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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

#101

Post by mindcrime »

jointpdf wrote: post #39

If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.

There are also no cars on Bald Head Island, in southeast North Carolina. There's not even a bridge to the island from the mainland... all access is via boat or ferry (unless you're a really good swimmer).

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

#102

Post by mktmkr »

beefalo wrote: post #75
plazmatic wrote: post #5

Good! Americas obsession with cars is one of its most glaring deficiencies. Every city should be accessible without a car, however unless you are in NYC, Chicago, or LA, or San Fran, well then that just isn't true.|

I would definitely not include LA on a list for accessible without a car, and San Francisco is debatable.

Somehow, 22% of Angelenos travel to work without a car. That's not as good as San Francisco, but it's a lot better than, say, Nashville.

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

#103

Post by Torwald »

noobermin wrote: post #94
colechristensen wrote: post #50

A thought in the back of my mind is fear of government oppression in a world without prevalent cars. If you have a car you can travel hundreds of miles with few limitations and it's particularly hard to quash this even in an oppressive state. If you only have your feet and public transit you are very limited to distance and location and tracking movements is an easy feature of the system. Things going wrong? The gove…

Arguments like this ignore the billions of dollars that maintain and create highways, roads, parking lots that the government already invests in. The blindspot regarding this "freedom" which apparently to some people exists magically is astounding. The government created the current layout of cities by building highways and making laws and regulations that birthed the city structure we have today. It did not develop…

The let me astound you even more that there also exist such things as off-road vehicles, natural roads (think of countries like SA or AUS), and that .gov cannot just bomb all it's roads away in an instant, like they could stop all trains and most flights.

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

#104

Post by Gibbon1 »

simias wrote: post #24
ArnoVW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Over the last 30 years it's been flipping. working class people with no safety net have been priced out/forced out of cities leaving the wealthy, upper middle class, and poor people.

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

#105

Post by adjkant »

simias wrote: post #24
ArnoVW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

For context, cities in the US used to include the rich, but then "white flight" [1] happened.

Then in the 2000's, young (usually more progressive) people with wealth and white collar jobs began to move back to cities, making that statement not really true today. Of course with this shift came the gentrification and rising urban living cost we see today in places like SF, Seattle, NYC, Boston, and many other popular areas in the US.

So your statement would be more correct in the 60's to the late 90's but not really today. Of course the combination of housing density (lower than Europe) and lack of public transport does indeed make cities more anti-(car commuter) than in Europe, which is also why its so crucial to live within the city itself, thus creating the crazy housing markets.

I think living without cars in medium-high density areas is ideal for many who don't want a rural life, but the US will need major restructuring before that's ever possible, and even then it would only apply to select regions like the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic coast, parts of California along the coast, and a few other major hubs like Atlanta, Chicago, and Seattle. The amount of land the US has all but guaranteed there will always this tension in how people live in rural versus urban areas. I find that the polarization is only growing stronger today interesting, as I'm sure tons of political scientists who have spent more time and research digging into the trend do as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

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

#106

Post by adjkant »

maxsilver wrote: post #36
simias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly how it is in the USA too, for about the past 20ish years now. Wealthy people have largely eliminated poor/middle class people out of the core urban areas, and moved them mostly to the suburbs/exurbs. Then, wealthy people tear down the functional public transportation between the urban city and the rest of the metro (mostly roads and freeways), and replace them with pretty but function-less "public tra…

> So you get this ridiculous situation where US cities can point to all these shiny new bus lines and bike lanes as "progress", but absolutely no one can afford the housing needed to use any of that, so on a CO2-per-person basis, we've regressed significantly. And 1990's era cities with it's freeways and parking were often better for the environment on a CO2-per-person basis than 2019's cities are today that lack those.

There's no way this is true. Housing density has increased within cities themselves. Generally things have also become more CO2 efficient within the cities as well. More people live in cities than 20 years ago. If someone in the suburbs drives, it's the same (or less with modern cars). If they use transit, it's less. If they move out of the suburbs or stop commuting, it's also less. Where does the CO2 increase come from?

It's also important to remember that these trends vary vastly depending on the city you talk about. High density cities with good existing public transit infrastructure have very much succeeded and improved public transit, not destroyed it. LA is very much not a good example due to the sprawling nature. I lived in LA for 6 months and would not call it a city but rather 13 connected suburbs. A bus there is indeed a failed project. Heck, even the Expo line they just built to connect the west side is a lot of travel time and not much coverage.

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

#107

Post by dheera »

jointpdf wrote: post #39

If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.

Boston is also great. Lived there for 10 years and never drove within city limits.

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

#108

Post by tommoor »

jedberg wrote: post #10

It's a lot easier for Europe to go carless than the USA. They have better intra-city public transit for one. Also, most (all?) of their major cities laid out their grids before the invention of the car. In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car. That being said,…

> In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.

I feel like this can be spun as a positive, every street is 3 lanes wide + parking on both sides. So much room to convert for more pedestrian and micromobility space – in European cities it's often either/or.

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

#109

Post by dheera »

zyzyis wrote: post #64

I have lived in both Europe and US for years. It is not fair to compare both places as the population density is totally different. You still do need a car if you are living in suburb area in Europe (in my case the Netherlands). And in US there is much less people living in the city.

I'd argue that even the suburbs of Netherlands are super bike-friendly. It's always a reasonable bike ride to the nearest train station, buses fill in the rest, and the roads are setup to be safe for bikers. That's not really the case in most of the US.

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

#110

Post by jacobolus »

kakwa_ wrote: post #65
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people commute into Paris by car in relatively large numbers? Where on earth do they park? Certainly in the UK cities I've known people who live in the core are much less likely to own cars, but people from outside rarely commute in by car to the core because it's just too slow. Medieval city plans just don't suit cars, even where the walls were demolished to make a ring road. I used to joke that there was no way…

Well, it depends. Paris is a bit special, it's not a city which kept a lot of its medieval layout heritage thanks to Napoleon III and Hausmann. You have a lot of Boulevard which are quite large and decently arranged. As for commuting, it depends also. Basically, the subway is exceptionally dense within Paris (keep in mind that Paris, as an administrative entity is actually very small and dense, roughly 10km in diamet…

It seems like it should theoretically be viable to add some commuter rail lines following the same rings as the current peripherical roads, and improve the suburb-to-suburb transit experience.
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