I moved from Spain to the US, and I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here.
Here are some other examples of things that I think contribute to the hostile walking experience in the US:
* Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk. Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
* Cars have much higher and stronger headlights, with the high beams often left on, and drivers are generally much less mindful of them. As a pedestrian walking at night on under-lit streets, you are constantly getting blinded.
* Tinted windows (even the mild level of tint that most cars in the US have). The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
* Often the only option to get food late at night are fast food places, which become drive-thru only after a certain time. Having to go through the drive-thru on foot is obviously a terrible experience, and they will often refuse to even serve you.
> I often find myself trying to explain to people back home just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here.
Same. I’ve lived in Los Ángeles and Amsterdam, and it is impossible to explain to my friends and family just how awful the quality of life is in LA precisely because of the difference in attitudes and priorities over cars. Perhaps some have “nicer” (aka bigger) houses in LA than they would have in Ámsterdam, but once they leave their front door everything is objectively worse
Every time a politician anywhere in the world suggests adding more freeways or more lanes to freeways, I think they should be forced to live in LA for a year and do a ~1 hour commute each way in traffic.
They need to see first hand what happens when you just add more freeways and more lanes. It's not good.
I had a conversation recently with someone lamenting that we didn't have roads like LA here in Boston. Saying their ideal road was 3 lanes, plus a bike lane, plus a bus lane in each direction. Imagine being a pedestrian trying to cross that!
I really don't understand someone who looks at that traffic disaster and wants to build the same thing here at home.
They're a car-centric person who wants the "nuisance" of bikes and busses out of their way while still pretending to have progressive values. People who only drive from garage to shopping center and back, never having to experience the dehumanizing impact of 6+ lanes affecting other transport modes.
This seems pretty counter intuitive but this is often the other way around. The safest streets in Europe are where cars, bikes and pedestrian mix together. It force focus on the driving task instead of doing something else. If you are interested, Freakonomics have an episode: "Why the U.S. so good at killing pedestrian". It's an interesting discussion with no simple answer.
It's because US streets are designed much wider than equivalent European streets. US design standards have wider LOS than Europe so they design for faster vehicle travel and higher throughput, which puts pressure on slower modes. This comes at a financial costs (better pavement, wider roads) but the US gladly pays a fortune for roads.
As an equal-parts driver, biker, e-scooter rider and pedestrian, this is horrible. Yes, you have to focus on the driving, or walking, or scooting, but you're in constant stress because you can accidentally hit someone coming from any direction. Or they can hit you.
It's far better to have separate spaces, and cross only when you really have to.
Maybe you should be stressed? The point might be that environments where you're not stressed because they lull you into a false sense of security tend to kill more pedestrians.
You're moving tons of metal at high speeds. Don't get too comfortable doing that.
Why do you assume I'm the driver in this case? I'm stressed as a pedestrian too.
You really think it's healthy to be stressed all the time?
I live in Israel and we've had pro-democracy demonstrations in a main intersection in Tel Aviv, every Saturday for the past 30 weeks. There are people and bikes all around but no cars and no motorcycles. It's ridiculous how calming it is to be on the street and not have to worry about hitting someone or getting hit.
Also, when I'm on the freeway, though I'm moving tons of metal are even higher speeds, I'm somehow less stressed. I'm alert, I'm actively driving, but less stressed - because the frequency of surprising events happening is low. In the city there are jaywalkers, kids, tiny bikes with no lights, e-scooters, buses pulling in and out of stations, gas scooters cutting you off. It's completely different.
I have also seen cars go 60+ km/h through traffic-calmed cul-de-sacs where children were playing on the street. Are you saying that only cyclists emulate Carmageddon in real life?
In that area you will find highways, surface streets, bike paths, pedestrian walkways, trams, commuter trains and other kinds of transportation in a way that comes across as elegant, at least to me.
Or maybe better the cognitive load? There are various studies that show removing white lines and navigation furniture to make junctions more of a puzzle, decreases speeds and increases attention and safety.
That's someone who's never actually had to drive in LA traffic. I only had to visit once for the experience of 3 straight hours of gridlock traffic just to get across the city to be seared into my brain.
I’ve lived in LA for five years now and lived in Boston for seven years prior. They’re both uniquely terrible.
LA’s roads are easy to imagine because it’s synonymous with huge interstates, congestion, and long commutes.
Boston is terrible because it’s layout makes zero intuitive sense and looks like spaghetti when viewed from the sky. Of course Boston predates the automobile, so I understand why.
I do enjoy the prevalence of bike culture in Boston. It’s just the right size to pedal most places and there are fairly good accomodations for cycling, like bike lanes.
But hey, at least I don’t live in Philadelphia. By far the worst driving experience each time I visit. :)
Funnily I live in LA and have a one-hour commute each way. But I drive a Vespa and am therefore limited to taking the side streets.
I don’t mind it all that much, aside from the distance. One thing that helps is that motor bikes are permitted to split lanes and thus I can flow through congested traffic quite easily. It’s quite fun and I find that it allows me to enter a flow state more readily and it takes some of the edge off of the whole traffic experience because I get to keep moving.
Try Massachusetts. You drive just as far, there are hardly any businesses to patronize on your commute (except for maybe two Dunkin Donuts), sometimes traffic is going 95 mph at 1am in the morning on Rt 128 in heavy rain, and it snows.
The reason LA doesn't have bike lanes is that LA City Councilmembers have fought back bike lanes for years. It's zero sum thinking. The Councilmembers think that making driving worse for cyclists hurts the dominant mode so hurts the most people, even though many of the arterials in LA just cannot be expanded because of existing businesses, homes, and ROWs.
I lived in a place for most of my life that refused to build freeways "because they didn't want to become like LA" meanwhile more people moved there, traffic got worse. Going "across town" about 15 miles was a burden. You hated to do it. I then moved to a town that had a few freeways and 15 miles away was considered close. The town I grew up in, finally built some cross town roads, and travel time improved.
I think you can have too many freeways, but you can definitely have to few
I think the problem with the town you grew up in is that they didn't build any good modes of transportation and not that they didn't build freeways. Sure freeways can fix the problem of people getting from point A to point B, but they're probably one of the worse ways to go about it. Street cars, bus rapid transit, metros, etc., are all better across the board even for the people who do want to drive because it allows non-drivers to get to point B without a car, thereby clearing up traffic for the drivers.
In a town that is very forward out, almost any form of public transportation is worse than cars.
And while I agree that public transportation helps. My current turn has horrible transportation abs more freeways and it is far easier to get around in than my old town.
I grew up in a similar place, which had too few freeways around it and navigating anywhere was a major headache. Now I live in a highly walkable town near a few freeways, and it’s much nicer; I can avoid driving altogether and walk/bike around town, or I can easily get to the nearby city by car. There’s a happy medium to be found.
I'd say split it half and half, 6 months LA to learn the pain of the wrong way, then 6 months in a place with proper transit like Amsterdam or Seoul, then they come back with a vision of what could be.
LA is by no means the worst that America has to offer. At least within a 1 hour radius you have a staggering population and amount of commerce available. People visiting LA from "average" places in the U.S. will note that it's really dense, about as dense as the outer boroughs of New York City. If it's "sprawling" it is not because it is uneconomical in the use of space but because the whole area that is habitable is crammed with people.
In Southern New Hampshire people drive almost as far although there is hardly anything to drive to. The confluence of Route 101 and I-93 south of Manchester is as bad as anything you'll find in a city 100 times Manchester's size leaving the question of where the hell all these cars are coming from and where they are going.
(The answer is that the population is dispersed over a large area with a hierarchical road network that, as much as possible, wants to be like your lungs. Thus you always get stuck in traffic at several bottlenecks on your drive that you can't avoid.)
Subjectively worse, not objectively worse. I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do. The only exceptions I can think of are if I were a kid in a car-centric area (strangely, the thinking in the US is usually reversed, kids supposedly need to be in the burbs), or if I was drunk. I don't often get drunk, so I'd prefer to drive for everything from minor groceries to outdoor activities ~100% of the time.
Jesus it's objectively worse. NY/Chicago/London/Paris/Tokyo you can conceivably and easily nip out to a grocer's, bodega, cafe or pub within 10 minutes of where you are. LA? Outside of certain certain pockets like DTLA, KTown, WeHo or similar walking is tough and if your friend is across town you're SoL without a car.
But I don't want to! I literally just walked to the store and it was in absoute perfect conditions - we wanted to go for a walk anyway, the weather is perfect (sunny but not hot), the store is 10min walk from my house, the neighborhood is nice and not drive-thru so there is ~0 non-local traffic. The plan was we go for a walk, and pop by a store and get one item. But as usual it never ends up being that way, so we had one paper bag of items - 6 pack of beer, some cheese, box of blueberries, nothing very heavy.
I am pretty fit, like I deadlift 280lbs :) and still walking with this stupid bag ruined the whole walk back. And it wasn't even much - if I replaced beer with food it would be like, 2-3 days worth.
I would have rather just finished the walk, then drove 3mins to the same store. In the most perfect conditions imaginable, with minimal amount of groceries. And what if it was 100F, or 32F, or raining, or I didn't want to go for a walk, or I needed to get some large items like sugar or rice or a gallon of milk or a lot of beer for a party?
Walking to a store is simply not an advantage at all. And if you go to even a poor country you can see most people agree - as soon as they can they start driving to big box stores, and small local stores die.
And regardless, even if (which I wouldn't grant) the majority would prefer to walk rather than drive, it's still SUBJECTIVE, not OBJECTIVE. A ton of people prefer to drive.
Not gonna lie, having a 10 minute walk ruined by carrying a bag home sounds like you maybe need to deadlift less and cardio more or something. Or maybe get better bags?
Walking to stores is an advantage because it allows for a density of services unavailable if parking lots are a serious consideration for businesses. I can go to my local convenience store, and my barber, and a no-waste shop, and my local bar, all in one pleasant morning… plus I don’t have to worry about a dui!
Yeah if you're going to walk with groceries, use a mesh or canvas bag with handles, or a grocery basket/cart if you're buying more than a few items. Carrying paper bags sucks because you have to hold them in your arms and support the bottom of the bag.
In many countries adults just continue to wear backpacks. One of the things I keep in my backpack is a big IKEA bag, meaning I'm pretty set for shopping on foot (or bike, which is more common for me). Medium sized purchases go in the backpack, larger things go in the IKEA bag.
I mountaineer too, it's just a chore to walk with groceries, esp. if the weather is bad and you have to do it every 3 days given how little one can carry.
I think I mentioned the drinking aspect in the original comment. I could do all of these things by car, probably faster too... except drinking. So I guess it depends on how often one drinks :)
As a mountaineer, you no doubt have a wonderfully ergonomic high volume backpack that is great for a week of shopping. Two if your diet is basic meat and veg not processed food in lots of packaging.
Same to the OP. You should own a decent feckin' shopping bag. It's basic adulting where I live. You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.
>You have observed the problem yet not doing anything about which is just really weird.
They observed the problem and simply have a different solution than you. I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.
> I'm sure there's a number of other factors they didn't mention that make it preferable to simply use their perfectly working car.
I'm sorry but when one is willing to put that much effort to try to justify using a car to avoid a 10 mn walk, that's only because one is way too lazy and privileged...
You treat the walk as the default and car as something that needs to be justified. That's BS. I think you are too privileged to live in a safe neighborhood, in good climate, to be healthy enough to walk with load, and to own a good backpack :P
To me car is the default solution, it's simply better in every way for most people. Making one's life better doesn't need to be "justified".
It is! Just like not having surgery, not using AC/heating, or not wearing glasses, etc. All those things are unnatural and some are expensive, but luckily we are not hunter-gatherers anymore ;)
The paper bags they give you are terrible, they're barely fit to walk to the car with. They always fall apart on the walk home, and the ergonomics suck too. But with any reasonable bag I find it's not a big deal.
I'm of the impression paper bags are not meant to be carried. As long as I've been alive, they always break.
I suspect they're simply supposed to be a bundling device so you can stack them for loading in one of those foldable vertical bring-your-own-grocery-cart like old ladies in urban areas use. They certainly can't carry all that crap in-hand either, but this is the only way I've seen paper-bagged groceries make it more than a block without drama.
Not particularly. I'd love to be able to walk a block down the street if all I need is a haircut and some milk. I just recognize that that isn't possible in my situation without spending a significant amount of time/energy (that I already lack) in doing so. I simply prefer that over the urban hellscape that is my local downtown (and well, the rural area where it's the worst of both worlds). It's also cheaper, so that helps.
There are other solutions to this if we don't only consider walking. e.g. public transportation. But my nearest bus stop is a quarter mile in the opposite direction. And only a quarter mile if you decide to hop the train tracks (which comes hourly, I am conveniently enough a mile from my local Amtrak); it's a half mile to do "safely".
I actually do agree that some of the tips here could improve even this short minor route I described to get to a bus, but suburbs don't exactly care much to begin with. When everything is far, everything is unwalkable, so why bother (in the minds of these small city planners).
> I just recognize that that isn't possible in my situation without spending a significant amount of time/energy
I'd argue the main reason it is isn't possible is because of poor town planning decisions made by governments over the last 50-60 years. It is still possible in many (most?) European town/cities, and is possible in the inner-city (but still pleasant and largely residential) suburb I live in, but I'd acknowledge there's far too few such suburbs in most Australian cities, and from what I've seen the US is similar.
> And what if it was 100F, or 32F, or raining, or I didn't want to go for a walk, or I needed to get some large items like sugar or rice or a gallon of milk or a lot of beer for a party?
As a New Yorker, you just described daily life here? It’s really not a big deal — things are so close you can take multiple trips if you need to. Get some canvas bags. Plus since everything is so close you end up just doing smaller trips every day or so. If the shop is longer than 10-15 minutes and I’ve got more than, say, 40 pounds of groceries I might get a car back home, but that’s a rare trip. And honestly I’ll probably just walk it back anyway.
Maybe we just have a higher tolerance for pain here — I’ve certainly had people visit who think of themselves as fit and they get gassed out by regular New York walking life.
> I’ve certainly had people visit who think of themselves as fit and they get gassed out by regular New York walking life
It's interesting how things become normal once you do it every day. I used to live in a fifth floor apartment without lift. Quite a few stairs to climb. Three things come to my mind.
a) You very quickly learn not to forget anything when leaving the house.
b) There is some perverse sense of satisfaction in having guests over and walking up the stairs together; and purposefully keeping a calm breath whilst the guests are wheezing and complaining.
c) Some tradesman was working on one of the floors. I will never forget the sight of him carrying something heavy up those stairs whilst practically breathing through the cigarette in the corner of his mouth.
For very legitimate reasons life like this is not for everybody. But I would say for able-bodied healthy people it would be good to have a bit of regular forced exercise like that.
> I will never forget the sight of him carrying something heavy up those stairs...
Oh man, absolutely. I still have a vivid memory of moving out of a 5 floor walk-up with a narrow stairwell and as I was walking back into the building out comes the guy bear hugging my Fender Rhodes electric piano. It's gotta be around 150 pounds and very bulky. He was walking like it was nothing.
You can still drive perfectly well in walkable cities.
And maybe it's just a TV trope, but do your paper bags lack handles? In Europe essentially all grocery bags have handles and are easy to carry. The amount of food you bought sounds easy to me to carry home, and I don't even lift.
It's a tradeoff - the argument is about car vs walking infrastructure, and while it's nice to have both I'd prefer to lose the latter if I had to make a choice. Driving in Amsterdam is... inconvenient. At least in central areas, I've never been far out.
They have handles, it's still just inconvenient to carry and makes a nice walk into a chore, vs driving with much more groceries per trip.
What about electric cars with nuclear power or renewables? In any case the argument is not about that. It's one thing to say "we cannot sustain the CO2 emissions / we cannot build enough highways for everyone so sorry, we cannot have some of the nice things anymore", but that's not what the above says.
It is also ok to express an opinion that car-free living is better for some people, or argue that most people prefer it, although I think that is self-evidently incorrect, cause as per IMF data I linked somewhere here, one of the first things people all over the world do when they get any richer (like, $2.5k-10k per capita income) is buy a lot of cars.
But the above is saying it's OBJECTIVELY better. Other than just being wrong, that betrays the kind of "I know exactly how everyone should live their lives, and I would make them if I could" attitude that I hate.
I agree with your general point about the romanticization of no-car life. I grew up without a car in a walkable city. It was nice but there are legitimate trade offs.
My mom used a wheelie cart to do our shopping growing up. As a kid I thought it was embarrassing but now I get it. Cargo bikes are another good option. Having to carry home groceries without some sort of cargo apparatus like that does suck, even in nice weather.
If all the externalities involved in having everyone use cars for every trip where they don't feel like walking are managed (including health impacts from pollution, sedentary lifestyles etc., time wasted sitting in rush hour traffic, dominance of cityscape by infrastructure dedicated to automobile traffic etc. etc.) then sure, driving is objectively better. I've yet to come across anywhere in the world that's true though.
I mean, this thread argues that the environment in Amsterdam/Tokyo/New York/... is "objectively better" than in LA to live in.
"sedentary lifestyles" is not a real externality and anyway is also easy to achieve with transit; "time wasted in traffic" is simply false (far more time is wasted on transit given how fast it is to drive for an average trip, and sometimes even in rush hour), "dominance of cityscape by infrastructure dedicated to automobile traffic" by itself is a subjective aesthetic preference.
Now as for the actual real externalities, I said elsewhere, it's one thing to say "most people reveal the preference to drive (and I disagree with them OR because driving is just better), however they cannot all have what they want because of pollution / global warming /...". That could be correct, although it would also imply this is a technological problem - they mostly solved pollution from cars, and if we e.g. had cheap fusion or solar energy and electric cars we could all go back to driving.
It's quite another to pretend that people need to switch to the inferior (by their own revealed preference around the world) lifestyle because it is "objectively better".
I basically waste no time at all travelling - I do it mostly by bike which is obviously beneficial health wise, and if I do take a train or bus I use the time to read etc. (plus walking to/fro stations/stops is, again, a positive use of time).
The objective downsides in the amount of infrastructure dedicated to allowing everyone to drive everywhere is surely seen in the cost of maintaining it, and the impacts it has on housing affordability etc. Not to mention the environmental damage caused.
I certainly don't want people feeling like they're being forced into making inferior choices - just that we make an effort to design our towns and cities so that the choice to walk/bike/use transit is a realistic one that compares favourably with driving.
Cycling commuting distances/speeds, especially European-style, only counts as exercise for very sedentary people. Walking is barely exercise at all.. in the same time one could drive and also do some real exercise. Reading does make transit less bad, but usually only works on a familiar (no need to check for stops), transfer-free commute that's not very crowded. Otherwise if you time overhead vs reading (I've actually done it once in a place with bad traffic and relatively good buses, sadly I had a transfer) you can maybe get 30-40% of your commute as focused reading time and driving will still be faster in most places. Interestingly I think for that, transit is actually better on long inter-city trips, like someone I know commutes from Tacoma to Seattle during rush hour, it's I think 1:10 by train with no interruptions, or a 50min drive from hell. In that case I'd prefer transit :)
I think people just don't realize on gut level how fast driving is... someone mentioned Edinburgh as a place where it would never occur to them to drive. As it happens it was 5:30pm there when I plotted a random trip out of the city center to some residential area, it was 25min in "red" traffic vs 43min by transit, not counting overheads of waiting of course - so realistically x2 faster and that's from a city center. That was also my experience almot everywhere I lived or visited... you'd look at "terrible traffic" and wince, then you look at transit directions and drive/call a cab cause it's way faster anyway :)
> Cycling commuting distances/speeds, especially European-style, only counts as exercise for very sedentary people.
Which I'd wager includes a sizeable fraction of the population. I also remember seeing a study in Germany some years ago where they found that exclusive car commuters had the highest average BMI and bike commuters the lowest. Granted, it was not a massive (ahem) difference, but definitively a few kilos…
When you live closer to grocery stores, you buy less food more often. I live two blocks away from the grocery store, I go fairly frequently, and I never have an issue with the weight I’m carrying. And I deadlift the same as you
That's because 10 minutes away is too far, that's almost a mile, and it becomes a chore.
I live a block from a store, and its much, much easier and more plesant than going to the effort of getting the car out, driving somewhere, having to find a parking spot, etc... Driving's a pain in the arse.
A decently walkable suburb/city would have a store within a block or two, maybe a five minute walk.
The US is too far gone for this to make sense. “Walking to get groceries”, I mean jeez this means something utterly different in the US vs Europe.
Here, walking to get groceries means depending on what I need, I walk down the road to get some daily fresh produce, or a few minutes more to get more variety of non perishables, cleaning products etc. It’s a lovely walk, it’s relaxing, and I come back with at most 3-4kg. I do this regularly, and I can do it on my way home when I take the metro for whatever.
In the US, it’s literally something you have to plan for. No kidding you don’t want to walk; one of the goals is to minimise time spent especially if it’s not relaxing time.
