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.

First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.

Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.

Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.

It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.

Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.

It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.

They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.

No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.

Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.

Sure.

I simply gave my 2c on your question.

> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?

Yes. I would. And honestly there really isn't much in it. In the US, basically everyone drives. In the UK, pretty much everyone who pays taxes drives.

At least in my situation, I think that if the costs were moved from general taxation to directly falling on car owners, I'd end up net positive!

Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.

You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.

If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0

Your car improves your quality of life. Every other car reduces your quality of life by a small delta: they reduce walkability and bikability, they are deadly, they cause traffic and slow down public transit, they reduce visibility, they are noisy, smelly and hot, they occupy space that is ugly, radiates heat and could be used for other purposes, and so on.

Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.

And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?

I don't really agree with your premise because you are not incorporating the positive contributions of additional users.

Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.

Those are the negatives.

But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.

The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.

There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).

> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.

They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)

On first read, I was wondering why on earth did they not use a train? I looked it up and found this from a primary source:

> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e; and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.

which makes a lot of sense. great reading: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/resear...

Another reason, not stated: The rail system melted down with the traffic load of World War 1. (Or with the government taking control, when they didn't know how to run a rail system.)

I always found it amusing how, in Bertha Benz's first trip in the prototype car, she had to go to a pharmacy for petrol.

Many early cars were large terrifying beasts. Huge wheels, engines and very noisy. Extremely expensive too. I totally understand with mud roads and low power densities of the time that is a logical design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mL4jA59ibU

The implication is that car ownership rose slowly from 0% to 80% despite the experience being terrible.

How can this be true?

I don't think your logic works. Cars are 10x longer, but (for example) my house is not 10x longer in all 3 dimensions.

The streets in downtown Salt Lake City were famously designed to be able to turn a horse-drawn wagon around. That width turned out to be pretty good for cars when they came - no additional scaling needed.

Salt Lake City has a huge volume of parking lots, highways, and many roads.

While individual streets may not have scaled up there were other parts of the built environment that did to accommodate cars.

It's even worse if you don't limit the velocity to sth like 30km/h - because then you need more space for turning and acceleration/breaking; and also noise increases with speed - which tends to make people put their houses further away from the streets - which makes everything even less dense, which requires people to speed up and use cars more.

So in practice it's worse than 10x.

Before the very first car has been made people in the West and Asia had been using horse-drawn carriages for centuries and built cities to accommodate those. If your logic is sound then adoption of cars has shrunk the cities as a horse-drawn carriage had been longer than a motor-driven car.

Carriages were extremely rare and cities were not built to accommodate them until the rise of the coach in the 16th century.

Carriages are not much longer than cars, and they're significantly narrower and articulated in the middle. The simplistic model of "length" breaks down when you want to compare two things of similar size, but it's good enough when we're comparing two things where one is 10x the size of the other.

If you visit old cities in Europe and the Middle East you'll definitely see a difference in size and layout between cities that were built for horses (not even necessarily for carriages, just pack-horses) and cities that weren't. And then you'll see another big shift if you go to e.g. South Africa where all the cities were built in the post-coach era.

Horse-drawn carriages were typically used for moving goods or for shared transit, not for most individuals in single horse drawn carriages going to all sorts of day-to-day trips.

The point is that the default mode of transportation requires vastly more space than it used to.

How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).

It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips.

If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.

And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.

My point is about the average space taken up on a trip.

In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.

I am sorry, you are still making little sense. The space taken by a car is the same no matter how many people walk, crawl or stay at home and don't go anywhere. It's more than a man but less than a horse carriage. And since you still refuse to compare the space taken by the horse carriage to the space take by a car, I figure you understand now that your logic is not sound, which is good enough result of this thread.

A horse carriage takes up similar space to a car, yes.

But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.

I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.

But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.

> that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.

I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.

In the low traffic volume world of carriages, one lane in each direction is ample or even excessive for most roads. Many pre-car roads aren't wide enough to even accommodate one carriage in each direction at the same time.

The pre-car Europe and the US were not low traffic. E.g. the main street (Nevsky Avenue) in St. Petersburg, Russia is 200 feet wide since 1760s (and it was expanded from the original 65 feet because that was not enough for traffic).

I'm talking about parking lots and roads.

If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.

Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.

As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.

