When I visited Hawaii last year I noticed that something was different at all the hotels compared to hotels at similar locations elsewhere; Thailand, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. In Hawaii, all hotels had huge parking garages and a large valet parking staff. Similar-sized hotels in the other locations never had parking garages, hotels with hundreds of rooms might have a tiny parking-lot somewhere, on which a few rental cars would be parked.
But in Hawaii, everyone rents a car, drives it the ten minutes from the airport to the hotel, parks it at the hotel, leaves it there for a week, then drives it back to the airport to get home.
It's a pretty funny and stark reminder of the completely different mindset and attitude towards cars that most americans have. Having a car is so deeply ingrained that the alternatives don't have a chance.
People looked at us as though we were insane getting the bus from the Airport to our hotel - it took 15 mins, and cost about $2 each - a taxi would have been a shade quicker, but would have been $20 to $30. A few couples even came over to see if we'd made a mistake, or offering a lift in their hire-car. In the hotel we were asked a few time how on earth we could travel around the island without a hire-car.
I don't have a drivers license either, and in the US I find myself cycling a bit. Cars don't really know what to do with you there. ^_^
When I mention that I'm not cycling to work and it takes me 30 minutes to walk, even my fellow Nederlanders look at me in shock and disbelief. 30 minutes, for reference, is about the duration of a typical podcast, and is also pretty standard for downloadable audio lectures, so it's not like I lose productivity -- and even without those, it really does clear my head to spend half an hour with my own mind and no internet to distract me.
When I had a bike, I lived further away and spent 50 minutes cycling to work. The thing is, that was only maybe 5 minutes longer than my next-best option, public transport (bus-to-train-to-bus). A car would have been a tremendous, polluting investment, and I lost something like 35 kg just because I got my daily exercise in.
So yeah. If you live in an urban environment, driving works but seems lazy.
While I agree with what you've said about cars, I'd consider it just as crazy to have a 30-minute or 50-minute commute by alternative transportation as an equally long commute by car. Either way, you waste a significant portion of your life going back and forth to work.
If you have a commute longer than 5-10 minutes, and you don't work from home on the vast majority of days, consider changing either your work location or your home location. That holds regardless of your preferred mode of transport.
I think that a 30 minute walk or bike ride is not "wasted" the same way 30 minutes driving would be. Driving can be a huge stress, especially in rush-hour commuting traffic. A walk or a bike ride is a chance to unwind.
Some people consider driving a means of unwinding the same way. Personally I'd consider all three a waste of time compared to actually being at the desired location. Couldn't you unwind more easily at home?
I used to bike 50 minutes twice a day (13 and a half miles each way) through London - and I can honestly say I loved it every day.
Some days I'd wake up feeling tired and grumpy, but once I was on the bike I'd be fine. Some days it would start raining just before I was going to leave for home, but still once I was one the bike everything melted away.
I totally agree everyone is different, and living closer to work would have been nicer. But by living far away I was able to: afford a house not a flat, afford a car for when I wanted to take journeys that actually cost more by train in the UK, live near huge green open spaces - all the while working for the UKs biggest media organisation and getting all the benefits of that and of living in London.
I ate listening to music on a commute, so it was 50 minutes of silence, 50 minutes of either planning my day or shaking off my day. When I'd get home I'd be totally chilled no matter how my day had been, and I'd get to work with a full plan of my day - or if I wasn't busy I'd just let my mind wander onto a million what ifs.
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I currently can't cycle and I really miss it - zoning out on the tube isn't the same, working out isn't the same, and it's hard to force yourself to cycled 25 miles a day if you aren't aiming to get anywhere.
But I can totally see how you could get the same from a car journey, or from just being at home earlier.
For me I have to work where I work now (central London), and I love living where I live.
God, I love driving. If I'm trying to think through a hard problem, I hop on the freeway and let my unconscious mind work through it while my conscious mind is focused on driving. It's as good for problem solving as sleeping is.
Biking, while healthy, is much more stressful for me. There's too much to watch for, too much that can go wrong too quickly, and no safety net if it does. I can't stop my mind of thinking what would happen if the rim collapsed right now, or if a squirrel ran out in front of me, or if the seat or handlebars broke... any system fails in a car you're still pretty well protected. On a bike, you're screwed. Doesn't stop me from commuting by bike, though.
I love driving... on open, uncongested highways at night. I can't stand driving to commute, straining my foot muscles in a maddeningly irregular pattern of pressing and releasing the brake as the cars ahead of me expand and contract at zero-to-five miles per hour.
Don't submit to playing the stop-and-go traffic jamming game. http://trafficwaves.org/ Even in rush hour I make a goal to press the brake as little as possible which simply means finding the average speed of the cars in front of me and going slower than it. It's a much less stressful way to drive and since I have a manual also requires less work.
I actually do my best to maintain a constant speed, though because of the large window in front of me, it often doesn't last long before someone merges in and sends me back to stop-and-go. I'm just glad I have transit options available.
A former roommate had a similar complaint. My response was "Your large window in front of you wasn't large enough." But I've also had a mile in front of me thinking the way ahead was clear only to turn a bend and brake really hard at the sight of yet another traffic jam. So it's not a perfect solution unfortunately. I want to see a startup that tracks people's phone and car GPSes (or other means of locating them since you don't need a GPS to get a cell phone's location) and offers a screen to put in the car or a tablet/phone app that shows you the locations and speeds of everyone in your vicinity it can and offers advice like "See this traffic jam 3 miles ahead? That's why you should slow down to 40 now like the new sign says you should do." (Eventually the app can control the car's speed itself.)
Transit is a good solution as well if time isn't important to you or you have a good transit system that doesn't take an hour to go a mere several miles. I've been up to BC's Vancouver a few times and I'm jealous of their skytrain.
Try commuting in a manual :) You can use the brake less by downshifting (which helps relieve congestion, people are seeing less brake lights), but talk about irregular foot movements. Need to be off the clutch to slow your car using the engine, but on it to slow your car using the brakes, off the clutch on the gas to start moving, then (clutch in) into second (clutch out) but whoa hold on, (clutch in) back into first (clutch out to slow down) and we're stopped (clutch in, brakes on, shift to neutral, clutch out).
Then we go again (clutch in, into gear, clutch out+gas), and it continues. If everyone was forced to drive a manual, we'd have less slowdowns (and less DUIs, IMO) just from the thinking and movement it requires. No one would want to stop.
Sadly, I don't know if this is true - all cars in England are manuals pretty much and we still have plenty of traffic and drink driving. Manuals are more fun though :)
True, this only works for places where people don't normally drive manual transmissions. Once the populace learns, this will no longer be effective.
I'm all for making driving more involving. If you have to use both feet and both hands to drive, it gets harder to eat a burger and apply your makeup and type on your laptop and wank all at the same time.
I doubt we (in the UK) have the same Drink Driving problem that the USA has, but I wonder if that is more to do with the distance to get to a good pub? It's often walking distance in the UK.
That said there are many nice country pubs, and I rarely see /drunks/ leaving them, though I am sure a fair few are over the limit.
Agreed. I think commuting by bike on trails, small streets, or separated from traffic is must less stressful than biking on a busy street. Even taking a bus is a bit more stressful than driving (for me) because the buses are so infrequent. Missing a crucial bus can cause an extra 30-45 minutes of travel time.
A 30 minute walk to work is great. It ensures that you get some exercise in before you get to work. If it's a nice area, you can drink some coffee, listen to a podcast and enjoy the walk. I'd much rather have 30 minute walk to work than a 10 minute drive.
You probably also don't see the point in home cooking when you could eat out, or growing your own vegetables when you could just buy them in a grocery store?
That is doable if you're single and live alone. When you and your preferred room mate work at different locations, it becomes impossible for both of you to live within 5-10 minutes of your workplace.
True, you spend a lot of time going back and forth, but while commuting by car requires that you focus 100% on driving (and the same goes for biking or walking), doing it by train or bus lets you do actual work if all you need is a laptop.
True enough. While you'll still have some overhead due to the walking in between, you'll probably end up with something comparable to a 5-10 minute commute. Still not ideal (due to the working conditions), but not a complete waste of time.
Firstly, I agree: working within a few minutes of your home is the greatest luxury money can buy.
That said, my two favorite activities while on a train:
1. Read.
2. Sleep. I really miss sleeping on the train in the mornings (my current commute is too short for a quick nap). I always felt so refreshed afterwards.
Neither of these is really feasible when commuting by car; having them available to you makes a world of difference between cars and trains or busses.
When my commute was Too Long (~50 minutes), I would even occasionally program on the train. That's harder to do, though, because you need a seat, and if you commute during vaguely normal hours (7-11am, 6-10pm) a seat on the subway is a rare commodity.
I had a friend come to visit a few months ago. He came over from Finland (Helsinki) with his fiancee to my mid-size Midwestern city. He says he had explained it to her previously but I guess she didn't understand that there is really no public transport here. She doesn't have a drivers license because she's never needed one.
While my friend and I were out and about, he got a call from her asking where the train station was. The only train here is Amtrak...
As an American, I've been explicitly called childish by several people for not desiring a driver's license. Because you only grow up when you have a car. -_-
> But in Hawaii, everyone rents a car, drives it the ten minutes from the airport to the hotel, parks it at the hotel, leaves it there for a week, then drives it back to the airport to get home.
When I was in Hawaii I took shuttles but my friends rented a car. One day I hitched a ride with them to a trailhead and we took a tropical hike that ended up being the absolute high point of the trip for me. It was remote and I'm pretty sure no public transportation went there.
When my wife and I went to Oahu for out honeymoon, we thought it was absolutely insane that anyone would rent a car while visiting the place. They have a free bus system that shuttles you around the down town area, and there are loads of tours that can get you to the regular hots spots that everyone wants to visit.
This is okay if you're a tourist traveling between popular tourist spots. As a local, taking the bus 10 miles from home to work would take me at least an hour and half to two hours, verus 40 minutes in a car.
The first time I visited Hawaii, I think I might have gotten away with not renting a car. However, the more I visit, the more I find myself driving places. Visiting relatives while I am there also requires a car.
If you want to travel outside of Waikiki (which doesn't really count as Hawaii IMHO) and a few popular tourist destinations I think you're going to want to rent a car. Of course I'm not saying that the majority of tourists should rent a car. Additionally the bus has restrictions on how much luggage you can carry, typically you can only bring a mid-size suitcase each (it has to fit on or under your seat).
I was going to say the same thing: if you want to do something interesting, like go to Haleakala or O'heo on Maui or various volcanic excursions on the Big island, you'll get nowhere without a car. Granted, that's probably a minority (thankfully) of the people...
Driving the road to Hana was one of the coolest things I've ever done.
Cars have ruined where I grew up in Dallas, though — so much sprawl. I live in Austin, which is sort of fighting it, but establishing the infrastructure after the fact is so difficult.
I think in the Netherlands, we've had this discussion a while ago already. Outcome: cities like Amsterdam have intentionally few parking spaces in the center, and they cost ludicrous amounts of money per hour.
People living in the center either complain their asses off, or ditch the car.
I'm not sure that this really helped people much. Ditching the car means you can't go visit your grandma in that village without a train station on the other side of the country easily. Keeping the car means everything sucks (super-expensive, no place to put it, takes ages to get from your house to the highway). Real solution: keep the car and move away from the city center, the exact opposite from what the OP is suggesting.
Long story short, I doubt there is a simple solution. Back in those wonderful old days, everybody lived 2 miles from their grandmas anyway.
(there probably are plenty non-simple solutions though)
In germany the concept of car-sharing is becoming increasingly popular. Most bigger cities have multiple providers, some are backed by car manufacturers, some are independent.
So if you want to pick up lots of beverages for your birthday party next weekend and don't feel like hauling them back in public transport or with your bike, you can just rent a car for x minutes, go shopping, drive home, park it in a reserved place in you neighborhood.
The price model of most providers is however not the best for the visit grandma in the countryside problem, but most of those carsharing companies have special tarifs with rental providers, so you can get a relatively cheap car for the weekend.
The way it technically works is almost always the same: You sign up and you get an RFID Key Card. You go on the internet or use an App to see if a car is available in your area and book it. You go to the car, open it with you keycard and find the keys in the glovebox. Sometimes you have to put in a PIN first. Some providers have a monthly fee, some just charge the usage.
Some Websites for those interested:
www.car2go.com - Backed by Daimler - Smart Cars even in some NA cities
www.greenwheels.com - indipendent, has been around for ages
www.flinkster.de - Backed by Deutsche Bahn (german railways), they also have bikes for rent
www.stadtmobil.de
www.drive-now.com - Sixt (biggest german rental firm) and BMW - nice 1-series and Minis
www.web.quicar.de - Volkswagen got into the business,too
I use Cambio for car sharing here in Belgium, and it works great for me. The price for one trip may sometimes feel steep, but overall it works out a lot cheaper for us than owning a car. Even when I had a company car, I paid more for it in taxes than I pay now in an average Cambio month. Also, getting to and from the closest pickup point is often faster than the time my neigbours spend looking for parking spaces.
So I'd recommend looking into it to anyone who doesn't need a car on a daily basis. (Personally, I'm lucky enough to live within a bikeable distance from work.)
While living in Philadelphia, we got very used to seeing the ubiquitous Philly Car Share maroon cars. They partner with public and private enterprises for preferred parking spaces at a variety of venues. A good section of the front row of parking at IKEA was reserved for car-share. Its a great system and one noticeably absent from my current midwestern city.
When we lived in London, if we wanted to go somewhere that wasn't well served by rail we'd just rent a car. The couple of hundred pounds we'd spend on car rental was far less than the cost of owning a car.
In the Netherlands I'd just cycle there. Nothing is that far away. ;-)
I second this. I rent cars between 5 and 20 weekends a year, and have been doing this for about 6 years. It works out fine. The car is always in perfect condition, and it is not that expensive. It is true though that some trips that do not reach the importance threshold don't happen.
Also, taxis work well here in my hometown. About £8 will get me to the other side of the city, and a weekend hire costs about £50. I found owning a car, all-in, cost about £200/month (adding up tax, insurance, repair bills, etc) so it's cost-efficient to hire a vehicle when I need it.
Before we had our own business (necessitating a vehicle) we spent a couple of years without a car - for 2 people it was always cheaper (sometimes quite a lot) to hire a car than it was to take the train. Such a shame as I generally love travelling by train.
I think in this situation, rental cars would help.
If 6 days out of 7 you can do without a car, then spending $50 or whatever it costs to hire a car for the seventh day would make sense. It would take a long time for that to add up to $20,000 - $30,000 people spend to own a car. Not to mention services and other car sundries.
Yearly? That seems high. My car is paid off and I pay nothing for parking (other than whatever portion of my steep Baltimore City property taxes pays for it).
Anyway, let's say I drive 8000 miles in a year, my car gets 30 mpg and gas is $4 a gallon. 8000/30=267 gallons * 4 = $1068 per year on gas.
My car's paid off, but I bought it 5 years ago for $10k, so let's just amortize that evenly per year, and assume it will die at the end of the year, and say I paid $2k per year for it.
My maintenance in the past year has been minimal; I think my greatest cost was replacing a headlamp. (knock on wood). Let's say $250 just to be conservative.
Let's add another $250 for government taxes, fees, etc.