I can't speak for all people in the US but my family is not content with selection in a single store. We buy different kinds of items in different stores. And I mean big stores, with big parking lots and dozens of isles. It is also not very clear that you spend less time shopping: you cannot possibly live off 3-4kg of food for a week or two so you must shop very frequently.
If you don't understand the core differences between how to even buy shopping and the influence this has on how you live your life… it's not possible to explain that, actually yeah, it's possible to never do shopping by car, even to feed a whole family.
I am sorry, the sentence with the "buy shopping" does not make sense to me. I completely understand this arrangement, I grew up in the USSR, where people had been carrying a net bag in their pocket (advised several times in this thread), calling it "what-if" bag ("авоська") and just going to the store every day and getting whatever was sold there, thinking the idea to plan to buy the exact things you need is ridiculous.
Grew up in the city and yeah you get used to it. We had our own bags my mom sewed or mesh bags. If we bought something like beer it wasn’t in 6 packs but one or two bottles at a time. Also we had decent public transportation, we’d hop on a trolleybus (electric buses) even for a few stops if the bags got heavy.
At the same time I agree that it wasn’t fun and I didn’t enjoy it as a kid. If we could have an option to have a car, drive it and fill the trunk with groceries and drive back we would have.
It's tragically hilarious to me that the car brain imagination can only consider moving a multi tonne large dangerous vehicle around in order to simply ease the discomfort of the small bag of groceries. Most people use little wheeled carts that are light and foldable and easy to push or pull around.
Yeah, most people thru history were also subsistence farmers and it's "tragically hilarious" that "civilized brain" only considers I dunno, engineering or science or art to make a living, or whatever when you could be subsistence farming for reliable and easy to produce food.
I didn't drive until I was 29-30 and lived mostly in walkable areas so I can easily consider the alternatives. They are just, as I found out when I tried car-dependent lifestyle, inferior. One might even say, "objectively worse"...
Walking to the store is great when it’s a habit to do so every day, so you’re just picking up some fresh meat and produce for whatever dinner you’re making that night. It’s a very pleasant (and healthy) lifestyle. For trips where you need to make larger and heavier purchases, it’s also very enjoyable to bike.
I'm an anti-car urbanist, but this kind of comment makes me embarrassed to be one. Different people like different things. The fact that something is bad for the climate doesn't magically make it unpleasant for everyone. That remains true even if they accept the climate impacts.
It's true that the inevitable conclusion is that we can't rely on individual voluntary actions to solve climate change, but the obvious plan B is government regulation, not vigilantism.
From my comment: "Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. "
I just don't like the hypocrisy.
However, it's the comments like this that make me think that for any equivalent level of far-, left is worse than right. The right wants to decide how you should live your life; so does the left, but the left does it in this vindictive, holier-than-thou ninny kind of way ;)
I'm sorry this person was rude to you, but I think you're extrapolating far too much. People on the right have their own infuriating comments they make, I would hazard a guess you may not notice them because they aren't directed at you.
One I've had tossed at me during a discussion is, "if you aren't a socialist when you're 20, you have no heart, but if your still a socialist when you're 50, you have no head." This isn't "holier than thou" per say, but it serves the same rhetorical role, it's smug nonsense from someone thinking that they just know so much better than you that time's steady march will make their argument for them (and so they don't have to address what you've said or treat you ).
Frankly, I also see people using the same tropes as in your comment mischaracterize substantive points as being whining or moralizing.
I would say the problem is that as a society, we don't understand how to conduct a productive discourse. I'm pretty sure we never have and have just been muddling through for millenia.
Believe me, I'd love it if being left wing meant the people I disagreed with online weren't frequently rude or vindictive, but I'm afraid I share your experience.
>eople on the right have their own infuriating comments they make, I would hazard a guess you may not notice them because they aren't directed at you.
Based purely on forum internet discourse: when talking about "micro discussions" (a kind term for "flame war between 2-3 people that go on for dozens of comments), the most negative Left-leaning language tends to be "personal", while the most negative Right-leaning language tends to be "internal". That is to say, in very wide swaths it seems like left leaning people tend to argue in a way that attacks the character "you're being X, you lack a soul if you don't Y", etc.), while a right leaning person tends to argue from a place of authority ("I'm right", "this is the truth", "Everyone knows X"). This can mean that a right leaning person at worst can feel like a prick. But a left leaning person can feel like a nag.
It's the difference between walking past the oddly loud fellow on the street vs. walking away from the person poking you. The latter will probably stick with you longer because while the poker may have done less damage overall, they were clearly targeting you. While the loud person wasn't targeting anyone in particular, it may not have even looked in your direction.
Again, it would be fun if I never had to deal with people implying my views implied I was actually a bad person, but it's not the case. I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online.
> This can mean that a right leaning person at worst can feel like a prick. But a left leaning person can feel like a nag.
What I'm trying to tell you is, these are the same thing wrapped up packaged with different aesthetics.
This brush is just too darn broad. If you're gunnuh judge by flame wars, everyone is gunnuh come out smelling like poo.
>This brush is just too darn broad.If you're gunnuh judge by flame wars, everyone is gunnuh come out smelling like poo.
I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms. But at the same time that is unfortunately becoming more and more commonplace.
I'd need much more than 2 paragraphs if we want to fully dive into the psychology of the internet, anonymity, negativity bias, and modern discourse. Everyone does indeed smell like poo here, but the kinds of comments that lead to flame wars are rarely the perfectly civil technical answers.
>I also see this in lots of conversations that aren't political, so I think it's more of an online discourse thing. People get nasty to each other online.
It can certainly happen in places like media, yes. But oftentimes it comes from applying some political topic to what seems tame on the outside. That's how we got here, since talking about Walkability lead to talking about environmentalism. And next thing we know we have a person talking about slashing tires because a single commenter mentioned how they would have preferred using a car to carry groceries after their walk.
> I did warn beforhand. I agree judging an entire political paradigm based on its worst actors is pretty much the worst way to approach said paradigms.
Then don't do that. One person got frustrated and said something about slashing tires (and was immediately corrected by another urbanist). Don't turn that into a mountain.
With all due respect, I feel you started the molehill by replying to someone who was (also) frustrated by getting a reply about someone slashing their tires because of a small life choice (one that they DIDN'T do, in this instance. Just wished they could in the future).
I just wanted to touch into the why's and hows of the frustration. It feels like similar results, but had different causes. If you aren't interested, I apologize.
Well, from my perspective, I was trying to say it was a mole hill, and you were saying, from this angle it looks like a mountain.
I think maybe I didn't communicate tone well enough in my previous comment, I don't mean it to come off as berating you to stop or something. I was saying that, if you understand that painting with a broad brush doesn't work, I'm confused why I see a brush in your hand.
Do you not think it's likely, if left wing people changed the language they used or otherwise addressed these reasons you highlighted (or likewise if right wing people did the equivalent), that because there was still profound polarization and disagreement, people would kinda find other things to complain about?
If you accept that premise, then does it really matter what things the people who you disagree with do that grind your gears and what it is you find grating about them?
Isn't it more important to try and have a productive dialog, despite finding the people you disagree with grating?
I think almost always when there is something about the way someone expressed themselves that bothers you, it's more a reflection on your preferences than anything else, and it's best to set it aside and try to hear them out anyway. There's no obligation to do so, I'm just suggesting it's the pragmatic and productive thing to do.
> NY/Chicago/London/Paris/Tokyo you can conceivably and easily nip out to a grocer's, bodega, cafe or pub within 10 minutes of where you are.
This keeps coming up on HN but it's not as absolutist as it's made to be.
There are lots and lots of suburban places in the US where you can walk to things as you describe. NY/Chicago/London/Paris/Tokyo do not have a monopoly on walkability.
I live in very suburban (approaching on rural, but still suburban) area in the outskirts of silicon valley. Within 10 minutes I can walk to two supermarkets, several cafes and two pubs. Also to movie theaters, library, two drug stores, many restaurants, child care, a department store and many other businesses.
But unlike Manhattan, within 10 minutes (ok maybe 12) I can also walk to an open space forest where I can hike, mountain bike and go camping. Unlike in Manhattan, I can road bike many tens of miles of rural low-to-no-traffic roads out of my front door. We have many open soccer fields within easy walk (kid loves soccer so this is great).
Suburbs can be very walkable and have more variety of amenities within easy reach than a dense city.
I think people are criticizing "American suburbia", not a a truly suburban form which is more urban than a rural form and less urban than an urban form. I live in what I call a "bike suburb". While the grocery and a couple other businesses are a 7-8 min walk away on a multi use path, the rest of the town opens up in a 5 min bike. Likewise I'm a 15-20 min drive away from tons of nature, and if we do need to drive around it's not as convenient as it is in suburbia but not too difficult either.
But a lot of suburbia is completely inaccessible or hostile by foot and unbikeable. Since you're in Silicon Valley, you can probably think of tons of places like that. Mixed use zoning and infill developmental priorities are what create this urban form. This is the important bit, not squabbling over which city is better than the other.
> Since you're in Silicon Valley, you can probably think of tons of places like that.
I sort of can't, which is why I always express doubt about these suburbs where one must supposedly drive 30 minutes to the nearest store (not a quote from this thread, but one that I've seen many times on HN).
I've lived also in south San Jose, Cambpell and Cupertino. In all those I could also walk to supermarkets and many other businesses.
San Leandro, Union City, Fremont, and further East like Danville and Pleasanton can be pretty bad to walk around in. The West part of the Bay has generally been wealthier and historically had more pedestrian affordances. I'm pretty sure all of these factors go into making the Bay as a whole such an expensive and desirable place to live.
Also, when grocery shopping using a car, I can carry a shit-ton more than I can on foot, so I don't have to go shopping nearly as often. In a pedestrian-centric town, grocery shopping is a daily chore. Using my car, I only have to go once a week or so.
This is exactly why I lived in Santa Monica when I lived in LA. One of the few walkables cities in the area (not all of SaMo mind you. Just talking about the area between Ocean and say 7th or 8th)
I've visited, although didn't spend much time in the city itself. I think it's not amazing for me cause other amenities LA has are not the type of stuff I need or enjoy, and there's a huge number of people who do need and enjoy them making the place really crowded. On the other hand, Amsterdam wouldn't be my first choice for similar reason (I've visited a couple times).
If choosing between areas that either are less crowded, or have all the stuff I enjoy, I'd prefer an LA-like one to an Amsterdam-like one.
I find I'd much rather drive to the mountains, or a lake, or at least a nice big park, and recreate there. Walking to a store in Amsterdam or Munich or Vancouver or Moscow was neither much fun nor a lot of exercise.
I am not talking about spending the leisure time but the amount of movement we need every day just to keep our bodies healthy. Sitting all the time is detrimental to us.
As a European who owns both a car and a bike, regularly driving somewhere just to do a bit of walking there feels like a complete waste of resources to me. I use my car for work related travel, at distances over 5 miles or to move heavy stuff. For anything else the default choice (which includes grocery shopping) is walking or biking. Amsterdam has great bike paths, I’d probably cycle even more there.
> I find I'd much rather drive to the mountains, or a lake, or at least a nice big park, and recreate there.
This is not a sustainable solution to population level health needs, even if maybe in your particular situation you do actually get enough vacation days and free time on weekends to be able to do this (I also doubt this).
Well, a more sustainable solution is everyone exercising at home whenever they want in the way they want, or going for a run around the block. Going to the store by car + going for a run, is still faster and more convenient than walking to the store (per unit of exercise - e.g. driving to the store 10 times and running 2 miles vs walking 0.2 miles to the store).
A gym is a great example of how we tend to support parts of life communally when we can live more densely.
For me the competing requirements are space for gym equipment and space for a workshop. I could have space for both if I lived further out, but then all other aspects of life would get worse. I'd have to drive constantly, to work, to social outings, to fun weekend stuff, it'd be a drag.
As you are pointing out though, we all have our tradeoffs we make. My only counterpoint would be that most cities are doing a terrible job of offering options to people who do want the more dense, "less car" communities.
I'm not sure you noticed you actually said you'd rather have enjoyable but infrequent events in one place than basic mundane and recurring chores.
A honest, objective comparison would be between going to a store in, say, LA or Amsterdam, and going to a lake or nice big park in LA or Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, you can go to stores on foot without any issue. Not in LA.
In LA you need to drive for hours to go to any of the nice spots you listed. In Amsterdam you can walk to a nice park or a nice lake, and for the same amount of time you need to drive in LA to reach any decent spot, in Amsterdam you can actually reach at least two different countries, and by train you can reach spots like Paris.
Going to the store - I'd prefer to drive in LA on an average day of the year.
For the mid-range activities we have to compare like with like. For some low-mid range activity (like a local park) indeed, walking in Amsterdam would be more convenient. Something more remote/infrequent (e.g. a specialized gym like a climbing gym or a large pool), I'd prefer to drive rather than take transit.
As for the surrounding area it doesn't really depend on the city itself, LA is surrounded by desert and mountains, Amsterdam is in one of the most historically agriculturally productive (and so, densely populated for centuries) and flat areas in Europe. If LA was built like Amsterdam, it'd still take forever to get anywhere interesting outside of the city.
Personally I don't even like driving :) To me it's a minor annoyance, like washing the dishes. But it's just SO much more convenient, so it's worth it.
> I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do
Sure…is that because driving is inherently more convenient than walking, or because your city was designed so driving was more convenient than walking?
A thought exercice: would you enjoy living in a 3x bigger house and drive a small cart from room to room ? with a well adapted house it could be more convenient. Would it be nicer ?
I don't think this is very relevant. I would prefer to live in a 3x bigger house, but it would still be walkable.
A reverse (also not very relevant) thought experiment - would you prefer to live in one room that is office/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen, just because you don't have to walk at all, everything is so close, why sprawl? :)
European and asian cities pretty much feel like a 10x - 20x bigger house for many.
You walk down 2 blocks to get some milk and bread for the breakfast, post office is 3 blocks in the other direction, 1 block another way and you have fruits and vegetable. Basically you can treat the immediate surroundings as an extension of your house where you just "go" without a modal distinction of getting into a car, parking, back into the car, parking again.
Even taking a bus or train feels less of a discontinuation as you just walk in walk out and at no point have to switch to a "driver" mode.
I dunno, I used to feel this friction (I didn't use to drive until I was ~30), how driving is a thing and not driving is frictionless, but I think it was just psychological. It feels reverse now - the only frictionless places for ~everyone are grocery stores and such, cause they are everywhere. And maybe things you consciously live next to, like if you decide to live next to an olympic pool facility or a nightclub. Transit has pretty high fixed cost of getting anywhere, even in transit friendly placed like Munich or Moscow.. everything takes at least 30-40 minutes given to/from and wait times, any time of day. And that's if you don't have any transfers. I used to take it for granted but now when I look up transit directions it just weird to think it used to take so long and I thought it was normal.
Whereas if you drive you can choose when to go and so make it convenient - like I go to a climbing gym at 6am in winter, no traffic and less people. Also, many things you don't even need to leave the house for - even with a relatively small house (1100sqft) I have room for a weight rack and home office, no need to go to a real office or to a gym.
This is why I personally prefer biking. I'm about to bike to the climbing gym. The one I like to go to is a 15 min bike ride away, so I'm already warmed up by the time I get to the gym. Likewise I can go whenever I want to avoid crowds.
I own a car in London and there are many cases in which it's objectively superior for me to use it purely based on time savings. Generally any journey that's more than about 3-4 miles from the absolute centre of town.
It's also more comfortable, private, has AC, I don't need to wear headphones to listen to music, can carry more, etc.
It's just fundamentally better. If the UK had an equivalent of LA I'd move there in a heartbeat.
The only people I hear who are rabidly anti-car are those who ideologically prefer not to use one. They're generally not people who tried it and found it lacking.
Almost certainly autocorrect. Bilingual devices sometimes forget (or mistake) the language you’re typing in. I’m typing this on a Spanish keyboard, for example.
Reminds me of the runin I had with someone from San Rafael north of SF. They corrected me when I pronounced it as the spanish name it is. Apparently it's officially pronounced ra-fell, and they're adamant about it.
Our town is Buena Vista, the first word is pronounced "Bew-nuh" -- and it's not strictly local, horse saddles were produced here in the early 1900s until I guess sometime before WW2, and old-timers who worked horses in the surrounding states know the local pronunciation!
The conflict aversion way to pronounce it is "BV" :P
Tinted windows are such a pet peeve of mine. I get it in the tropics but in most of America the individual benefits of dark tint seem like they’d be outweighed by the collective good of better visibility through cars, enabling eye contact with drivers, etc.
The SUV craze is really to blame - in general many US states don’t allow dark tint on traditional cars but do on SUVs. And since rear windows on vans and light trucks (aka SUVs) are exempted from window tint restrictions, pull up to a typical intersection in the US and look around and you can’t see worth a damn.
Somehow it’s ok for a Subaru Crosstrek to have dark tint but not an Impreza that is the same car but lower? There are even more weird situations like the Mercedes Benz GLA compact CUV which typically has tinted windows, but not the top-of-the-line AMG trim because that one has a lowered suspension, making it a “car” instead of a “light truck”.
I was surprised by SUVs being able to have more window tint, and I looked it up, and you’re right [1]. For windshield and drive side windows it’s the same as a sedan, but for rear windows it can be darker for passenger comfort.
Apparently in Alabama at least, the manufacturer determines the designation [2]. So you might be able to call Subaru about the Impreza and have them call it “an SUV” to get that sweet rear window tint.
In most states (all?) it's illegal to have a tinted front window, yet people still have them, because it's not enforced. IMO cops should be citing people left and right for tinted windows and tinted license plate covers. You'd think they'd already be taking advantage of such an easy revenue source.
They do though. It's one of those things you'll get cited for if you're already being cited for something else, or they need a reason to pull you over to begin with (seatbelt law). See how many people complain about this on tuner forums, especially in hot/sunny places like Arizona and California.
Sometimes they'll let you tear off the tint and avoid the citation.
Technically they should be ticketing everyone that doesn't use turn signals either but there are only so many cops, so many hours in the day, and more-pressing issues to deal with (accident reports, domestic disputes, etc.).
Cops are understaffed and overworked in any major city. They have bigger fish to fry than worrying about stuff like window tint or really most traffic infractions that aren't just totally reckless driving.
Basically, if it's something that would just be a ticket and a fine, and not an arrestable offense, chances are good they have something more urgent to deal with. Even if it's something they could make an arrest for, if the prosecutor is just going to dismiss the case, why bother?
Chickens are coming home to roost after the last few years.
Perhaps, then, those officers could get safer jobs doing something else, if they are unable to perform their duties. Or perhaps it could be harder to drive around freely with and conceal a deadly weapon. We have a lot of options other than "just let people break the law, I guess".
> Nope. “Let people break the law” is the new standard.
First of all cops in America don't have to do nothing. Being robbed or murdered? Nah, let's look other way. Mass shooter on the prowl? But he can shoot at me better hide. White person in expensive car, nothing happened, nothing to see. But as soon there is money to be made through civil forfeiture, every cop is all of sudden a brave law defender. There is no money in law enforcement, but a lot in legalised theft.
> Perhaps, then, those officers could get safer jobs doing something else, if they are unable to perform their duties.
Do you have this same energy for every hazardous occupation? Like when workers protest dangerous working conditions? Do you also advocate they "could get safer jobs?"
There are many issues facing the US, but consistently unsafe working conditions doesn't seem to me to be one of them. Can you explain why you think there's widespread opposition to workplace safety in the US?
SUVs having different rules is bizarre, but I'm confused as to how this impairs your ability to make eye contact with drivers since it doesn't apply to the front windows.
So now individuals get dark tint on windshields and front side windows, which would have really stood out 40 years ago but now is just another dark window in a sea of dark automotive glass. That’s my theory anyhow.
People in this thread are really talking past each other. I've been to the nice Asian mega cities with great and clean subways and buses. And I've lived in the American suburbs. You can't make the American suburbs like the mega cities by just making them walkable.
Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
> The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
It's even worse than that. You don't know they can see you, you know they could see you but you cannot know if they do see you. That's terrible for pedestrian safety.
Adding even MORE to the insult is this part from the article: "many agencies will simply remove pedestrian facilities to reduce the cost of compliance". I see that so often: having to cross the damn intersection three times just to continue across, and all the light timings favor cars. It's a big middle finger.
I see this all the time. It makes me SO angry. They do the same thing for construction. "Oh, sorry, the bike lane is closed for the next 2 years. Sorry, sidewalk closed. Walk 10 more minutes for the next 2 years."
I live in the US in a "platinum rated" bike city (so there are a relatively high amount of bike commuters) and have gone through drive throughs on my bike a handful of times. Every time I have been served but told not to do it again.
Pedestrians are not served at drive-through windows at least in part because they are more dangerous to the workers. A driver at a drive-through window can't open their door, the window is very close to the drive-through kiosk but the kiosk is usually much higher (in a sedan) making it hard to climb out through the car window...they've also got a license plate.
During the pandemic most fast food places locked their lobbies and only did drive-through, which meant truckers couldn't get food because workers wouldn't serve them due to policies the companies refused to adjust.