I don't know where you live but in every city in the US I had been there are minimum lot sizes and setbacks to prevent fires and flooding and those leave plenty of room for parking so I don't see how walking could change that (it's not like fire propagation and water absorption cares about your mode of transportation).

You are describing the problem. Minimum lot sizes is a problem caused by over reliance on cars.

Not really, they existed before cars. As I said they are dictated by the fire safety, flooding danger and nuisance concerns. All the stuff you read on Reddit ("people want to live in tiny apartments but those are illegal to build", "it's illegal to have mixed commercial and residential use", "lot sizes are blown up by parking requirements") could be proven to be completely insane with few minutes of research.

This isn't really true outside of some very tarmaccy American cities.

I live in London, UK. I can use my car to get to places, it just costs more, through congestion charges, parking, and time.

The car hugely, hugely increases my exploration radius vs. walking and public transport.

There is also a value in things being bigger. I remember going to a random grungy arcade bar in LA that had fifty pinball machines. We don't have the space for that, at least, not unless it's an Experience(tm) with a corporate backer .

Those very "tarmaccy" US cities are what you get when you "stretch" cities to accommodate the scale of cars.

Other US cities are gradually moving towards that design by adding incrementally more parking and highways, but it's a slow process.

I have no opposition to cars, but designing cities where nearly all trips require a car is an extreme that most people in the US live in. If you own a car you use here and there that's absolutely fine, but if there's nowhere for someone to live where they can comfortably get by without a car that's a bad place to be.

And as I argued in my initial point when everyone needs to drive the congestion and distance between things substantially reduces the advantage of driving in the first place.

A good example is looking at Apple's old campus:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/da...

I get the total area to be 131351 m2 and the area inside the "Infinite loop" road to be 58029 m2, i.e. only 44% of the total area.

So cars waste half of the area. https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculat...

Forget the Apple campus

Just look at Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/dat...

Half the city is parking

What I absolutely don't understand: Why are there no parking garages, why only surface parking lots? Isn't that prime real estate?

Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?

Can’t say for certain but intuitive guess is it’s dirt (literally dirt in some cases) cheap to do a ground level parking slot?

Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good?

Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project?

I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.

Yeah people I know in the parking industry have a saying that if you want to print money build a parking lot or garage. They're stupidly easy and result in tons of recurring revenue if they're in a good location. Even the little lots can produce thousands per month of revenue.

How come no investors are buying that real estate and building skyscrapers or parking garages?

Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?

They've already done so. They're just waiting for the economics to make sense before they convert the land. The parking lot is just how they're paying taxes and the mortgage on the land.

Land Value Tax would fix this.

But even without, it’s crazy that you can afford the mortgage with the parking fees.

I'm definitely on board with a land-value tax. It would be a significant boon to productivity, economic mobility and even growth.

Say you've got a lot with like 420 spaces a few blocks away from Minute Maid Field in Houston. You charge $25 for parking during the event and you're guaranteed to fill it up every game. 81 home baseball games a season. That's $850k in revenue a year, practically guaranteed, and just for the baseball games. How many other events will they host there?

Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.

Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.

Maybe zoning.

In arglinton, Texas, often called one of the least walkable cities on Earth, there's a requirement that each building has a parking lot proportional to it's occupancy. So if you build a 200 person building, you need a parking lot to handle 200 people. I can't remember the exact ratio, I doubt it was 1:1 like that.

So the parking lots are there by force, not convenience or cost.

This is why: https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/par...

Developers effectively can't 'outsource' parking. If you want to build anything, you get to build parking. For a long time, building a parking garage cost more than just buying a bigger plot to develop. Now that's not the case, but the rules haven't changed, so it would take a developer with deep pockets to build a parking garage, and it would have to be associated with a massive development project.

> Why are there no parking garages

As someone who lived in Houston for a long time, there are lots of parking garages.

https://downtownhouston.org/navigate/parking/garages

But there are still lots of incentives to have a surface level parking lot. $$ per spot, it is stupid cheap for a surface lot in construction costs. Why pay $25 to park in a garage for the day when the surface lot around the corner costs $5?

Given that Apple is the most successful company in the world perhaps it's not a waste and there's something in your model that doesn't capture reality.

Along a similar vein, I'd be interested in the correlation between car use and economic growth is between similarly developed territories is. I know that the US and EU were roughly equal in economic size when I was in school and now it's more like a 3:2 ratio. China has also aggressively adopted cars over the past 3 decades while passing many other countries in per capita GDP.

