6 ms·

I've seen this "car free utopia" idea dismissed as an idea by and for "elites" (see Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's comments on people who ride the subway

by skort 1y ago

I've seen this "car free utopia" idea dismissed as an idea by and for "elites" (see Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's comments on people who ride the subway in NYC) plenty of times as a tactic to avoid doing anything about reducing dependence on cars. It's quite a counterproductive argument in my opinion. Even if there are well paid tech workers who are able to enjoy a "car-free lifestyle", why should it end there? Just because the system we created means that currently the only affordable place for the working poor is in suburbs where they must rely on cars doesn't mean that it needs to continue to be that way. You can support building infill housing and adding transit to eventually reduce the need for so many people to have cars. It's one thing to call it "bias" and use that as an argument to not make things better instead of coming up with ways to help make car independence available to everyone across classes.

flomo 1y ago
Because the truth is nobody has any real idea how to retrofit the last 70 years of American suburbia so that mass transit is actually effective and useful for people. "Transit-oriented development" really only helps downtown workers and doesn't get you to the grocery store or daycare. (And even in NYC, the subway is not great out in Queens/etc, so people own cars.) But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.
- cycomanic 1y ago
  I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities. Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
  - flomo 1y ago
    You are putting a lot of pointless words in my mouth. As I said, I have actually lived the San Francisco car-free bike and streetcar lifestyle, and quite enjoyed it. So I have the perspective of why it does or does not work (for Americans). I would love to see some concrete solutions proposed here other than just the usual Cars Bad/Cars Good handwaving and downvoting. (I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
    - im3w1l 1y ago
      Self driving cars will make it much more viable to use cars for last mile on either side of a public transport trip.
    - cycomanic 1y ago
      Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion and Chicago can't build public transport infrastructure because it's 1.5 less dense? That doesn't make any sense.
      - flomo 1y ago
        Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete. For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
        sriacha 1y ago
        Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogota-bus-system-transmilenio.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogot...
- panick21_ 1y ago
  Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it. > But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go. Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development. Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia: - Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone. - Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway. - Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody. - That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities. - Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japan/ https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa... - This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such. - In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them. - Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such. - Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure. - In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars). - Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes. - Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan. - The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w - Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax. - Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part. - Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car. - Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings. - If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia. - Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built. I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research. Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work. Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different. I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag
7speter 1y ago
Poor people live in the parts of cities you avoid until your rent gets expensive, too.

by skort 1y ago

flomo 1y ago

Because the truth is nobody has any real idea how to retrofit the last 70 years of American suburbia so that mass transit is actually effective and useful for people. "Transit-oriented development" really only helps downtown workers and doesn't get you to the grocery store or daycare. (And even in NYC, the subway is not great out in Queens/etc, so people own cars.) But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go.