Therefore, in the last year, my car cost me about 1068+2000+250+250 = $3568, nearly an order of magnitude less than your assessment.
I assumed his estimate was for buying a new car, not yearly. Your numbers seem approximately right for yearly, although you also have to add in insurance. I think my maintenance expenses have averaged more like $500 as well, between routine maintenance and an oil change once a year, new tires every 4-5 years, battery change every 3-5 years, and miscellaneous mishaps (had to replace my windshield once after it got hit by a rock when parked in a city).
Good points both, my insurance is $1300/yr, and if we up the maintenance estimate we get ~$5000/yr.
I've been fortunate that my car has run with nearly no repairs, and city living hasn't done much damage to it besides some moron who ran into the bumper and drove off while it was parked.
(I assumed it was for buying a new car too, I just wanted to point out that the yearly cost of owning a car is much less than the number he was using.)
What's your insurance cost? Most people probably pay at least $500 per year for insurance.
But the majority of a car's cost is depreciation, which of course will quickly take your estimates up by 2-3x if you buy a new car. (Which, even though it's such an atrociously bad economic decision, a surprising lot of people seem to do.)
You might have skipped insurance in your list, but I don't think the parent meant $20k-30k as the yearly cost (because that much is rare), but as the initial purchase price (which is common when buying new).
Living in a crowded area near the Tel Aviv port (think shopping, clubs, restaurants and sometimes events) a car would've been a real hassle. In fact: If I'd have decided that I need a car here, this location wouldn't have made sense at all.
But I think I can get by without one, most of the time. And given the traffic here I consciously decided that I really don't want to participate on a regular basis anyway. I rent a car for trips across the country if needed, use a bike for the rest. Rarely a bus/shuttle taxi/taxi. Trains are .. well .. kind of pointless for my uses so far.
I'm convinced that I save money this way and do 'Something Good' (tm), both for myself and the environment.
As an Israeli living abroad (Vienna in my case, have been here for 7 years), the lacking mass transport in Tel Aviv (you can kinda get by without a car, but it's not easy and as you say even if you live in a central location you still need a car sometimes) is my most major reason to not even consider Tel Aviv a real option right now (neither me nor my girlfriend have driving licenses or the will to ever have a car).
Even just dropping the silly no-transit-on-saturday rule would be a huge improvement (then you could actually get pretty much anywhere you need to, just not very quickly and you'd have to live in a farily central location inside Tel Aviv proper).
This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't?
I rent a car for trips across the country if needed
How do you visit people outside Tel Aviv on the weekend? Probably my most common ailment in your situation would be that I couldn't easily visit family members and friends even if they live in greater Tel Aviv on weekends, since the buses/trains don't work on Saturdays and shared taxis don't go everywhere.
So - I have a license and love to drive. But here it is ~different~. The whole traffic 'culture' constantly makes me think that I'd cause accidents here: My Autobahn mindset doesn't translate to the driving behavior here, so I fear that _I_ will crash into someone, someday, because of 'No, he certainly won't do ... BOOM'.
Agreed, the Saturday issue is annoying sometimes. You can go by train as far as I am informed (but where to? The options are limited) and the sherut + cab solution works. Bus, (sherut,) cab are ~cheap~ here.
In TLV I need no car, never. For shopping it might be annoying sometimes, but that's really just my own lazyness, I think.
Renting cars: I don't need one without planning ahead. If I do that, I can easily rent it in advance (ignoring the Saturday issue again). In the greater area I still try to use the bike. A car is for visits to the dead sea, to Haifa, Jerusalem (train works just as well though) etc. I don't have family here and friends are ~local~, i.e. TLV, Ramat Gan, Ramat Aviv etc. => Bike
This really puzzles me - if significantly poorer cities such as Budapest and Prague can pull off decent mass-transit, how come Tel Aviv can't?
Can you provide some source? Since, at least according to EUROSTAT the Prague NUTS-2 Region is in EU's top 10[1] and Tel Aviv is not even in the Middle East's top 10.
Also, a lot of the machinery for the Czech mass transit systems (trams, trolleybuses, metro trains, Esko (commuter) trains, buses, fare collection systems) is produced locally, thus directly contributing to the economy. Israel just doesn't have those centuries of excellent tradition in machine-engineering and construction.
We were in Krakow recently and just about cried seeing the number of trams running through the place - in Edinburgh we're spending about a billion pounds for one tram line that goes from not-quite-the-airport to the city center.
I don't have a source, the impression was based on my subjective knowledge that my Czech friends earn significantly less than my Israeli friends.
I know a lot of people in both countries - 1000 euro/month is a nice middle-class salary in Prague, in Tel Aviv that's just barely making ends-meet, if at all (it's quite possibly that your rent alone will be close to that much, and not in a particularly nice apartment either).
Also, why it is only decent? The Prague mass transit system has comfortable clean and warm vehicles, extremely good coverage (14 commuter train lines, ~24 light rail, 3 metro and hundreds of bus routes), short intervals and all of that is also in the suburbs. I have been to a lot of places, but haven't seen a system that functions much better.
Thank you, it's nice to hear this as a resident. Alas, I'd also go for "decent" because although the transit system is good, it's being sabotaged by the city council - it prefers to fund building highways through the city center, and to sell off the profitable parts of the public transit company. Dark times are ahead, what with much of the rolling stock nearing the end of life and much-needed extensions being deferred indefinitely for purely pork-barrel reasons.
I've done the math when I considered switching to zipcar and even here you barely break even. I spend just over $200 a month on my car (amortized maintenance, depreciation, insurance, etc.) before gas, which is pretty much the same number as here. With costs the same, I just go with the option where my car is always outside. `
We live in the center of Edinburgh and the parking in the center of town is split into standard "Pay and Display" and zoned resident-only parking (which we pay a fixed amount per year for). This seems to work fairly well - we have a car that we really don't use that often (my wife and I both walk to work and our son walks to school) but we just keep it parked on one of the residents parking spaces on the street outside our flat.
You have to have proof of actually living in the relevant zone to get a residents parking permit - but this is pretty easy to do (they check you against the council tax register).
Japan's solution is to forbid owning a car if you can't prove you have a parking space for it (as a rented space or you own it, choice is yours).
It worked pretty well IMO, and car rental was cheap enough to cover the need to see grandma case.
BTW Paris is testing the casual car rental strategy also.
The fun part is, there is no strong definition of how much space you need to park a car, you have to prove you can actually park your car in the space you declare.
An officer follows you to your parking place, and stands there watching your maneuvers.
I don't think you have to prove that. In big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, most people use public transport to commute anyway. Although it's not mandatory, in practice every company will reimburse your commuting costs if you take public transportation.
You are clearly not living in the city center of Amsterdam.
The system works perfectly for people living there: those who want to keep their own car can get a relatively cheap parking permit, and most only use their car for exactly those rare scenarios you've described. It takes 10 minutes to get to the highway. Nobody is complaining, having a car is simply pointless 95% of the time.
I live in Amsterdam (I'm an American used to US-car-culture).
I have a bike. It lets me go almost anywhere in Amsterdam, cheaper, more easily, and generally faster than any other mode of transportation. Sometimes you get a bit wet.
There are a few distances inside the city which are not handy. For those I use the wonderful tram/bus/metro network.
Occasionally I'm lazy and don't want to bike, or need to go somewhere strange. Then I grab a car2go (electric smart car, €.30/min, including electricity, insurance, parking anywhere). When I get to my destination I park it anywhere and end the rental.
Since moving here, my transportation costs have gone from many-hundreds-of-dollars per month for a car/gas/insurance/repairs/tolls/parking/fines in the US, to around €40 month for a bike, public transport usage, and short-term car rentals.
It is much cheaper, and much more convenient, to call a taxi or rent a van when the above options don't fulfill my transportation needs.
That mode of living only works if you primarily travel _within_ the city or to a few well-connected cities in the region.
Travelling from Amsterdam to places without a train station kinda sucks. In some cases, even travelling to places _with_ a train station takes almost twice as long by public transport.
And while waiting for a permit (about 2-3 years, but we live in the area with the longest waiting lists) we could park the care somewhere within a 10-15 minute tram/bike ride. Which is not a big deal if you use the car about once a month. Neither is taking 5 minutes to find a parking spot.
All of these are a small price to pay for the convenience of not needing a car 99% of the time.
Parking is not that big an issue in Amsterdam in general compared to many other major cities. Largely because few people are stupid enough to use a car when a bike or public transport will do...
I'm coming to Amsterdam twice a year during huge trade shows at RAI, and I have no particular problem getting parked in the centre, near the Dam and al. Really, Amsterdam is quite easy, not worse than Paris.
Couldn't you just rent a car? I haven't been to the Netherlands so may be I am missing something obvious here.
In the U.S. now you can rent not just by the day, but also get hourly rentals like Zipcar or peer rentals like GetAround. It is still early days for both those options, but those and similar new developments may make this a much easier problem to solve across the world.
Others have suggested renting. There's also car sharing, which makes a lot of sense for exactly the situations you suggest.
What's more, for a country the size and density of the Netherlands, anybody should be able to visit their Grandma using public transportation (buses, too, not just trains). I'm not saying it's possible right now, but it ought to be.
It is possible to get everywhere using public transport in the Netherlands, but the time difference is huge. If I use public transport to get to my girlfriends parents house it takes 60 to 90 minutes, if I go by car it takes 30 to 40 minutes.
I vastly prefer a longer ride in which I have my hands free and can do a little work or read a book, versus being chained to the steering wheel in a car. To each his own, of course.
Okay, I guess I was talking more about "viable" than "possible". Or maybe, it should be viable for 80% of all trips and at least possible for the remaining 20%. I guess you can't realise it for all of them, that's just a consequence of urban sprawl.
or if you are only using it to visit your grandma on the other side of the country, maybe just rent a car for a couple days? or if you have a car that is paid for leave it on the outskirts where it is cheaper and take transit to it?
I completely agree. It's sad that we've let cars completely take over in detriment of quality of life.
I worked on this set of visualizations on traffic in the center of Madrid a few years ago: http://trsp.net/cow
I found the numbers stunning. Some avenues had an average of 100k vehicles driving through daily.
I've since moved to San Francisco, and find that traffic in US cities is less painful, the cities' grids and sidewalks are better prepared. But still, it's ridiculous how much freedom cars are given. A few months ago traffic in Valencia St, one of the nicest streets in the Mission, was cut off, and it was bliss to take a walk there, even though the street was super crowded. At least some streets should always be traffic free, I dont think it's that much effort to ask, and the benefits in quality of living are tremendous.
The main opposition to pedestrian streets in the U.S. tends to be from merchants. Their view is that cars driving by is good advertising. Even if the cars don't actually stop, when they drive by a store daily, they're reminded it's there and might eventually visit, while if the traffic gets routed in a different way, fewer eyeballs will see the stores daily (and instead they'll see different stores). State Street in Chicago was pedestrianized from 1979-1996, for example, but merchant pressure eventually caused it to be reopened to traffic.
It depends a lot on the circumstances. Here's a recent situation where the decision to make some streets in Chinatown pedestrian-only and removing parking on others (if only for a day) was supported and well-received by merchants:
The midtown Atlanta example is all wrong. Yes, there are a lot of cars in Atlanta. Yes, there are a lot of parking lots in Atlanta. Are these parking lots required to sustain these cars? Not at all. The rates for parking vary wildly, because people only want to park near where they are going.
Those parking lots are not for cars, they are for flipping real estate.
Real estate in midtown has been booming for a little over a decade as small run down buildings are demolished and 10 ~ 40 story skyscrapers are built. That means huge increases in land value, which attracts speculation. When a lot with a small building is purchased, what happens next? If the building stays, it will have to be serviceable, and a tenant found, which will lock the property up until the tenant leaves. So the building has to go, and the property might need to be re-zoned from single family residential.
If you pave over that lot, not only do you remove unwanted structures and get the opportunity to re-zone, there will be some low-maintenance passive income generated from people using the property to park their car.
So ultimately, those parking lots are good for the city in the long run. They're useless eyesores right now, but are more easily converted into high density buildings, as they have been doing for the last decade. In fact the real problem with midtown is that there has been too much high density construction too quickly, and not enough people have moved in yet.
So as much as I love a naval gazing rant, reality is a little more subtle, and a lot more complicated.
I live in and own real estate in a building that is pictured on that map. Some notes:
1) Not every red box is accurate. For example, one of them contains a bank as well as a parking structure, yet the bank was circled as well.
2) Not everything is counted evenly. Some condo and office buildings' parking structures are circled, and some aren't. Almost all of the condo buildings have their own interior parking, most of which is not circled. Hell, mine has an exterior blacktop parking lot and its not even circled.
3) The majority of those lots circled are not for flipping real estate. The ones circled are mostly commuter lots and business lots that are often mostly empty.
The majority of those lots circled are not for flipping real estate. The ones circled are mostly commuter lots and business lots that are often mostly empty.
It might be a matter of perspective, but a mostly empty parking lot is not in the business of being a parking lot. Flipping commercial real estate can take decades, the point is that the lot is not required and will likely help the area become more city-like.
I'd hesitate to call that "flipping", then. Flipping real estate is usually meant to be a short term process to extract quick profit, not a decades long wait. That would be "investing".
To me, investing is putting it to good use. Buying it cheap, paving it, and waiting to sell high is not "investing". Again, that could just be perspective.
It's been proposed that municipalities that want to increase density in a particular district convert their property taxes to land taxes in a revenue-neutral way.
That makes it much more painful to leave real-estate in a less-than-maximally-productive state.
Cars do not kill cities - urban planning without enough foresight into how cars actually interact with one another, and with cities kill cities.
A large portion of current urban plans date to Robert Moses - he essentially built New York, invented the ring of highways system used in DC and other places, and advised places like LA in constructing their major arteries. Moses was in love with cars, but never experienced traffic as his limo was chauffered with a police escort. He built highways and made them inaccessible to public transportation (see the West Side Highway) so that poor people could not use them. He had no real understanding of capacity utilization/maximization for transport and stopped learning long before he stopped designing. He never updated his understanding of the damages caused by simply adding more highways, but retained the power to keep building them.
The most pernicious impact of Moses's style of urban planning is not, however, gridlock or a lack of walkability. Moses decided that he could put roads wherever he wanted, and used eminent domain to put them right through vibrant communities - which he destroyed. He killed the bronx, parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and almost ran a huge raised highway across 34th street.
In any case, The Power Broker is an amazing book to read if you're curious about these issues and why cities are designed the way they are now.
The biggest problem with mass-transit is that most often riders do not want to pay what it actually costs, so they vote for some form of tax-supported subsidy. And that almost inevitably hobbles it, because acquiring new passengers will affect total revenue only a little, whereas conforming to the whims of the public and the local government will affect its revenue a lot.
Aside from that, these sorts of analyses ignore the many benefits that cars provide and the many downsides of public transit. You aren't going to get people to switch just by pointing out how much more efficient something is, you have to make it actually better.
When I have to commute I prefer to do so by bus, but there are still a ton of use cases for local travel where I would only consider mass transit as an absolute last resort due to the intrinsic advantages/disadvantages.