What portion of the GDP does the vehicle manufacturing industry account for?

A relatively low portion in the US the past 25 years and almost none in China until this decade.

Another way to think about it is cars allow people who live further from the campus along routes not served by transit (either at all or in a timely and convenient manner) to still work for the company. A multi-story parking structure would also have reduced the amount of surface area dedicated to vehicles.

Ban in the center is not enough, at least for us. Zoning and parking minimums should be ditched too. This would gradually densify the area

if you want densification and you're willing to using zoning changes to achieve it, adopt the solution favored by truly dense cities: force more skyscrapers

Densification is good up until a point. Ideally you would want mixed use and mixed style development

I was under the impression that skyscrapers weren't good for dense walkable areas. 4-7 story tall mixed use buildings are supposed to be the best.

I'm afraid I don't have a source for this. The Youtube channel Not Just Bikes might have said this.

it's a mixed bag. Some argue that sporadic skyscrapers might be a good thing since those would act as a point of easier orientation in space + providing housing/work area for ppl that want to live/work high. The problem appears when there are too many of them or public transport infra is not adapted to handle such an inflow of people towards a single point

Tokyo is truly dense and is not skyscraper heavy. They just have tiny roads and tightly packed buildings, mostly low-rise and single family homes.

It depends on what you consider "low-rise". Different parts of the city have different densities and building heights. Some parts near the center have real skyscrapers (and new ones are under construction now), and other more-central areas are full of buildings that are 5-10 stories or so. Many places are full of apartment blocks, and the newer ones are usually 10-15 stories. Some places are full single-family homes or buildings that have just a handful of apartment units in them. Of course, the taller buildings tend to cluster near train stations more, and the single-family homes tend to be farther from stations since the land is less valuable the farther from a station it is.

But yeah, "tiny roads and tightly packed buildings" summarizes Tokyo's layout to a good degree. If you look at Tokyo from a satellite view and compare with typical American cities, the biggest thing you'll probably notice is just how little space is wasted on things like wide multi-lane roads (or stroads), parking lots, and lawns. That's what makes it so walkable, and why public transit works so well here. A 5-minute walk can take you to a very large number of buildings, which equates to a huge number of apartments or businesses. A 5-minute walk in a typical American city like Houston will probably only get you across the street.

Another thing I've noticed is that people drive even when there are nearby options. I live in a suburb of DC, right where a residential area meets a commercial area. There is a large Korean grocery store less than a block away, fully accessible by shaded sidewalks. My neighbors always drive 10-20 minutes to different stores. I go to the nearby one because it has cheaper and fresher produce, although I still make bulk purchases by car.

There is also a lot of times when you could walk to a place but you may be motivated to drive because other drivers are more accommodating to a car. It may sound crazy, but in Los Angeles (my home) drives are often more patient and behave in a safer manner toward cars then they do bicyclists or pedestrians.

A nice thing about electric bikes is that it seems to be making bikes more common. It really needs to be normalized that a person doesn't have to be in a car to use or cross the road.

I mean, I sort of get it. There was a time when I stopped driving to the grocery store all together but it was only because there was a great independent grocer right on my walk home from public transit. The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what we needed, and I wasn’t even going out of my way to do so. It was fantastic, I loved it. Maybe once a month we drove somewhere to get anything we needed that they didn’t carry, or for a big pantry restock.

If I had a grocery store I could walk to now, I don’t know that I would because it would be an extra trip all on its own. So unless I’m making that walk each day on principle, it’s inconvenient and I don’t know I would.

And yes, that is absolutely because of the car-centric suburb I now live in. When circumstances allow it, I look forward to moving back to some walkable, urban neighborhood again.

Carrying capacity is a challenge, but I'm still surprised a 5 minute walk always loses to a 40 minute round trip by car. I struggle to get enough exercise as it is.

Because for a lot of people it isn't a 40-minute round trip by car. It is a five minute each way trip by car for multiple grocery stores for me personally.

In my case, reverse those times.

> The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what

Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.

Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.

There is a fixed time in every supermarket trip no matter how big or small it is. Multiple trips accrue these costs. For example, I live next to a supermarket, a big one. It's a 3 minute walk door to door, 6 min round trip. Inside it takes about 5 min to find what I am looking for and another 2-10 minutes to checkout depending on the size of the line. So, at the very best I am spending 13 minutes per trip. If I shopped for groceries there every day I would be spending at least 1.5 hours per week shopping. Instead, I drive my car to Costco every two weeks and spend less than 1.5 hours on that (20 min drive x2, 30 min picking groceries and checking out, 5 min parking, 5 min loading and unloading), saving more than 1.5 hours of my life every other week.

