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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

#381

Post by baud147258 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #53
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…

>So you end up with this "class warfare" type situation. This is a weird framing because the very poorest segments of society in Europe also tend to live in urban areas and don't even own a car and rely on public transport, so it's more of a class sandwich. The very car reliant demographic seems to be what in the United States is called the 'dream hoarder' class, which is to say the largely socio-economic isolated mi…

In France, not all poor are immigrants/PoC. The "very poorest" are protected/supported by the gov, with government allowance (equivalent to UBI), public housing, free schools, free healthcare, reduced price on public transportation… A good chunk of the yellow vests are people making just enough to not be part of the "very poorest", so don't get all those helps, but have to bear an increasing tax burden. They usually leave the poorer urban areas, often being priced out (as having no access to gov housing grants or public housing) or looking for better conditions of living than the post-war concrete blocks.

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

#383

Post by markus92 »

briandear wrote: post #372
flexie wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why people are down voting you, but I think this time it may not be the general HN negativity, but simply because they think you are attempting a bad joke. This is exactly how many parents in Copenhagen drive their kids around. I would say that around half of all young parents in Copenhagen get a transporter bike like this one. We were leaving Copenhagen for America shortly after our youngest was born but ot…

We have transporters in the US, they are called cars. And they have air conditioning. The entire world doesn’t have to be just like the Netherlands. Try riding one of those transporter bikes in the Colorado mountains in winter or in south Florida in the summer.

That's why they invented e-bikes.

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

#384

Post by Signez »

briandear wrote: post #350
H8crilA wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care. China has a fantastic subway system in most big cities, for example. I once took a subway ride from the Shenzhen airport to the Hong Kong border, crossed the border, switched to another subway and arrived in downtown Hong Kong. That's around 65km (40 miles) by publ…

Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans. No public health care? That isn’t true either. Medicaid and Medicare are public health care. Another legitimate peculiarity of Americans is the vastly higher disposable income compared to most other countries. Even with all of the “free” stuff, the French have lower wages and far less disposable income than Americans.

> Checks? France loves checks and use them more than Americans.

I am afraid your data is outdated: it is now used for less than 15% of payments, mainly by old people or for C2C payments.

I am in my late twenties and have emitted only 3 checks from my account, in my entire life.

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

#386

Post by goodcanadian »

vinay427 wrote: post #334
goodcanadian wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely hate this argument. In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations. While there are lots of small towns and villages close together in a way that you don't necessarily see in North America, the average density is considerably less than Los Angeles, for example. There is no good reason LA couldn't be crisscrossed by trains instead of by freeways.

This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively. Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it mea…

Density would rapidly increase around stations if planning allowed for it. See all along the Skytrain in the Greater Vancouver area (British Columbia). For people in between or away from stations, you need good integration with the bus network. Anywhere where there is enough traffic to cause congestion has enough traffic to support good public transit which definitely covers most of LA.

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

#387

Post by Traster »

rayiner wrote: post #170

I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling... That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit us…

I think you've got this almost exactly backwards. People in Paris don't buy cars because they have low utility. A car is slower than public transport for almost any journey in Paris. That's because population density in France is 4x higher than that in the US.

What's also important to remember as well is that commuting by car doesn't scale well. As population density rises, commutes become exponentially longer due to grid lock. So in some ways you can see the direction of movement and France is just further along that direction - as population density increases you're forced to move to more efficient forms of transport.

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

#389

Post by oefrha »

ghaff wrote: post #380
boohoojangles wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry but I've noticed to be a bit different in Copenhagen. I've been living here for 3 years, and the number of cars have grown quite a lot to my perception, specially between families (maybe just because they are luxury cars and Teslas everywhere). I am 36 have one little child and feel like I am missing a bit of the country because I don't have a car, even if I have made few trips by train. Also, a lot of my…

You're hitting on a point that drives a lot of the disconnects in these sorts of discussions. There are a lot of places where you don't need to own a car or even have a drivers license. And you constrain your activities accordingly. You may rely to some degree on friends with cars (though this tends to become less and less practical as you get older). Or you rent cars as needed if you have a license. But you probably…

There’s a world of difference between having a car and using it sparingly (or just renting one sparingly) and having to have a car for every goddamn thing in life. Many friends of mine back in my home country have cars, but they don’t need to drive if they want to say grab a snack at 11pm. For me however, the barrier of stepping out of my home is pretty high, and the decision to anything unplanned and unnecessary is usually why bother. I guess it’s different for people who enjoy driving, but I don’t.

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

#390

Post by goodcanadian »

vladojsem wrote: post #358
vinay427 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively. Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it mea…

I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed. If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.

There is no way every stop costs you 5 minutes, more like 1 minute. I am not a fan of buses because they are in the same traffic as cars plus they have to stop as you say. There are some mitigations like dedicated bus lanes that can swing the speed equation back in favour of buses. What you really want, however, is feeder buses taking people to the train, and it is easy to design a rail system that beats cars for speed in a city (basically any urban rail I've ever seen).
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