Car operators usually don't pay what it costs, either, both literally in the sense that's it's directly subsidised by public infrastructure and the free use of a huge amount of very valuable public property, as well as more indirectly through externalities such as air and noise pollution and the massive toll they take on public health and the quality of life in cities.
Actually drivers do pay for roads in the form of gasoline taxes. Moreover, the gas tax incidence lies purely on a driver whereas funding for mass-transit comes from the entire populace (including those who will never use it).
Actually, registration and gas taxes don't even cover the damage cars do to tax payer subsidized roads. The real taxpayer funded contribution to transport is almost identical for public and private transport. The key difference is that cars have the roads, public space and pollution subsidized where as transit have the marginal ticket price subsidized.
Here's another example: The Texas Department of Transportation's 2010 budget was $8 billion. Its 2009 revenue from gas taxes (after diversions) was about $1.5 billion.
Texas levies a 20 cent per gallon tax on gas and diesel, while the federal government levies an 18.4 cent tax for gas and 24.4 cents for diesel.
Over 2 years (the budget period for the state) the gas tax provided $4.55 billion for roadwork. However, 1/4 of the state gas tax revenue is diverted to education so the actual revenue is around $6.1 billion. Additionally, $6.9 billion of funding is provided from federal sources. This is roughly equivalent to the amount raised by the federal gas tax but also pays for things like airports. A further $2.7 billion is raised through registration fees, and other motor vehicle related taxes and fees.
In total the gas and motor vehicle related taxes pay for the entirety of the TxDOT budget plus they help subsidize the local school system to the tune of 3/4 of a billion per year.
I think you're correct that I misused the numbers. My point that roads don't pay for themselves is still correct.
"In Texas, [Mike Krusee, former chairman of the Texas House of Representatives Transportation Committee] said that, on average, it cost the state 20-30 cents per person per mile to build and maintain a road to the suburbs, yet drivers only pay on average 2-3 cents per mile through the gas tax, vehicles fees, etc.
"What we found was that no road that we built in Texas paid for itself," said Krusee. "None."
This doesn't say that car users are not paying for the roads they use. Indeed, the figures I pointed out already proved they do pay, and more. What this is saying is quite different. It's saying that some roads are more expensive per passenger-mile than others, and the most recently built roads in Texas are being subsidized by other roads. He's making the argument that people driving (and thus using gas, and thus paying the gas tax) on poorly maintained roads in the city center are subsidizing the construction of less trafficked roads in the suburbs.
It's questionable to me whether this is even a valid complaint. Road upkeep and maintenance is not always linearly proportional to gasoline consumption. Cars and trucks will idle more in the city than in the suburbs and thus increase gas use, but that's no excuse to demand a higher proportion of funds be used for those roads.
Besides which, at best this is a problem of car use subsidizing other car use, not of non-car tax revenues being misspent to subsidize road building.
It's questionable to me whether this is even a valid complaint. [...] that's no excuse to demand a higher proportion of funds be used for those roads.
It is a valid complaint. It's not about demanding that the funds be used for those roads; it's about the people who use roads being the ones who pay for them. That isn't currently the case.
Besides which, at best this is a problem of car use subsidizing other car use, not of non-car tax revenues being misspent to subsidize road building.
Since the gas tax is insufficient to meet Texas's road needs, cities and counties have been funding them from their general funds; that is, via property and sales taxes. They are only partially reimbursed by the state.
It doesn't sound like you're taking into account the opportunity cost of the land set aside for roads. That's valuable space that could be used for other things.
> Its 2009 revenue from gas taxes (after diversions) was about $1.5 billion.
Not so fast - you dont get to ignore diversions.
Also, you're ignoring other car-taxes, from registration, to sales tax (I don't know if Texas has both sales and gas taxes, but CA does), to sales tax on car stuff. (No cars, no sales tax on car stuff.)
Also, car use is pretty much universal, so there can't be a significant amount of money going from non-car users to car subsidies. It's car uses paying, even when it isn't labelled a "car tax".
"Mass transit" subsidies are mostly money from "not users".
If you care to read a little ways up the thread you'll see that the parent was replying to the assertion that "drivers do pay for roads in the form of gasoline taxes".
Incidentally, registration fees are there to cover the cost of the beaurocracy overseeing the registration, the sales tax brings in about $235 million (based on 1 car per 2 people, replaced every 10 years, selling for $15,000). It might really be higher or lower, but its still going to be far less than the gas tax. And sales tax on car incidentals is going to be much less than that.
Also, the fact that there are more car users actually doesn't tell us anything about which way the net flow of money goes. If there are 10 times as many car users, but expenditures on roads is 20 times what it is on trains then there will be a fairly large flow of money from train users to car users. If spending on roads is only 5 times as much as on trains, there will be a fairly large flow in the other direction.
So may I suggest you consider the facts a bit more carefully the next time you try imputing dishonesty to your opponent?
> If you care to read a little ways up the thread you'll see that the parent was replying to the assertion that "drivers do pay for roads in the form of gasoline taxes".
Way to miss the point.
> Incidentally, registration fees are there to cover the cost of the beaurocracy overseeing the registration
They do more than that.
> sales tax brings in about $235 million (based on 1 car per 2 people, replaced every 10 years, selling for $15,000).
Cars are sold more often than every 10 years, the average new cost is more than $15k, and I wrote "car stuff" for a reason. There are a lot of taxed car stuff purchases other than "car sales". And, I didn't even mention other taxes on biz providing car services and purchases.
If you're going to argue that someone isn't properly accounting....
> Also, the fact that there are more car users actually doesn't tell us anything about which way the net flow of money goes
Net flow doesn't have the properties that your argument requires.
The subsidy argument says that folks who get deliveries by truck don't pay for the full cost of truck delivery in their direct payment for truck services. So, when a no-car-truck-delivery person pays a subsidy, they're actually just paying for the indirect truck-delivery costs.
And, as I've pointed out elsewhere, a huge fraction of the city costs for "cars" are required even if there isn't a single private car. Buses, "official vehicles", delivery trucks, and so on require roads. A lot of city road maintenance costs come from activities that have nothing to do with usage.
In short, you're assuming savings that can't happen.
With regards to subsidies of public transport my opinion is that you are facing a tragedy of the commons situation but with two different categories of stake holder.
You have the public who use the transport and you have the businesses that need it to operate.
An example is that the City of London has a night time population of the vicinity of 11000 and a 330000 who come in to work every weekday.
The businesses that operate in the City rely on the network effect of working close to other companies in this area but my impression is that that they don't pay sufficient infrastructure tax to support the city and hence the public transport costs are born by the 'end user'.
Some of those end users are paid commensurately but some are minimum wage cleaners who are just as essential to the city but are the losers in this situation.
I totally agree about the downsides. Even when a bus goes from exactly where I am to exactly where I want to go with no transfers or half-mile walks in the middle (which, incidentally, is almost never), I still have to conform my schedule to the bus's. If it runs every ten minutes, that's no big deal, but if they run every 40 minutes (like my school's shuttles) or every 20-60 minutes (like the CTA is wont to do), that's just not going to work.
My most frequent use of my car is a trip that takes 40 minutes through the city by car, and 2+ hours by bus/train. I would love it if the CTA managed to increase frequencies and fix all the slow zones on their track. It's just never going to happen.
Those aren't inherent downsides of public transportation, those are downsides of a non-functioning system of public transportation.
Of course it's a chicken and egg scenario: it's difficult to argue for buses every 10 minutes if the current buses aren't anywhere near being used to capacity. And no one is going to start using the buses as long as they're on such a useless schedule.
I think it's inherent once a system gets large enough. As the size of a transit system grows by a factor of n, there will be O(n2) different kinds of trips that people need to take.
This is obviously wrong as shown by functioning public transportation systems in large cities like Berlin, with busses, trains and undergrounds every 5-10 minutes. The transport system isn't organized as a complete graph, but instead looks something like a powerlaw distributed graph. The diameter is still small, but the number of lines stays linear.
I think it's only true up to a certain value of n. Once the mass transit system has a subway system that has a train every 5 minutes and stops at most a block from any given location, it makes very little sense to drive. When I visited Hong Kong, it felt like this -- massively convenient and efficient. No time wasted looking for parking under $20/hr.
The network doesn't need to be n-to-(n-1) - it can't be "ride to this single central hub and wait an ungodly time for a connection", either. Looking at my city's public transit, I see a dense interconnected network - denser the closer to the center you get - with branches and leaves off the edges; rapid, high-bandwidth transit (underground rail - with stops relatively far away, but still more or less walking distance, from each other; plus normal trains with stops every few klicks) and slower, smaller forms of transport with stops closer to each other (light rail and buses). It's fairly efficient - I can get within walking distance of almost anywhere with 2 transfers, and anywhere with 3 (with transfer times <5 minutes); it outperforms cars on many trips (what with congestion and whatnot). Alas, it gets about 70% of funding from city subsidies, so extension and maintenance is a huge pork-barrel issue.
I live in Vienna and there are few I can't reach within the city within about half an hour (buses/trams/subways often come in 3-5 minutes intervals too).
Within 45 minutes practically the whole city is covered.
People will not pay attention to making it better or easier.
Even in some Australian cities, where it is so much easier to cycle, people still drive. My sister who works a 5 min ride from work, takes longer to drive there, and she has to pay for parking, will never cycle.
As a Melbournite living in London, I can imagine a sharp uptake in public transport use back home if we had half of the infrastructure London has. The problem is that cities like Melbourne are serviced so badly at the moment that as you indicated driving is the default option even when it's slower.
Also, let's not forget brilliant strategies like implementing a city bike-sharing system without a corresponding change in bicycle helmet laws.
Adelaide, which has nice wide roads, lots of bike paths, and the traffic is nowhere near as bad as Melbourne or Sydney. On top of that, most of the year the weather is great.
>Aside from that, these sorts of analyses ignore the many benefits that cars provide and the many downsides of public transit.
Actually, the post doesn't ignore the benefits of cars. It says for example that an SUV is a great option for a family of 6 going to the suburbs. Perhaps you had some other benefits in mind?
How many days can you feed your family on 2 bags of groceries? Gonna carry the new TV you just bought on the bus with you? I can't imagine doing normal shopping without a car.
>How many days can you feed your family on 2 bags of groceries?
4 of us actually live 2 blocks from the grocery store and I think someone gets a couple of bags every other day. The "10 bags of groceries" shopping trip is actually an effect of cars (and suburbanization). When cities are walkable, grocery stores are nearby too.
I think it's obvious that just like a family of 6 can't fit on a bicycle and would need a SUV to go to Florida, you'd need a big vehicle to get a TV home. Presumably, you don't buy a TV every week.
> Gonna carry the new TV you just bought on the bus with you? I can't imagine doing normal shopping without a car.
I'm doing that just fine by using a tramway. And I'm not dead yet :) The good thing is that the hypermarket is only 3 tram stations away, and yes, there's a tram that goes by the hypermarket. Not to mention the 8AM-to-10PM grocery story that is open just outside my building, in case I need something very quick. That's what urbanization is all about. American suburbs don't fall into that category, they're more like Roman rural villas that will find a quick and painful death once the Barbarians "invade" (a stupid metaphor for when gasoline prices in the US will finally reach their normal levels).
And I carried my 43' plasma using a taxi, I agree. I paid the taxi driver 15 bucks (in my country's money), and he even helped me carry it to my building's front-door.
"Intermingled commercial and residential" was the phrase Jane Jacobs threw around.
If you visit a city like New York, you'll notice that everything is zoned a bit differently; heck, it looks like it hasn't been zoned at all. Most residential buildings have a store of some kind in the first floor. Consequently, in a city with intermingled commercial and residential buildings, you're never more than a block or three from a grocery or a drug store, and generally never more than a block from a coffee shop or a deli.
Doing your grocery shopping via mass transit is insane. That's why in a city where 75% of the population uses mass transit as their primary form of transportation, you don't. You just walk across the the street.
Mixed-use zoning is making a comeback, and it really fosters walkability. You can have a dense area that isn't that easy to get to things because its zoned too rigidly.
Zoning originally came about for a few reasons. One was that industrial pollution was a serious issue and people wanted that away from other types of land use. The other was the rise of the car. Zoning has allowed places to require minimum lot sizes or state that mixed-use isn't allowed. One of the reasons we have so few walkable communities in the U.S. (even small ones like old towns used to be) is that zoning doesn't permit it. Because of this, areas that are walkable and are mixed-use are extremely expensive to live in.
I feel like zoning away industrial pollution is a bit of a band-aid. "That factory is generating a lot of pollution. Let's ... put it somewhere we won't see it."
Zoning a required minimum number of parking spots is indeed a terrible thing. Back where I went to college, that was a major headache for every business around campus. A bar was blocked from expanding because it couldn't acquire enough parking spots (and you want people driving to a bar why?), and the public library was required to put in a three story car park across the street when it renovated, demolishing a half a block of shops and apartments. This despite being a block and a half from a seven story car park which was never fully filled.
New York, on the other hand, doesn't seem to give a flying fig about parking. You drive, it's your own problem.
Actually, current zoning laws in NYC require [most] new developments to have some minimum number of parking spaces available (usually underground) based on the size of the building. Just look at any of the new condos that have gone up in the last 10 years. Found this recent article while looking for a reference:
How many days can you feed your family on 2 bags of groceries?
1-3 depending on what I buy. Fortunately both my girlfriend and I walk past a couple of different grocery stores, fish mongers and vegetable stands, on our way home from work, so it's never a problem to drop in and pick up anything we happen to need.
Gonna carry the new TV you just bought on the bus with you?
Nope. Most likely I'll get it delivered to my front door (same with furniture and other similarly sized purchases). If for some reason that isn't an option, I'll call a taxi. Fortunately I buy TVs very rarely.
I can't imagine doing normal shopping without a car.
Are TV's regularly part of your "normal shopping"?
I agree that the TV example is rather silly. But it is one the first things that pops in my mind when I think about living without a car. We are so used to it, that we don't know how to function without it.
This approach assumes that you, the consumer, are supposed to take on the price (and problem) of delivering goods from a central "market" to your own home. This is an evolution of the old ox-and-cart system, and it's extremely inefficient.
It's much, much better for you to pick the items you need on the internet, or in a showroom, and have them delivered; the delivery round will be much more energy-efficient, serving multiple customers in one go with one vehicle. We are slowly getting there, one item at a time (first books/cds, then electronics, then nappies, then then then...). The main stumbling block (people who want to check the horse's mouth before buying it) is really not a problem in the age of precise mechanization, food standards and cheap shipping.
I do my grocery shopping online, most of the time.
Um, that is exactly what I did with my last fridge. I went to the appliance store, and got a $30 discount for cash & carry. Backed my F150 up to their warehouse, loaded it up, and drove it home.
Now I don't buy a fridge everyday, but I've had to get enough large items over the last 10 years for the house to make the pickup truck worth it (when I first got the truck I was picking up some 2x4s, couple sheets of drywall, etc, about every couple weeks -- finished the basement, built a shed, etc, buy buying a couple pieces at a time).
Real-life situation(my own family): 1 adult, 2 seniors. In an apartment on a steep hill in the city. No car since 2008 - a rental is done maybe once or twice per year.
There are definitely drawbacks, however, most of the large items, and the bulk of the groceries, can be done with an online order today. Smaller items can be picked up while out. (No regular jobs here - all independent business, contracting, etc.)