I also use Costco for bulk purchases too, but buying in advance requires careful planning. Unless you have a repetitive diet, supplement with a quick grocery run mid-week, only purchase frozen/shelf stable food, or throw out a bunch of expired food each week it's hard to predict what you need two weeks in advance.

I usually eat out so my diet is quite varied, which is another problem for walking advocates because they are limited only to the restaurants in their walking distance, or cold soggy deliveries, or, ultimately, have to spend a lot of time cooking themselves (or making large batches and eating the same leftovers for days in a row). This is besides the point, which was the time spent with daily shopping by foot. It's incredible waste of time and I know that because I used to do just that.

> so it's easy to go round in a few minutes

x7 days a week. But it's not just the time in the store, it's also whatever detour there is to get to it. At walking speed. Whatever the wait time is at checkout.

> less if you know exactly what you want.

So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

And if there is another pandemic like event, I'm also constrained to the one day's supply of food that I have in my house at any given moment (maybe less than that, realistically). And it's still a fucking pain if I'm anything other than single. There was a point in my life not so many years ago, when we were going through about 4 gallons of milk per week. Hell, some of the things that we like to eat, that we should be eating for health reasons... you can't even buy those in single meal sizes. We'll probably have 3 (plastic) bags of vegetables home for salad.

> So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

Oh, the horror. Usually I would just go in an see what looks good and decide then what I wanted for dinner.

The detour is small. I think it's also more common to go every second or third day, rather than every day.

Search "supermarket" in Copenhagen — not the city centre — and see how many results there are: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@55.703748,12... . You may well need to zoom in and refresh the search to see everything.

> I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so?

Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

> Pandemic

You can easily build up some reserves.

> Milk

You clearly have a large family, so you might consider that your situation is not universal. I think many Danes with a large family would mix the two options — shopping by car (or online for delivery) every week or two, and supplementing it with additional trips for fresh food.

Two adults is also two people to share the shopping.

> The detour is small.

For you. That one time. Honestly, I always seem to be on the wrong end of the curve when it comes to salaries... betcha I end up in the ghetto apartment in the food desert.

> Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

Nah. You just get the things you usually get, and you make whatever of that you feel like that evening. No need to plan, you figure it out when you open the fridge.

> You clearly have a large family, s

Just the two children. Even with just two children, this quickly becomes absurdly impossible. For any more than that, the walkable city people just sound like stooges. Well, they sound like that long before we start talking about large families.

The map link is intentionally centred on a ghetto -- Denmark has a legal definition of that.

Around 15-30% of urban Copenhagen households own at least one car, depending on the neighborhood.

Even in suburbs, it does seem that the potential of in-fill development and mixed-use repurposing is undervalued. For example, I've lived in many low-rise apartment complexes; they always had one or two ground-floor units that were unpopular and frequently vacant because of their proximity to a road or something, and it never made any sense to me that they couldn't be converted into a small commercial space for the neighborhood. Something like a small cafe or corner store. With a higher commercial rent, residential rents in the area could be lower, and car trips to similar spaces would be reduced.

These complexes also were always roughly 50% parking by land-area. Converting some amount of it to new units would be so helpful. Or even something as simple as converting a one or two reserved parking spaces to one of these (https://i.pinimg.com/736x/56/42/1b/56421b53bcffe6b0c92369c44...) so that cyclists wouldn't have to lug their bicycles up 2 or 3 flights of stairs after every ride.

The "logic" of anti-pedestrian thinking is just a desire not to see anything at all change.

Detached houses and tenament houses also space things out compared to commie blocks which is why I have unpopular opionion that low-height (+- 4-story) commieblock neighbourhoods designed before cars were widespread are the best form of walkable cities.

When they are well designed and well-maintained they allow for more green spaces than any alternative AND everything is closer together AND they aren't dehumanising like the 10+ story commieblock districts. All that without causing "concrete canyons" like medieval parts of cities or UK-style rows of detached houses with token lawns.

I mean sth like this - from before commie blocks were adapted to cars: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGFKGntsHU85qwpu8

> car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac)

Good example here is Salt Lake City - the streets were designed intentionally to be very wide everywhere.