I remember some police departments were volunteering to go through the drive-throughs for truckers.
The nightmare is being shot through a drive-through window and not even being able get a license plate. I've never had a car driver's license (only motorcycle) and I completely get it.
They're not staffed the same way at night as they are during the day.
As much as the political salesmen love to emphasize the differences, Soviet style bona fide government central planning and American style corporate central planning have many commonalities.
I've had some luck asking a stranger in a car to trip the sensor and then back up so I can order and walk though. Once your order is in its more work to say "no" than it is to say "yes but don't do it again"
Some cities like Portland, Oregon have made it a violation of city code to refuse to serve pedestrians and bicyclists through the Drive Through window if the lobby is closed.
There are still some businesses that violate this, but at least you can report it and they will be fined, and threatened with revocation of their business license.
Good. Let's make this federal law. These restrictions are ridiculous and we stand no chance of eliminating car culture without eliminating them. I wish I was kidding, and I wish it were just a trollish joke to say "you should be able to bike through Taco Bell at 2am", but if we're gonna eliminate car culture in the US, we can't just do it in the downtown cores of Chicago, NYC, Seattle, SF, etc. We gotta do it everywhere, and a lot of "everywhere" in the US is drive-thru this and drive-thru that, especially once you get out into the boonies (which of course need more infrastructure work to become bike friendly in their current states, but also, rural bike trails can and should exist, but there'll be little reason to use them if you can't stop anywhere along the way to take a break - and the rabbit hole continues from here)
After 9 or 10 PM that's exactly how it is here in TN, USA. Dine in is closed and the drive through won't take you on foot or on a bike. I think most franchises have a blanket policy against serving people without a car to intentionally exclude... Certain People.
But why? They would have to allow these same “Certain People” in their lobby from 7am until 9pm when their most affluent patrons are probably coming in for lunch, after soccer practice, etc. At the drive through there is barely any interaction between staff and customer much less between customers.
I would assume the homeless, certain income ranges, etc. That's the real reason to close the lobby but keep the drive through right, so people aren't hanging around in it and resting at night?
just how miserable and even humiliating the pedestrian experience is here
I ended up talking to some woman yesterday who mentioned she loved to come back to Oakland because of how walkable it is compared where she is now in the central valley. I was amused at the whole exchange because while Oakland and San Francisco do a decent job, they're by no means great.
Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk.
Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all
pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
One of the big things I noticed when comparing the pedestrian experience in Manhattan (and to a lesser extent the outer boroughs) to San Francisco is that New York lacks the curb cuts that encourage this kind of behavior. You spend a lot less time walking around parked cars or having to keep an eye out for someone who's in a hurry to exit "their" driveway.
In San Francisco, at least, there's a big tug of war about where your driveway ends and the curb begins. Suffice to say blocking the curb is one of those things that's almost never enforced.
Tokyo is very oriented towards pedestrian traffic, considering shinkansen and most rail service - yet satellite suburban sites, like Saitama, etc have tiny residential rows that literally don't fit both a car and a pedestrian. And that's where most people live. Yet Japan is highly pedestrian.
Now, South America. Most if not all urban centers of 1M are extremely well covered by bus networks. And they have to, since most of the population cannot afford a car. However, the moment you step off the old city centers, you are literally walking on the main road, sharing space with speeding cards and buses driving like maniacs. You will often find a major road has literally no sidewalk, only dirt, weeds and sewage.
Compared to those situations, the US is a walking paradise.
The problem of distance is very different from the problem of safety and confort in the US
You can find a ton of much worse examples than the US, but the US is just vastly far behind Europe (i.e. Spain, to which OP was comparing the US to).
Plus, it's worth mentioning that while Tokyo has a lot of mixed-traffic streets, the streets are small, have very low speed limits, and have strong restrictions on the size and type of car that can actually be within the city. It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
> It's less like you're walking in traffic and more like the car is intruding on a pedestrian space.
As far as I can see, this is essential to ant attempt a truly "walkable" city (assuming that is your goal). City streets designed & optimized around car usage are basically inconsistent with pedestrian spaces that really work well.
> Unpopular opinion: We (US) should stop subsidizing Europe's security
It's cheaper to subsidize European defense than to let them arm up and start fighting again. The lack of large militaries in the second half of the 20th century has lead to the longest period of peace in Europe in about 1500 years.
What would be smart, as has been shown by the invasion of Ukraine, would be to integrate the NATO supply chains more deeply (for the same reason we do multipath and redundant routing). This wouldn't threaten US jobs or safety, but instead make the whole system more resilient.
(Honestly I don't know why supply chain people don't talk to networking people and consider multipath, bufferbloat, and the like. The finance people wicked down those supply chains and have resulted in too many single points of failure.)
US is defending its interests in Europe, not Europe itself. This benefits GoldmanSacks, rather than it is for the benefit of Nathan the Romanian plumber.
Europe is the largest affluent market outside US. They’ve considered purchasing tech from China, they’considered taxing internet tech companies based on revenue instead of profit, and each time US convinced them not to.
Without really reading the article, I think maybe the parent's point is that the US basically pays for large portions of defense and security of Europe, especially when it comes to the need for blue water navies to protect trade. That frees up a lot of time, money, and manpower for them to spend on not defense, and spend instead on infrastructure and nice things. It's also nice that another effect Pax Americana has contributed to is that the majority of Europe has stopped starting progress-destroying wars with each other every two decades.
The US doesn't get that benefit as the self-employed enforcer, and I'm sure we're all aware of how insanely massive the defense budget is.
So the argument is actually that the US can't have livable cities because they spend all that money defending Europe? Because of the implicit assumption that European-style cities are more expensive in upkeep than current US cities?
I think the assumption is more that us Europeans can afford such decadent, livable cities because we don’t need to spend as much money on defense (?!) So car-oriented hellscapes are somehow the default, "normal" situation, because of course what you have accustomed to feels subjectively normal to you! Then Europe is some sort of a fairy-tale Disneyland that doesn’t need to face the Realities thanks to the US. Anyway, a nice claim but building and maintaining all that sprawling infrastructure is actually vastly more expensive than a denser, more sustainable urban fabric…
It can be both that in America we value sprawl and car-centered culture at great cost to ourselves, and that maybe it'd be nice if we pulled back on being world police a bit and invested more financially back at home. Maybe we could use all that money being spent on destroyers and forward bases to tear down all the stroads in the country and replace them with walkable mixed-use developments connected by rail.
In real life though, it's never that simple. Those destroyers and bases are being used for something even if it's stupid, and if they are no longer there, then things may change in unexpected ways.
Correct. People in these EU countries never understand how large the US is. it has the 3rd highest population but is almost 10 times less dense than Japan, 9 times less dense than the UK. There's so much dang land here. And until modern industrialism so much of it sucks to build a proper community around. mountainous, extreme weather, disaster prone, simply infertile. Much of western US doesn't have hundreds of miles of view into the horizon; you're going to get cut off maybe 5, 10 miles off by some mountain (or you live in a valley). It's very hard to "just build denser cities" in the same way the EU could.
That's what makes China really impressive (losgistically speaking). it's really large AND very dense population wise (I don't know about the land quality).
I just spent the last 2 months i Europe and on many side streets there is no place to safely stop a car which means pulling into the sidewalk is the only option. So I frequently had to step into the street to walk around a stopped delivery van or similar.
You're probably not supposed to stop a car in those places, and when you do, you're supposed to stop on the road, never on the sidewalk. Steep fines for that in Belgium at least, though the odds of getting caught are slim.
It's illegal in the US to block the sidewalk with a car and it's one of the few things cities will actually enforce aggressively -- if they don't, they can be sued for discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
At least in San Francsico this is very rarely enforced. What I've seen professionally and personally is that cities will ticket the easy stuff. Street cleaning is at the top of that list followed by time-based red zones.
I’ve never heard the experience described as “humiliating,” which is incredibly surprising because just seeing that written out (and your thoughtful elaboration) made a lot of things click into place for me.
Actually, the tinted windows worry me because I don't know whether the drivers do see me. Vanishingly few drivers would deliberately run over a pedestrian, but plenty are distracted or otherwise inattentive.
It is illegal in most places to park a car on the sidewalk.
I don't know of anyone, at least the big chains, that will serve a pedestrian in a drive thru. If you live in a more walkable part of town there is usually an all night diner.
>If you live in a more walkable part of town there is usually an all night diner.
Oh I wish. On the contrary, it feels most everything closes around 9pm here and it hurts as a night owl. Heck, so many cafes seem to close around 6-7pm.
This lens is underutilized in the discourse, but people feel it acutely. Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there. See also: rail slow zones, buses that shimmy and rattle violently on imperfect pavement, how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light. If you’ve never seen good, dignified implementation of walking and transit then a lot of this seems inherent & car culture seems synonymous with dignity. Short of tickets to Amsterdam for everyone, I don’t know how to fix it.
> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.
I grew up in close contact with a large urban poor population and I think the view of bikes was the exact opposite of this. Biking in the city is considered the purview of affluent white people
I grew up in a low income, immigrant suburb and the poor rode bikes. They didn't wear bike kit and they had crappy mountain bikes with franken parts, not an 11 speed electronic shift bike. Often they either couldn't afford a car or the family only had enough money for 1 car, which in patriarchal immigrant households went to mom and the kids she drove around while dad biked to his back of house or construction job.
in my local facebook bike-to-work group i often comment about Schrödinger's cyclist: "too poor to have a car" according to some haters, and at the same time "too rich to be in a hurry" (because motorists have a real job they're driving to) according to others
I've had multiple professional-managerial friends tell me they personally won't bike because that's something they left behind in their childhood or broke-student days. It's beneath them now. But you're right, people also complain about bike infrastructure projects taking space from working-class drivers to benefit white yuppies.
We see this often with urbanist topics. New multifamily construction is gentrification and colonization if you lean left, full of crime and a threat to our schools if you lean right. The only widespread agreement is that it represents the Other. The stranglehold of postwar suburban car culture on the American psyche is self-reinforcing at this point.
Why? It's the basis of WW2. Their raison d'etre are the other side, both enflaming each other, giving a scapegoat and a simplistic good/evil worldview.
The chart of income vs percent who commute by bike is u-shaped but with a higher left side. Rich people bike more than middle class people but poor people bike more than either the rich or middle class. People who are on the right half of the distribution think biking is affluent-coded because they only see the right tail where it curves up and they don't know anyone on the left side of the distribution where the gradient goes the other way.
I ride my carbon fiber road bike down the bike trail in the morning; when I drive home after a night of entertainment, I see laborers riding their bikes in the busy street to get home after a long day of work. I feel the irony deeply.
We should improve society somewhat.
Yet you participate in society.
Moving the poor to the suburbs was one of the intended consequences of cleaning up the cities where now only affluent white people own bikes.
I'm not joking. Cities tore down their tenement housing "projects" because of the rampant amounts of crime, and the residents went to the suburbs to live in Section 8 private housing. It's one of the reasons (there were many) that violent crime decreased so sharply beginning in the 1990s: the criminals were more spread out, diffusing much of the network effect.
In some way it makes sense. The poor are driven by high property prices to live far away. The more affluent can choose to buy property in the heart of the city and use bikes in the city.
I think a lot of people are overgeneralizing the dynamics of urban poverty from what they have observed in the last decade of home ownership trends, but affluent white flight from cities only really ended in the mid-00s-2010s (for some cities) and there are plenty of significant poor populations near urban cores able to remain because it's either where section 8 housing was built or by rent control.
They just take public transit or walk. Not biking.
You know how long the waitlist is for section 8 is, in say, New York? All poor people don’t just go out and ask for section 8 or rent stabilized apartments and instantly get them.
I think I likely know more about urban poverty than you do. It is incredibly hard to get a section 8 apartment, especially if you aren't a family, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that in urban cores as section 8 contracts are being shifted towards outlying areas.
Nonetheless, there are lots of people in urban areas living in section 8 housing and it is a substantial part of the story around urban poverty and how people still afford to live in urban cores.
I think it depends; biking because you need to and biking for fun look very different. IME of Phoenix you could have the cyclist doing training routes in their kit and the crackhead strapped with bags of their stuff pass by on the same street.
I don’t think anyone with financial burdens is spending $500 on a bike and $150 on a kit. And if they are that’s more of a mental issue than a financial one
Not very relevant but I just thought it was funny how it's obvious that you don't do cycling when those are the prices you came up with as an example :)
Walk behind restaurants in many US cities and you'll see the cheap mountain bikes that the lower-paid kitchen staff (mostly immigrants) rode to work. This is particularly common in the SF Bay Area.
(I am in favor of improving cycling infrastructure for everyone regardless of income level.)
This isn't an immutable law of the universe. It just demonstrates that there is ridiculous demand for walkable, pedestrian-friendly cities, and, predictably and demonstrably if you've ever been to any city council meeting ever, not nearly enough supply. Everyone always says "not in MY back yard!" and then complains that downtowns are expensive. You cannot have it both ways.
I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes. The balance of walking, subways, busses, taxis and delivery trucks had worked pretty well. Bicyclists introduced the concept of failing to yield, then acting indignant and entitled.
> I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes.
A car driver, a cyclist and a pedestrian walk into a café and order ten cream cakes. When the waitress places them on their table the car driver grabs nine of them and scoffs them in his face, then he leans over to the pedestrian and whispers: “don’t let the cyclist take your one”.
The problem here is not the cyclist -- though that's for sure a dick move -- but the lack of proper space for cyclists to exist. There'll be seventy-two lanes for cars, and maybe one cycle lane which'll end up occupied by parked cars anyways.
e: Actually, not going to get into it but c'mon - cars kill pedestrians in a way that bikes rarely do and removing the cars from your NY neighborhood would have an obviously better impact on pedestrians compared to the bikes.
As a New Yorker, with cars on the road I have a reasonable expectation of where they might be coming from or what direction they're headed (ie, they're following traffic laws). With bikes, they can (and do!) come from any direction, on the sidewalk, riding the wrong way on the road, wrong way in the bike lanes, etc. These bikes could be considered as motorcycles (ebike designation is a legal one), they often go 20mph or faster by delivery drivers with little consideration of pedestrian safety, and you really don't know where or how you might encounter one so your head needs to be on swivel as pedestrian in NYC.
That said, I'm still pro-bike and acknowledge that cars are much more dangerous for pedestrians, just I'd like to see the delivery bike / ebike problems fixed.
I think with e-bikes we've entered a new equilibrium that will take some time to shake out. It used to be that the fastest bikers on the road were usually the most experienced, this is no longer the case and as a street biker I have noticed it causing more danger.
Where I live e-bikes haven't caught up yet. I need to be mindful of that people get scared of me biking fast close to them on the sidewalk, even though I'm experienced and know that there's no danger. A bike without motors is enough steerable that it doesn't pose any real danger for anyone imho.
Cyclists in NYC are positive menace. They don’t need to be but they choose go the wrong way down one way streets, routinely ignore all traffic signals, ride on busy sidewalks and eschew bike lanes to weave in and out of heavy traffic. Well under 50% wear helmets.
As a pedestrian in NYC I feel far more endangered by bikes than I do by automobiles. There is room for cyclists, but there has got to be some compliance with rules.
This is the exact opposite of what the article is saying. When somebody is deciding whether to walk or drive to their destination, they don't pull up a scientific journal and consult the latest studies, they think about whether it feels safe and dignified. If you ignore the perceived threat of cyclists whizzing every which way while ignoring all traffic laws, you'll find fewer people choosing to walk and have no idea why.
That isn't why it's a bad idea at all; people don't walk and instead drive because walking "feels" unsafe. Legislate changes to make walking "feel" safer and people will walk instead of drive, and then will be safer because the changes will be things like separated walkways from cars, more guarded pedestrian crossings, road design which slows traffic, and more people walking will mean fewer cars on the road.
But bikers are not a large reason people aren't pedestrians.
I agree that a certain level of abstraction 'feel' is important, but we shouldn't legislate by 'feel' about how people 'feel' about bikes, that is one level of 'feel' too many.
> But bikers are not a large reason people aren't pedestrians.
They are a significant piece of the reason in NYC, although car-centric road design is a larger piece.
You and several other commenters continue to ignore people pointing out seriously problems that are localized in NYC by quoting stats that are for the entire country.
And that risk is mitigated by traffic rules, separation of pedestrian v. vehicular traffic, etc. That goes out the window when you have a category of vehicles that routinely ignores those mitigations.
I don’t see too many cars mounting sidewalks as I do bikes and scooters do (daily occurrence, not to mention 220+ pound guys who ride around on cheap underpowered scooters in the street), but yeah anecdotal data.
Helmets don’t help - cycle helmet is rated to save you from a fall or from hitting a tree. It’s basically useless when hitting a vehicle, and that’s 95% of cyclist deaths. You’d have to wear a full motorcycle helmet.
> weave in and out of heavy traffic
I’ve seen that too. But I’ve never seen it happen in an area with segregated cycle way.
1) I certainly don’t want to die. I also simply don’t want to get hit.
2) Bicycle/pedestrian are under reported.
3) I am specifically referring to my experience in Manhattan. In large portions of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx I think my attitude would be different.
(Also thanks for the link - poking around the DOT site they have some great information. Surprised to see how many pedestrian fatalities involved alcohol — on the part of the pedestrian!)
One is not a consequence of the other. However, the first is an observation in support of the idea that in general many cyclists eschew rules including those that exist for their own safety.
I don’t think helmets make you any safer on a bike. At least now to a relevant degree.
I remember reading that it actively makes you less safe because people wearing a helmet trust it to protect them, when in reality, basically any collision with a car will crush them.
> basically any collision with a car will crush the
Orrery, bicycle helmet only protects you from hitting the ground /a tree at normal cycling speeds. It does not help you if you hit a car at speed.
NYC bike messengers. And rollerbladers. Not sure how it is now, but in the late 90's they were exactly as the other poster described. Fail to yield, swerving in front of buses and flipping off the drivers if they honked. Utter contempt for everyone else. I was in far more danger of getting injured by them than any vehicle, and this was Manhattan traffic.
Plenty of stories of grandmas getting knocked down by rollers and bikers in Central Park back then too.
Honking within urban areas is forbidden unless used to prevent immediate danger (well, in France anyway).
Honking for "educational purpose", ie to yell at someone, is a major nuisance. Every honk annoys dozens of people around the driver, wakes up babies and so on.
> The woman at the center of that case, Helen D. Immelt, had been raising chickens in Snohomish County, Wash., apparently in violation of her local homeowners association covenants. A neighbor complained, and Ms. Immelt, according to court documents, drove over at 6 a.m. and applied some free-speech payback.
The Pacific Northwest has always had a libertarian streak, I doubt this would be ruled permissible in other states.
It's cultural. In India and other places in Asia, honking is just to say "hey, I'm here, did you see me?" and prevent an accident, but it happens so frequently that sitting in traffic is a cacaphony of honking at all times. In (my part of) the US, honking is to express displeasure at whatever it is the other driver did, and is infrequent. In other places, they might as well not install a horn, because it never gets used.
It's used much the same in NYC and some other than areas. A quick tap to say "hey I'm here and I'm doing something" like changing lanes or pulling out of traffic
Aside: I really wish cars had two different horns. A nice little boop horn, to say "hey I'm here" or "lights green buddy" and then the big honking thing that says "you nearly hit me by rolling through that stop sign, pay better attention"
If you want to expand your mind, travel to south east Asia or India for a bit and see a different way of how billions of people live and drive every day.
I've done it. I've got a little loud speaker that plays a soft awooga sound when I press a button, but it would be nice to have a factory option, or even a standard
Statistics are not a good indicator either because most events never get recorded. Nobody keeps statistics on how often cyclists whiz within inches of pedestrians on the sidewalk, scrape by people, or knock people over but they get right back up again with a few bruises. It doesn't get recorded unless the police get involved or somebody goes to the hospital, both of which are pretty rare. Believing you understand what's going on just by looking at statistics is terribly naive.
The stats dont record whose at fault in NYC, nor do they record when car drivers and pedestrians have to avoid dangerous situations caused by bikers and people on scooters.
I don't think you've been to NYC in the last 5 years or so if you think that bikers aren't routinely failing to yield to pedestrians. The worst and most dangerous culprits are the people whizzing around on e-bikes with a complete disregard for pedestrian safety or traffic laws.
The drivers in NYC are comparatively safe. They drive relatively slowly (compared to other parts of the country), pay attention to pedestrians, and obey traffic lights and signs.
Even per capita of bike riding vs. car riding, the deaths from drivers are disproportionate.
> bikers aren't routinely failing to yield to pedestrians
I didn't say that, I think it is true. That said, I also think pedestrians sometimes have an expectation that a biker would yield in a place where they wouldn't even try with a car (ie. crossing the road between two vehicles into the bike lane).
This is what you said, and what I am responding to.