It would be harder if this were a two adults-two children situation and the parents both worked 9-5 jobs. The kids would be more dependent, and it would be tough for everyone to hit the work/school schedule exactly. However, it wouldn't be impossible.
I get my bulky shopping delivered, I mean sticking a 42" TV into a sedan doesn't feel really safe anyway. I do my groceries in small portions, in a shop that's very close by. What's your problem?
> I do my groceries in small portions, in a shop that's very close by. What's your problem?
Last time I lived in a city, there were no reasonably priced grocery stores within walking distance, just tons of pizza shops and fast food. I live in the suburbs now. I buy more groceries per trip and eat healthier now -- I'm not tempted to eat out instead of revisit a grocery store when I'm out of food every few days.
I moved my 42" TV in my sedan because it was safer there than in the moving truck.
I live about 2 miles from the nearest grocery store, and still cook at home at least 70% of the time. One backpack and a bicycle buys enough food for 2 weeks.
Even when I lived in the suburbs, there were grocery stores at that distance. It just never occurred to me that one could bike to the store and buy stuff, I always drove until I tried using the bike. I think the problem is more psychological than reasoned.
I live in London; but I very rarely take public transport unless I'll be drinking. There's a middle way: scooters. In most of London, parking is free, cheap in Westminster, and fairly plentiful outside of the City.
The nearest big supermarket is about 30 minutes walk away, or about 5 minutes by scooter, somewhat longer by bicycle (owing to a road that bicycles aren't allowed on). There's a bus that goes directly to it every 15 minutes, but it doesn't really save time, only effort.
I can't imagine only visiting a grocery store every few days, not least because I like my food fresh, particularly for baked items. Having to plan ahead for meals also kills some spontaneity. Knowing that you're 5 minutes away from buying anything you need, for a trivial transport cost, and having no concern for traffic (owing to scooter agility and filtering), is liberating.
I moved my 42" TV in my sedan because it was safer there than in the moving truck.
That doesn't make much sense. The shop is responsible for whatever happens to the stuff they deliver. If they damaged it, they'd have to repair it at no extra cost. Using your own car, on the other hand, puts the liability on you.
I wonder what's the "walking distance" is in this case, but lack of nice grocery stores and good food places is actually a common consequence of a car-optimized city.
As for moving 42" TV in a sedan being safer for the TV, one, I doubt that, two, I'm more concerned about the driver than the TV. I know, odd.
That is an effect of car-based city planning. Here in a smallish town in Germany there are three different grocery stores within walking distance of my home. It's like that in every German town that I've visited so far.
People own collapsable shopping carts that they walk to and from the grocery store with. A lot of times a grocery store or market may be on your way home from work, making it not a big deal to stop in and get some fresh food.
How often would you say you buy a new TV? Making transportation decisions based on a once-in-a-10-year purchase isn't that rational. Plus, you could just have the TV delivered.
> Actually, the post doesn't ignore the benefits of cars. It says for example that an SUV is a great option for a family of 6 going to the suburbs. Perhaps you had some other benefits in mind?
Those benefits will go the way of the dodo once all the externalities will finally go into gasoline prices, at least in the US. Right now the EU I think does it better, it tries to inhibit owning a car by taxing gasoline prices extensively, while the US has chosen to start and fight apparently useless wars just to keep those gasoline prices under control.
And before I get accused of being a conspiracy freak just for stating the obvious, just remember that Japan's forays into SE Asia and Germany's desperate try to put its hands on Caspian Sea oil reserves during WW2 were made because of the exact same reasons: control of natural resources.
ahhahahaha, "it tries to inhibit"... It tries not; almost every EU country will have a number of subsidies for car ownership and a number of processes that, under the guise of promoting "environmental" and "safety" standards, really just force people to periodically upgrade their cars for the benefit of the car industry.
What it originally tried to inhibit was the depletion of oil; most EU members introduced it 30 or 40 years ago, during the oil-shock period. Nowadays gasoline taxation is just that, a tax, and a profitable one: it's grown to be one of the largest income items for most states.
(and if you think the various Middle-East wars were fought to keep oil prices under control, you're sorely mistaken; they were fought to maintain oil availability for corporations to exploit. Big difference.)
>almost every EU country will have a number of subsidies for car ownership and a number of processes that, under the guise of promoting "environmental" and "safety" standards, really just force people to periodically upgrade their cars for the benefit of the car industry.
For example, UK Road Tax is now heavier on "polluting" cars, which mostly means "old". After two years, all cars have to be officially checked every year, forcing old vehicles off the road when the cost of mostly-optional maintenance becomes higher than the actual car value. Several cities block access to certain areas depending again on the "environmental impact" (i.e. age) of the vehicle; the European Emission Standards have been changed on average every three years, so anything linked to that standard changed accordingly. Most countries run, or have run in the past 10 years, "scrapping" schemes where people trading in their old car would get a direct government subsidy when buying a new one.
This is all fairly useless, considering how study after study demonstrated that the largest threats to air quality in cities are old heating systems and industrial activity, and 90% of accidents are not due to mechanical breakdowns; but it does push people to get newer cars.
I'm not saying this is a negative thing (in theory it's quite nice), but in practice it's just another way to help car-makers.
Most countries also dish out subsidies directly to struggling car-makers; companies like Renault and FIAT are seen as "national champions" and treated accordingly -- although this is now illegal under EU competition law, nobody complains because every manufacturer based in Europe will have enjoyed some "public love" at some point. After all, car manufacturing still employs, directly or indirectly, a lot of people.
The biggest problem with mass-transit is that it's "public", i.e. state owned. Back in Kyrgyzstan (my home country), there are plenty of cheap private shuttles ("marshrutkas") which ferry people on pre-set routes. They are only slightly slower than cabs. Legalizing private mass-transit would be a good way to make it better.
That very much depends on the country's laws - here in Prague, there are no fewer than seven different transport companies providing public transit. The traveller doesn't need to know or care that the bus line 292 is run by one company, line 165 by another, yet another runs 314, yet another runs the light rail and another runs the normal trains - the fare is integrated, so tickets are valid for all of these. The integrating organization (which IIRC holds auctions for licenses on each of the lines) is city-sponsored, so you could call that a government influence. It should be noted that this is a system that's been taking hold for some ten years now, and that the majority of public transit is still provided by the city's public transit company.
In Phnom Penh (where I live), people are just starting to get rich enough to own cars, so you can watch the transition happening. The roads and the (lack of) traffic rules work really well with just motos / pedestrians / bicycles. But add cars into the mix and it starts to fall apart. 1. More congestion. 2. the "road rules" don't work with such large objects. 3. lack of consequence if anyone hits anyone else.
I'm Australian and have lived in Germany (Cologne), Zurich, London and (now) New York City so I'll add my perspective. I'll also add that I can't drive (because of an eye condition).
Australia is very much like California. Population density is low. Almost all of Australia is car dependent. Land sizes are large. This makes public transport largely uneconomic and unworkable, with certain exceptions (eg parts of Perth, inner Sydney, Melbourne). Even then, that transport is largely limited to going into and out of the city. If you want to go somewhere else it's a huge problem.
Gas taxes are much higher in Australia (petrol costs $1.40-1.50 per litre last I saw and there are ~4 litres to the gallon). I'm not sure if this covers the cost of roads and infrastructure (for the quarter acre dream) but I highly doubt it, especially once you factor in indirect costs.
London is a mix of inner London where public transport is very good and outer London (Zone 5+) where you are car dependent but you absolutely can get away with using car rental when you need it most of the time. The problem is public transport largely stops at midnight (apart from night buses).
Personally I found the light rail in Cologne (and Bonn) great and never felt the lack of a car.
You absolutely do not need a car in Zurich or pretty much all but rural Switzerland. Intracity and intercity transport is superb. Even getting to ski resorts by train/bus is fine.
Which brings me to NYC. NYC for me has the ultimate public transportation system. It's cheap, goes almost everywhere, runs 24 hours a day (HUGELY important IMHO) and unlike every other example listed above, cabs are actually relatively cheap, although there are oddities to the system (eg the peculiarities of shift change make it somehow impossible to get a cab to the airport in Manhattan at 3pm).
NYC also has an extremely large commuter belt covered by trains and buses such that no one I know drives into the city for work.
I live 7 minutes walk to work, which I love. Actually the idea for me is about 20-30 minutes walk each way because that's just about the right balance between time taken and getting some exercise (IMHO), particularly for us engineers.
What I don't see in this thread is the issue of people (like me) who don't have the option of driving a car. For this reason I can see myself largely living in either NYC or one of several European cities.
Charging homeowners fairly for their infrastructure costs is a hugely divisive and problematic issue. For example, hiking gas taxes would have all sorts of unintended consequences, not the least of which is inflation (since that cost is built into transporting food and everything else).
It seems fair(er) to build maintenance costs into property taxes and initial capital costs into land costs.
Peak oil [1] is either here or soon will be (IMHO we've already passed it). Arguably cities produce lower per-capita carbon footprints [2]. At some point people are going to need to realize that their gas-guzzling ways can't (and won't) continue forever.
The non-driver issue is a big one. I believe I have read that typically on third of the population don't drive, either because they are too young, too old, or have some sort of disability. This doesn't include those who are poor enough that keeping a car is a major expense.
The ways we have used zoning (minimum lot sizes and setbacks, and putting housing over here and work and shopping way the hell over there), and engineering our roads to make automobiling as quick as possible, has disenfranchised a large part of our population.
> I believe I have read that typically on third of
> the population don't drive, either because they are
> too young, too old, or have some sort of disability.
Presumably a sizable portion of that third isn't capable of getting around on their own regardless of public transportation options.
You'd be quite surprised how mobile disabled people can be in a walkable area. It's night and day how many disabled people you see in a walkable area versus the suburbs. Areas that make it easy for people to walk are also very friendly for people in wheel chairs. Where I live, there are lots of people with motorized wheel chairs and they can go to restaurants, the grocery store, the liquor store, the movies, ride public transportation to get to other areas, etc.
You'll see many of wheelchair-bound people outside every day, interacting with people. I can't imagine how lonely it must be to be disabled or elderly (to where you can't drive) in a car dependent area. You'd rarely leave your house.
Walkable areas are also more liberating for children. Where I live, we have some areas that are pedestrian only, and you'll see children hanging out and playing. They can walk there from nearby homes.
The disabled, elderly and minors do ride public transportation.
Old age is a funny thing. A lot of people seem to think that the incredible loss of strength and stamina they experience is totally inevitable and just shrug and think "well at least I have my car to get around".
That car is a big part of WHY you feel so lethargic and dread walking further than between the car and the edge of a parking lot.
Contrast with the most pedestrian friendly area I've ever seen: central Tokyo, with density so high that within a short walk of most homes there are all the services you need. I routinely see bent over grandmas that in the US would be considered incapable of traveling outside the home, calmly and slowly walking with a grocery / walker contraption holding some groceries.
I'm an Aussie too living in London. I'm a keen cyclist and love walking.
I've been hit by several cars while cycling, three times very seriously.
I walk whenever humanly possible, cycle for a lot of odd jobs that most would use a car for.
I just have to say my bit in defense of cars. You (cletus) didn't seem to be attacking them per se, I'm mostly chiming into your anecdotes.
* Some localities are just too hilly/valleyey (sp?) without cars.
I cycled from Bondi/Maroubra/Neutral Bay daily in Sydney and the hills killed me. The Harbour Bridge is just two massive ramps BTW. I've heard HongKong is too hilly for bike/cycle.
* Cars are great for Kids and Shopping
* Vans & Trucks bring in all our vegetables and consumables. Rail okay for heavy goods, but laying rail everywhere would bankrupt us all.
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My suggestion on how to make cars better/greener is to gradually introduce automated driving vehicles. Specially equipped vehicles should be allocated special roads and given priority. They'll still have manual controls for the normal roads of course.
Regulating the speed of the vehicles will make everything much cheaper/cleaner.
Not an Aussie, but living in Australia... I think the GP overstated things a little. Melbourne is reasonably dense compared to some other cities I've lived in. Quite a few of my co-workers don't own cars, and none of them drive to work in the city - every one of them walks, cycles, takes a tram or catches a train. Melbourne buses are terrible, but the trains aren't nearly as bad as everyone says. Our trams and cycle lanes are ubiquitous and they're incredible. Most of the hills in Melbourne exist in bike riders' imaginations, though - compared to my native NZ it's dead flat.
Having commuted on Brisbane's buses I know they're top notch, and the ferries aren't bad if you're near the river and have some extra time in the mornings. The trains are getting a lot of money thrown at them, too, upping service frequencies and extending them further north.
There's definitely cultural lean towards living in the suburbs and having a back yard big enough to play cricket on, but you only really know what you see. What used to be called outer suburbs are now called inner suburbs, and they're getting dense and very transport-accessible.
Just to add some more food for thought, from someone who lives in Cambridge, UK.
The basic problem with aiming for fewer cars and more public transport and walking/cycling is that neither alternative is actually a viable alternative for a surprisingly large proportion of journeys made by car today.
Public transport essentially relies on having critical mass. If you have enough people wanting to travel similar routes at similar times, then you can make great economies of scale, avoiding congestion, using natural resources more efficiently, and reducing environmental damage.
Unfortunately, while megacities like London typically achieve this critical mass, smaller cities like Cambridge rarely do. You see mostly full buses for an hour or two at the start and end of each working day, or on major routes like those between the Park and Ride car parks on the edge of the city and the centre. However, the average number of passengers on a bus, taken across all times they run and all routes in the UK is only something like 7 IIRC.
At that point, buses are actually more polluting per passenger-mile than the average family car with an average of 1.5ish occupants, not so much in the carbon oxides that get all the press, but certainly in the really nasty stuff like PM10s. They don't compare so favourably on things like fuel consumption either.
This lack of critical mass also creates problems for financial viability, which in turn means that you get less frequent services and that those services that do run have to follow fewer, more circuitous routes. That makes the whole thing less efficient than personal transport, and at some point, you reach the stage where getting the bus simply doesn't save you any time over walking, and not because we're talking about a short journey where waiting for the bus dominates.
On top of all of that, buses are basically a menace to every other class of road user. They are obviously dangerous to cyclists. If you don't have space for dedicated roadside bus stops so the buses have to block the main driving lane while picking up and droping off passengers then a single bus can hold up an entire queue of traffic, slowing everything down to its stop-start pace. That is inefficient, environmentally unfriendly, and dangerous, all at once. Moreover, dedicated bus lanes and other priority features tend to violate the normal road layout rules, causing difficulties for just about everyone else at major intersections.
Basically, if you've got enough people to run frequent bus services on fairly direct routes between everywhere and everywhere else, buses have a lot going for them. Otherwise, they suck and have almost no redeeming features whatsoever.
Cycling and walking have a lot more going for them, and if we could just ban buses around here then we could probably get a lot more people cycling. They are clean and efficient methods of transport, and of course they have side benefits in terms of health and fitness. Unfortunately, they aren't much use if you're trying to get somewhere and still look presentable at the other end, it is impractical to carry large/heavy/young and wriggling loads on most journeys, and they are pretty unpleasant in bad weather. Oh, and a single cyclist can hold up a whole queue of traffic on a narrow road as well, and even on a relatively wide one the choice is between a hold-up or a stream of other vehicles passing dangerously close.
