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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

#411

Post by puranjay »

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…

> Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,

What's good for individuals might not necessarily be good for society.

In 100 years, we'll look back at our car obsession as some sort of temporary societal madness. The environmental impact of cars alone is a compelling argument in favor of public transport

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

#412

Post by Broken_Hippo »

louwrentius wrote: post #396
rpedela wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While traveling outside the US, I have found many people think Americans are cold and heartless and just let people die. It is an understandable conclusion the way people talk about the US system in the media and internet, but it also isn't true. The US has dysfunctional, public healthcare but it isn't so dysfunctional that you just die if you fall or get an ear infection without insurance. So saying the US has "no p…

But you are fucked with a huge bill that would cripple your life in a way that you might as well be dead.

And folks do skip going to the doctor, ration their medicines, and other such things.

Folks suffer until things are an emergency as well and hospitals won't always help if you, say, need surgery for cancer that isn't presently killing you and isn't an emergency.

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

#413

Post by isostatic »

_delirium wrote: post #26
mxscho wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

It's crazy that Manhattan doesn't have a blanket "15 minutes only" rule for parking, no return within an hour, which gives enough time for deliveries and dropoff/pickups, but prevents garaging.

The value of a typical 17 square metre parking space in Manhattan is about $400k [0]. If you want to park your car on the road, rather than paying for a commercial garage, you should be paying for that land.

[0] 22.83 square miles of land in Manhattan is 78304708.32 square metres. Parallel parking space is 2.76m by 6.1m according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-size-of-a-standard-parking...

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

#414

Post by agent008t »

marble-drink wrote: post #343
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…

You just can't compare commuting on time alone. If you commute by car then 100% of that time is spent sitting down either driving or stuck in traffic. If you commute by public transport then maybe 50% of the time is spent reading, and 50% is spent walking. If you commute by bicycle then 100% of the time is spent cycling. It's a shame that study only shows a mean aggregate. I'd be interested to see the raw distributio…

If you commute by public transport then 90% of the time is spent packed like a sardine in a train or a bus, often with no air conditioning.

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

#415

Post by boudin »

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 would like to see what data you assumption that public transit is slower than car is based on but I'm quite sure it's not true. From my experience, car as always been slower than walking + public transport. And much more painful and stressful. Those numbers might also mean that having a good public transport infrastructure allows people to work from further away than car does.

Comparing salaries is also quite a broken. You can turn what you says around. Maybe Paris has a great transport system because of better investment in public infrastructure and distribution of wealth. I have no idea if what you say about Houston is true, but if it's the case, maybe the lack of public infrastructure is due to the lack of investment in public transportation, causing the obligation to have car, which is expensive for the most vulnerable households and causing all the environmental issues we all know.

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

#416

Post by dwd »

arkh wrote: post #345
dwd wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would consider talking hands-free (if you're holding a phone you deserve to lose your license) no more distracting than listening to music. There are worst things like eating or talking to someone else in the car. (look at the road not the person when you're talking)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safe... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-18024-008 >The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conver…

Thanks for the links, learnt something new. The bit about the cognitive load preparing to speak or speaking rather than passive listening was interesting.

Yes, when talking to someone in the car they should be aware of the traffic and pause the conversation, where you have to tell the person on the other end of the phone that you need to go.

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

#417

Post by n4r9 »

padobson wrote: post #368
briandear wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't forget we also spend less on feeding ourselves than anyone else in the world[0]. [0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

That's partly due to lower food standards, surely? Salmonella causes hundreds of deaths per year in the US but I believe almost zero in the US.

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

#418

Post by yxhuvud »

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.

In practice, this is solved by having two layers of lines on the same tracks - one which stops everywhere and one express line connecting bigger stops.

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

#419

Post by sgift »

Nullabillity wrote: post #395
sqren wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the people who say you need a car if you have kids - this is how we do it in Copenhagen: https://live.staticflickr.com/3662/3465284112_5aab494014_b.j... A transporter bike can carry 2-3 kids easily. It's the most convenient, cheap and healthy option. As soon as the kids are old enough they get their own bike. Of course, it's convenient to have access to a car a couple of times a month. But definitely not on a dail…

As someone who commutes by bike regularly, transporters are one of the primary reasons for why it is so miserable. They usually go 15km/h or even slower (presumably due to the extra weight and/or overprotective new parents), and they're so wide that they take up the whole lane, preventing you from overtaking them. And since we usually have grade-separated bike lanes here (supposedly the holy grail, according to HN!)…

> and they're so wide that they take up the whole lane, preventing you from overtaking them.

This is a problem with lanes that are too small. An effect of giving most space to cars and sharing the left-overs between bikes and people walking.

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

#420

Post by dsfyu404ed »

oefrha wrote: post #252
konart wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thing this is what codebolt was talking about. If you can one kid - there is no problem really. Walk him or her to school in the morning, ask grandmother to bring them back etc. When you have more than one - it is entrily possible they will end up going to different schools and after the school one of them had to go to the music shool and the other one to his hockey team or something etc etc. You simply can't…

As have been pointed out by multiple people, kids are perfectly capable of taking public transit themselves. Kids under ten might need to be accompanied by a guardian, but there are usually two parents in a household, and some grandparents will help, too. Caretakers can be hired in certain cases. Some family “pool” their kids together too, not unlike in the U.S. where parents would take turns to drive neighbors’ kids…

>usually two parents in a household,

That's getting less true as time goes on.

>and some grandparents will help,

If your parents live more then ~45min away (this is probably true for most people) it's probably not realistic to expect them to help out with childcare.

>Caretakers can be hired in certain cases

If you have the $$$ to rationalize it. That said, if you have to choose between a caretaker and a car it's an easy choice for most people.

>I grew up like that. People have been doing that for decades.

People have been enduring hardships for centuries. It's foolish to expect them to voluntarily continue doing so when they have other options. The fact of the matter is that most people who are in a position to own a car find owning a car worth the tradeoffs.

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