Also, I would suggest that deaths from drivers are probably only higher because the probability of a collision being fatal is a lot higher when one party in the collision is 2 tons, and that the fatality rate is not a good proxy for the rate of total accidents (even the rate of total accidents where someone ends up in a hospital). I have not seen a credible measurement for that, but I would expect from what I have seen in my 6 years living in Manhattan that the accident rate with bikes is a lot higher than it is with cars, and that so is the rate of injuries. As a pedestrian, my chance of getting killed in a traffic accident are so astronomically low that I actually care a lot more about my probability of being injured than my probability of being killed.
Did you read the comment you replied to? I will say it again: there were 300 pedestrian injuries caused by bikes and 10,000 caused by cars in NYC in 2017. Click on the link.
I did read it. To spell it out for you: Looking at the official records (which the NYT did - I did read the thing you cited) will severely underreport bike-pedestrian collisions and the resulting injuries because almost all of them are not handled through official accident reporting channels, so they don't get counted.
Like I said again, I have yet to see a credible study counting non-fatal injuries from bikes in the city. Someone could do this, for example, by randomly sampling ER patients to see how many were involved in bicycle-pedestrian crashes, but nobody has.
Also, that NYT article is almost a pro-bike op-ed in its tone, and I would suggest finding sources that at least sound a little more neutral on your issues of choice.
I will tell you who is entitled, driver of a 20 ton construction truck that drove over pedestrian area, where children play, to beat traffic. This was on pavement, few meters from the front door of my house.
It's amazing how you post this and a bunch of cyclists come out, elbowing each other aside to be the first to act out their most obnoxious stereotypes. "Yeah, we bomb down the sidewalks at 30 and categorically refuse to yield to pedestrians while shouting 'Share the road!' at anyone using an engine, and you should be grateful we didn't get in an SUV and plow through a daycare center!"
Meanwhile hundreds of people per year are being killed by NYC's toxic car culture. It would be interesting to see a per-mile comparison, but ebikes are looking a helluva lot safer by comparison.
"Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light"
What is the reason for this? I see it all the time in metro areas, and it always blows my mind that traffic lights aren't synced with the tram schedules.
Sometimes I suspect that there is signaling going on that helps the traffic signals to favor the light rail train here. Then, sometimes, I suspect that there is not.
> how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light
There are safety and scheduling reasons for this. They are not merely trying to snub riders. For example, the light rail trains here have a standard for how long they open their doors at each station. It's something like 14 seconds. A vehicle with open doors will also allow passengers to disembark; it's a two-way passage. So should they sit in the station with closed doors, or push off a few yards down to the intersection? Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green. It seems weird to imagine a train that lingers at the station as if it's boarding but it's not, it's really waiting for the light to change, and then it will pounce on the opportunity. That's less than predictable behavior, as far as other motorists are concerned.
Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early. We're also reminded that if we miss this one, another one is on the way. Passengers need not inherit that toxic road rage.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. The space is for drivers. The rules governing the space are tuned for the predictability and convenience of drivers. The light rail is just a slower, less maneuverable, very timidly driven car that we're all sharing.
It wasn't like that in The Netherlands. Urban spaces where the LRVs operate have few cars and fewer traffic lights. The train moves like it means business and anything in its way scatters. As a passenger, it feels like you & your journey matter. On Muni it's like you're in a DMV waiting room.
Well, I suppose if you want to seize on one reason out of several, then I suppose you win. I could've easily have said that pedestrians also expect the same sort of behavior at a red/green light.
> Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early.
For reference, In the Netherlands you only strictly need to be at the stop 30 seconds before departure, as that is when the doors close in preparation for departure.
> Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green.
Why in the hell would drivers need to know that? Leave the train with the doors open at the station to allow any late comers to board. When the track clears start the traffic light cycle to stop car traffic, close the train doors and depart. The drivers see a red light and hopefully know to stop, whether or not they can see a train waiting.
That's nothing compared to Tokyo and Osaka. The train arrives within 20 seconds of its scheduled time, the doors open for about 10 seconds, and 3 seconds after the doors close the train starts moving again.
This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful. I walked to and from the conference center every day, took the metro a few times, got to ride the high-speed rail from the station that's literally integrated right into Schipol airport, and witnessed more bikers than I've ever seen in one place. All of this while the city and its infrastructure was clean, quiet, safe, and beautiful.
Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars.
I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.
I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.
The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.
I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side.
I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful:
1. Take classes part time (doing this)
2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work
3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field
Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better.
For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.
Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.
My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat.
Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends.
Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough.
I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on.
I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing.
It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.
It's so strange because it isn't that people are flooding into cities and bringing their car fixation with them. As a rural/suburban person, nobody I know from here drives when they're traveling in a city because the driving experience is so miserably bad compared to driving in the country. It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.
> It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.
Some even manage to enjoy it. I did not believe anyone actually wanted, let alone enjoyed the misery of modernity until I experienced one such person firsthand. It blowed my mind, I was in shock for a straight day. The guy genuinely "liked" the new Transformers movie (which was beyond awful), "enjoyed" fast food, and "liked" the big car-honk-filled city center and CO2-infested loud mall. I'm yet to see a more oversocialized person. When I think of words 'deranged' and 'insane', no criminal but this guy appears in my mind's eye.
Respectfully, who made you the arbiter of taste? Are people not allowed to like movies and foods and environments that you don't? Isn't it great that the world has something for everyone?
You're right, my comment reads like I was stating merely my taste from your perspective and mine. My mistake. To clarify, I don't buy subjectivism and believe that there's an universal one moral truth independent of human minds. I believe this truth says humans ought not live in a technological world, for that they're not designed for it, and that one who have successfully (!) adapted to technological life as to not feel any distress and even enjoy it must be one with a malformed psyche, one far from his original nature and thus morally bad.
Indeed from your perspective this is still merely my "taste", my point is that this is truth independent of my existence from mine and apparently many agree.
This argument becomes recursive almost immediately. He criticizes their opinion; you criticize his opinion of their opinion; he criticizes your opinion of his opinion of their opinion, and so forth.
From an American perspective it could be. Amsterdam is the largest city in our country and it still pulls together walking, cycling and public transport in a way that doesn’t suck. Of course smaller towns have it easier in some ways because of the way Dutch towns are historically configured. What makes the large cities interesting is that they are somewhat metropolitan and still have the Dutch vibe.
Driving in Amsterdam sucks, parking costs you your leg per five minutes, bikes are very agressive, pedestrians fill the roads because there is more tourism than the city was designed for.
Its one of the worst places in NL I've been, from a driving perspective.
That's the point. Maintaining car infra is expensive, so owning a car should be expensive and discouraged. That's why there using a car to get to a destination usually is much slower compared to a bike. Cars are still allowed for the people that either really need them or don't need them but are willing to pay extra
But I agree that Utrecht is a better city bc of less tourists and even more bike infra
Of course, and I admire that, but its therefore not a good example of a city where cars, pedestrians and bikes coexist (because its not meant to be one)
Why? All of them coexist and most efficient ones get preferential treatment, for example priority on intersections/semaphores, more direct/shorter paths for mass transit and bikes
What's not that good is the train quality/frequency/price, for this Switzerland is much better (pricey but good quality and frequent), but NL is still ahead of many countries even in this regard
Maastricht, to give one example, is considerably nicer for walking and cycling. Remember GP isn't saying it's absolutely bad for walking and cycling, just that Amsterdam isn't great by NL standards. And it's not.
Amsterdam may not be the best existing public transit (+cycling friendly), but it is the most visited city in the NL - and it is good enough at it - that it is understandable how it becomes the standard for how a (large) city can be decent to non-drivers
I myself have never been to any other places in the NL and use Amsterdam as an anecdotal example of how things can be good
(Also of how bikes with peda- instead of handgrip-breakes designed for tall people are tricky for us shorter folk)
I imagine more people who've traveled, and are not from the Netherlands, are likely to have been to Amsterdam than to Maastricht, meaning it's easier to index on how Amsterdam functions than Maastricht for discussion.
> From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.
That doesn't have data. It doesn't even have good summations.
How is "cycling" defined? For pleasure or for day-to-day travel? How was the data collected? How did they include/ account for the unemployed 20-somethings in poor suburbs who aren't biking to work, aren't "cycling" in events, aren't carrying the family groceries home in a basket, but are on bikes constantly going between houses (and maybe a gas station food mart)?
1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.
2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.
It's a flywheel either way.
Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.
But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.
You don’t know that. You would have to run the experiment - spend equal amount of money on infrastructure for bikes and for cars. Then see.
Most British cities are tiny, you can cross most of them on an e-bike in like 15 to 30 minutes. Except London of course. But there is usually no safe way to cross them.
When I ask people in London, why are your not cycling, 95% say they are afraid of getting hit by a car. They are wrong - they will be killed by a truck. Most cyclists in London due to 4 axle construction trucks. I have seen one of the bastards illegally drive into a cycle lane, then onto a pavement where women walk with kids, and drive on that pavement to get around traffic. I have seen a BMW stuck on a bend in a segregated cycle way at Tower of London. I’ve seen a wolksvagen in a cycle lane upside down.
Go to a rich and cycling safe are of London like hackney, there are plenty of bikes. Go to an area with dangerous roads, like Surrey, no bikes
We spend insane amount of money on car infra. We just built a new tonnes in east London, the only way to cross the river for miles, and you can only cross in a car.
Here's a great link: "Vehicle ownership starts to grow quickly when countries reach income of
about 2,500 per capita in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms. Rapid growth
continues until income per capita reaches about 10,000. Saturation level is at
about 850 vehicles per 1,000 people."
The limiting factor for having tons of cars is income.
But you're assuming that people want to own cars to make short journeys.
When I lived in Edinburgh, I had a car but I would never use it within the city or anywhere that I could get to on a train/bus. This attitude was pretty common among my entire social circle.
Reading all your comments in this thread felt surreal to me. I guess I'm in an anti-car bubble, because I've never met anyone with your opinion before.
How short is short? Edinburgh looks pretty small. I just plotted a route from a random point in the center to a place called Bonaly that looks like a residential area, 5 miles away. Two observations is that traffic is pretty bad (red), so it looks like people drive even though transit is available, probably confirming my prior observation that people will choose to drive until driving capacity is used up or over-used then switch to other modes. 2nd is that transit will take 43 minutes vs 25mins of driving (and that doesn't account for waiting time, nobody has exactly perfect timing), so driving is still faster :)
As for cars it's actually one of the biggest things I changed my mind on in my life. I used to be anti-car and always lived in walkable areas till my mid/late twenties. Then I actually tried driving and living in non walkable areas and I couldn't believe how wrong I was :) Especially when I go back to visit walkable areas and it's annoying and getting anywhere takes forever, something I never noticed when I lived there because it was the default.
Countries at "income of about 2,500 per capita" are not exactly known for their car infrastructure. Moreover, by necessity with low car ownership they cannot have car-centric cities - most people don't have cars. I mean have you been to Hanoi or Belize City, or some place similar?
Yet, despite crappy roads, short distances and chaotic traffic (and good climate, in many cases), people get cars as soon as they can afford them - instead of staying on bikes and mopeds that they are already otherwise using. Until, if IMF is to be believed, they reach 0.85 cars per person.
Those places are freaking deathtraps. It's basically what the article is talking about! Those cities are _extremely_ anti-pedestrian. They may not be car-centric, but they are definitely moped centric.
There are usually no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are full of parked mopeds or you'll be walking along and the sidewalk will just end abruptly.
You are usually forced to walk along the road. Nobody will stop when you're crossing the road, they just weave.
A quick Google search shows that Vietnam has 29.81 per 100,000 of population deaths from traffic accidents.
These places are awful examples of safe bike/pedestrian cites. Of course people prefer cars there, it's much safer!
Well they don't have much car infrastructure either, and operating a car there is much less convenient than a moped or a bicycle, not to mention extremely expensive relative to income. Plus the car is not necessary by definition since most people don't have one. So it's not really massive spending on car infrastructure, or distances created by car-centric lifestyle that's driving the adoption. It really feels like moving the goalposts, these cities are more convenient for bikes and mopeds than cars by any standard (faster, much cheaper, easier to park etc.). I don't think safety is a primary driver either...
Or you can also just take middle-income cities, like Moscow. It wasn't built with many cars in mind, and there's severe lack of parking in particular. People used to have fistfights over public parking spots when I was a kid :) Yet, they still buy cars until traffic becomes completely unreasonable, it used to be that transit across the city (where I was going) tool ~1 hour, and my co-worker who drove a similar route would take 2 hours thru traffic, and he would still drive. Obviously so did all those other suckers stuck in traffic, that's how much they wanted to drive :)
> Well they don't have much car infrastructure either
They have hundreds of motorways -> roads exclusively for car use. They have zero cycle ways. Like this is not subjective, look at the amount of money spent on ‘active travel’ anywhere, it is never even 5% of road budget.
> Moscow
I’ve cycled in Russia. Drivers stick their hand out of the window to yank on the steering or push you. There is zero tolerance for cyclists.
We are talking about in-the-city commuting. The local roads/streets at some stage of poverty are full of mopeds and bicycles, with very few cars. When people have no choice. When they have a choice, they could get better bicycles or mopeds. Instead they get more cars, before these cars are even convenient to use (e.g. you may get stuck behind a bicycle with a produce cart for 10 minutes at 5mph as mopeds stream around both of you).
These cities start out in no way optimized for cars, basically by definition (nobody has cars). The reasons cars do better in them too, before the govt responds with more car infrastructure, is because cars are just simply better in terms of convenience. If people wanted to continue cycling after they get more rich, the govt could have built infrastructure for that much cheaper and easier.
Also btw, no matter what, bicycling is still marginal in most climates and for many people who are not fit. The real thing to discuss is transit... many of the middle-income and even poor cities have great transit, but people don't clog the transit and then grudgingly switch to driving, it's the other way around :)
> It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.
This is literally a tautology. "People find driving more convenient, except when driving is less convenient".
> But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses.
Price signals are real. The fact that millions of people choose to pay large amounts of money to live in big cities and not drive instead of moving out to the sticks is proof that it is an extremely desirable lifestyle for a large fraction of the population.
It's not. First, there's the "afford" bit, that is the key. And second obviously it's a tradeoff based on infrastructure available, but my point is unless you outright restrict it, everywhere in the world people will fill up as much driving/parking capacity as available, then a bit more, and only then consider other options. Hence gridlock and expensive/scarce/both parking in all of the "big cities".
That is not true for biking or transit - nowhere in the world, that I'm aware of, do people clog the bike lanes or trains until they are barely usable, then switch grudgingly to other modes of transportation.
People in big cities still drive. I mean, LA discussed here is a big car-centric city, why does this have to be about living in the sticks?
> It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one
Indeed. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. are all among the countries with the highest vehicles per capita in the world (it's not as much as in the US, but then in the US people can drive starting at 16 years old, so it messes the stats quite a bit).
>Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?”
I agree with the overall point that people don't want to cycle because the experience sucks, but your description feels like an unnecessarily inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience". Nobody says "a lot of the anti-cheap laptop stance comes down to, "what am I, poor?".
Anecdote time. Ten years ago I (Mexican, living in Mexico, a bit "white-er" than the average Mexican skin color) worked for a Silicon Valley startup with HQs in Mountain View. One time I was visiting said HQ, I met several people, I got to talk with one of them (Chinese/Asiatic looking woman) about how I was moving while I was there, and where was I staying (she didn't know where I was from).
At some point I told her that I hadn't rented a car, so I was basically walking. And because I wanted to go to some outlet, I was thinking on taking the bus. Her comment was: "Don't take the bus, that's for Mexicans!", I had to swallow my surprise and keep a poker face, just answering something along the lines of "ooh yeah? thanks for the advice".
I guess the stigma that only poor people (And we Mexicans are poor you know haha) take the bus is pretty alive in some parts of the US.
The one time I had visited and hadto travel longer distance in the US I took a greyhound and boy, it was a interesting experience. Back home, going by bus was the norm but in the US it's... Really different.
Greyhound is a really bad bus operator, and they are the only option for a lot of routes. But on more competitive routes like NYC to Maine or NYC to upstate cities you get much better operators. I’ve had very positive experiences riding on those corridors with OurBus and Concorde Coach Lines. Clean seats, quiet passengers and on time departure. So it’s not bad everywhere in the US.
Surprisingly, more people are opting for Greyhound because of the horrors of flying since COVID-19.
Greyhound is also, in my mind, significantly different than regional public transit. I consider it more like an airline for poor people. Public transit, definitely there are poor people using it, and there are also commuters, especially on the Express lines, which have a premium fare and operate exclusively during office-commute hours. (R.I.P.)
> Surprisingly, more people are opting for Greyhound because of the horrors of flying since COVID-19.
Are we talking during the covid era (eg. 2020-2022), or the post-covid era (2023+)? I can understand how flying during the covid era sucked with mandatory masks and PCR tests, but my flights in 2023 were all pleasant. All the covid protocols were lifted, and I didn't experience any long lines at check-in or at customs/passport/security lines.
Same for me. I visited my company's US branch in San Francisco (I work in Copenhagen) and the colleagues there were horrified that I was planning to walk to a nearby Best Buy (~10 minutes walk). They didn't actually let me do it — they insisted to give me a car ride until I relented.
Asian Americans lump together homeland countries of over half the world’s population.
The waves of immigration also look different demographically; the people who came over to build the railroads and staff laundromats, restaurants and nail salons are very different from the tech worker on H1B. (And the latter often look down on the former.)
> I guess the stigma that only poor people (And we Mexicans are poor you know haha) take the bus is pretty alive in some parts of the US.
Because it's mostly true.
It's not _always_ true and we shouldn't hold prejudices, but it would be just as wrong (though not as un-PC) to claim that public transit was used equally across income levels, racial/ ethnic checkboxes, etc.
"Americans who are lower-income, black or Hispanic, immigrants or under 50 are especially likely to use public transportation on a regular basis, Pew Research Center data show."
The bigger problem for most folks (not your racist co-worker) is the crime, drug use and general anti-social behavior on public transit. This will vary by city/ transit district, but it's gotten much worse in the last decade (after it had gotten much better for the previous two).
The funny thing is that a lot of the “crime, drug use, and general anti-social behavior” on transit is overblown in the very minds of people who don’t take transit regularly. Sure, in the US it’s nowhere near as pleasant as it could (or should) be, but it’s really not that bad, nor as slow as people with a car imagine it is.
My realtor said I was the only person she’s worked with who has ever bought a house that doesn’t own a car — in Los Angeles, of all places.
Yet 8 years later, I still get around by a mix of Uber and trains and bus. And the funny part is, I am almost always the first to arrive because I don’t have to worry about parking, and even with 50% of my trips done via Uber to fill in gaps in the network, after gas/insurance/parking I am still spending less!
I do walk a lot too, but that’s one place I would agree LA has absolutely systemically dropped the ball on outside of the historic pockets that the city didn’t demolish. I often feel like I’m the only one who has walked on a given sidewalk in years, and wonder if I’m supposed to be walking there
> The funny thing is that a lot of the “crime, drug use, and general anti-social behavior” on transit is overblown in the very minds of people who don’t take transit regularly.
Yes, it's unheard of that folks can become accustomed to circumstances which most people would view as abnormal or dangerous.
I've been riding public transit almost my entire life; I started riding _by myself_ when I was 8 so I could get to and from school, back when the Bronx was much more violent.
Riding during rush hour is a very different experience than riding off-hours. While I almost never felt unsafe (gotta keep your head on a swivel), lots of women have told me how they've regularly felt unsafe. Maybe it's some dude ranting on a subway car. Maybe it's one ranting on the subway platform. Maybe it's a dude sitting WAY too close on an empty bus. Then there's the open drug use on some systems like BART.
> but it’s really not that bad,
Maybe you're just more tolerant of crime, drug use and general anti-social behavior.
I didn’t say it wasn’t pleasant— there’s so many ways transit comfort and safety could be improved — but it’s really not as bad as people who have never taken a train or bus, and never will regardless of how comfortable it is, say it is
I agree with you and I think it's the main point of the article: cities need to push to make public transport a "first class transportation medium" so that people from all Socioeconomic levels take it.
The same thing happens here in my city in Mexico: public transport is uncomfortable, slow, insecure and dirty. So, mid/high income population avoid using it and instead buy cars. The government then has to spend more money in infra for those cars; money that could be used to improve public transport.
I guess a difference between Mexico and USA is that because here the m as majority of people are "poor" , more people use public transport.
I spend more time in the Bay Area than I would like to. Despite everyone being outwardly extremely “progressive”, people in SFBA are generally extremely insular and bigoted. This expresses itself in many ways, including racism when the other person thinks you’re not the race they’re talking about (and it’s definitely not the exclusive provenance of whites).
My own recent anecdote: For context I’m white, but I speak Spanish, lived for a time in South America, and ended up marrying a US-born Mexicana. I wanted to get some legit Cali-Mex food while I was on a trip so got an Uber over to Mission and 24th which is a predominately Hispanic area. My Uber arrives and it’s a hippie-looking white woman in a Prius /covered/ in left-wing bumper stickers including one that said “Stop Racism” and a BLM sticker.