On the face of it, the solution to most of the drawbacks of cycling is to provide better cycle facilities: dedicated cycle lanes away from the main traffic, secure cycle parking, mandatory shower facilities at places of work, and so on. Sometimes, the results are inconsistent or counter-intuitive, though, particularly with the idea of separating cycle traffic. Nervous/inexperienced cyclists often prefer to ride on separate paths off the main road, but more experienced/capable cyclists typically prefer the main roads rather than having to give way to motor traffic so much when separate cycle paths need to cross main roads (or vice versa, if you prefer).
My personal feeling as a driver and cyclist is that if we could redesign the city around a good quality cycle path network from the start, and then overlay a road network for motor traffic on top with suitable under/overpasses to avoid breaking up the cycle network (since it's much harder for cyclists to stop and get going again if they have to yield priority) then a lot of these problems could be overcome. But right now, the local authorities here are proud of the fact that they have got a couple of major cycle routes from one side of the city to the other coming together after several years. I don't think it will ever be practical to implement something as comprehensive as I've described in an old city like Cambridge.
The only solution, therefore, is to give up on finding a workable transport infrastructure for the city as we have today, and change the planning policies so that over the coming years there simply isn't as much need for so many people to travel into the same small area at the heart of a small city from everywhere around on the same few roads. Urbanisation might be inevitable, but we don't have to design every city so everyone is trying to get to the same place right in the centre when the area feeding it isn't big enough for public transport to reach critical mass.
Urbanisation has huge economic benefits - making everyone work as closely together as possible seems to have a magical effect on productivity. Organisations need to compete in the same market, the job market is pooled and made more efficient, and there are weird productivity gains - people moving to work in cities seem to add more to the economy, and it's not perfectly understood why.
I went to a presentation in Melbourne by a who worked on the CrossRail business case, and he said that the benefits of agglomeration alone made the case for the link. In his eyes urbanisation wasn't a necessary evil, it's was goal, at least as far as London was concerned. He did make a point to say that it wasn't for everyone, and that it'd be a good thing to keep some jobs in the satellite towns to cut people's hair and sell and entertain tourists, but...
Sorry for the late reply. I don't remember the name of the presenter, and I'm having a hard time googling the event. As an absolute stab in the dark it could have been Kieran Arter, but definitely don't quote me on that. The presenter was definitely English and probably not white. He was just stopping through and giving a quick talk about the project (possibly also doing the same thing in Sydney?)
There were two talks on transport economics, the first quite general and the second on Crossrail. My notes on the second presentation, hopefully somewhat meaningful:
"Cross-rail: Wider economic benefits"
- Biggest infrastructure project GB has done. ~16M GBP, good BCR, but lots of smaller, "less risky" projects with worse BCRs have been getting built anyway.
Rail is very expensive. Often most expensive infrastructure project. Usually lose money on them, often lose money on them forever. Almost never repay any investment.
3 lines build since the '60s, BCR all <1: Jubilee Extension, Fleet st sometihng, something else. ThamesLink and CrossRail have consistently had BCRs >2, but couldn't build due to opposition.
Productivity gains:
- agglomeration. Cities are good for business.
- biger employee pool/labour market.
- Product market - supply specialisation, drive to compete. (Not only provider in area)
Also: Move to more productive jobs (M2MPJ). Relieves capacity constraint. Need to prove it works, though, which is hard to do. Big win, though.
Big value differential in jobs in city/suburbs. Melbourne average salary difference is 75k:50k.
"M2MPJ" --> "Absolute density"
"Pure agglomeration" --> "Effective density"
Other things.
BCR guys were forced to assume no socio-economic benefits (an economic efficiency assumption, I think - don't want any double-counting). The argument goes that if the improvement in commute times makes someone change their job, then the difference in utility between the old job and the new job can be at most the utility gained in travel time savings. Presenter's argument is that people aren't logical homo economicus, I think.
Still argue to be able to measure a win from these benefits, though, through a "tax wedge". Commuters are indifferent to things after tax, so differences before tax can go to treasury. I don't understand this completely, but the idea seems reasonable (if a little contrived). Makes an important difference.
Wider Economic Benefits ("WEB") push the BCR from 1.8 to 3-5. Huuge change, turns it from a good project to a "do this now" project.
Presenter argued for WEB things to be included in the "Wider Benefits Working Group" (govt thing). Some things got in, other things got rejected. Got enough, though, project got funded.
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Transport benefits not enough for rail projects - "Investment in growth" is/should be a higher priority.
Imperfections in the market allow for this. There are real value differences not explained by the "pure" economic theories.
Work with market w. economic policy. The old "satellite town" idea didn't really catch on in London, was a top-down decisionthat didn't address the real needs.
About pollution, what about troleys, trams and S-bahns then?
Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zurich_model
And take Basel as a small city(~170k population) with a very good public transportation system.
The models are already out there and working nicely, other cities just have to emulate them.
> The models are already out there and working nicely, other cities just have to emulate them.
That's OK if you're starting from scratch, but very few new city-scale developments are started from a clean sheet, at least here in the UK. I don't think many people would look kindly on demolishing historic city centres just to build new tramways or light rail...
I wonder if you could build a network that optimized for both bicycles and small motorized vehicles (ranging from segways and mopeds to enclosed three wheelers like the auto moto or carver one). Allowing and optimizing for enclosed three wheelers gives options for the elderly or commuting in bad weather. Full size automobiles would be relegated to major thoroughfares and highways.
The problems with buses are all caused by cars. Why not build new roads solely for the use of buses? This would allow you to superimpose a subway like system on top of city's without the restrictions and cost of rail. Let specially licensed freight use it also to give business benefits.
Sorry, but that's just not true. In a relatively small city with narrow streets like Cambridge, buses have just as many problems navigating around cyclists, awkward intersections, and indeed other buses. And the problems buses cause, particularly when only sparsely occupied, have nothing to do with cars at all.
> Why not build new roads solely for the use of buses?
Where are we going to put those?
They're trying to create new roads only for the use of buses, by taking away lanes that used to be for everyone and designating them to be bus lanes instead. That is making things much worse for everyone else, because it means 50% of the road surface on major arterial routes is unused most of the time. And it isn't even helping buses that much, because they still have to get to and from those major routes on the back roads they serve, and they still have to stop at lights or give way at roundabouts just like everyone else.
(Cambridge also has far too many sets of traffic lights for its size, which introduces an entirely artificial ceiling on the capacity of its road network for reasons no-one seems to quite understand. You can usually tell when the lights fail at a major intersection, because the drivers all start being polite and taking turns to proceed, there are hardly any queues in the area, and journeys are invariably quicker and more pleasant. Note to people wanting saner traffic systems for cities in future: competitive routes and stop/go lights are an evil that will cripple your efficiency.)
> (Cambridge also has far too many sets of traffic lights for its size, which introduces an entirely artificial ceiling on the capacity of its road network for reasons no-one seems to quite understand. You can usually tell when the lights fail at a major intersection, because the drivers all start being polite and taking turns to proceed, there are hardly any queues in the area, and journeys are invariably quicker and more pleasant. Note to people wanting saner traffic systems for cities in future: competitive routes and stop/go lights are an evil that will cripple your efficiency.)
Incidentally, I did hear about a study that indicates that roundabouts are far better for safety than traffic lights. Unfortunately, I don't remember the reason they concluded for this. Suffice to say... I don't really see much reason to ever use traffic lights if they can be avoided.
Only if you're in a car. For cyclists they're far more dangerous than traffic lights (where you can do a hook turn), and also pedestrians (you can install pedestrian lights, and the cars will be going slower anyway).
It depends a lot on the design of the roundabout. Our traditional medium-sized model here in the UK, with two or three lanes coming in as one block from feeder roads, certainly isn't great for cyclists. However, we seem to be moving towards a more continental style, where for a medium-sized four-road roundabout you'd have one lane peeling off to the "first exit" and a physically separated lane onto the roundabout for those going further round.
This is generally an improvement for everyone, because you only ever have to worry about merging with traffic from one other lane at once. It's also an improvement for cyclists in particular, because you can construct those single lanes so that either they are wide enough to pass a cyclist with a good clearance or they are narrow enough that overtaking is clearly not an option. When there are several adjacent lanes, an aggressive driver will often force a cyclist into the next lane over (even if there's another vehicle there). When doing so requires driving through solid concrete lane dividers, funnily enough it doesn't happen so often...
It doesn't help when making right hand turns* or going straight. In that case, a cyclist has to cut in front of two lanes of traffic (left and straight/right), which isn't very good for either them or the cars.
You also have to consider that the cyclist needs to give way to the traffic from the right. If they've stopped, they need an extra large gap in the cross traffic, since acceleration on a bike isn't quite as good.
* - This is for areas where you drive on the left, obviously.
The risks you describe are all true, but mostly apply at traffic lights as well: a cyclist still has to navigate into the right-hand lane at a junction if turning right from a two-lane (or more) entry road.
In practice, modern design practice for roundabouts ends any separate cycle lanes well before entrances to the roundabout, thus allowing everyone to merge on approach in plenty of time. Also, the roundabout itself should be designed to limit both the number of potential points of conflict and the speed of traffic crossing those points if shared use is expected, for example by the use of solid islands and dedicated lanes that must be chosen on approach and then followed throughout in a predetermined spiral path around the roundabout. That means cycling on such roads is usually both more efficint and safer than cycling through signal-controlled crossroads of a similar scale.
For larger roundabouts, cycling around with several lanes of traffic is rarely advisable anyway and alternative provisions will need to be made. Although dedicated cycle routes like underpasses come with their own safety concerns, particularly at night and not necessarily anything to do with traffic, most roundabouts on that scale are signal-controlled anyway these days (at least here in the UK) so a separate system of crossings to allow cyclists to move around the outside like pedestrians can be provided.
> The risks you describe are all true, but mostly apply at traffic lights as well: a cyclist still has to navigate into the right-hand lane at a junction if turning right from a two-lane (or more) entry road.
No, they don't - as a cyclist, you can do a hook turn: http://www.cyclingtipsblog.com/2009/05/the-hook-turn/. Even if this is technically illegal in your jurisdiction, I'd still do it, since it's much safer than trusting car drivers to do the right thing.
Solid islands are also dangerous, since they narrow the road and most drivers will try and push past rather than slow down to cyclist speeds. Neat fact: the handlebars on my old bike are higher than the wing mirror on a VW Golf. How do I know this? They passed me on a roundabout, and the wing mirror passed under my handlebars. Lucky I ride a bike with flat bars, and not a racer.
May I ask where you cycle? What you're describing is very different to my experience here in Cambridge, and I can honestly say that I have never seen any cyclist of any standard pull what you call a "hook turn" here.
Given that we have a vocal (to put it mildly) local pro-cycling campaign and there is another one down the road in London, while I'm not questioning your own experience, I am a little surprised that no-one has been talking about and promoting such an alternative cycling technique if it really is safer in general.
In fairness, drivers around here are also very familiar with and aware of cyclists. While some drivers pass too close, and some cyclists complain at any driver passing less than an absurd distance away, for the most part the two groups do actually get along. I've never had any problem waiting to turn right on a normal line in mid-junction, nor with drivers passing as close as you describe while going around a roundabout.
Roundabouts typically take up a bit more room. You would need to cut chamfers off (demolish and rebuild) the corners of buildings at junctions to make enough room for a roundabout that's more efficient than traffic lights.
Point of note: the average dwelling in the UK is 75 years old. That's a mean; a substantial proportion are over a century old, and many are under preservation orders ... and they were designed at a time when automobiles either did not exist, or were owned by fewer than 2% of the population. (Car ownership hit one vehicle per 25 people only some time after 1945.)
We just don't have the land area to go throwing up new construction (including buildings or roads) willy-nilly -- if the US land area was populated to the same average density as the UK there would be around 6 billion people living there, not 300 million.
This goes for most of the living urban cores of European cities, similarly. Urban sprawl is cheap and lets you build around the automobile -- although it's intrinsically hostile to public transport by reducing population density. But if land is astronomically expensive to re-purpose, urban sprawl simply isn't a viable solution to the transport problem.
Of course the average population density of the UK is a bit misleading because significant chunks of our islands are rather thinly populated - particularly the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
That means we're pretty tightly squeezed here in the bits that are densely populated.
> This leaves out the fact that there are people whose only real choice is between taking a bus and not going anywhere.
Because of financial hardship, or because of physical limitations such as a disability that makes driving and cycling impossible? (Or for some other reason?)
> And if you're studying at Cambridge University, the Computer Laboratory is waaaaay the hell out of town.
Sorry, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. The Computer Lab is closer to the city centre than most of the outlying villages are, and plenty of people commute in from by bike those every day, so I don't think the Lab's location is a strong argument for buses being the only practical way there, if that's what you're getting at.
If you think NYC is great, try Hong Kong... the MTR is pervasive throughout the city, and even the suburbs (New Territories) are covered. Trains run every 2-15 minutes depending on destination and time of day. Taxis and buses cover areas that don't have rail directly. Shopping malls, work centers and sometimes even apartment buildings are often connected directly to rail stations. Everything is automated, with service points for exceptions. They use an RFID refillable cash card that is also accepted at convenience and grocery stores (Octopus card).
Not only is it easy to get around in HK without a car, it's often easier than driving, parking, tolls, etc (owning a car is a huge status symbol).
Whenever I think about mass transport, I'm reminded of the Planetary Transit System [1] from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri game... Hong Kong is much closer to the "gas" state than any other place I've been.
I like the MTR, but I think the NYC subway is better. For one thing, most of the lines in Manhattan are four tracks, allowing for express service. The MTR's coverage is also very sparse; most of the island is not in walking distance of an MTR station and you have to take minibusses.
The Ocotopus card is better-implemented than most of the similar systems I've used in the US, specifically because reading the card is properly debounced. In Chicago, using the RFID card to ride the bus is always difficult because if the card becomes readable, unreadable, and readable again very quickly, you get an error message even though your card was charged for the fare.
> London is a mix of inner London where public transport is very good and outer London (Zone 5+) where you are car dependent but you absolutely can get away with using car rental when you need it most of the time. The problem is public transport largely stops at midnight (apart from night buses).
Not to mention that automobile traffic strangles the bus lines. Bank (Zone 1) and Manor House (Zone 2/3) are approximately 5 miles apart. The 141 bus runs a direct route between them. On a good day, the journey takes 45 minutes. Taking the tube (Northern Line -> Piccadilly) will hardly shave any time off the journey and turn it into an unpleasant, claustrophobic experience.
The decision to cut down the congestion zone and divert a lane from an East-West artery for the Olympics is sure to make public transport just peachy.
Manhattan has the same problem, especially considering how narrow the streets are (due to "free" parking) and the lack of crosstown subway lines. It looks like the MTA has started a new program where some busses have police-car-like flashing lights and dedicated lanes. I haven't had the occasion to use the bus yet, but it doesn't look like it does anything. Taxi drivers make it their goal to use the road as rudely as possible, and there are a lot of taxis in Manhattan.
The new express busses are faster, but not by enough. Getting crosstown is still a hassle. I walk from 2nd Ave to 7th Ave every day for work, and find that it's generally nearly as fast to make it a brisk walk -- healthier and cheaper, too.