But not for cars. They were made wide enough for an ox wagon to turn around.

Ok, let's reduce ox wagons too then.

Are you sure that's a good example of car centricity? The streets in my town are wide enough for a six lane highway, yet the streets were built before the car was even a glimmer in someone's imagination.

If it wasn't car-centric then, it sure is now.

Nah. If it were car-centric it would be much more friendly to cars. It has come to try to be everything-centric, which results in it being awful for everyone.

More people live in the suburbs than city centers. That's where the real problem is. I don't have any problem walking around the streets of SF.

There are parts of SF that have another "dignity" problem unfortunately. I know too many who refuse to walk in many areas there due to feeling unsafe and the smell issues. I know another one who refuses public transit now due to similar issues. They tend to be small women and it's super sad and it really limits a lot of their transport options in life.

I agree this is the current situation, but I think the concentration of homelessness in urban areas is largely a consequence of policies that favor suburbia:

- Requiring a car for daily life drives up cost of living, pricing the bottom tier of earners into the streets

- Restricting housing unit supply by mandating single family zoning makes whole regions unaffordable

- Blocking effective public transit into the suburbs effectively geofences homelessness into urban centers

- Concentrating the overwhelming majority of homeless services downtown is a policy choice, not a natural outcome

I think a lot of people look at urban areas in the US and think "that looks awful, my area should make the opposite of those policy choices", and it leads us to subconsciously hold some weird beliefs. Tall buildings and public transit don't make people homeless. They do the opposite. But something about the American lifestyle (my own upbringing included) plants these negative associations with urban centers, and it wasn't until I saw other cities around the world that I realized it didn't make any sense at all.

Yes, that's a different problem than the article is referring to.

If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.

You're essentially just raising taxes on the poor. Why? Let's take SF above as an example. The median salary in SF according to Gusto is $104,000 annually, which at the 30% maximum federal recommended housing payment would be $2,600 monthly all-inclusive. Using Zillow to see what I could afford with zero down at this monthly payment (VA loan), I find nothing in SF, and virtually nothing in the Bay Area, except some shacks which are essentially land in Richmond:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1964-Van-Ness-Ave-San-Pab...

Perhaps I could erect a tent and live homeless on my own land, but with Newsom's new alt-right homeless policy, probably not. The closest I could find which was (barely) habitable in Concord, a true fixer-upper but something anyone can do with enough time and effort and watching home repair tutorials:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/168-Norman-Ave-Concord-CA...

This is about one to one and a half hours each way, depending on traffic, to my old office in downtown SF (before I was offshored). Currently, the house above is what I could afford and what I would most likely buy if I received a job again and had to go into the office a few days a week (or six days a week as some startups want now). Driving, although long, is the only viable option. Even when mass transit routes can be found, they add 1-2 hours to the already long commute (each way).

People in this thread within the technobubble generally miss what driving is for most Americans: a necessity. It's not an option because we prefer SUVs and huge houses, that's true for some people, but most people don't have many options of where to live or how to live, they are wage and price takers, and we go where we can afford. And that's somewhere we need to drive, nice walkable areas served well by mass transit are luxury items in the USA only for the rich. The rest of us must drive, and hindering that only makes those of us already struggling on the edge of middle class even poorer.

The usual counter argument is that you can take the money raised by making cars expensive and give it to the poor. That’s fairer than subsidizing cars, since rich people tend to have more cars and use them more than poor people.

The only reason everything you mention is a problem is because SF's zoning policy is a disaster that doesn't actually reflect true demand for housing.

A properly zoned SF would look like New York, with 5x more transit options than it currently has.

Not sure what this has to to with the article. Kind of wondering why there are so many off-topic comments attached to mine. Maybe the word suburbia sets people off?

A lot of times it isn't by choice, but as a consequence of zoning and parking minimums that are affecting housing stock and it's prices (both in the city and in suburbs). You may not have problems walking in sf(debatable but doesn't matter), but could you say the same about detroit/huston?

When I am driving through suburbs in central Texas I think it is interesting to note that there are rarely people outside the houses. Mostly the the people I see are mowing.

I think the article points out one of the reasons.