So we make small talk on the way, when we get to my destination and as I’m about to open the door to step out she says to me “be careful, this area isn’t so safe, there’s a lot of Mexicans.” I don’t know how to react exactly so I just leave. As I’m walking around looking at restaurants I realize nearly every street parked car is a relatively new import luxury vehicle. So it’s safe enough to street park your $100k car, but I need to watch out for those scary Mexicans.
As a white person I encounter this stuff a lot outside of work where people feel comfortable “confiding” their racism to me. For the record I gave her 1 star in Uber. The more left-leaning an area in the US, the more affluent and white it tends to be and the more likely I am to encounter casual racism.
that's about the equivalent of calling someone 'asiatic', a term used for animal species lmao. of course you probably don't give a shit, and neither do we really care about calling you names either.
mexican isn't an ethnicity. it's a nationality. there are native american mexicans and the whitest of white european mexicans as well as "asiatic" (lmao lol) mexicans.
It's both, but as an ethnicity it's subdivided in several cases based on their origin (e.g. "white mexican").
But can also be seen as the future/aspiring all-encompassing Mexican ethnicity through the inter-mixing (cultural and genetical) going on for centuries...
(It's not like "Spanish" in Spain are some pure ethnicity that always existed either, it's one that emerged by combination of several ethnicities).
Looking down on cyclists is a common sentiment in some parts of the world. Meanwhile here in Cambridge (the UK one) there are numerous people who cycle around the city simply because it's a better way to get around for lots of reasons. Those people range from students at the universities who in many cases will have very little disposable income to professionals with some of the most highly paid jobs in the country.
The idea that cycling is "for poor people" seems quite bizarre after living somewhere like this. Indeed it is one of the few things - in a city among the worst in the UK for inequality - that truly spans almost all financial and social classes.
The idea that a lot more money and resources need to be invested in improving facilities to make cycling and walking more attractive does resonate though. The arguments made in the article look on point here.
This is a hyper regional statement. Where I live, you'd be considered a weirdo for carrying that sentiment. Drive an hour away, and the statement could be considered a lot of credence. All we can do is make the right choices for ourselves and help influence those in our spheres to encourage the behaviour we want to see.
There is this story that nobody takes the bus in L.A. but when I go there and ride the bus the bus is always full. It is not bad at all to ride the bus from Beverly Hills to Hollywood but the bus does not stop at Rodeo Drive, you have to pick it up on the next street over.
Surprised to hear the bus is always full. I took the Metrolink train from Union Station to San Bernardino recently, during an hour when people ought to be going home from work, and it was spookily empty. The one single other passenger in sight told me it was usually so empty. I thought of how crazy it was to offer this huge rail infrastructure - which really did seem cheap and convenient - for so few people to use.
You have to provide public transport infrastructure _first_ if you want people to use it. You can't get rid of your car in the hope that 8 months down the line you can get a train; unless your boss is happy for you not physically attending work for 8 months, at least.
that is honestly very little, barcelona is a lot less populated (1.5M) and even during non-tourist season we get 2 million riders per day (not deduped and people coming from nearby areas). I dont have stats of any particular line, but dividing that between the approx number of routes gives you about 50k riders per line. Some routes will have less, some routes will have way more (particularly subway lines)
One problem in the United States is that transportation planners apparently think that buses are for the poor and people won’t ride them. Instead they want to build expensive light rail or subway when a good bus system would be much better, flexible, and affordable.
I've not spent enough time on the current crop of Muni streetcars, but the old ones were horrific. They had fixed windows and really unreliable A/C. Perhaps the one saving grace of the first generation ones is that you could open the windows. BART's much worse, but the drivers will typically take note of cars without A/C because it can be indicative of bigger electrical problems.
poor maintenance leading to excessive nose and exhaust fumes in the cabin
Poor maintenance is poor maintenance. For a while Muni drivers would disable the door interlocks on the trams because the doors were so unreliable. Used to be inattentive drivers would take off without checking to see if anyone was trying to board. Ask me how I know…
extremely poor personal space
seating configurations with poor leg room
Check out that seat right by the articulation joint. Or the seats next to the stairs
convoluted routes and schedules, degrading point-to-point travel
This is a system not mode issue. BART's designed for point to point travel (mostly out of hubris really) and Muni is designed around multi-modal transfers.
the driving can be uneven, because they aren't much better off than riders
Then you've really not seen just how bad auto train control can be. When manually operated I'd run into drivers who couldn't remember how long the train was and accelerate out of a 90 degree turn and knock people at the back out of their seats. In the early 00s Muni managed to actually derail real dramatically for the same reason.
Light rail can be better but not always. Certainly the diesel vs electric issue can come into play (although you can make some truly awful trolley coaches too).
There is another reason for building rail systems. The routes are fixed. It is easy to change a bus route by moving the stops around and issuing a new map. It is, as you say, expensive to change a rail route.
Because rail routes are fixed, that means that developers can count on their longevity, and therefore they develop real estate to match it. A rail line can greatly gentrify the neighborhoods it runs through, given a decade or two to get started. This is a big reason why many neighborhoods will protest and block and vote against any rail lines being built near them, because they know it will start the timer on rising property values, rising rents, new neighbors, and the destruction of low-income and affordable housing.
That flexibility is also a reason for building bus routes: they can be re-routed as needed due to construction or changing rider patterns, buses can be replaced (improved) without having to retrofit the entire system, new ones can be added where needed, old ones can be removed where not, etc.
Central planners might like the idea that they can choose which neighborhoods will succeed, but count me among those who think they can F themselves.
Buses work. They're cheaper than every kind of rail. They're more flexible. But planners and meddlers want control.
Plenty of bus stops, special bus lanes, modern buses, air-conditioning, clean environment, frequent on-time schedules, and plenty of routes to take you to/from all major city areas and suburbs. No crazies and violent crime either.
Of course the city also needs to support walking the final 300-2000 ft to your destination after the bus stop. If most of your stops are some BS office or industrial zone, with roads build for cars, no shade, no shops, and nothing to do around, it's pointless.
Buenos Aires has about 200 bus lines with fairly high frequency (2-7 minutes during peak riding times) and almost all lines have overnight service, albeit at low frequency. Bus rides are highly subsidized. Congestion can get pretty bad during the day but you can get anywhere you want within the city.
I use the busses in Boston all the time, and have been for over 20 years. Way back when it was a pain but ever since bus tracking apps showed up on the scene about 15 years ago it's been a smooth experience.
I live in Boston and would still use the T buses as an example of bus service as an afterthought. The buses are loud, uncomfortable, bus stops frequently have no shelter and are on busy roads with no buffer from 2-3 lanes of traffic, and there are almost no dedicated bus lanes so the bus gets stuck in the same traffic as all the cars.
In San Francisco Muni shelters are largely all the same whether for street level bus or tram. They're all equally awful because they were designed to be inhospitable in an attempt to prevent people from sleeping at them.
I was pleasantly surprised at San Antonio's bus system. They were everywhere downtown, frequent, and even had lines that go about an hour out of the city.
I was only there as a tourist though, I don't know how well they'd be for day-to-day life and cross-town trips.
In other cities where I have used buses regularly, I've found them to suffer a bit from limited routes, transfers, it taking 2 hours to get anywhere, and then buses stop running too early at night.
The sentiment that having money makes one "above" a form of transit is a bit despicable, but it absolutely is the case. I think particularly with public transit. "Hey, would you like to take a multi-leg two hour journey with at least ten minutes of waiting between each leg, or drive fifteen minutes?"
Two hours with a transfer to fifteen minutes is a bit much (not that I doubt such poor public transportation options exist), but the mental toll of driving, even just fifteen minutes is not to be ignored.
There's an ad in rotation right now on a popular local radio station where the whole bit is that character A's car isn't working, and character B talks about the great deals at a specific car dealership. "Don't walk," he exclaims and he shares the gospel of car ownership.
Literally, the whole framing is that walking sucks and is embarrassing :(
It's like idiocracy where they say something like "you drink water? like water, that you use to flush the toilet?". People are easily manipulated because they want to signal that they're valuable and/or rich; "walking is for poor people" ... well yes, also people who want to stay fit, or who care about the environment, or want to be closer to their community, or ...
> If you're walking there are fewer opportunities to advertise to you
How so? I’m reminded of that sequence of shots in Zabriskie Point where Mark Frechette walks around Los Angeles and is assailed by billboards everywhere around him.
In the vast majority of American postwar development, walking does suck and is embarrassing. That’s why the article’s framing about dignity for pedestrians in street design is interesting.
> inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience"
You got it all wrong! It does noy matter how the expience feels physically.
The problem is social stigma attached to cycling.
Like tell you mates you spent 3 weeks fixing your car, or built your own house, and it was super u pleasant and you broke your hand in the process - you are cool.
But tell them you cycled to work to improvr fitness, and you are a weirdo.
Few companies have showers on site, and "fitness" is frequently associated with sweating.
The last thing I would want to do is show up at an office for an 8 hour shift soaked in sweat. Where I live, it is humid enough during the summer that there's really only at most 4 months of the year where "pleasant" can be described to use the weather for biking.
In fact, the weather forecast for today is 85% humidity, and is going to hit 93% twice this week.
> Nothing about the post you responded to says "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience".
Are we reading the same post here? The one I'm seeing lists out all the reasons why cycling/public transport sucks, all of which can be avoided if you pay several hundred dollars per month for a car.
If we want a shift to walking, we need cities to plant around 100x the number of trees they have.
Ever walk through an old, mature neighbourhood? Usually there are tons of people on the sidewalks, and a primary reason is that there are mature trees providing plenty of shade.
Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
> Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
Neighborhoods you’d typically want to walk in do have shade because they were all built a long time ago and there is somewhere for you to walk to. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t designed that way which is why even if there was shade there’s still nowhere to walk to.
I do agree we need more trees planted and more shade. Unfortunately a lot of space near and around places people would want to walk or bike to us instead covered in pavement for cars and parking.
We can do more than one thing at once though. We can make areas more walkable while we also plant trees. And we can flip state highway departments [1] so that they focus on serving the people and their needs instead of themselves or a small, vocal minority.
[1] Note that departments of transportation in nearly all states are highway and road transit departments first and do next to nothing w.r.t better means of transportation. Their entire context is cars and drivers and you can confirm this by looking at the budget.
> Neighborhoods you’d typically want to walk in do have shade because they were all built a long time ago and there is somewhere for you to walk to. Suburban neighborhoods aren’t designed that way which is why even if there was shade there’s still nowhere to walk to.
I agree with what you are saying generally but my point stands even for urban cores, which tend to have little to no trees (or many trees but not mature enough for any real shade) and tons of concrete. Awful walking experience despite lots of things to do and see.
I agree though I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the suburbs. In Columbus we have lots of surface parking lots just to make sure you cook while you’re outside. (Or freeze)
I personally can't think of many urban areas where this is a real problem in the U.S or Canada that I've been, but it is where it is. I did a small paper on the impact of population growth in Dar Es Salaam, and trees had a significant impact on how people were using the streets. In such extreme heat, shade is crucial.
100%l the lack of tree cover everywhere is criminal.
Three sticking points in my experience trying to help manage street trees in a neighborhood of 400 homes:
1. Planter strips are too small. This leads to infrastructure conflicts that are costly like lifting sidewalks and exploding irrigation lines. The problem is many municipalities simply have standard streets too wide and planters too narrow.
2. Maintaining trees is an ongoing expense and if not managed by an HOA or municipality the costs explode as individuals have to pay a crew to drag out equipment for just a few trees.
3. Lack of mandatory diversity- my neighborhood is 60% ash because the builder got a good deal 15 years ago after the emerald ash borer was found out east and wasn’t top of mind in the west yet. If the EAB makes a strong foothold entire blocks will be starting from zero again.
Can't upvote this enough. In Austin, with us on track to break the record of 100+ degree consecutive days, there is a huge difference between walking along nice, shaded areas and barren sidewalks. The trees don't even need to be that "mature" - I've seen new developments plant grown trees that only take a couple years to really expand.
Like the blog post and other commenters mentioned, it's not just trees alone but especially in hotter climates it can make all the difference.
It's crazy to me that people need to be reminded that trees, and plants in general, lower the temperature. Sufficient amounts of dense bushes do absolute wonders. I can feel the cool, moist air from 20 meters.
Animals understand this stuff just fine, yet certain modern humans somehow have trouble with the concept.
Near me there is a preserved section of forest (in the middle of a suburban sprawl). It connects a senior-living apartment building to a Walgreens, nothing more. It's one block wide and two blocks long, just enough forest for a winding walkway to never see the roads on either side.
When you step into the walkway you immediately feel the cool and moisture. It feels magical.
I don't think the tree has much to do with it. While shade is important and should be even more so going forward, the general scale of new neighbourhoods compared to old ones is dramatically different.
It's like homes used to be so much closer to the sidewalk, it was just a couple of steps to reach the sidewalk and get going, but now it's these giant football field widths separating homes from the sidewalk, and then massive 4 lane sized roads separating sidewalks on either side. I'm exaggerating of course but the point is still there, the scale is just so different planting trees won't solve it.
This difference in scale creates such a different atmosphere, where sidewalks are just for dog walkers and bored baby sitters, not for regular commute. It's like if you want to talk to your neighbour from the sidewalk you have to bring a megaphone.
I do. I lived 25+ years in Atlanta and I walked all over downtown, midtown, Buckhead, Little 5, Westside, etc. and a lack of trees means you BAKE walking more than a block.
There are lots of really nice, shaded neighborhoods in Atlanta. But anywhere there's a business that you'd walk to, you BAKE.
You've discovered a core disagreement point in safety, "good for everyone" versus "good for the individual".
Yes if I live near a road I want trees/big fence/whatever so drunks don't take out my house. Yet if everyone does that, the number of traffic fatalities increases.
Of course it's a much harder stat to deliver who died and why versus just optimizing a single fatality count.
Go read the page you just linked, but more closely. Induced demand is relevant to adding more car lanes, not dedicated bus lanes and other off-grade transit.
Freed-up capacity is freed-up capacity, no matter whether it was created by building an additional lane or by motivating some people to switch to alternative modes of transport. If enough people switch to public transport to noticeable reduce congestion, the reduced congestion makes driving more attractive again, so some people will switch back to driving, or people who used to drive anyway will now make longer trips, etc.
So if you're just building out transit while keeping road capacity the same (less common with dedicated bus lanes or light rail, because space for those is often created by converting former car lanes, but with "other off-grade transit" modes you need to make a conscious effort of reducing road capacity if reduced car usage is your goal), it's entirely possible that public transport use increases, while passenger miles travelled by car remain the roughly same long-term.
How is increase of drunk driving suicides a bad thing? I hate this argument. Let's cut the trees because certain people just can't help themselves. Infuriating for all sorts of reasons
It wasn’t one reason. Some of it came down to liability (buckling sidewalks, falling limbs in storms, pruning), public safety (baddies can hide under trees and away from choppers before FLiR), impact on utilities (100+ years ago maybe there was a sewer line and maybe a water line, but not much else in most places).
It can cost tens of thousands to remove a single tree.
No shot those reasons would justify millions in tree removal fees.
However the huge budgets for roads could do it trivially.
You underestimate the impact of measuring fatalities as the only way of verifying success of transportation policy...
Certainly if other benefits were weighed properly it might not happen but if you ignore the upsides... (certainly we historically ignored shade for pedestrians).
Closer to where I work, over the four-year period ending one year ago, we had one tree per year fall during the Winter season. The period ended when the campus arborist did a detailed check of all the trees in the immediate area, and a number were removed.
In the wider area, this part Winter had multiple trees fall. Not tree limbs, entire trees. One came down in front of a minivan carrying a local bus driver & his supervisor. I've got pictures.
I'm a pedestrian: I own neither a car nor a bike. But I understand why some trees are removed. I don't think the trees here are not watered deeply enough, so they don't have a deep hold on the ground.
Drunk driver dies hitting a tree. Whose fault is that really?
Could have easily hit a person, a traffic pole, another car on sideways.
I don’t understand the argument why trees are at fault here.
Trees are the ultimate carbon capture, they produce oxygen and humidity, they provide shade, something beautiful to look at. They bring in birds and tree dwelling animals like squirrels.
Trees are a magical invention by nature.
That’s why we feel amazing walking in a neighborhood with trees.
Then try walking in a new neighbourhood with barely any shade. It is awful.
Love how south-centric this statement is. In Northern countries, that's true for a month typically, otherwise "oh god please I hope the sun will shine on me".
In December, I see 4 hours of sun, where the light gets above tree tops. And that's in Southern Canada!
Not a hatred of trees, but a dislike of shade trees.
edit: until I visited Texas, I never understood why people wore hats. The sun is never hot enough here for it. It never gets as high in the sky. Yet it's a brutal beast in Texas. I can only imagine further south..
On the contrary, not south centric at all (note my spelling of neighbourhood!) - I lived in southwestern Ontario for most of my life and now live in southeastern BC. I have yet to see a new neighbourhood where I’ve thought the tree coverage was too much at any time of year! In fact, the same is true for old neighbourhoods. I just cannot imagine feeling oppressed by the shade from trees.
Unless all your shade trees are evergreens (unlikely) there's this thing called "autumn" when the leaves fall off the trees and they don't provide shade any more.
Given the conditions around the Mediterranean in recent weeks I'm not sure citing Barcelona as an example of why cities don't need trees to be walkable will be a convincing argument. Barcelona is a great place but it's also horrible to walk around at lunchtime on a hot summer day.
And yet, there's way more walking going on there on average than in typical US cities.
As far as I can tell there's probably also more walking going on on the dark side of the moon on average than in typical US cities so I'm not sure that's a great argument either.
Trees provide both natural shade and natural greenery. Both are well established as creating more pleasant environments for people.
Barcelona is a wonderful city and it's very walkable but it would be much more pleasant to walk around it between late morning and mid-afternoon for half of the year if the main pedestrian areas and connecting corridors had better coverage. I don't understand how this claim is controversial.
If you want to encourage people to walk more in places that have a firmly entrenched prejudice against it and a similarly passionate obsession with motor vehicles then you are going to need all the advantages you can get. Trees are a win in multiple ways and if properly planned they cost very little in either installation or maintenance compared to the value they bring. Again I don't understand how this claim is controversial.
I spend lots of time walking through old, mature neighbourhoods with mature trees. Usually the sidewalks are empty, because stuff is too spread out to be walkable, and there just aren't enough people for sidewalks to be full. Yes, mostly in the US, but I've also observed this outside the US. Leafy+dense enough to be vibrant areas are really nice, but the exception. The thing that really makes new neighborhoods awful for walking isn't lack of shade, it's everything else about the new neighborhood, typically built in an extremely car-centric manner.
I observe that in a 1950s neighborhood with mature trees. The sidewalks are only for people to exercise themselves (jogging) or their dogs, not as a means to get to a destination.
One of the fundamental axioms of traffic engineering is you can't have trees too close to the edge of the road, because drunk/speeding drivers might get hurt. It is not just that the neighborhoods are mature enough for trees to have grown in, it's that they predate this science.
Then those traffic engineers are idiots, because they should be designing the roads so that people don't feel like they can safely drive at speeds that will endanger themself and others.
I like mature trees and love walking among them (e.g., downtown Sacramento). In 99% of the US more trees would be better (and I try to contribute by planting an acorn or other tree seed when I spy a place a sapling might not get mowed, wherever I go). But I still consider more trees a distant second to buildings closer together, without room for trees (or, as typical, empty space or junk). If there's room for many mature trees, the place is fundamentally not dense enough to be totally amazing for a life of walking, as opposed to walking tourism.
I'm curious what the rates of walking are in Sacramento now, given that it's got that whole "City of Trees" moniker and is also hot as Hell during the summer. I've honestly never been there in the summer, so I couldn't even share anecdotes. I'm not finding anything useful on Google.
What you say makes sense, when I walk in my own (new-ish development) neighborhood in Orange county, I specifically go to the areas where trees are more developed and provide more shade.
People walked under sun since forever. That's what hats are for. What you're really saying is walking under the sun crosses a discomfort threshold for you which driving and walking under shade doesn't.
I spent a few weeks recently cycling from LA to the Mexican border across non-coastal Southern California. Zero complaints about cycling in that part of the USA: I was pleased by how many hard shoulders had been turned into bike lanes, and drivers seemed courteous.
But man, was walking in towns a drag. If I left the bike safely at a hotel and wanted to stroll over to a restaurant or supermarket, every intersection was button-operated traffic lights where pedestrians wait ages for their turn to cross. Then, the pedestrian light flashes for almost too little time to cross the six or seven lanes of traffic. The sheer width of ordinary US roads must have a deterrent effect.
> I was pleased by how many hard shoulders had been turned into bike lanes, and drivers seemed courteous.
But how many are protected bike lanes, instead of just paint? Painted bike lanes are only helpful for relatively confident cyclists, and obviously do virtually nothing to actually protect people on bikes. Imagine if we started replacing sidewalks with painted walk lanes!