That said, taxis aren't the problem. At least they're always on the move and always picking up passengers. The parking lanes on the major streets should absolutely be turned into dedicated bus lanes -- but it's not taxis that are using that parking.
"... Australia is very much like California. Population density is low. Almost all of Australia is car dependent. Land sizes are large. This makes public transport largely uneconomic and unworkable, with certain exceptions (eg parts of Perth, inner Sydney, Melbourne). Even then, that transport is largely limited to going into and out of the city. If you want to go somewhere else it's a huge problem. ..."
Cletus, Melbournite here. Isn't the majority of the population urban and concentrated on the eastern sea board? The density is high. The picture you paint of car dependence is not quite as bad as you portray it in Melbourne at least. Public transport is actually pretty good compared to the roads cost wise & safety. It's not at European standards, but Europe is far denser and politically different. It's also hard to lump the cities together. Melbourne has had good public transport, Perth better. Sydney is pathetic. Having said that, if you live outside the 50km zone (less in some capitals) of Melbourne you will either get a car or depend on day and irregular public transport, if at all.
The key point to remember here is, traditionally the major capital cities of Australia moved from serviceable public transport to car based travel, only when the sprawl of the 70's occurred where land use, surpassed infrastructure and the will to supply it. Transport moved from communal and "tax based" to private and "user pays".
Yeah, NYC is great except for that Lincoln Tunnel bus congestion in the morning and the evening. It would help to have more rail lines to NJ. Let's start with the 7 Line:
Honestly, I'd just love to see the 7 actually be a functional subway line. It's the only one near my girlfriend's house in Queens, and it's often completely non-functional; IIRC, it's completely shut down Queens-bound for the next 11 weekends or something like that. Constant problems.
The weekend is the MTA's Achilles heel. You are much better off at 3AM on a Tuesday than Noon Saturday. At least in the outer boros, they try and keep the lines in Manhatten south of 110 at least vaguely useable.
I don't know what the solution is though, they have to do maintenance and upgrades sometime or other.
In Prague, the metro system runs 4AM to 0AM - all maintenance and upgrades are done in the four-hour window without revenue moves. It's a system that's an order of magnitude smaller (in revenue track length) than New York subway, though - I'm not sure how this would scale.
I suspect it would benefit me more than the average New Yorker, but I'd love for the M60 to be replaced by a train line, something going from Columbia through LaGuardia out to Flushing.
Whatever the number is, it's simply not enough and plans are underway to expand, even after the last plan was cancelled by the NJ governor because of budget issues.
Which makes a ton of sense, really. Manhattan is a crowded, congested, expensive place with high taxes and high costs of living. Regional transit accessibility is one of the few reasons people would locate a business there. Manhattan is clearly the primary beneficiary of the tunnel, and why New Jersey ever offered to pay for it in the first place (to the tune of ~$9 billion, before the inevitable overruns) is beyond me.
I think NJ is a pretty large beneficiary as well; a huge part of New Jersey's economy is dependent on para-NYC activities, ranging from businesses with satellite operations, to infrastruture (e.g. EWR), and property/income taxes from people who work in NYC and live in NJ. Without all that, cities like Newark would be even worse off economically than they already are, and there wouldn't be a lot going on in, say, Hoboken.
A short commute from New Jersey to Manhattan would convince people that would otherwise live in the city to move to New Jersey, moving their 10% state income tax with them. (And don't forget the city tax. I'm surprised we don't have borough and block taxes yet!) It seems logical that New York would want New Jersey to spend the money to enable this.
I was in Melbourne for 3 months last year and was surprised at how car-centric it is. The road from Melbourne to Geelong has some of the worst traffic I've seen anywhere, including Los Angeles.
If a city is a conglomeration of asphalt and buildings, then Cars are just a part of that. Sure traffic jams suck, but another effect of a car is less social interaction overall. If a city is a place for people to live, interact, share ideas etc, the picking up the dry cleaning by driving is not only bad for the environment etc, it's also a way to really isolate yourself from others en route to your destination. Commutes on the other hand where you're driving yourself can be equally anti social and wastes the most precious thing we have, time. In NYC, used to take the subway. I was able to read books, meet others. Got to know some neighbors who also took the train the at the same time to get to work, and even ran into friends I hadn't seen in a while. I'm sure you wouldn't want to run into a long lost friend while driving (or anyone else for that fact).
After moving down south I realized how little social interaction I get outside my specifically chosen work group or actively seeking out social engagements. Mass transportation is sparse at best here and walking to the dry cleaners would take half a day.
Good point. One of the best places for social interaction in the US are universities. It's no coincidence that students rarely own cars.
Back in my college (Yale), the campus and building layouts were pretty great. Some dorm complexes were much larger than city blocks, food was available in most living spaces. The ability to bump into people you know without need for mass planning is sorely missing from "adult" life.
Most of that is due to college being an incredibly efficient social filter. The odds of a social interaction between Yale student and another being worthwhile (so to speak) are an order of magnitude higher than a Yale student and non-Yale New Haven dweller.
Basically, all 3 cities had been steadily increasing the number of parking spots they had, until Cambridge deviated and banned creating new parking spots. Cambridge grew much faster than the other two after this change was made, and the chart correlated fairly closely. This may have been because of rent-control or other issues but the case for parking rules is strong.
I doubt it had a lot to do with parking spaces. Cambridge has had huge growth in biotech and other high-tech in a lot of the old industrial area over the past couple of decades. Several of the more rundown areas have gentrified as a result. Parking in Cambridge varies. It's really tight in some areas--though those are mostly fairly accessible by public transportation. In others, it's not bad.
Cars need lots of land for parking because they spend most of their time idle, because people find it cheaper to own their own car than to use taxicabs. Also, people buy the largest car they could plausibly need, unless they buy more than one. Individuals' strong identification with the car they drive further contributes to excessive size and power.
Automated taxis solve the problem. They will spend much less time idle, can be parked more compactly, don't need to be parked near a destination, and can have a size distribution that matches the needs of individual trips (i.e., mostly very small.) If they're cheap enough, then they'll be widely used, and wait times will be small. Because they will be automated, they can be taken in and out of service very quickly, and there will always be about the right number available. Also, they'll be much safer for cyclists and pedestrians to share the road with, and they'll use less of the existing road space, allowing us to add and widen bike lanes throughout our cities.
Driving is like a chicken and egg problem. I need to drive because everyone else drives. I live in a city that is very sparse because of all the parking lots and wide roads, like the article mentions. So not much is walkable. I also can't feasibly bike to work because the direct route involves taking an interstate as there aren't any near alternatives over a river, doing this on bike is illegal. Add in the no bike lanes and idiot drivers and it just isn't not a good idea.
All of these reasons for needing a car are caused by infrastructure to support cars. Therefore the only way to break this cycle for the public good is to make driving less economic. Gas tax seems like the obvious choice, but it is usually not done because of purported public opinion. But really it actually would be fair as onemoreact said the maintenance for roads is so expensive, that without gas tax you are really just subsidizing driving.
It may be the story's catchy title or the implying "solutions" of it, but i feel compelled to play devils advocate here, and defend the car.
Cars improve the lives of drivers with increased range movement, more time independent movement (start your journey when it suits you, not when a timetable allows you to) and allow for more freight to be carried.
When cars are criticized for bringing down the quality of life it is mostly an issue in urban environments. People in rural or suburban areas rely heavily on cars. The car may even have saved the quality of life in rural areas (ie stopped/slowed down the flight from those areas into cities) while it's what makes the existance of modern suburbia possible. It therefor provides cheaper housing and a broader choice of how you want to live (Not everybody needs five starbucks and a movie theatre in the neighbourhood). They also slowed the population increase of cities.
Adding costs to drivers in urban areas mean higher burdens for people that have to commute by car, since suburban/rural areas are too thinly populated to allow for efficient public transportation.
The quality of life argument often tends to demonize technological progress and romanticizes the past. The funny thing is, that this romance is only possible because technologies provided us with spare time. So did motorization. People who lived back then, would have always opted for the new technologies.
That being said, cars do decrease urban quality of life in certain ways. But it is important to not let generalization allow for bad policies. Light Rail for instance is alwas proposed, while it costs more than individual motorized traffic and while rail tracks usually decrease nearby quality of life more than any road could.
I'd propose simpler measures:
1) stop providing free parking. Allow the parking space usage to be priced at what the value of that land would have provided in real property taxes, if it had been tilled with a house. There's an interesting book about the "cost of free parking" by an UCLA Professor http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf
2) get rid of cab driving restrictions to dramatically lower cab fair prices. cities with limited amounts of cab driving licenses have higher fair costs. A NY cab medallion is considered a better investment than gold http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/ny-cab-medallions-w...
3) If property owners where to decide, they'd propably opt more likely for narrowing the streets and expanding sidewalks as it would increase their properties value. BID (business improvement districts) often do this. Enable more owners to make those decisions.
4) start with yourself and ditch your car if you don't need it. Do you really need more range? Do you really need to be able to start your journey every minute and not just every 10 minutes. And do you always need to be able to haul up to 4 fridges? And thus do
5) car sharing. i'm a very satisfied user of http://www.car2go.com/ and similar services.
6) if there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are, this need could have already been eliminated by using more buses for public transport.
Maybe this is my inner American Biker showing through here, but to me access to the roadway and the freedom to go where I want to, when I want to, without being dependent on the competency of others to get me there is a huge feeling of freedom. I can't stand not having my vehicle nearby.
When I was younger we lived about an hour away from the city. There was a gas station and a small grocery store near the out-of-the-way suburb where I lived. That was it. Getting my first car was a life-changing event for me that basically allowed me to become as independent as I am today, and 'going out for a drive' was just something I did as a young teen trying to keep himself entertained and trying to find new things to do. I ended up finding a Navy recruiter, but that's a different story.
I'm aware that the costs associated with this 'One Person - One Car' idea might not be scalable over the long term, and we should probably start offloading some of the costs associated with maintaining this paradigm onto the city driver while providing good alternatives. But I will always have a vehicle, no matter what it costs me.
I grew up in an exurb and know the feeling of freedom that finally having a car can give you. There wasn't much in my town and without a car, I couldn't even see most of my friends from school.
The greatest freedom of all is the ability to use your own legs to take you to where you want to go. Your idea of freedom changes when you live in a walkable area and realize that you don't have to rely on anything other than yourself to get you to most things in life.
First, understand that I am not suggesting you or others like you are wrong, if you are happy then cool.
But... I simply cannot understand the desire to live in such close proximity to large numbers of other people. Never ever again will I subject myself to high density living. I live in a suburb and simply hate having to go downtown especially when there are big events going on. The bars are crowded, eating establishments are packed, noisy has hell. Won't do it, you can't make me!
I like the quiet, I like being able to walk into a suburban bar and not have to shoulder my way through a crowd to try to find a seat if one is even available. It's nice to simply walk in, sit down on a bar stool and actually hear the game on the TV. I like not having the noise of a city outside my window when I sleep.
The greatest freedom of all is that either of us can make the choice of what lifestyle suits us.
As for the deep revulsion of being surrounded by tons of people, you're right, you have that right to feel that way. Personally, a crowd of 50,000 people is still easy to walk through, but even 1,000 people trying to leave a big sports event in their cars at the same time is a total nightmare taking an hour+ and during that whole time you are completely stuck in your car. I left a soccer game in Tokyo that was at a completely absolutely full stadium, and when it ended the huge mass of people slowly and orderly filed to the nearby train stations and we were on a train (packed) heading home within 20 minutes, at full speed.
It would be lovely if we could choose which lifestyle suits us, but most of the cities in the US do not provide ANY option for someone who wants proper high-density, so to exercise my "freedom" to live in a pedestrian friendly high-density city involved leaving the US entirely.
The bars are crowded, eating establishments are packed, noisy has hell.
But how many of those people drove to the downtown area because there were no equivalent establishments within walking distance of their suburban homes? Not trying being a dick, of course, just pointing out the chicken and egg nature of the problem.
See, I lived in upstate NY for a while in Saratoga Springs. You can walk all the way across that town very easily (I did a few times). But with my car I was able to drive up to the Adirondacks and go hiking on a whim, or drive myself and a bunch of other bored Navy guys across the border into Montreal as soon as we got off a 36-hour shift and had to be back in exactly 24 hours. Some of my local friends without vehicles ended up relying on me to get them anywhere outside of the city when they needed to.
There are definite advantages to living in an area where you rarely need a vehicle, but I will always want to own one anyway. :-)
I suppose you are an exception then, because the traffic problems, at least here in Toronto, arise from a large majority of people who positively do not need a personal vehicle for their day-to-day activities.
Well, I would argue that the traffic problems arise because of a failure on the part of city planners to design their roadways to accommodate the amount of traffic that they receive (not a problem unique to Toronto), but yes, the traffic problems would certainly be reduced if less people used vehicles.
Car traffic fundamentally isn't scalable in urban areas. The only failure on the part of city planners is attempting to accomodate that kind of selfish, wasteful behavior.
Cars ruin the amenity of your city. Space taken up with roads and parking can't be used for anything else, and cars are dangerous to be in or around. If you know that, and still choose to drive, then you are, to some extent, selfish.
Also, owning house and yard is a selfish waste of space compared to living apartments, but I don't hear too many people complaining. If a city were to say "NO CARS, TOO MUCH SPACE WASTED", then they might as well say "NO HOUSES OR YARDS, TOO MUCH SPACE SELFISHLY WASTED ON PERSON", but if I have the means and it is for sale, what is the issue? Not serving my fellow man with my purchase? Eh, count me in the selfish category permanently.
As a matter of public policy, owning a house with a yard isn't really subsidized. Buying is subsidized over renting, but that's an indirect thing at best. But cars are massively subsidized.
I think it's actually a bit more selfish to want people to give up their earned conveniences to satisfy your own particular desires, in this case, making the city 'how it should be', when it clearly works fairly well the way it is. Saying cities are 'ruined' by cars is hyperbole and guilt-based rhetoric, plain and simple.
Agreed, no accidental deaths/smog if everyone walked/biked, but that doesn't mean city+cars aren't accomplishing their job of A to B. It isn't the cleanest or safest way, but I don't think he argued "greater good" so much as "good enough". If these were deal-breaker issues for everyone, then people would walk/bike instead of use cars (or just leave the city), but clearly cars are a definite "want" item.
Which is to say, yeah, I suppose we're selfish, but then again, owning property is selfish, comrade.
It's questionable to base public policy on individual choices when the costs of those choices are socialized and the benefits of those choices are privatized.
Idealistically sound, but not realistic. Roads and cars exist to meet a need (individual mobility and mass transit, primarily). At this time, that need also serves the public, and it is disingenuous to say that roads only benefit those with cars. Perhaps some good public transit systems will come along one day that can make a meaningful dent in the amount of people who need to own cars. I'm still waiting for those systems, but I won't be holding my breath.
Also, as an aside, try riding a bike about 5 ~ 10 miles when it's 105 degrees out (pretty common where I live), or even hovering around zero (fairly common where I used to live). It's not fun, nor is it practical. It's a big part of why nobody does it.
> Perhaps some good public transit systems will come along one day that can make a meaningful dent in the amount of people who need to own cars. I'm still waiting for those systems, but I won't be holding my breath.