cycomanic 1y ago
I find it fascinating how the debate around cars in cities evolves. Initially counter arguments always are that reducing cars is not desirable "nobody wants less cars in cities, people need to do their weekly groceries, nobody wants to bike in bad weather...". Once these points are refuted it always evolves into "yes it would be great, but it can't be done, because it's too expensive, politically controversial...". It's almost like there is an irrational fear of less cars in cities. Regarding it can't be done I encourage anyone to read up on how the investment into public transport transformed Bogota. Which is both much poorer and in a much more challenging geographical environment than most US cities. So if they can do it, why can't US cities?
- flomo 1y ago
  You are putting a lot of pointless words in my mouth. As I said, I have actually lived the San Francisco car-free bike and streetcar lifestyle, and quite enjoyed it. So I have the perspective of why it does or does not work (for Americans). I would love to see some concrete solutions proposed here other than just the usual Cars Bad/Cars Good handwaving and downvoting. (I just looked at Bodega in Google Maps, and it is significantly more dense than all but the most "boogie" American cities. Compare it to say Chicago.)
  - im3w1l 1y ago
    Self driving cars will make it much more viable to use cars for last mile on either side of a public transport trip.
  - cycomanic 1y ago
    Chicago has a density of 4500 people per sq km compared to Bogota at 4100 so Chicago is denser? That said I actually meant Medellin not Bogota which is significantly denser. However Medellin topology makes it extremely challenging to build infrastructure, the central valley floor is more than 1000m lower than most of the suburbs. Moreover the GDP of Medellin is 70 billion compared to a GDP of Chicago of 800 billion and Chicago can't build public transport infrastructure because it's 1.5 less dense? That doesn't make any sense.
    - flomo 1y ago
      Genuinely curious, do you have a good article about Bogota? Because your entire demeanor is acting like you have some "gotcha", without advocating for anything concrete. For example, from my brief perusal of Google Maps, it looks like they have some sort of growth boundary, because it goes from dense city to farms in a sharp line. For historical reasons, America is not organized that way. (And Chicago is fucked-up, so be it.)
      - sriacha 1y ago
        Bogota is interesting for their bus rapid transit (dedicated bus lanes), which as far as I know was built out for a fraction of the cost of a metro system. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogota-bus-system-transmilenio.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/headway/bogot...
panick21_ 1y ago
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it. > But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go. Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development. Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia: - Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone. - Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway. - Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody. - That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities. - Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underutilized. This also means no more minimum parking space and all that nonsense. See maybe like this: https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japan/ https://www.realestate-tokyo.com/news/land-use-zones-in-japa... - This will make it so suburbs can go from single house only to a mix of single house, duplex, fourplexes, townhouses and so on. Like suburbs used to be. And it will make it so that light commercial developments can happen in subburbs. Meaning a single house can turn into small shops, coffees and such. - In the city select a few core blocks in different places in the city, make those pedestrian only. Or like Montreal does, a whole long street. Each year add more of those pedestrian zone, improve walking infrastructure between them. - Make it so subburban residents start to pay full price for their utilities including water and other infrastructure. New subburban developments are often hilariously subsidized, needing more water pumps and such. - Redevelop current stroads into much fewer lanes and create separate access roads to the commercial developments. This improves flow on the stroads, reduce accidents and makes walking and biking along those stroads safer. Of course some of those lanes would turn into bike infrastructure. - In the subburbs, also reduce road with, install protected cycle lanes. Break open the horrible cul-de-sac, the city can buy part of peoples garden to create cross connects between different cul-de-sacs and surrounding developments (cross connects for people and bikes, not cars). - Make all the bus services public, heir a real transportation engineer to come up with a plan. Consisting of a few main routes, using the old stroads and highways, and smaller buses that serve as connectors to these major routes. Of course for that you would make some lanes on the highway, busways. Despite what some people in the US think, you can actually do decent bus service in suberbia. Combine that with public on demand service, that gets you cheaply to the next closes major public transport node. Maybe start planning a tram route along the major bus-routes. - Look at your old rail infrastructure and develop a plan for a decent regional service. Develop a 50 year rail plan. - The city can also simply buy up some cul-de-sacs that are strategically located and redevelop them into proper nice walkable neighborhoods. The city can even own the land and only rent half of the appartments, some at affordable price. This worked well in Britain and still does work well in Austria. And of course develop a transportation plan for those new neighborhoods. See an example, where old soviet style neighborhoods were developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfonhlM6I7w - Change your property tax into a land tax, or a property tax heavily focused on land. Or potentially do more with sales or what taxes, importantly, just don't do property tax. - Like in Japan, require anybody that wants to own a car in a city, to first prove the have a private place to part. - Make all car registrations based on weight, meaning you pay more for a heavier car. - Focus development on the city and the first suburban ring around the city. Offer intensives for people in the outer rings to move into the inner rings. So for example somebody that owns a small house in the far outer ring of the city, could move into a duplex in the inner rings. - If yours city has repair backlog (and most cities do) focus on the city core and the inner ring of subberbia. - Do not develop more land, US cities already are far to wide spread. Simply announce no new infrastructure or roads. And not taking over into city property stuff that developers have built. I could list more, pretty much all of these have been discussed in urbanism research. Pretty much all of these have been done in different places at different times. And the all pretty much work. Doing them all together hasn't been done but there is no reason to believe it wouldn't work. Of course this does not mean that for 1 day to the next everybody will go from suberbinate to die hard city person. But the culture after 1-2 decades of such changes will be dramatically different. I also suggest to see this video about comparing two cities over time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uqbsueNvag

7speter 1y ago

Poor people live in the parts of cities you avoid until your rent gets expensive, too.