> The sheer width of US roads must have a deterrent effect.
Yup. In Munich, not only are roads generally not as wide, but if they're even sorta of wide, they get a pedestrian island or two.
Painted bike lanes of this sort are quite common in the EU (and even a step up from painted shared lanes), I can't regard the US ones I experienced as inferior. Moreover, because the roads are often as multi-lane and wide as I described, cyclists over in that painted lane might even feel well removed from the main flow of vehicles.
Yeah, and they suck there too. In Munich, there's a lot of protected bike lanes, but also some painted ones (especially closer to the city center) and the painted ones sucked. No way would I ever bike with a six year old on those, like I did on the protected lanes.
Would a child or elderly person feel comfortable on such a lane? Generally, no. They're not accessible, and generally a waste of space.
It's largely municipalities cheaping out on infrastructure, because outside of, say, the Netherlands, biking is a second class citizen at best, and often more like third class.
We are talking about two separate things. You are thinking of urban cycling where elderly and children commonly move about. I am talking about US rural roads, where a guaranteed paved shoulder and some lane marking now offers a respite from what bicycle tourers have historically considered a downside of cycling in the USA: sharing a lane with rural drivers. As I said, even in most of the EU one can't expect completely separated bike infrastructure for dozens of km of rural cycling.
Even for rural areas, it should be separated paths. The US actually has some of those (way more than it has protected bike lanes, anyway).
Fair though, a painted bike lane is probably better than nothing.
> even in most of the EU
Why are you saying this like the EU is some kind of exemplar? Most of the EU sucks for biking. It's better on average than the US, but most countries there aren't like the Netherlands, which is probably the only country there where biking is treated with similar seriousness to driving in terms of investment.
Why do I compare to the EU? Besides that fact I am from there (and you say you’re from there, so we have a shared frame of reference), rural commuting there is vastly more common compared to the USA. Over the last decade I have lived in villages in two EU countries where the nearest shop has been over in the next village, a few km along a tertiary highway, and the bicycle serves as a common way for me and my neighbours to travel that distance – and most of my neighbours are older people, since such are the demographics of rural areas.
That gives me an idea of what minimum infrastructure and driver behaviour is required for ordinary people to cycle. And in spite of your preference for 100% separated infrastructure, that doesn’t seem obligatory and I don’t think it crosses any of my neighbours’ minds.
> If you were driving past and saw a friend walking or rolling there, what would your first thought be:
>>“Oh, no, Henry’s car must have broken down! I better offer him a ride.”
>>“Oh, looks like Henry’s out for a walk! I should text him later.”
To me, this is a great way of framing it. I sometimes see people walking along a stretch of road and I feel for them because I know that no human would be waking along that stretch unless their life was in a bad place.
When I lived in Berlin from 2009-2012 I was impressed by the pedestrian friendly infrastructure and found myself comparing it to America's. Berlin's system is certainly made with dignity: Trains, trams, and busses were always clean, and the people at that time were overwhelming quiet and polite. Bicycles never given a second glance. I never felt safer without a car.
Contrast to America where trains and busses where the level of danger is considerably higher, to a degree that it is dissuading to walk. Vehicles provide safety in an otherwise uncertain society.
I like this idea of dignity, but no matter how amazing a walking/biking infrastructure is, it is only as good as the behavior of the people who use it. Until busses, subways, trains, trams, streetcars, and just walking down the street is made safer and cleaner people will continue to stick to the safety of the cars
I think what's being noticed here, as in many urbanist conversations, is that our urban conditions are primarily reflective of the vastly unequal socio-economic structure we have at large.
In places where the working poor are the most disadvantaged, there also tends to be the highest auto dependency. (Think American South, Panama City, Panama etc)
To Soap box for a moment, almost all of our problems are reflective of our vast inequality. Our ability to live more sustainably, enjoy greater opportunity, ability to form new businesses, household formations, civic function etc. ultimately are limited by the degree of inequality a nation faces.
On one hand, it's kind of a tautology - sure, if you're in a city that is very car-dependent, it's a disadvantage to the working poor because owning a car costs money.
But in the US there are also (usually older) cities with relatively great public transportation that are more walkable that also have enormous amounts of wealth inequality.
Doesn't really have anything to do with inequality, in the US at least it's mostly just reflective of when cities were built and developed. Pre-WWII cities like NYC and Boston have (again, relatively) great public transit options and huge walkable parts, while newer cities (often in the South) developed around the car.
That certainly makes sense, and I agree, but I interpreted the parent comment ("our urban conditions are primarily reflective of the vastly unequal socio-economic structure we have at large" and "In places where the working poor are the most disadvantaged, there also tends to be the highest auto dependency") as inequality being a cause of our poor transportation infrastructure, instead of our poor transportation infrastructure making inequality worse.
I agree that I perhaps poorly framed my comment earlier. By reflective, I think I was really thinking of a cyclical relationship. Where lack of transportation compounds inequality, I also believe that inequality is at the very least, co cyclical with poor infrastructure due to a lower interest in collective investment in that infrastructure and greater private control in development.
An example of such would be Atlanta, where public transit investments have been sparse due to wealthier areas of the metro having little interest in funding transit. Many wealthier residents live suburban developments that are highly car dependent. As the article points with walking, many wealthier areas opt to avoid transit access, many residential areas do without sidewalks and follow a land use pattern that (effectively) cuts the neighborhood off from pedestrian access
The poor people living in Boston live in Roxbury and Dorchester. Coincidentally, these are the areas with by far the worst car dependency and worst public transit in the city.
Apologies, I was basing my take there on having biked through most neighborhoods and witnessing the worst traffic by far in those areas, so it certainly feels as though the car density is the highest. (It's also the only place I've ever been hit on a bicycle, and then had someone behind me get mad for being in the way while I was picking myself back up)
That sounds awful. Impoverished areas are well known for lacking traffic calming measures leading to higher pedestrian and bike accident, this is certainly true in my home city of DC.
On the flip side, Boston is the only city where I've ever hit a car with my bike.
The problem is that the shining example of low-inequality urbanism (Western Europe) achieved this by having effectively the most exclusionary immigration policy in the West for two centuries.
Europe may have great biking culture and equality, but they have effectively sacrificed pluralism.
I’m an Aussie, and after living 3 months in LA I think it was the most poorly designed city I’ve ever been to for this exact reason - I felt unable to walk practically anywhere!
It felt like my options were drive or taxi. And we know what LA traffic is like.
I can’t speak to other US cities, and it is possible that certain areas of LA are less terrible than where I stayed. (But I will say, I was in quite an affluent area which had no business being unwalkable and without public transport).
But it really opened my eyes to how good we have it in Australian cities (which themselves are still far behind many European cities).
Bipetalism is a homo sapiens superpower. We are healthly and happy when we walk serious distances. A lot of people discovered that during the pandemic.
The plot twist is that another homo sapiens superpower is inventiveness and adaptability. So we have invented powered mobility and changed our world to take advantage of it.
We have more or less adapted to that new mobility-on-steroids reality but our legs are still made for walking. And fossil fuel based mobility is in any case unsustainable.
The final act is when we realise that we must adjust the intensity of usage of our various inventions to achieve optimal quality of life for the long term.
Walkable cities is a major piece in solving that puzzle. Less pollution, more space, more natural, more fun. Life need not be overengineered in all its aspects.
The thing is we (as an American society) really don’t want a shift to walking. We like the idea of walking more but won’t actually do it. Instead we’ll make up a million excuses about why we just can’t walk.
I say this as someone who at 40 years old has never learned to drive and who has walked/bicycled/taken the bus virtually everywhere I’ve needed to go. And I’ve lived in very rural and very suburban areas, as well as mid-size and bigger cities.
I know it’s possible. It’s just that the vast majority of people don’t want to do it. And if you show them it can be done they’ll just make up a new excuse and keep on driving.
> I say this as someone who at 40 years old has never learned to drive and who has walked/bicycled/taken the bus virtually everywhere I’ve needed to go.
I say this with no mockery or disrespect, just description . . . you are not normal. I mean in a statistical sense. Not only are you part of (maybe the last) generation who salivated over the thought of getting a driver's license at 16 and getting away from Mom and Dad, for the vast majority of Americans, this is a totally unrealistic ask for day-to-day life. Either because of urban design or else living somewhere rural enough where it's infeasible.
Urban solutions do not always work across a country as vast, huge, and diverse as the US.
As someone else who is not normal, I have to say I'm a little tired of having my taxes subsidize the roads and sewers for someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and commutes 40 miles each way by car. "But my kids NEED a backyard!" Fair enough, but afford it on your own without a handout from the government.
I wouldn’t mind the wealth transfer if the client jurisdictions’ representatives didn’t meddle in their patron jurisdictions’ local politics. But I suppose it leaves them more to expropriate.
Also this isn't accurate. Car-dependency in urban environments was fought by the majority of people who lived there. In the beginning, cars were toys for the rich, and they (the rich) pushed for car-friendly design. Since they had influence as elites, they were able to crush the protesting masses and destroy the pre-existing urban fabric.
Then the feds misunderstood the German highway system and thought you were supposed to highway through cities, instead of between them. At this point, the momentum seems to have carried itself forward, spawning the urban design disaster in most US cities.
So I would say it's more that some groups of wealthy industrialists managed to coop urban planning at a critical time, and propaganda their way through the opposition to fuck over the urban masses. They did make a lot of money though, some some would argue it was worth it.
No, most people don't even realize that urban areas tend to subsidize less dense areas.
Usually when they're initially presented with this info, they immediately go into an obvious denial mode where they try to find some logic to explain why it isn't true.
Most people in the US live in an urban area, where urban solutions work. Only a small minority live in a rural area, though many living in suburbs like to pretend they are in a rural area.
I agree that the "US is a rural country" thing isn't true, but the way most US cities are built make walking either very inconvenient or outright dangerous.
Posting this channel in this sort of thread is basically a meme, but this take on the topic is pretty good:
> many living in suburbs like to pretend they are in a rural area
Suburbs are not rural, but they're not urban either. The population density in most suburbs is too low to support the kind of walk-everywhere infrastructure that a true high density urban area can (and should) provide.
The real issue is that many people fail to realize that there is no problem with that. Having different areas for people to live with vastly different population densities, and different solutions for how people get around, is a feature, not a bug. People have very different preferences, and urban, suburban, and rural areas exist so that people's very different preferences for how they want to live can all be accommodated.
There is a huge problem with that. It turns out that offering urban-level services at suburban density isn't sustainable. It turns out urban areas are subsidizing suburbs quite extensively.
Now, if suburbanite were willing to pay their own way, perhaps we could discuss that. But another issue is that car-dependent suburbanites demand access to urban areas. For example, people living in Palo Alto want vehicle access to San Francisco. This degrades the city significantly, far outweighing any benefit from having suburban influx.
Now, non-car-dependent suburbs do seem to work. Street-car suburbs, for example, seem to work reasonably well. They seem to be more dense than car-hell suburbs, but not urban like a city. So I think there is a way forward for people wanting suburban life.
> It turns out that offering urban-level services at suburban density isn't sustainable.
What do you mean by "urban-level services"? If you mean urban-style mass transit, then yes, I agree--and I don't want such services in the suburbs. If I'm going to live in the suburbs, I'm going to own a car and that's how I'm going to expect to get around in the suburbs. If I wanted to live in a place where I could walk or use mass transit to get around for all of my daily activities, I'd live in the city, not the suburbs.
> It turns out urban areas are subsidizing suburbs quite extensively.
No, it turns out that politicians and ideologues who think everybody should live a certain way, are trying to impose that way of living in areas where it makes no sense, and using our tax money to do it. That's not a "subsidy", it's just incompetent leadership. Living in the suburbs, I get zero value from all the public expenditure on mass transit in areas which are too low density for it to make sense. So I would be fine with all those expenditures just stopping altogether.
In fact, such expenditures can have negative value to the very people they are supposed to be helping. In one suburb I lived in, I could drive for about 15 minutes to a commuter parking area and catch a bus that took a half hour to get to a stop within walking distance of my workplace. Then the urban planners decided that it would make more sense to spend public money to extend the subway out to that area and outlaw the bus--meaning that from the same commuter parking area, I would now have an hour's trip to the same stop within walking distance of my workplace, during which I would have to change trains, at a higher per-trip cost than the bus was. Which meant it no longer made sense for me to take mass transit to work.
> car-dependent suburbanites demand access to urban areas
What kind of access? I'm fine with using, say, a train to go into the city if I need to do that. Or parking somewhere on the outskirts of the city and using mass transit to get in further.
> non-car-dependent suburbs do seem to work.
Again, I think this depends on what you call a "suburb". To me, if you're living in an area that has a high enough population density to make street-cars, for example, workable, you're living in a city, not a suburb. If I want more space than such a place can provide me, I'm going to live in a less dense area where mass transit is not workable, and as above, I'm going to own a car.
I pay for those with property taxes. Plus a portion of the purchase price of a house is the developer recovering these infrastructure costs when a neighborhood is built.
If you read the link you would realize that property taxes don't even cover 25% of the ongoing maintenance cost. The rest comes out of the general tax pool at everyone else's expense, regardless of whether we live there or not.
This article isn't saying suburbs are a drain on cities. It's saying that cities have overextended themselves because of skewed incentives imposed on them by government policies (the main one being printing money to fund real estate development). The solution to that is not to abolish suburbs. It's for the government to stop imposing skewed incentives.
And by people who live in urban areas who don't get the benefit, since they also pay property taxes that are sufficient to pay for their infrastructure. It's a subsidy for the suburbs.
How does mandatory single family zoning and parking minimums factor into your "feature?" When people want to live somewhere dense, and that's illegal to build, they're forced into suburban living even though that is not their preference.
> When people want to live somewhere dense, and that's illegal to build
It's not illegal to build everywhere. That should be obvious since there are lots of dense urban areas.
I could just as easily ask why I'm not allowed to build a new single family home in Manhattan. The obvious answer is that Manhattan is not a suburb. The equally obvious answer to why you can't build dense urban housing in a suburb is that it's not a city. Unless you are arguing that everywhere should be a dense urban area, there are going to be different areas with different densities and different kinds of housing. That's just a fact of life that everyone has to deal with.
You can in fact build a new single family home in Manhattan, if you can afford the land to do so.
Meanwhile, regardless of land price, dense housing is illegal to build pretty much everywhere that is not currently dense, due to zoning laws. Why shouldn't someone be able to build dense housing in a suburb?
What it sounds like you advocate for is that everywhere currently dense can stay dense, and everywhere not currently dense must stay not dense. That doesn't make sense unless you want the dense area to continue to skyrocket in price as more people want to live there and we have no new housing to accommodate them.
> You can in fact build a new single family home in Manhattan, if you can afford the land to do so.
Really? Where? Note that I don't mean a townhome or a row house, I mean literally a detached single family home.
> What it sounds like you advocate for is that everywhere currently dense can stay dense, and everywhere not currently dense must stay not dense.
Obviously this won't be the case long term; areas will evolve. Some will become more dense, some will become less dense.
What I am saying is that people have a wide variety of preferences, and that is just a fact of life. Talking as if one particular way of living is "better" does not recognize that.
> That doesn't make sense unless you want the dense area to continue to skyrocket in price as more people want to live there and we have no new housing to accommodate them.
Why would there be no new housing in urban areas? New construction is going on in cities all the time.
People who want to live somewhere “dense” can go live there. The dense parts of most cities don’t have mandatory single zoning or parking minimums as far as I know. I’m not going to stop you from living in or near downtown and neither is anyone else in the suburbs. You do you and let the rest of us do us.
Except for price, because a lot of people want to live in dense areas.
Why exactly do you think you should have a say over how other people live? That's what you claim to oppose, but your support of zoning in order to prevent other people from building density on their own property is exactly that.
> Except for price, because a lot of people want to live in dense areas.
And the way to fix that is for urban areas to allow for more construction of living space. Which, historically, urban areas are very bad at doing, for example by restricting the maximum height of buildings. But how is that the suburbs' fault?
> Why exactly do you think you should have a say over how other people live?
I have said no such thing. I have never said there should not be urban areas. Indeed, I have explicitly said that there should be areas of all different kinds, urban, suburban, and rural, so that everyone's different preferences can be accommodated somewhere. You are the one who keeps talking as if everywhere should be dense urban areas.
> your support of zoning in order to prevent other people from building density on their own property is exactly that.
So you think I should be able to build a single family home in the middle of Manhattan, provided I can buy the land?
Zoning is much more of an issue in urban areas, and in fact, as I noted above, is one of the main reasons why urban housing is overly expensive.
You have explicitly said other people in your suburb should not be able to build dense housing on their property. Why?
And if there are many people who want urban areas and not enough housing to accommodate, would you support expanding them, or is this an attack on your preferences?
> You have explicitly said other people in your suburb should not be able to build dense housing on their property.
I have said no such thing. I have said that in a suburb, most people won't want to do that. But that doesn't mean nobody will. In every suburb I've lived in, there has been a mix of single family homes, townhomes, and apartments. Some suburbs are even evolving to the point where they have a core area that is basically urban, with almost all buildings being high rise. I have already said that such things are to be expected over time.
> if there are many people who want urban areas and not enough housing to accommodate, would you support expanding them
If the urban area is already fully built out, and it acquires the additional land legally on the open market, sure.
But much so-called "urban" area is nowhere near fully built out. For example, much of the city of San Francisco is still fairly low density, with little or no high rise and many lots still being single family homes, and is kept that way by restrictive zoning, even though there are multitudes of people clamoring to live there. Before expanding the city out into the suburbs, I would say the city should first allow more people to live in the land that is already part of the city, and adjust its zoning to make that possible.
The whole point I'm making is that many suburbs are zoned by law to be exclusively single family. That's a problem. Expanding that zoning doesn't mandate density, but it will allow it where it is currently banned.
>> Most people in the US live in an urban area, where urban solutions work
The word "urban" in the US means different things to different people and in different contexts.
For the US census bureau, you can find their up-to-date list of US urban areas at https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g..., and it includes areas such as the New York City metro area, at a population of 19,426,449, and Munds Park, Arizona, at a population of 773, and 2,643 other urban areas in between.
By that definition of urban, most people in the US live in an urban area, but that does not mean that the same solutions work for all people in the US living in urban areas. Population densities of 600 people per square mile across a small area require different solutions than population densities of 6,000 people per square mile across a large area.
America being large is irrelevant. China is just as large and you don't see them struggling to figure out how to walk places. The fact is most of the US is practically empty. Connect the major urban hubs with rail and remove the cars (from urban centers) and we'll have fixed this.
> for the vast majority of Americans, this is a totally unrealistic ask for day-to-day life. Either because of urban design or else living somewhere rural enough where it's infeasible.
They can convince themselves it’s infeasible, but it is very feasible. It’s just a matter of wanting it. I wanted it enough to make it work. They don’t.
That’s 100% fine — I lie to myself about plenty of stuff to get through my day. Everybody does.
> (...) salivated over the thought of getting a driver's license at 16 and getting away from Mom and Dad (...)
I'm afraid this mindset needs context. If you find yourself living in a place where everything is located tens of km away, and short drives are assessed in how many hours you spend in a car, and this is further compounded by the utter lack of a public transportation infrastructure, then gaining access to a car is a basic necessary condition for autonomy.
Contrast this with some European urban centers such as the Netherlands' Randstad, where a two hour train ride from your doorstep can get you anywhere everywhere, and can actually be an international trip.
Yes, and the highway system was originally intended as defense infrastructure to more easily move equipment across the country. A great idea, but a design that was not originally intended to plow right through cities. This has been a big contributor to the mess that we are in when it comes to urban / suburban design and the extreme lack of walkability.
Not true. They were definitely intended to plow right through cities. That’s why they built highways/freeways right through urban cores, or planned entire metro regions around them.
Specifically, right through minority neighborhoods in cities. You can't ignore the explicitly racist history of urban "renewal" when discussing freeway planning.
> We like the idea of walking more but won’t actually do it.
Wrong.
The reason people don't walk is simply because walking mostly really sucks in like 95% of urban or suburban contexts in the states. Even crossing the street once can be a huge pain in the ass sometimes (e.g. strip mall to strip mall across two giant parking lots and an enormous stroad).
It is astoundingly rare to find an actual nice, not-tiny area to walk in, in terms of urban design and points of interest. To a lot of Americans, "has sidewalks" means an area is walkable, which is just...so, so very wrong.
I lived in Germany for five years, and during our annual summer trip back to the states, it was always so sad to see the pathetic state of walking and biking infrastructure everywhere we went. It's like we're not even trying...because, well, we're not. Walking here sucks because we choose to make it suck.
I like walking and walk almost everyday (not right now since it’s summer). Why would I want to walk 15-20 minutes each way though to go pick something up when a 2 minute car ride would get me there. Sure sometimes I’ll take a leisurely walk to the store on a Saturday afternoon but usually I just need something quickly.
> People can still do things that suck if they want to do those things enough.