They exist in most of the developed world; North America is the major exception. All that's required to create them here is good public policy, which was the topic to begin with.
The businesses and other establishments around you that make you 'independent from roads'? Yeah, those are likely completely dependent on roads. So you aren't, really.
If we stop building free parking (or rather requiring it, as most city and town codes require) and stop subsidizing roads and car travel, this issue would naturally sort itself out. Most people are car dependent because our government policies have made it so. If people had to pay the actual cost of parking, the upkeep of roads, gas, etc. it would be less palatable to drive a car everywhere.
Of course our country is overrun by cars, including our cities. The government has enacted policies that encourage car driving above other transportation means. This in turn has encouraged suburbanization, which, as you point out, generally requires a car-centric lifestyle.
There is nothing wrong with suburbanization, but we wouldn't have nearly the extent of suburbs that we have now if all transportation options were on equal footing. And it shouldn't be the governments job to make car travel so cheap that people buy large, cheap houses in the middle of nowhere.
This also ignores all the other costs of car-centric living such as increased risks for obesity, heart disease, depression, etc. If you live in a walkable area, you naturally walk a lot more and get daily exercise. The idea that you would need to go to a gym to get exercise in your daily life is one of the reasons that Americans are becoming so unhealthy.
> "There is nothing wrong with suburbanization, but we wouldn't have nearly the extent of suburbs that we have now if all transportation options were on equal footing."
This is basically what I'm thinking these days. Having suburbs is fine. What's really killing us, is the incredibly low density of those suburbs, caused by zoning and the hiding of transportation costs that subsidize that zoning.
It's the cul-de-sac neighborhoods and massive parking lots sitting idle 90% of the time that make suburbs unwalkable and impractical to service with public transport. If the suburbs themselves weren't so sparse, their residents wouldn't need to use their cars as much and transport options for getting into the city, or to neighboring suburbs would greatly alleviate traffic and increase freedom for those who can't drive, can't afford to drive or just would prefer not to.
There's a difference between suburbs where everyone has a yard and peace and quiet and suburbs where the sidewalks inconsistently exist, cul-de-sac neighborhoods inflate route lengths and compound traffic snarls, zoning breaks up residential areas with light commerical areas that have mandated massive lots to handle twice-a-year peak parking needs, etc.
You can literally see the difference in walkability and infrastructure service levels between suburban neighborhoods built in the 50s and those built in the late 70s and later.
One has consistent street and infrastructure grids, parks, likely bus stops (because they're feasible) and commercial-cluster downtown areas for goodness sake! While the other has larger yards, cul-de-sacs, inconsistent sidewalks and the closest they come to a downtown is a (likely now decrepit) mall with its own ocean of usually-empty parking and the commensurate traffic-snarling entrances and exits.
This is why I feel so out of place in the vast majority of american suburbs today. Standing in any public space, if you look at roads and parking lots as dead space, it seems as if half the total space surrounding you is just nothing. It isn't beautiful, it isn't usable, it is just empty space that soaks up the landscape, carving it up all to make it cheap for someone to drive, but making it impossible for someone to walk.
I'm not 100% convinced by this line of reasoning. All major forms of travel (including walking) can be seen as "supported" by government policies and money. If nothing else, eminent domain plays a huge role in transportation infrastructure.
I don't think we can build infrastructure like this piece at a time to see which one wins. So there is no true "equal footing" or "fair" approach that everyone can agree on.
" but we wouldn't have nearly the extent of suburbs ... it shouldn't be the governments job to make car travel so cheap"
I think we're touching here some fundamental problems of governance and city-planning.
a) what should the role of goverment be?
b) cities dont have those clear-cut borders as administrations have (ultra-dense areas somewhat evolve into rural areas as you drive outside of a city)
c) thus multiple layers of government and morality are involved in shaping our cities
I think providing people with more choices is usually the better policy, thus suburbia has its right to stay. My experience though is, that in suburbia you often end up with the worst of both worlds: the crime, dirt, traffic and anonymity of cities as well as the unacessability of culture, services and long commute times of rural areas. So I'd rather go all-in citywise or stay out of the whole thing at all. but then this is the personal preference of a 20-somewhat and not your typical young family founder who may strive for suburbia.
The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars. So, as congestion increases they become less viable. Light rail really solves 2 problems, it can transport more people than an equivalent investment in roads and it increases property values by decreasing the need for parking spaces while increasing mobility.
PS: Roads are really expensive if you compare road infrastructure costs to miles driven you need a ~3$ / gallon gas tax to break even. Anything less than that and your just subsidizing cars which does not lower costs it just hides them.
As I said, "If there's a growing need for light-rail, chances are" buses being the better solution. I'm not arguing against light-rail in general. But most of the times light-rail is considered as solution in political debates, buses would do a better job. Cheaper prices allow for even more transportation capacities than light-rail. Light-rail is a good option when bus-capacities can't be increased anymore.
"The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars"
IMHO this is to be considered as advantage over light-rail. There is no additional infrastructure to be built or maintained.
In theory this could be solved politically, but when I'm looking for housing options, I tend to ignore bus and look only at rail, because it's the only thing I can be reasonably sure will still be there in a few years. Buses get rerouted all the time, so I can't assume that my convenient directly-on-the-line-to-work bus route will still exist in 5 years, but I can fairly safely assume that BART will still be on the same route in 5 years, because the cost of moving rails and building stations makes it much more stable (light rail isn't as expensive to reroute as BART, but still too expensive to do normally).
From what I've read, developers think similarly: they're willing to invest capital in housing developments near rail-transit lines, but not on the basis of bus lines, because they need to be able to assume that the transit situation will be stable for long enough to pay off their investment. In other words, the flexibility of buses is precisely the problem, because it means residents/developers/employers can't rely on them in making plans.
"Buses get rerouted all the time" living in Hamburg, Gemrany most of my life, I have had seen bus lines rerouted maybe 2-3 times in my life. Changing public transit access that often as in your city argubaly adds uncertainty to development projects. but i'd tackle this problem from another angle.
I think a lot more urban public transportation could be achieved by tackling your mentioned correlation: Property owners benefit by far the most from public transport infrastructure errected nearby their property (at least if underground or not noisy etc.).
Even if the owner's property taxes rise, the tax increase usually lacks behind the actual property value increase by some years up to a decade.
So if I want to solve it politically I'd:
1) get rid of that lacking-behind in property valuation. Then
2) maybe add the expectalbe increased property-tax income to my calculation when planning a new subway line
3) consider talking to owners. if a subway line is to be errected, I'd propose to owners that I'am willing to errect stations nearby their property if they participate in the costs.
I see your argument, and in some places, this might work.
I believe that in most places in the US, your suggestion that nearby property owners might support nearby transit to the extent of partially paying for it would be a non-starter. Usually, nearby (say, within 200m of the route) property owners oppose new bus/train routes tooth and claw.
One of the most famous examples of anti-transit sentiment from property owners is the congressional bill that Henry Waxman (a generally liberal Democrat) got passed, prohibiting a subway extension from downtown Los Angeles toward the ocean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westside_Subway_Extension_(Los_...).
About 25 years later, this law was lifted, but a lot of the sentiment remains.
wow... this NIMBY mentality is a complete different issue. my idea isn't really thought through and may be naive. But i think the anti-transit sentiment is very much comparable to anti-gerntification sentiments and a somewhat blurred definition of public space, real property and the like.
Thanks for your perspective. It's interesting to connect anti-gentrification to NIMBYism.
I have come to believe that most anti-gentrification sentiment, at least where I live in LA, is misplaced. It's a young city and to expect neighborhoods to stay the same on the time scale of decades is unrealistic. There are laws (many mistaken, IMHO) to prevent property taxes from rising more than about 2% per year, so nobody will be forced from their home. Renters may have to move, although there are rent protections on many properties also.
Anyway, anti-gentrification sentiment is interesting because it never stops. People who moved to my neighborhood in 2000 think the 2010'ers are gentrifiers. People who moved here in 1990 think it's the 2000'ers. People who moved here in 1970 think it's anyone after 1980.
Most resentment and name-calling about "gentrification" is among the young, however. By contrast, NIMBYism is more of a middle-age and old person's thing. At least where I live.
"anti-gentrification sentiment is interesting because it never stops."
Excactly! Where does one draw the line? Usually one draws the line so that protection includes himself. For me, it's a moral problem as well, because this line-drwaring scales up to elections that justify way too much government regulation. From my perspective anti-gentrification sentiment is almost always misplaced.
"By contrast, NIMBYism is more of a middle-age and old person's thing."
Maybe the difference is also, that NIMBY-ians engage proactivly against changes (they know that where they live is already good), where as anti-gentrificationists seem to be more reactionary (not anybody expected sudden price rises to occur).
Where I connect NIMBY- and anti-gentrification-sentiments is that one want's prohibit things to change (anti-immigration, trade restrictions). All of those sentiments are understandable. But prohibiting things from change via legislation tends to be an unfair deal for future generations. The change I don't want to happen is an opportunity that for many will never occur.
"to expect neighborhoods to stay the same on the time scale of decades is unrealistic."
Absolutely. In Hamburg there are restrictions on building heights. The most stupid one is, that in downtown 'no bulding should block the view of the churches'. It's the one place in Hamburg, where land is so expensive that buildings need to rise in height if you want affordable rent prices. But the buildings can't rise, so no one lives there anymore. Thus the churches have lost their communities and downtown is a dead place after 8pm. Just one example where the attitude of "conserving culture" leads to killing it off.
There are lot's of ways to implement both system, but when it comes to significantly dealing with congestion busses simply don't work.
Consistent market research and experience over the last 50 years in Europe and North America shows that car commuters are willing to transfer some trips to rail-based public transport but not to buses. Typically light rail systems attract between 30 and 40% of their patronage from former car trips. Rapid transit bus systems attract less than 5% of trips from cars, less than the variability of traffic.[42]
That said, buses are cheaper than new roads so most city's adopt them at some point. The real issues IMO is most city's are going to be around in 100 years and need to think in those terms. When you look at New York and other major city's you see how development and public transport are closely linked and light rail continues to gain value even in competition with cars and buses.
But where do you put the light rail? Put it on an elevated track, and that property value change goes the other way (noise, visual pollution, loss of sunlight). OK, so put it in the middle of the street. If it's a dedicated lane, not only do you suck up space from the cars, you have to figure out how to squeeze in platforms, and the light rail has to stop at both platforms and intersections making it painfully slow (take the Boston green lines as an example). If it isn't a dedicated lane, it's a streetcar and you have cars constantly squeezing around it and everybody has to stop to let people run into the middle of the street to get on, plus the odd traffic patterns created at every intersection (Toronto).
If you have the space for a dedicated right-of-way you might as well go full out and make high-cap rail. Otherwise, I see light rail as the worst compromise in-between subways and buses. There's a reason Manhattan has essentially eliminated all at-grade light rail, and elevated rail still exists only in the relatively poor neighborhoods: wherever the subway doesn't run, buses are best at filling the gap without destroying the street-level environment.
In some european countries, Portugal is the one I know best, actually have a specific lane for buses, where cars cannot use (fined if they do). That should help avoiding congestions for buses, at a very low cost.
Losing a traffic lane is not cheap. That said, allowing buses to use additional lanes has significant benefits. One of the best ideas I have seen is only allowing buses to use the break down lane. Opening them up to normal traffic risks major delays after an accident and often the real issue is off ramps not though traffic, but a bus can get around the occasional broken down car with minimal delays while significantly increasing a roads capacity. Also adding bus specific shortcuts can provide major benefits for minimal cost.
> The problem with buses for transport is they use the same infrastructure as cars.
I've always thought that was their #1 selling point. Light rails are just insanely expensive. When you've already got roads in place, buses become very attractive.
A tramway can be 50 meters long. A bus is usually 12-18 meters.
A tram system can be fully automated.
An electric engine is more efficient (constant torque) in an urban area with lots of stops.
In countries like those in Eastern Europe, car drivers don't give a fk about buses and bus lanes. But they are scared enough to make way for the trams (if they collide, the tram will barely be scratched while their car ends up totally smashed).
The tram vehicle lasts more time. My town uses 50 year old trams without any issues, while the buses must be replaced after 10-15 years.
I just want to say that while I love the idea of car sharing services, the reality is that they're only slightly less expensive than owning, and compared to renting from the big local car rental services, they're much more expensive. At least in the DC area.
I went car-less for about 6 months as an experiment. Initially, I tried to compute value from the local car sharing services, but it didn't compute. Plus, the nearby cars seemed to be heavily used, limiting availability. So, I never signed up with them. Instead, I discovered that with a little foresight and planning, I could get economy rentals from the big rental companies via priceline for like $12-15 a day. Of course, I had to pay for the gas, but insurance was covered by my credit card. It worked out well for times when I had to commute outside the urban area.
Inside the urban area of DC, I found that driving was extremely painful with traffic and parking, but oftentimes it was still less hassle than trying to get around the DC metro system. The DC metro system doesn't work. The train system has frequent delays, huge time gaps between trains, over-packed cars, limited times of operation, and trips are expensive. Furthermore, the bus system seems to have bizarre, unoptimized routes.
Anyway, I really want car-sharing to work, but it seems like it can only work in some geographical areas, under certain conditions, and with some local support. But, I'm always looking forward to new ideas in transportation; it's one of the worst parts of living in DC.
I've been to DC once for a couple of days. For tourist destinations the metro was fine, even though Georgetown seemed to be unaccessible due to its residents refusing a metro connection there (fear of gentrification?). Also the similarity of the stations made orientation from inside the train different for newcomers.
I've also used the the SmartBike DC, which wasn't nice, since there are few bike lanes.
About car sharing:
My experience is that car sharing is cheaper than rental if you're using the car for less than 6-12 hours a day. But your right, those numbers work differently from town to town. As soon as I added expectable car price decline to the monthly costs of owning, car sharing became incredibly cheap. I'm also happy to not have to deal with maintanance and tax/insurance issues. If I'd had to travel by car daily, owning/leasing a car would still be the cheapest option.
Georgetown does not have a metro stop primarily because it would delay people getting to the heart of the city, where most jobs are. Georgetown is a primarily commercial / residential neighborhood, not a job center, and the ridership calculations at the time did not justify a stop there.
Compared to NYC or Paris, the DC Metro is limited, but it's still the second-most-used system in the country, and far ahead of most American cities (SF in particular). Train headways are as low as 2 minutes during rush hour, and the system runs until 3 AM on Friday and Saturday night (unlike the BART which stops at midnight). It also goes close enough to almost everywhere you need to get to.
I agree that maintenance-related delays on evenings and weekends can be significant, and packed Orange Line cars are a real problem. Hopefully the former will go away as the current round of maintenance is completed; we'll probably need to build a second Potomac River tunnel and the M St subway to resolve the latter.
He focuses less on the differences between bus and light rail (unimportant distinction) and more on what it means to actually provide mobility that people can use. Rail vs bus is about as useful as emacs vs vi - fun for practitioners, useless for users that care about code or getting places in their life.
Most of the issues with public transport can be solved with some careful planning. If you haven't seen it already, http://carfree.com/ covers a lot of the practical ones (including how you migrate existing cities over to being car free).
