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Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

economist.com

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Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#21

Post by asteli »

opportune wrote: post #9

It's going to be tough doing this in a lot of US cities, especially those which had most of their growth after WW2. So much was built with the assumption that all transportation would be via car (or bus as an afterthought, sometimes). You can probably do it in an old downtown area but good luck trying it in suburbia

The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward.

There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#22

Post by ekzy »

cm2187 wrote: post #14
DennisP wrote: post #4

Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.

If you ever want to reverse that opinion, I suggest taking London's tube and/or Paris' Metro or RER at peak hour in the morning.

But it’s still the best option. And if not, a bus is probably quicker than a private car stuck in traffic that you can’t even park.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#23

Post by Scoundreller »

StudentStuff wrote: post #13
robert_foss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll still be able to bike, a life-pro tip is to get some gloves for winter biking.

Biking in the snow can be quite fun, I enjoyed it last winter up here in Seattle. Good gloves, glasses and rain pants are useful to make it an enjoyable ride tho :P

I highly recommend a bank-robber style facemask. But I'm regularly dealing with colder temperatures than Seattle.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#24

Post by simias »

ArnoVW wrote: post #11
tmh79 wrote: post #3

Its amazing to me how cheap these changes are, and how much people love them after they are implemented. You go to a neighborhood meeting in the US and all you hear about is "loss of parking", "traffic", but when you remove the cars, everyone loves it.

There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake. The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine. The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can ima…

I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation.

Of course since in practice the richer people who live in the city centers are also those who elect the mayors things still eventually move forward in the direction of fewer cars.

I suspect that it might be different in the USA because I've always heard that things worked the other way around here: rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#25

Post by mxscho »

Scoundreller wrote: post #17
tosh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as c…

But are they the same stores? It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble. If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation. It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.

I think the ideal solution is to migrate business which depend on transportation into commercial areas like it has been done in the US from the beginning (because everything could be planned from scratch without "technical debt"). Of course it is hard to convince stores to move out of the historic districts of major towns into these kind of areas, but it actually makes sense for them if they're combined with other businesses and people have to spend less time travelling around to get everything done. I have seen it being done like that here in Europe.

The biggest argument against that around here is that eventually, all stores want to move to these new business areas which causes the town's center to lose attractiveness. That's why it's usually difficult for city administrations to decide about the locations of individual businesses.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#26

Post by _delirium »

mxscho wrote: post #8
tmh79 wrote: post #3

Its amazing to me how cheap these changes are, and how much people love them after they are implemented. You go to a neighborhood meeting in the US and all you hear about is "loss of parking", "traffic", but when you remove the cars, everyone loves it.

I never knew loss of parking was even a thing in the US. I can't imagine it being as bad as within European cities where most of the streets (and adjacent buildings) have been built before cars were a thing. Probably one of the main reasons why alternatives to cars are well-received is that cars have never been an option anyways, especially in historic districts. Big cars are another dimension of this problem. Americ…

It depends on the city, but there's a weird entitlement in some big, dense American cities from people who feel they have an inherent right to store their car for free or very cheap on public land, when that land is in the middle of a dense city with a ton of competing uses for public land (bike lanes, sidewalks, pickup/delivery zones, street trees, bus lanes, heck even traffic lanes). In the densest cities, these also tend to be more affluent people. Oddly, though, also usually the kind of affluent people who consider themselves environmentalist and liberal. At least that's true in NYC and DC, two cities with substantial neighborhood pushback against reallocating street parking to other uses, happening in well-off neighborhoods that are full of signs promoting liberal causes (Upper West Side NYC, Dupont Circle DC, etc.).

I can see it in lower-density, car-dependent areas, where you arguably need somewhere to park, and poorer residents of apartment buildings without their own off-street parking might be impacted. But the cognitive dissonance around being an affluent liberal in Manhattan and suing to stop a bike lane [1] because you don't want to lose free street parking in Manhattan is absurd. Of course, they're still environmentalist because they support banning straws.

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/30/breaking-upper-west-s...

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#27

Post by pornel »

cm2187 wrote: post #14
DennisP wrote: post #4

Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.

If you ever want to reverse that opinion, I suggest taking London's tube and/or Paris' Metro or RER at peak hour in the morning.

Rush hours are unpleasant, but so is rush hour traffic.

If you compare the throughput of the rush-hour tube vs rush-hour roads, you'll find that it's simply impossible to move this many people so quickly by cars.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#29

Post by tosh »

Scoundreller wrote: post #17
tosh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as c…

But are they the same stores? It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble. If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation. It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.

Good question. Not disagreeing but a bit more context:

You can still get close by car, you just can no longer drive along or cross over the shopping street. You also have access to pretty good public transport options in the area (underground, bus, tram, …).

I can imagine other scenarios and areas where a change like this might be strictly bad for some stores. From what I can tell I don't think this was the case here. Happy to be corrected though if someone knows more.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#30

Post by captainbenises »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #18
marcus_holmes wrote: post #2

Living car-free in Berlin is ridiculously easy. I have my own bicycle, but still grab a Jump bike when I've walked somewhere and need to get home faster/easier. But this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.

I am lucky to live on the outskirts of Brussels and cycle for 17km to work once or twice a week. I would have done it every day, but I have to put kids in school and pick them up by 17:20. Schools (and kids, by extension) are a major traffic issue and impediment to cycling.

Cargo bikes! You can easily take one or two children on a cargo bike (yuba for example).
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