Yes, but why would they when a thing is painful and unpleasant? There's other ways to get around or get exercise, people will default to things that are nice and convenient.
> If you want to walk and have two legs that work, don’t whine about wishing walking didn’t suck. Get out and walk.
Incredibly nonsensical dismissal. Let's see how silly your reasoning is:
"Americans just don't wanna walk, no matter what."
"People don't do X because it sucks, if it didn't suck more people would do it."
"Doesn't matter, suck it up and do it anyway loser"
Wow, we sure learned a lot there. Do you teach gym class maybe?
We're talking about a systemic problem. Insulting people isn't gonna get the population to walk more, shockingly enough.
Perhaps when those things have a benefit to society, we should invest in infrastructure to make them more pleasant, rather than browbeating people as lazy if they don't brave urban arterial roads to walk to a grocery store?
I’m not saying they’re lazy or browbeating anyone.
I’m saying they’re lying to themselves. Nothing wrong with that. Whatever it takes to get through life. I lie to myself about a lot of things to make the days go by easier.
But yeah, wait for those infrastructure investments to come and tell yourself that once they’re here you’ll walk more. Or go out and walk today. Or don’t. Doesn’t really matter at all.
This has not been my experience. I'm lucky to live in a very walkable part of a very walkable city, and almost every time someone comes to visit I find they've disappeared within 24 hours to "explore the area".
These are people who virtually never walk anywhere unless they have to, but you put them in the right environment and they almost can't help it.
When I'm in a new city I love to go for an aimless walk with no destination in mind just to get lost, get a feel for the place and see what I discover.
Then I visited the US and quickly realised that this is a terrible idea in pretty much any American city.
There are a few exceptions but yeah, it's bad. I remember visiting Houston and asking the hotel receptionist which way to walk to get to some restaurants a half mile away, and it was clear that no one had ever asked that before. And sure enough it was a terrible experience.
We had rented a car from San Francisco to San Diego. My wife was going to drop off the car at the airport. We asked at the hotel (by the harbor near Little Italy) how to get back. 'Uber'. We then looked at the map and realized it was about 0.5 miles away, with sidewalks the whole way. She walked.
My Houston experience was when I wanted to go to a nearby salsa place. It was about 3 blocks away from the motel, as the crow flies, but the other side of the interstate. It required a car to get there.
I don't think it's possible to make Houston pleasant for walking outside, it's too hot and humid. Houston uses the same solution to avoid the weather that Toronto does -- tunnels connecting buildings. You can walk for 6 miles underground in Houston.
Leaving out the obvious cities (NY, Boston, DC Mall), I can think of half a dozen cities off the top of my head that have great walkability: Denver, Boulder, Portland, OR, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, ME, etc. I have wandered for hours in all those cities.
American cities have a higher proportion of unwalkable areas, but unwalkable areas exist in every city. I suspect that what is happening is that you are staying in areas of the city that aren't very walkable.
> Leaving out the obvious cities (NY, Boston, DC Mall), I can think of half a dozen cities off the top of my head that have great walkability: Denver, Boulder, Portland, OR, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, ME, etc. I have wandered for hours in all those cities.
I don't think any of these cities have great walkability. They have acceptable walkability in certain areas, but great? Not even close.
A lot of Americans just have really low standards for what they consider walkable. Even in the core of larger US cities, walkability is often worse in practice than random little villages in, say, Germany.
Like, I live in the Seattle area now, and when I head to the denser areas, walking is okay, sure, but it's not especially pleasant the way it is in Munich. Walking in Munich was just nice, compared to a city like Seattle there's just typically wider sidewalks, more 'pedestrian plaza' type areas, more buffer between walking areas and cars, fewer cars, slower moving cars, roads are narrower and easier to cross, more pedestrian islands, more walk/bike cut throughs, fewer pedestrian 'beg buttons', the list goes on and on.
I lived in Capitol Hill in Seattle and found it to be a very walkable lifestyle. So much so that I never used my car except to leave the city. I was walking distance to four major grocery stores, dozens of restaurants, buses, trains, etc. I would ride my bike 10ish minutes to SLU to go sailing.
It’s also worth noting that Boulder’s main downtown area is dominated by Pearl Street, on which cars are not allowed ever. Denver has 16th street running from one end of downtown to the other, the only vehicles allowed there are free shuttles.
My point isn’t that American cities are more walkable, it is that it is silly to say that they all aren’t walkable as a rule as the GP said.
Is Barcelona a more walkable city than most American ones? Yes. Are there areas in Barcelona that you would be a fool to try and walk in? Also yes.
> My point isn’t that American cities are more walkable, it is that it is silly to say that they all aren’t walkable as a rule as the GP said.
> Is Barcelona a more walkable city than most American ones? Yes. Are there areas in Barcelona that you would be a fool to try and walk in? Also yes.
My experience has been that it's matter of "what is the exception?" In Munich, most areas were (highly) walkable, areas that didn't feel walkable were an infrequent exception.
In Seattle, Capitol Hill is reasonably walkable yes, but areas like that or Belltown are the exception at least in terms of geographic area. Most parts of Seattle aren't really that walkable. They're still better than average for the US for sure, but far from great, or even good.
It's especially damning if you consider urban areas and what's part of the principal city. Munich takes up most of the immediate urbanized area (there are suburbs, of course, but they're mostly separated by farmland from Munich proper), and yet it's still mostly walkable. And even the surburbs do pretty well on walkability.
Seattle, though? Long before you reach the suburbs, you've mostly lost walkability, and the suburbs are mostly really walk-unfriendly except for little strips of downtown.
When I was in Munich I was living on the outskirts, we were less than a five minute bike ride to forests and horse paddocks, and yet I still had a general purpose grocery store in less than ten minutes by foot, and multiple options for that within a ~5 minute bike ride.
American cities, with a tiny number of exceptions, are not built for walking and biking. When neighborhoods, businesses, and infrastructure are built, their design is fundamentally based on the assumption that the users of it will have a personal motor vehicle.
We're talking about what it would take to induce behavioral change on a societal level. I don't mean to be rude, but when someone comes into a discussion like this and says "well actually, if everyone lived like me it would be fine. Everyone else is just too lazy", it's essentially a non-sequitur and comes off as you trying to hold yourself in some kind of position of moral superiority.
You're 40 years old, so I expect you to know this already, but I'll let you in on a little secret: you cannot rely on other people to the right thing on a mass scale. You can, however, rely on them doing the easy/comfortable thing.
The challenge in sustainability is to align the good with the comfortable as much as possible.
It is commendable that you've managed to live car-free so long in such a car-centric country, but we cannot rely on all 340 million people living their lives like you have.
I live in the US, and have spent time in something like half a dozen European countries, and I can tell you that there's a clear reason why Europeans walk & bike more, and it's not because "Americans are too lazy not to drive" or something like that.
For example, my local supermarket is a 8 minute walk from my house. Driving there would take about 5 minutes, due to one way streets etc, so including the hassle of parking etc it takes about as long. Driving there seems positively insane to me, except if I’m shopping for a party or something and need to fill the trunk. Are you saying that Americans would choose the car here? Or that in America it’s a 5 minute drive vs a 25 minute walk?
Cause tbh in the latter case I’d pick the car too, despite my Dutch habits.*
I guess what I’m trying to ask is, are you sure it’s American psyche and not, mostly, the town layout as this article suggests?
*) okok I’m Dutch so I’d bike but I kept that out to stick with the wall vs car topic
Have you spent much time in the US? American cities are nothing like Europe. Everything is far more spread out with more empty land in between buildings, so all the distances are longer. And the concept of what we Brits call a "corner shop" hardly seems to exist in 'Murica - you get these huge residential zones where it's nothing but homes, homes, homes for miles and miles with no shops or anything commercial. So if you need to, say, buy a loaf of bread, or do any of the everyday chores of life that require one to leave the house, your destination is never within walking distance. It's my least favourite thing about day-to-day life in America.
I have not, which is why I asked. The commenter I replied to suggested that the problem was that Americans prefer to drive, intrinsically, and not that the problem was road layout. This surprised me because reading HN I got the idea that road layout very much is the key problem, so I asked.
It's highly situational, but speaking broadly the US usually it's a "5 minute drive vs a 25 minute walk" situation.
But even if you live 5-10 minutes from the supermarket many people will still drive because everything is designed around people driving. For example, it's very common to lack sidewalks and even when there are sidewalks, protected crossings can be sparse.
So a 10 minute walk to the store can involve you having to walk in the street or in the mud and grass, cutting across the street where there's no crossing signal, and having to walk through a busy parking lot to actually get to the building.
And even once you're in the store things are designed around cars. The size of packaging and the quantities that people normally buy in are based on the idea that Americans take their car to the grocery store once a week and fill their trunk space with groceries.
The size of packaging and the quantities that people normally buy in are based on the idea that Americans take their car to the grocery store once a week and fill their trunk space with groceries.
Yes. My grocery store often has sales where you have to buy 5 of a large and/or heavy product to get the discount. As a pedestrian I have to either forego the savings or have an awkward trip home.
It’s not a one-for-one replacement for at least two reasons: each shopper doesn’t have their own delivery vehicle, and the number of shopping trips that require vehicles is less.
Exactly. We'd be substantially better off, in terms of total quantity of driving done, if the standard practice was to have groceries delivered. Grocery stores could then be optimized around that, and eventually some of them could stop catering to in-person customers entirely, reducing expense and waste.
The grocery store example is very helpful to illustrate how its not just the quality, safety, and practicality (e.g. time) of the walk that leads to most Americans driving- there is also the fact that the whole process and experience is predicated on the expectation that you will have a personal car.
Specifically: In the parts of W. Europe I have visited I observed mostly small grocery stores (esp in towns and cities) that folks visit daily or nearly so for food. People may stop on thei walk home to get dinner items each night! Contrast that with the U.S., where you are more likely to encounter a large grocery store- except perhaps in the densest inner city (but then maybe no grocery store at all, which is another story)- where people visit once a week or so. When people go to the grocery store, they stock up. Stores are optimized for buying multiple (more than you can carry at once) bags of groceries, which you then necessarily would load into your car and drive home.
Most folks would not willingly opt to take a long risky walk through unpleasant surroundings, traverse a giant parking lot not designed for walkers, then have to march through a large grocery store for many minutes to leave with just what one could carry. Sure, folks could bring a personal hand trolley or something but this really does not address other underlying problem.
So, in the case of grocery stores the basic culture of shopping at a very large center less frequently would also have to shift for people to leave their cars. And, I would argue, so it goes with many things. Shifts to a more pedestrian-oriented culture and environment may happen with time or in certain areas, but I don't think it would be simple, quick, or widespread any time soon in the U.S. for reasons that go beyond sidewalks.
> People may stop on thei walk home to get dinner items each night!
I'm glad that people who want that have that option, but that sounds incredibly unpleasant to me. I'd much rather minimize the total amount of time spent shopping.
we have option to go to huge market and stock for a week, but that's unpleasant, biting long and cumbersome.
stopping by and for small shopping while walking with dog and or biking from gym to buy few fresh things for this tonight is hardly a unpleasant chore... so it's a matter of perspective
I'm half a mile from a grocery store. Perfect walking distance, but to do so I have to walk along a street without a sidewalk, cross at an unsigned intersection and then walk around a mall to get to the grocery store.
The latter is the perfect illustration of the problem. The mall was designed with a nice cut-through for pedestrians, but it got bricked up because teenagers used to hang out there and smoke.
25 minute walk. And even if the supermarket is close enough to walk, it is setup for drivers. So you have to cut through someone's backyard, climb a fence, then walk all the way around to the door on the opposite side. Unless the backyard you cut across above is actually yours the real distance is not walkable, and if it is your yard the trip is not 'dignified'.
to be fair though its usually possible to find a hole in the fence, or a little path forced through the shrubs, or a plank across the drainage ditch. it always makes me wonder who else walking through this? kids? immigrant workers? homeless?
What the other commenters haven't mentioned is that it's a 25 minute walk... to one store... then a 25 minute walk to another store, then a 25 minute walk to a gym, etc. Whereas in Europe when you walk to a high street, there's a reasonable variety of shops and services there.
Yes, many would. I've even seen people drive down to the end of their driveway to get the mail from the mailbox or put out the trash.
But also the car culture makes it so that a car is a big part of your identity and also a sort of adjunct living space; a personal safe shelter and place where you can keep your stuff. It's pretty common for people during their breaks at work to go sit in their car and eat.
People used to having cars get very anxious without it, even for a few minutes. They'll drive around in circles in a parking lot for half an hour waiting for a closer parking space to open up so they can save 2 minutes of walking, but also so that their car won't be scarily far away.
If you're not a car person, other people think you're that weird oddball who actually walks to the store and maybe there's something wrong with you.
> Driving there seems positively insane to me, except if I’m shopping for a party or something and need to fill the trunk.
How much food do you keep at home? In the US many people have room for quite a bit of food at home and on most grocery runs they are filling the trunk or at least buying enough that carrying it home would be difficult.
Walking might require them to go to the store 10+ times a month whereas driving might only require 4 trips so even if walking is as fast as driving they can spend much less total time traveling to and from the store if they drive.
Americans don't live in cities, or in towns, or in villages. They are farmed in facilities called "housing developments", where there are no stores.
A developer purchases large plots of agricultural land, and colludes with government to put a sprawling system of widely-separated four- to six- lane roads through it (often by widening and paving country roads until they are unrecognizable). Then, to hide this ugliness and block the resulting noise, they ring their newly-acquired fields with large earthen berms, which they cover with evergreen shrubs and chemically-treated wood-chips. At gaps in the berms they put gatehouses, with unarmed guards. Within these fortifications, they then build fanciful, curvilinear, branching systems of slower roads, like the endoplasmic reticulum of a cell, and around these fractal structures they put large, cheaply-constructed houses and driveways, which sell for $800k and above. Compared to the cities nearby, this is affordable.
Outside the berms, on the other side of the stroads, often without sidewalks, are, at best, strip malls, and, at least as often, are instead big-box stores surrounded literally by acres of blacktop parking lot. An "acre", you may recall, used to mean that which a man could farm in a day. Not this.
Now suppose you find yourself inside one of those houses inside the berms, and that you want to buy a vegetable. As the crow flies, it's possible that you are only a mile and a half from the nearest supermarket (not a very short distance, but achievable). But to get there by walking along the roads, you must first get to the gatehouse along the berm (which may or may not be in the direction of the store), and, to get there, you must traverse this fractal system of roads. The arclength may exceed the Euclidean distance from A to B by a factor of three or more. Either that, or you must violate peoples' sacred property, by cutting across yards and next to houses (which are not very far apart), and then finally scramble over the berm, amidst a shower of wood-chips.
Having achieved your escape from the "community", you must then find a way to cross four lanes of 45 MPH traffic (on a slow day). If you are lucky, there is a sidewalk, so you can walk half a mile to the nearest crosswalk. You do this separated from the whizzing death-machines by about the eight inches of grass that separates the sidewalk from the road. Do not let your mind wander. Keep your arms and legs inside the pathway at all times.
Upon finally crossing the street, you finally enter the shopping complex. It is surrounded by parking lots. Sweating and relieved that you have gotten this far with your life intact, you step into the air conditioning.
Then you buy that one vegetable you wanted for your supper, steel yourself, and conduct your return expedition.
Which, of course, is why you don't just buy what you need for today's supper. No, you didn't walk there at all. You drove there in a car, loaded the trunk with food for at least a week, and drove it home, to be preserved in your oversized fridge. Because venturing out in all that is a chore.
Back within your "community", there may be a nice, parklike atmosphere, full of what look like walking paths. But you may find that this is actually a golf course around which the houses have been built, and that -- ostensibly for safety from golf balls, or perhaps from golf carts -- these paths are often closed, in principle, to the "little people" who merely live there without additionally paying to whack a ball around. There are then petty conflicts between the golfers who have purchased special rights, and the simple pedestrians, who have the unseemly desire to locomote with their God-given feet.
An overwhelming proportion of the American landscape is like this. It can hardly be described as a culture or a way of life. It's just what people do when they have no identity and no ambition to create a worthwhile future. These people are deskilled, demoralized, and incapable of anything but consuming garbage.
A friend from Europe used to complain that, in America, the cows just stand there, whereas in Poland, the cows were mischievous and frisky. The process of domestication is further along in the US, and it degrades the people as much as it does the cows.
The good news is that these people will not have grandchildren and their houses will decay within 100 years. The bad news is that a shithole mess is going to be left behind.
Anyway, that's why they don't walk to the grocery store.
As someone who has become increasingly bitter about and alienated from the American lifestyle because of this issue, this comment made my day. Brutal, biting, hilarious. Thanks for writing it.
Our governments recommend storing several days' worth of food and water in case of emergency. Your supply chain had better be very reliable without it.
I've seen people lose their jobs because they weren't willing to walk a half mile. No car, but taking Uber for that trip. It turns out, Uber is not reliable transportation. But walking usually is.
Well in a well-designed city, you could just walk to all those things. From my house in Berkeley, CA, daycare is about 400 meters from my house. There are two fields of soccer-ing size, one about 10 minutes away and one 25 minutes by foot.
The grocery store is a 4 minute walk, my hairdresser is a 1 minute walk, CVS is a 3 minute walk.
I also have an amazing park with play structures, basketball courts, tennis courts, large gracy field, a creek, picnic areas, and such about a 1 minute walk away.
I can bike to work in 20 minutes.
This could be everywhere in the US. There's nothing special about where I live except that it's development predates the automobile.
> There's nothing special about where I live except that it's development predates the automobile.
Seems like there is, and it's that it's very rich? Because something like this:
> an amazing park with play structures, basketball courts, tennis courts, large gracy field, a creek, picnic areas, and such about a 1 minute walk away.
doesn't exist in the entirety of my city, which also predates cars.
Also, do you mean a detached house when you say "from my house"? How many customers within 5-10 minute walking distance does (for example) hairdresser serve in such place?
> doesn't exist in the entirety of my city, which also predates cars.
Really? You have no parks in your entire city? How is that possible? I don't think that's a wealth problem, sounds more like a governance problem to me.
I live in a quadplex on a mixed-density Street. I'd guess there's a 1000 housing units within a 5-10 minutes walk. I'm sure people come from further away as well though.
> Well in a well-designed city, you could just walk to all those things.
You may call it well-designed, but I think that all those close amenities you are enjoying is a side-effect of high-density living for high-income people.
After all, no matter how well you design a place, that (for example) hairdresser still needs enough people who can afford the service to live within walking distance so that it can turn a profit.
I think it's less a case of "How do we design this city so that everything is no more than a 25m walk away?" and more a case of "High density population with lots of money attracts businesses to the area".
> There's nothing special about where I live except that it's development predates the automobile.
Just throwing it out there but it would be nice if there were a lot more pesestrian and bike only roads built separate from car roads. Big cities already have recreational walking trails that typically follow some sort of a drainage or sewage "river".
Another thing I wondered is how under most city streets there is already wiring and tunnels and some infra. Is the cost that unreasonable to convert roads one by one so that cars go underground and intersections overlap to avoid stops, then all you need is exits to parking spaces and low-speed residential streets. Cars get to go a lot faster with little stopping in cities (which will reduce freeway jams), less pedestrians die, self-driving cars would do well there too. Flooding is the main issue I can think of but given climate change, they need to make cities much more flood tolerant and making more floos tunnels/digging might be needed anyways.
In my ideal city, these roads will also have systems for small package delivery/transport and garbage disposal where people will select the type of garbage and put it in a box, upon validation they get credits for it if it gets recycle but also less package waste because the package delivery system won't need to have boxes with your address on it, it would just be the stuff, as-is. And this will work with grocery delivery and even high volume destinations like warehouses to walmarts which also require a lot of packaging and waste. Now imagine this delivery system as a subway for packages and imagine adding humans to the mix, delivering them to destinations as if they were packages and then you need a lot less cars and parking space waste. That type of transportation removes the downsides of public transportation like sharing space with a lot of people and being picked up/dropped off ar specicific points and then having to walk to the destination.
Just random ideas to put out there for anyone who reads and knows the subject better.
Milton Keynes tried separating pedestrians and cyclists, it is mostly considered a failure.
Reasons include- they built the place so well for cars that everybody owns a car- poorly lit underpasses- confusing layout- crime and the feeling of being alone if somebody were to attack, due to no cars passing by and no shop windows.
"You have to cycle quite a long way to get anywhere useful - Signage is appalling. If I hadn’t had the map I would have got quite lost. [the cycle paths don't follow the grid system]"
Tunnels are quite dangerous, having cars at high speed for long distances is extra dangerous. Having them leave the tunnel is either a highway junction or a stroad. There is one in Boston though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5pPKfzzL54
> Milton Keynes tried separating pedestrians and cyclists, it is mostly considered a failure
That's not what I was suggesting, I was suggesting restructuring cities so that pedestrians and cyclist have their own road network accessible to residential streets and businesses. This road network would complement artery/busy car roads as opposed to being a sidewalk next to them.