What I really need is a good international network of car rental stations, such that I would only have too pay for transits between places. My main problem are holidays: renting a car for two or three weeks still seems too expensive (~1000€). I've never owned a car in my life, but my girl-friend loves driving and the discussions everytime we plan holidays are a huge pita.
Likewise in the city a car sharing service that worked like that would be great. We need the car to visit our son's grandparents, and paying by the hour would easily come to 20 to 30€ per visit, while the car is mostly just sitting there waiting.
Meanwhile I can only wait for autonomous cabs, I suppose :-(
When I used to live in LA I used to be so dependent on my car, not to mention the hassle of finding parking wherever I went. Since then, I got rid of my car and have lived in SF, NY. I haven't had a need to own a car in any of these places. Public transportation in SF and NY are really great and whenever you do need to make that trip out to the suburbs or have to make an IKEA run, there is always Zipcar. Zipcar works really well in SF.
I'm walking more, which is healthier, have no need to find parking, which is less stressful, and no need to pay loan-payments/gas, which saves me a ton of money every month.
>I completely agree. It's sad that we've let cars completely take over in detriment of quality of life.
I agree that they can be a burden if you live in a major city with an average or slightly-above average income because parking becomes an issue. However, I am probably not on the same page as everyone else because I'm a huge automotive enthusiast. I'm the kind of guy that would go on vacation to go driving in another area. I could easily spend more money on renting an exotic car than what I would pay for the hotel. Nurburgring anyone?
This is probably going to sound foreign to many of you guys. After reading these comments, it almost seems like most people here are from the Bay Area, NYC, Chicago. So here i go...
Just because you live in a certain area where walking from A to B is possible or even preferred, doesn't mean the rest should/can follow. I live in Kansas City, a place where owning a vehicle isn't a convenience, but a necessity. My residential neighborhood doesn't have any sidewalks to any convenience stores or main roads. I have to walk on a narrow two-way road, which is a tragedy waiting to happen. I simply cannot WALK anywhere. I could opt-in for public transport, which happens to be very inefficient because nobody uses it, and wait 40-50 minutes for a bus to arrive. The irritating thing is that I'd have to drive to the closest bus station. This scenario is pretty typical for most suburban neighborhoods in KC. I even tried biking at some point, but people here just don't understand it. They'll honk at you, flip you off, run you off the road or throw stuff at you.
Commuting by foot has never been popular here. Therefore, the city infrastructure never saw the need to support it and likely never will, unless people start mass-croaking from heart failure. So, when someone start a BS rant about cars killing cities and the need to abolish personal transport, I immediately close the browser tab. You guys need a reality check.
If only there was a smartphone app that allowed you to call your self-driving car to swing by your apartment/office to pick you up. Then cars could be located underground in some out of the way location many miles from the city center.
Of course, what I'm saying is science fiction, we don't have self-driving cars capable of driving 30mph to pick us up.
> Of course, what I'm saying is science fiction, we don't have self-driving cars capable of driving 30mph to pick us up.
I suppose you're being sarcastic ? We already do have such cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car It will not be long before they are provably safer than professional human drivers.
However, that doesn't get rid of all the problem : your car still have to drive in and out the city. But if you combine automation with sharing, then you can afford smaller, more specialised cars. You could have tiny delivery cars (they don't even need to transport a human). You could have truly individual commute cars that would take just 1 person. By using the car that fit the job and use less space, we may be able to help with congestion.
I would guess that the average person might cover .5 mile (< 1km) in 10 minutes so it wouldn't be possible to reach the parking that's located "many miles" away. Also, I didn't say your car is 10 minutes by foot away, more like 10 miles. It could easily be 15-20 minutes for your car. Your goal is to minimize your commute time not your cars.
This wouldn't work in NYC or London, which are much bigger cities than discussed in the article. The first leg of your journey there should be a train whisking you away from the city at 120 mph to a train station within 15-20 miles of your home where your car will leave home to pick you as soon as your phone tells it you are 15 minutes from your station.
Same number of cars as today. Granted, each car will be driving a little more but pickup and dropoffs could be made more efficient with taxi stand pull-up lanes, for example.
I think the commuting option doesn't seem to work for many people. Seems like people spend too much time on the lawn, but sure it does work for some people.
True, but I think that's thinking too small. In a autonomous car world why would everyone have their own? The car could drive itself home after driving you to work to take other people where they need to go, but that is still thinking too small - thinking within the current system.
In a world with autonomous cars I think a subscription service for car ownership makes more sense. A parked car is a wasted resource, autonomous cars could have uptimes similar to airplanes. Of course this isn't even including the advantages an autonomous fleet would have with fuel efficiency and traffic handling.
How much of the "road cost" can be eliminated by reducing car usage by 90% in cities?
I'm pretty sure that buses, delivery trucks, ambulances, and police cars need roads, so a significant fraction of the road cost (in cities) is required even if there isn't a single private passenger car.
Eliminating extra traffic reduces the amount of wear-and-tear on a street, which means you can go more years without resurfacing or replacing it. So even if you still need all of the roads, they could still cost significantly less to maintain.
That said, I'm not really sure how the math works: delivery trucks and buses are a smaller number of the vehicles on the road, but they also weigh a lot more than cars. Some DOT probably has a chart somewhere which breaks down road wear by vehicle type.
> Eliminating extra traffic reduces the amount of wear-and-tear on a street, which means you can go more years without resurfacing or replacing it.
The standard argument is that wear goes up either exponentially (which seems wrong) or quadratically (seems more reasonable) with vehicle weight. Since heavy vehicle use will actually go up (more delivery) if we eliminate cars....
I've seen how other activities, tearing up streets for utilities and the like, which are surprisingly common in cities, lead to street repair. Those activities won't change if cars are eliminated.
Parking garages will go away, and major streets could be narrower. I doubt that either effect is significant compared to the road costs which have been claimed to be huge.
Nref = Nx (Wx / Wref)^4
Nref = number of trips of reference vehicle
Nx = number of trips of other vehicle
Wref = weight of reference vehicle
Wx = weight of other vehicle
The quartic formula really works in our favor for bicycle commuting: if a bicycle (with rider) is 1/20th the weight of a car, the bicycle will produce 0.000625% the wear of the car. So if commuting were the only purpose of the road, you would essentially never need to replace a road again.
This does make adding (larger) delivery vehicles quite bad. If the average delivery vehicle is twice as heavy as the average passenger car which was formerly used, each trip will produce 16 times as much wear. Looking up the curb weights for a Chevy cargo van (5000 lb) and a Toyota Corolla (2800 lb), the actual wear factor is 10x.
This article is very broad and (probably because of this) doesnt really go in depth on many issues. If anyone is seriously interested in transportation, I highly reccommend the excellent blog http://www.humantransit.org/
I do take some issue with the title of this article however. Whilst agreeing with the general sentiment of the article (US cities need to generally focus on more accessible development), cars dont 'kill' cities. Cities couldn't survive without cars (and trucks) - this is important. Cars kill pedestrianisation, but this is a different story - only small parts of our cities (even European cities) are (and have to be) attractive and enjoyable for pedestrians....
One case not mentioned here is families with small children. With 3 little ones, public transportation becomes a real hassle, especially when there is walking to be done on either side. It is by far my top reason for owning a car in the city.
I have two little kids (I know that's not three) and public transit or biking (I can fit both on my bike) is great for outings. It turns the journey into an experience itself. Driving with the kids strapped into car seats the whole time is much less fun. I live in a very bikable town within walking distance to light rail, but that was by design. We bought our house by drawing 1/2 mile circles around parks, rail stops, and grocery stores. Bought the first place that intersected all three. I was just thinking recently about how my kids likely be autonomous much earlier. By age 11 or 12 they'll be able to go all around the city on their own.
Curiously, where do you live? I wouldn't let my kids ride transit by themselves; that's where the crum bums go to pee.
I also don't want to be against a grocery store as the noise from the large parking lot (and busy road) is annoying. Living by a park is highly desirable.
We're protected from the busy road and the grocery store parking lot by elevation; we're 50 ft below either. We can hear the highway, but I only notice it when the din is missing when we visit friends in the country!
My wife and I share a single car in Salt Lake City and have done so in other places, included Washington DC and semi-rural West Virginia. This setup is ideal, because we can coordinate our use of the car and combine that with biking/walking and public transportation. We also have a 2 year-old son who goes to pre-school every day and has to get dropped off an picked up by car. Sharing w/i a couple or family is a really good way to reduce car usage but retain the benefits of having a car. I'm definitely a proponent of reduced usage combined with biking/walking and public transportation.
One of the things that might happen is that you get out of the car in the city, and the car drives itself to a parking space a few kilometers away. This will make all those inner urban parking spaces available for better use again.
good morning - a 10 seconds glance at a US city, 30% of whose area is occupied by parking lots and (always-clogged) highways is more than enough to come to that conclusion.
I love your point that car storage decreases city density and therefore walkability. I was made aware in grade school that cars enabled low density settlement, but you have enlightened me to a case in which they FORCE it! Something you may investigate in further posts is that the path versatility of cars(and trucks) is also a waste of resource capacity on most long or oft repeated trips.
For those times when a car is the only practical way to get somewhere, car-sharing is a much more sensible alternative to universal personal car ownership.
Most cars sit idle and unoccupied for 90-95% of the time. That represents a huge opportunity to increase the productivity of each car while reducing the price of access and the cost in money and wasted space of storage (i.e. parking).
It's not cars that are the problem. It's cars that are usually 3/4ths empty that are the problem. Full cars are comparably good to other forms of mass transit.
The solution is called "jitney transit". It is illegal due to taxi medallion laws. So the real problem is special-interest groups (such as taxi cartels)—and a political system that encourages their formation.
The original vision for Walt Disney's EPCOT was a radially designed city, where "the pedestrian will be king" (Walt's own words) and electric vehicles are segregated from the streets. See: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/the-epcot-fil...
Yes, but that's how cars are driven. Bikes are obviously at capacity (since it's 1). Buses are arguable, but the point of a bus is that you get it to capacity, which is not how cars are driven.
If you're really bored sometime sit beside a busy road and count the number of cars that have more than one person in them, it's a surprisingly low number.
I bike commuted in Mexico City for a year and it was excellent. Also, the public transit is great; it's just that lines 1, 2, and 3 of the Metro and 1 of the Metrobus are badly overcrowded and need to be expanded with quadruple express tracks and higher frequency automatic train control systems.
The city building industry must be one of the greatest business opportunities ahead of us. It's very cost intensive, and the stakes are hight, but the possible returns is even higher.
In short, create a new manhattan on a desolate location, and the increase in real estate prices could be extreme.
"Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University)"
The reason people commute is generally because living in a city is very expensive, and living outside the city means a nice house and maybe even a back yard.
This is a supply and demand issue. A lot of people do want to live in dense, urban areas, but there isn't enough housing stock to meet demand, hence the expensiveness of urban living. But if you factor in your transportation costs into living expenses, all of the sudden living outside of an urban area isn't so cheap: http://htaindex.cnt.org/
There has been a big push to see housing affordability as intertwined with transportation costs. If you have to drive a car to do everything in your life, that costs a lot more than someone who can walk to the grocery store, movie theater, bar, etc.
The flaw (or shall I say, "limitation") of this HTA index is that it apparently ties affordability to the median income of the region.
I think this would be subject to a kind of selection bias, for example punishing rural areas for employing laborers and so on. In fact, one of the reasons manufacturers set up shop in rural areas is because the areas have lower real costs of living.
If laborers move to Manhattan, they won't suddenly start making a banker's salary. So the fact that housing is affordable somewhere relative to average incomes there, in many cases, is wholly irrelevant.
Similarly, if an urban high-earner could take his earnings into a low-cost suburban area, his purchasing power would be huge.
Transportation costs are a real issue that should be weighed, but that index completely distorts it by tying cost of living to regional incomes.
If I'm wrong, then all the retirees in Florida must be misguided, and really they should move to NYC, where things are "cheaper".
One thing this article disregards and I haven't seen touched on here yet is time value. My time is worth money. If driving a car saves me more money in time than it costs I'll drive a car.
For example, if it would take 20 minutes in a car vs 1 hour in a bus I've saved 40 minutes. If I bill at $75/h that's $50 worth of time or $100 round trip (assuming I work instead). Do that a few times a month and the car has paid for itself.
"My time is worth money. [...] assuming I work instead"
That is a big assumption. I think the assertion that time is ALWAYS money is incorrect. Often, it is just time. At 3AM, or after you stop working, your time is probably not worth $75/h.
In your example, you only loose money if you stop working early to account for the drive. So, for example, instead of working 8AM-5PM, you work 8:30AM-4:30PM, in order to still get home at 5PM.
With that sort of logic, you could just as easily say that if you work 2 Extra hours each day for a month, the car paid for itself and you still get to live in the country. However, like your example, this assumes your work amount is infinite.
So, while an argument could certainly be made for saving money in gas, spending less time driving, or more time with family, unless you decide to take the drive time out of your work hours, the opposite of how most people determine when they need to be at or leave work, you wouldn't be loosing money, only time.
In the US, an increased tax on gasoline is political suicide. Another solution, would be for the oil companies to pay their fair share of the wars we have been in to defend their supply. This would more directly, make real, the cost of our gas.
You can make a reasonably well working mass transit that everyone will use.
People would still buy cars to stay in traffic for hours.
But the real long-scale problem is that cities discourage children. People living in a big city tend to have two to zero children and that makes country population unsustainable. On the upside, you can always find a good school for your few children if you care.
In recent times I don't see many children on the streets. It seems that children are being turned into indoors pets. This is sad. Adults feel obliged to drive children around to their activities. The pedophile hysteria being promoted by media doesn't help either.
Cars also grow cities - the blanket of small-to-medium cities covering the eastern half of the US is the product of having cars. Public transport needs serious population before it can start up.
Cars don't kill cities, hi-rise buildings do. A thousand people getting in an out of on acre of land will cause all the problems we see today in big cities. Stick your head out of your window office and see how many people there is in your own acre and then imagine how many cars are needed to move all of them. If I were a benevolent dictator I would prohibit all buildings higher than a story and solve the traffic issue once and for all.
You say you like tall buildings? Then enjoy your damn traffic and shut up.
What you've just described is known in the planning field as suburban sprawl, and is not without traffic problems of its own.
If you start with an assumption of auto-dependence, then your conclusion follows, but the article is really arguing against making that assumption in the first place.
You can't decouple urban density from traffic of any kind, be it pedestrians, bicycles, cars, buses or even flying cars, they go hand in hand. There is no magic trick to solve it no matter how much money you throw at the problem.
Show me the city in the world with the worst traffic and I'll show you the city with the highest buildings.
Only accepting that fact we can start planning better cities. Also worth considering, giving telecommute a high priority, since most of the office work done in these big cities can be easily done from home.
Suburban sprawl becomes a problem only when those millions of people have to drive downtown to work clogging the driveways, but traffic is not an issue in suburban areas per se, lower urban density wins again.
But in Hawaii, everyone rents a car, drives it the ten minutes from the airport to the hotel, parks it at the hotel, leaves it there for a week, then drives it back to the airport to get home.
It's a pretty funny and stark reminder of the completely different mindset and attitude towards cars that most americans have. Having a car is so deeply ingrained that the alternatives don't have a chance.