The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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People lived before cars, people will live without them.
Not if cars destroy the planet with us first.
Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.
The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.
The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.
It's actually still doable, but requires some creative thinking to undo the damage done for half century. Train can carry people from suburb into the city, the last mile can be solved either by brt, tram, or by micromobility. Bus, tram, and bicycle need their own dedicated lane for this to work nicely. This won't necessarily prevent people from driving but it will make driving not the only way to go to work.
Iirc Amsterdam is basically that, it used to be car-centric but the government take away that monopoly and give it back to bicycle and micro-mobile. Paris is another recent example on how bicycle usage is rising if given the proper safety infrastructure to ride around. It's also a car-centric city before this.
It's not that it's hard, it's just lack of political will and dinosaur way of thinking. It's something that never crossed their mind.
Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we're absolutely initially designed around walking.
Cities design around walking is technically harder because the space limitation if they want to share it with car, but tend to have everything in close proximity, which in that case it's far easier to just ban car from entering and cater the street to just pedestrian and bicycle/non-electric scooter. Cities design around car however, is easier to convert, as they tend to have wider road and more lane for car. They just need to take away one lane and give it to cyclist and that's it. The only hard part is going through the legislation and carbrain.
Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.
How do people get downtown?
The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren't easily adapted.
"Just use park and rides" doesn't solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it's more expensive and slower than the existing system.
Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there's pushback against expanding it.
The first step and the mindset is already wrong, focusing on moving traffic instead of removing traffic. So yeah, of course it wouldn't work. Houston failed at it doesn't mean other city would fail too.
People can't travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.
The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.
It's an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that's less-convenient for most users.
I'm not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.
Does ALL Americans travel 30 miles for work?
Foldable bicycle? Kick scooter? Skateboard? Frequent scheduled tram? Frequent scheduled buses? Walkable suburb?
So does all those micromobile.
That's what called lazy design, and that's why american and all the people from car dependent city are so miserable about their daily commuting.
Our definition of "little" might be a bit different.
And a costly one. Maintaining road for car is far more expensive than for public transport because of the amount of people each mode of transport carry.
It's difficult because it's written into stupid law by stupid politician. That's what i called lacking political will.
It's not even about replacing one for another, it's about providing a good, viable option, and not a half done one then call it a day, to people who want to use such infrastructure.
Nobody think that, that's just strawman argument. You know why people around here don't take you seriously? Because you never pay attention to what their stand are. There's a reason carbrain is a popular term with urbanist/pro-strong town because car people just can't seems to wrap their head around on the concept of giving people the option for viable alternative transport. Literally every car brain i met seems to believe everyone is living on some edge case hence car should be the only transport, they never seems to think edge case is just that, edge case.
https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?si=1NXVnwQDm_C9B9R1
I'll just leave this video here.
There's also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris's 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.
What's a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn't require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don't own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn't safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn't significantly add to commute times?
I don't live in the US so maybe I'm mistaken but in my opinion a possibility could be :
Wait for a small group of houses in the suburbs to be available (preferably towards the center) and transform them in convenience stores, schools, office space, etc
Next you can link multiple suburbs like that with train/tram or metro for exemple. And you can even leave roads connecting zones for delivery or for people needing to go to another town or things like that
Couple that to a good public transport system overall and now you're living in a space were there's less danger due to car circulation, you don't need to drive multiple km to do groceries, kids can walk(or commute via PT) to school, etc
Edit: Naturally this would not be feasible in a year or two but I can easily see this implemented in 5 to 10 year time
Do you think we don't have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?
We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don't get used because it's 110° for months at a time and you don't want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.
But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don't bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.
I'll accept that maybe my vision of the suburbs is biased by films and TV shows 😅
I live in a city where temperature could realistically go to 110° F (that's about 40~45° C for me) in summer but here bus and tram have AC and there is water fountains (decorative and drinkable) everywhere + the city try to maintain vegetation despite heat waves. So even if it's hot outside, felt air temperature is actually way cooler.
I'll admit this is very dependent of where you live, the climate around you, water availability and other things, but certainly it's doable in some places of the US. For others places, in between accomodations can be found. Walkable cities are not a black and white sets of solution there's levels, hierarchical implementations, etc
@chiliedogg wow this is a nice summary from which to start defining possible solutions. Off the top of my head, it would be low-rise residential co-op ownership clusters with adjoining, enclosed spaces like small Milan gallerias. Residential clusters will be connected by main commercial streets with offices and stores. Cluster groups form towns and cars would only be allowed to travel between towns but not within. Millions of people still need to transition to this, there’s no way around that.
Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that's a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.
Our residents don't want neighbors. They don't want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.
I don't live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won't cover a week's mortgage for some of these houses.
@figstick @chiliedogg speaking of, one of the bigger challenges is the desire to be farther from other people. I think half of the lawn crowd is less about the lawns than just being farther from neighbors. Or at least that's what I experienced with folks who moved to Staten Island and New Jersey, basically trying to get away from places like Brooklyn where it was too crowded. They wanted more distance. For those folks, you need to accommodate some level of isolation which nobody talks about.
@chiliedogg @Annoyed_Crabby cities that were designed around cars should be easier to convert as there is so much wasteful tarmac dedicated to low occupancy travel and parking.