Where I am, cycling on the sidewalk is prohibited but i see people use it all the time, even where is a bike lane because cars don't take enough care, especially if you wear a helmet. There are many "memorial" roadside spots where cyclists and pedestrians were killed by cars. Walking with someone is also hard because even smaller busy roads have loud cars that make it harder to talk. But the one time my family lived close to a walking/biking trail, everyone started taking routine recreational walks (weather permitting)
Most of the reasons you mentioned are easily solvable except the first one, it would indeed require businesses placing signages and retargeting to include foot traffic. But if you think about it, if these complementary roads are parallel to arterial car roads, food trucks and street vendors will flock there. I also see people walking their dogs next to unpleasant busy car roads when they really prefer the type of roads i spoke about, but also dog parks and other recreational human friendly spot could be exclusive to these roads. Milton keynes seems to have had an implementation/planning problem.
> Tunnels are quite dangerous, having cars at high speed for long distances is extra dangerous. Having them leave the tunnel is either a highway junction or a stroad. There is one in Boston though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5pPKfzzL54
Freeways already have cars at high speeds for long distances. What I am proposing isn't making the tunnels very fast, just slightly faster than existing roads but also actually faster because less pedestrians and stopping. A 30mph road might become 45mph not 60mph. The right lane would be slow enough to take a ramp to/from parking lots.
I was also suggesting the tunnels for artery roads, not huge highways. And unlike boston, there would be no addding lanes, above ground would be converted to pedestrian roads and/or metrorail where it makes sense. This can be done one road section at a time, roads would dip into a tunnel and then dip out. Sidewalks would be replaces with space for offramping. Places with underground parking fit even better. Another huge advantage of this is that there could be much more grass/soil/greens above ground making the city cooler and more flood resilient. Boston replaced a highway but used that to add more lanes. They had their railway add more stations according to that video but if they went my that would be done to begin with above ground where there are cars now
> Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.
> Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
Because when they are on vacation they are a tourist. They are interested in exploring the area and discovering things that are new or different to them. They are taking a break from their normal busy routine and are free to relax.
Walking is a wonderful way to explore a new area and see what shops and attractions and sights are there.
When they get back home they are no longer a tourist. They already know where everything is in their area and what it has to offer. They are back to their normal life with too many responsibilities and not enough time. When they go somewhere in their area traveling there is not a delightful opportunity for exploration and discovery. It is a bothersome chore that is getting in the way of what they want to do.
I was looking at an old map of my city- and 100 years ago, there was a well run trolley system that could take you to any place in the city within a few minutes. Now, we’re told that such a thing is impossible.
The more you think about it, the more you realize that most people's vacations are to places where they don't have to drive everywhere. People get on cruises because "they have everything". Disneyland is just walking around to stuff. Vegas is basically one strip with huge sidewalks and a whole bunch of stuff. Resorts are... resorts. Yet no one seems to want to have any of that when they are not on vacation.
I don't care that much about the "safety" as described in TFA: there's a big mall across the street of where I live now, so I walk there. The sidewalk is a bit hectic: I don't care. What I do care though is that it is safe: as in, it's not an hellhole of a shit city where the risk of being mugged is high (well I did martial arts in the past so at least they'd get some for their money).
You aren't getting people to walk or bicycle if your city is a shithole where thieves are roaming free.
Fix insecurity in public transports. Fix pee/urine odors in the subways. Then I'll consider using your public transport (which I do now use, here, in Luxembourg, because it's both pristine and feels mostly safe: except around the train station but, well, nothing can be perfect I guess).
But if you city is insecure and your subway stations stink and buses feels like a place where little gangs makes the law, then, fuck it, I'm using my car.
I walk everywhere and never think about this. There are going to be times you need tog et from A to B without being in an environment perfectly designed for aesthetics or convenience the whole way. Where I live, is something is very poorly designed (eg the path with two unnecessary 90-degree turns joining a crossing to the main path), people just wear a trail across the grass which shows the optimal route.
I have to agree with a lot in this article: I just walked down a street in staten island... very narrow, just enough for me and nobody next to me. Many spots just push you onto the road by trees and signs. Winding. And many spots with no shade so it is unpleasant in the summer.
But walking is just one aspect of the equation. You need public transportation to be convenient, fast, and reliable. Without that, when I need to go more than a few steps away, I will drive.
That's the point. There are very complex challenges, but the only real fix is a massively efficient transportation system combined with pedestrian areas, to encourage everyone capable to prefer that over driving.
I thought (and hoped) this post was going to mention the bizarre american phenomenon where people driving by a person walking have the urge to scream something at them.
Maybe dignity is part of it, but the main issue (in the U.S.) is that everything is very spread out and very few places have the requisite density to support walking. I don't care if it's the most dignified experience ever. I'm not walking 30 blocks to go to a coffee shop.
A lot of improvement could be make by just enforcing the laws. Many cities across the US allow sidewalk parking for example. My neighbor has a Tesla Y and his charging station is literally on the sidewalk, he can afford the car but not a house with a garage.
Weird complaint because it says a lot about political dysfunction in American society when a (mostly) self-driving car costs about $40,000 but a reasonably decent house in those cities where those cars are built cost about 15-20x at around $800,000. Let’s get rid of arbitrary suburban zoning codes that keep the status quo that makes density and walkability a low priority for “neighborhood character”
While true, I don’t see how suburban America could ever become walkable without just scrapping the project and starting fresh. The foundations to build on are hopelessly incompatible with pedestrian life.
I didn't have a car between college and my late 30s. I thought I was a pro-walking chauvinist but turns out I was just a single guy living in NYC. Within a year of our first kid, I was living in the burbs with a large SUV.
Anti car people tend to be single or at least childless and they fail to understand that the majority of Americans aren't like them. About 40 percent of households have kids under 18, ie 60-80% of American adults have kids of the age where having a car is immensely helpful. So while these people also recognize that it's annoying to press the button to turn the light green or to walk around a parked car, those are nowhere near the top of their life's concerns.
So I think the "we want" is a bit presumptuous in the headline. The guy who wrote the article is a city councilor and an avid biker but what he doesn't seem to be is a parent, so his concerns are skewed a certain way vs the mass of the population.
Like I said, I get the love of walking and walkable spaces, but I see now that this is way more interesting when you are single. As a parent you also get excited about things like tossing all your groceries into the trunk.
That's because you live in a car centric place.
In a well designed city, a car is optional.
I recommend watching Not Just Bikes videos on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes/videos
I did not missed it, but you describing it as a walkable city was funny.
I don't have kids, but you also watched 0 video of the person I sent. They do have kids.
Also, lots of inhabitants of Paris, Amsterdam have kids, yet a lot simply don't have a car.
Sure. I grew up in eastern Europe and most people didn't have a car - because they couldn't afford it.
The few lucky ones that had one used it all the time. I can totally imagine having a kid in NYC or Paris or whatever without a car it's just a pain in the ass.
An appartement in Paris for a family is at least a millions dollar, you are telling me they can't afford a car?
No, moving in car is simply inconvenient here. You can walk or take the public transit to get where you want, it's just faster.
Lots of parisians have a car, often in a parking spot far from their home, and rarely uses it.
Someone commuting to Paris with a car instead of public transit is seen as someone mad loosing their time in bad transit.
Again, watch the videos of the person I sent, you prone bringing a new point of view while it's the same carbrain arguments that is unable to even imagine an alternative, that already exists.
Again I don't understand your point. Obviously it's possible to live in a city without a car and with kids and some percentage of people will chose to do that for a variety of reasons. Nobody is disputing that.
Both US and other counties have cities where you can live without a car and some people do that. If that's all you are claiming then sure I agree.
My point is simply that the likelihood of someone wanting/needing a car goes up as they have kids. Are you telling me that the likelihood of a Parisian family moving out of the city and/or getting a car doesn't statistically increase with every incremental child? I'd find that hard to believe.
I would also bet that there are very few Parisian families having 3+ kids while it's more likely outside of the city, same as in the US.
I'm 100% with OP. Also lived in NYC for 10 years without a car. I had everything I needed within a 10 minute walk including my commute to work. Have you ever seen a family struggle to get two strollers down to a subway?
After having kids , a single family house and a car is 100% better.
After reading most of the replies in this thread I'm guessing it is mostly filled with younger people without kids... notice I'm saying mostly, not all.
I liked lots of this, but I really disagree with the night shot. What about the dignity of the people living along the bright (overly) lighted sidewalk, who lose their dark skies and dark bedrooms?
Street lights suck, and should be absolutely minimized, and turned off at 22h. If you feel intimidated by the dark, you can solve that for yourself: don't shine your fears into my windows.
I'm confused by this sentiment. It's possible to illuminate the sidewalk without shining in through people's windows (or cause excess light pollution, for that matter), especially if the sidewalk is the only thing you need to illuminate and the lamps can be built lower. It's also not unjustified fear. The risk of being subjected to violent crime such as robbery, assault or rape is higher when there is no illumination.
There is actually a simple solution, which is to put red lights on street lamps instead of white lights. You can buy LEDs which emit only in frequencies that won't disturb circadian rhythms.
They are a bit more expensive, but I think the reason we don't do this is because planners/governments are probably unaware of the problematic nature of light pollution.
excuse me, what? No, if I need to walk through late at night, I want to be safe. You have some options:
- put the bedrooms away from the street
- invest in some curtains
- live somewhere more pastoral???
Not sure I buy that. [0] has some data to suggest that light decreases crime, and there's also common sense. If you can see a potentially sketchy situation a block down, it gives you the chance to take a little detour and perhaps avoid it entirely. The light also allows more witnesses, more people to step in if needed, more people to call cops if needed, and more chance for cameras to be effective.
Strikes me as a load of hogwash. Witnesses are next to useless. The more people witness a crime, the less likely any one of them is going to help, i.e. the bystander effect.
Street lights also don't increase visibility all that much, they increase visibility in the lit areas, at the cost of reducing vision in the unlit spots because your eyes don't have time to adjust.
It's as easy as bending and cutting some sheet metal into shrouds so the light doesn't enter residential windows.
My place has this problem and I'm not sure why it does. The solution seems so cheap and obvious to me. Just shape the shroud so the beam only shines downward.
Recently I've seen that in our city new street lights on minor roads near buildings usually have a special form and lower height specifically to counter this problem
Local zoning in US dictates many sidewalk placements. For example, Stafford, VA literally has sidewalks to nowhere. There are strips of sidewalk in front of a business or development un-connected to anything-there is no walking on those sidewalks. They are more like lawn ornaments: fun to look at but serve no purpose.
I'm disappointed this article repeats the misconception that ADA mandates removing non-conforming curb ramps. It does not. In fact it prohibits removing curb ramps on the grounds of non-compliance. Some interpretations of ADA require ramps at every corner of every intersection, but this hadn't been fully tested in court last time I checked.
This is in 28 CFR 35.151(i): "Newly constructed or altered street level pedestrian walkways must contain curb ramps or other sloped areas at intersections to streets, roads, or highways." Some traffic engineers try to weasel out of this by claiming that after they remove the approach (the short bit of sidewalk that connects the main sidewalk to the ramp), the walkway no longer interesects the roadway. But that was not the intent of ADA, and legally it's not true.
A major street like El Camino or Stevens Creek (to take Silicon Valley examples) will be 100 feet curb to curb. With right turn on red, and even worse, left turns active while the pedestrian walk light is on, crossing them is a harrowing experience.
If we want a shift to walking, we need to either a) develop cities much more slowly and organically with a car prohibition (1800s simulator) or b) copy the layouts of cities that developed under a natural version of (a).
There is also another issue in the USA specifically, which is that certain people don't want to live around certain other people. This has driven a lot of the suburbanization in the USA AFAICT. I'm not sure what to do about it, exactly, but what's being done currently does not appear to be working.
1/2 mile of it, is on the local high school running track.
That’s because the neighborhood after the high school (where I would prefer to walk) is actively hostile to pedestrians. No sidewalks, no shoulders, lots of blind curves, and a ton of distracted drivers. It’s dangerous as hell.
In fact, I often smell weed, when cars pass me.
At 5:30 AM.
That’s a great way to get started on a productive day.
They are heading towards the train station (not away from it).
In any case, it doesn’t matter. They are DUI. Pot may be a bit better than alcohol, but I’ve seen some … interesting … decisions made by drivers on it.
No one would drive around sipping on a can of beer, but no one thinks twice about blazing 420 behind the wheel.
just looking at the photos in the article, the main detractor seems to be the distances and how sparse and big everythging is. i dont think any european city is like that
Agree and disagree with the article. Was an intern at a local governance, Americans with disabilities act (ADA) office for a year. It was a city with history, and not a very good city planning at the start. Yes, need to compliance, reality is, it is very hard. Like you built everything on top of a single MySQL and then facing the scalability challenge so you will need to re-shard every other 6 months - and worse, as re-architecture a city faces much more complex problems.
The disagree part is the complexity for compliance is under stated. Implementation is way more complicated than what the author has described even at the end there is a good sentence one there is a long way to go. IMHO, it is too ideal, still.
Some problems is not solvable, at all. After a year taking note and consolidate notes of the public hearings, there are items that's leaving there forever. No progress. No solution. Not possible by design. And it is not something like, you can migrate from MySQL to CRDB. How to do that to a historical city?
Walkable cities have hit a snag I never imagined: People who think that making cities walkable is a front for totalitarian control of citizens, requiring passports to travel in/out of cities or between "walkability zones", and that everyone who advocates for walkability is in on this conspiracy.
I'm starting to believe that we can't have nice things, and wonder how we ever did.
How about more driveable cities? There are a few walkies out there, but a stated preference for walking usually comes down to sour grapes (can't afford a car or a move to the burbs), or poor urban planning making driving more onerous than it should be. Dignity is car ownership and the infrastructure to make the most of it.
How about not. It's not sour grapes that people prefer walking, and even if you had a government program to give everyone a car, what then? Congratulations, you've just made more traffic. Car's don't scale. They are super convenient and I will admit to having one (sometimes two!). But being unable to afford one doesn't deal with what to do when it breaks down, or gets stolen, or is towed, or gets clamped for unpaid parking tickets. There is no dignity in having a shitbox car that's 20 years old and falling apart and is just threatening to break down on you.
Good, please discuss things like this more. No one wants to live an indignifies life like the climate activists typically (not all) promote. I come from a developing country and I certainly do not want to go back to live like I did. The people in developed country certainly wouldn't
This article kind of skips out on safety. Many of the urban areas that have the density for walking, often have issues of homelessness and open drug use that makes people feel unsafe walking, especially with children.
The pyramid structure is used to illustrate that upper layer concepts are supported by the bottom layer concepts. So, in this case, dignity is less essential than safety. Given safety, one can begin to develop dignity.
They go hand in hand; unsafe infrastructure is inherently undignified to use. It is both unsafe and undignified to walk in a dirt ditch due to lack of sidewalks.
I don't like the word dignity for this. I think a clearer term would be priority.
We want to encourage people to be pedestrians so pedestrians should have priority over cars. In some countries, pressing a walk button actually triggers the stoplight to cycle to yellow then red for cars. Why not implement that more frequently? Also favor putting cars/roadways through tunnels rather than pedestrians. Surface can be nice parks.
I'd argue that. To many having to wear a motorcycle helmet or even a seatbelt is less dignified. As is road workers having to wear a reflective yellow vest.
Dignity is weird, some people consider school and other uniforms dignified, many others consider them an affront to free-expression and for them being forced to wear it is an affront to dignity.
If the goal is max dignity, perhaps pedestrian crossings should simply play here comes the chief or long live the king as you cross.
The same can be said for virtually any societal change. Want people to proactively fight climate change? It turns out guilting people doesn't work, but give them a dignified existence and they will immediately care about the world they live in.
Is that so? The most dignified, people with the most money, are also causing the most desctruction.
I find it odd to say people are fighting climate change if they actively contribute to climate's destruction. Doing it for a short time with a clearly stated end date would be one thing. However, almost nobody emits less than the crucial threshold of 2 t CO2/year.
At some point you have to admit that if you aren't doing it, you aren't doing it.
Carbon credits are the equivalent to murdering an innocent person and thinking that raping 2 women and supporting the offspring morally absolves you of the original murder and 2 rapes because you assume those 2 children will go on to save the world.
Nah, with people who can produce 10's-100's more pollution per person than others, making an individual choice to do better makes little difference.
Certainly learning to make small choices in the right direction (stop denying local net zero energy projects, switch away from heavy fossil fuel consumption vehicles, etc) are important individual contributions, but ultimately nothings going to get done en mass until nations start bullying each other into compliance.
South Africa is a generally developed nation and its entire energy grid are almost entirely coal. The US is pretty hard on global carbon energy initiatives because they're now a net positive oil and gas producer? Lower priced net zero tech will certainly steer the narrative as time goes on, but will it be fast enough to kill greedy self-interest in the status quo..
Stop telling them they need to eat bugs, not take vacations, and live a worse life.
People who eat exotic steaks, fly private jets, and own outrageous fortunes forcing people into that derivation will always come across as abusive — no matter what social cause you dress it up in.
Create a world where people are prosperous and have lots of children… and they’ll care about the future.
People who have lots of children, and people who are prosperous, currently do not care about the future. In fact, it seems the wealthier people are the LESS they care about the future for some reason.
If you ask me, people need to be more educated, and especially when it comes to science and misinformation. Wealth won't make people better people, which isn't to say that inequality isn't a problem, it is, but fixing it won't solve the climate problem. That comes purely from ignorance and selfishness.
What does loosening zoning restriction shave to do with "planned economy"? One of the strongest proponents of this, the Strong Towns guy, is a libertarian.
Yes, problem is complex but also easy fixable in long term: abolish parking reqs & allow building dense buildings & force building nice sidewalk+trees+bike lane+ safety islands on every street renovation. This way there is no upfront cost to rebuild everything instantly, instead same public resources will be used(street renovation money is already allocated) and the town will become more walkable gradually
You just cited a chief complaint that people against a car dominated culture have about car culture as if they never thought of it, never thought of one of their own major arguments?
It was over 100 degrees where I was in the Houston area. I don’t want to walk anywhere. Nicer sidewalks won’t change profuse sweating. All of the bike and walk crowd seems to have never been to Houston in the summer. It’s 80 degrees in Cupertino right now and 96 degrees in Houston as I type this. That’s a huge difference in what is comfortably walkable.
Nobody likes walking in 100 degree heat. When I lived in Europe, certainly walkable towns were awesome. Although, I do remember being on subways in Paris that didn’t have air conditioning in July and it was straight up miserable to be packed into a sardine can surrounded by sweaty aromatic people, then exiting the station to be greeted by a blast furnace on the surface and then walking multiple blocks to the destination.
Taking a taxi was air conditioned comfort and a welcome luxury when I could afford it. I am not knocking Paris, but making the point that the ideology of eliminating private transport in favor of being out in the elements is a regression, not an improvement.
There should be balance when it comes to transport options. Streets can be improved, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of cars entirely. Make it great for all modes of transport. A great example is when Houston ripped up driving lanes to add bike lanes — other than hobby cyclists, those lanes are rarely used unless it’s on one of the six days a year that the weather is nice enough. The bike lanes made traffic worse while benefiting just a few die-hards that cycle as some sort of social protest rather than as a legitimate means of navigating this huge city.
Why not make motorcycle and motor scooter lanes instead of bike lanes? Why do people insist on trying to turn Houston into Amsterdam? Houston isn’t Amsterdam. Greater Houston is 10,000 square miles with 7.5 million people. Greater Amsterdam is 1000 square miles with 2.5 million people.
Trying to make places with very hot weather “walkable” is about as logical as building a ski resort in Austin.
Barcelona is hot too but somehow it works, bc less cars and more trees(especially near sidewalks) means nicer walking even in hot summer
"Greater Houston is 10,000 square miles with 7.5 million people. Greater Amsterdam is 1000 square miles with 2.5 million people." - yes, we know that american towns are inferior because of parking requirements and local zoning, yes the problem is more complex, but does this mean it's not a problem or ppl just should start slowly fixing it? (Like abolishing parking reqs, zoning laws and just pass a law that forces companies to build a nice sidewalk&bike lane when a street is renovated, slowly fixing the problem). We can't know for sure walkable city will not work in Huston because laws generally prohibit building one with those stupid requirements
Here are some other examples of things that I think contribute to the hostile walking experience in the US:
* Cars parked in short driveways often extend all the way across the sidewalk. Even if you can easily step off onto the road to walk around them (not all pedestrians can), it just feels like a slap in the face to have to do that.
* Cars have much higher and stronger headlights, with the high beams often left on, and drivers are generally much less mindful of them. As a pedestrian walking at night on under-lit streets, you are constantly getting blinded.
* Tinted windows (even the mild level of tint that most cars in the US have). The whole experience of being a lone vulnerable pedestrian among a sea of cars is made even worse when you can't see the people in the cars (but you know they can see you).
* Often the only option to get food late at night are fast food places, which become drive-thru only after a certain time. Having to go through the drive-thru on foot is obviously a terrible experience, and they will often refuse to even serve you.