Weird. Many downvotes to my comment and then a bunch of random complaints having nothing to do with the article.

exactly, especially in the suburbs. My closest places to talk to

- ~half a mile to a local taco stand. Could be closer but railroads are in the way and they run on the hour (and a big ditch also discourages that). kinda bad, but still on the verge of "walkable".

- now, the other direction about a mile away is a wal mart. But, half a mile of this walk is a vertical 200 foot climb. You'll be exhausted at worst and sweaty at best before you even get halfway there. But if you make the walk you got a plaza of whatever you need.

- And that's really all the "walkable" areas. The next closest plaza is 3 miles from the taco shack, a bit outside of "walkable" if you just need to grab some tools from Home Depot or wait for an order at In n Out (inside isn't much better than the drive-through). Buses do run here, but only every hour (and is next to the taco shack. so half a mile walk)

Those in EU places can find it hard to understand. But there's just so much dang land between everything if you're not downtown.

>I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres.

If we had a better bus schedule, I wouldn't mind that. even if we just have to drive to a bus stop, it could be the start of this walkable city concept in downtown areas. But there's a lot of powers opposing that.

It honestly isn't _that_ different in the UK.

Outskirts of a smaller city, you are 0.5-1 mile from everything. A corner shop, a takeaway, anything.

Some Americans think that everywhere is like central London or Berlin or whatever. Most of it is like an American suburb but with poorer condition smaller houses.

About the only difference is that if you are poor and in a suburb you can probably take a slow bus that is infrequent. But no-one actually wants to do that if they can afford otherwise.

I sure hope y'all don't have to climb 200 ft hills in those areas. If it wasn't for that I'd say it's a walkable enough area for my needs.

I understand that not everything will be packed in all of EU, but better public transportation makes up for that. The other annoying aspect of non-urban us cities tends to be geography. It's very hilly in the western US with little fertile land, and blazing hot and humid and the deep south. We'd absolutely need better bussing to overcome that.

It’s worth remembering that a lot of car centric design has political roots. For example many of Berlin’s wide roads were built so that Nazi tanks could traverse them. Likewise Paris’s wide streets were built so that cavalry army’s could pass. And a big part of America’s single family home suburb design (which necessitates cars) is born out of a desire keeping white and black people separate (as well as regulatory capture by the auto industry).

My favourite places in the world tend to be much older and basically built at random by the people who lived there, like London’s Soho and Clerkenwell or Barcelona’s old town.

Very subjective question I know, but how significant do you think racist intentions are compared to the many other factors? I wasn't under the impression it was one of the top two factors that pushed us towards a car centered built environment.

I think it was an enormous factor. Just google for "white flight". While the rise of the automobile was a big enabler, there were other factors like the real estate industry practicing "redlining" which prevented Black people from moving into the suburbs to follow the white people who were abandoning the inner cities.

If you don't realize just how horribly racist most Americans throughout most of the 20th century, you must not be very old. I still remember how commonplace it was in the 1980s even.

I always think when walking around the USA that one could literally insert a narrow block into the middle of even a 2-lane-each-way road and end up with similar spacing as a typical Tokyo neighborhood. Imagine how much density that would create.

This is the only way it can work. Walking makes natural sense in dense city centers, and the paths don't even have to be pretty. By all means, have ample roads and parking around the center so people can drive to it, but there's no reason people need to drive through it. Close 4 blocks, let businesses develop, then close more.

Just making the paths nice and other stuff mentioned in this article isn't enough if there's nowhere to go. A lot of the time, this effort only worsens traffic.

I live in Dallas city center and I can only think of two roads that have more than a single lane in each direction. Banning passenger vehicles may still make plenty of sense for other reasons, to reduce pollution, noise, congestion, make it safer for pedestrians. And a few streets have actually shut down to vehicle traffic in the past decade. But I don't know what you're imagining about space. The roads we have aren't going anywhere. Aside from emergency vehicles, trucks still need to get in to make deliveries, and they require more space than passenger vehicles. The intercity bus station and both metro transit transfer centers are also in the city center, so seemingly you need room for buses, which also require more space than passenger vehicles. The water and sewer mains also run under the roads and need to have some minimum circumference to allow the throughput to supply a city center.

Even if we somehow managed to eliminate roads, I'm still not sure I get what you're imagining. Are we going to tear down all of the existing buildings and replace them with buildings that have 7 meter wider bases? That would take decades and render the city mostly unusable while it was happening. There would also need to be room for trucks to bring in construction material and remove waste.