Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
Yet a heck of a lot of people have cars there. Private car ownership in the Netherlands is around 590 per 1000 population. It's within 10% of Germany on cars per 1000 population and on percentage of families that own a car. The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as…
> parking is perhaps the greatest determinant of whether people decide to make a trip in a car or by some other means Surely that can't be true in general - I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor (but yes, you could argue that's rolling multiple factors into one). But as an example, plenty of offices I've worked at over the years have offered free or cheap par…
> I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor The alternatives almost never beat a car in quality, convenience, and cost (minus parking costs, which is the point). The exceptions are very specific cases, like inter-Manhattan travel at certain times of the day, for example, where $2.75 can get you most places faster than your own car and cheaper than a cab.
I suppose what I meant is if the quality/convenience/cost of the alternatives are good enough, many people will choose not to use a car, e.g. to avoid the stress of peak-hour traffic or because they believe it's a more productive use of time (even if it technically takes longer door-to-door), or better for the environment or whatever. And there can be real $ savings if this choice means a household then only needs 1 vs 2 cars.
I'm Dutch and I want to push back against the glorification of our infrastructure. To comment on that video specifically: Yes, fully on board with the narrower streets, "hiding" parking, having some shared public space like playgrounds. These are all good things. But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints. I specifi…
> But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints. There is nothing 'natural' about the evolution of NL cities as demonstrated by the fact that (e.g.) Amsterdam started to go down the car-centric route: * https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... It was a policy choice to not go in that direction—or…
Definitely thought you were talking about Newfoundland and Labrador until your footnote, thanks for that
I haven't looked at 'cities: skylines' or if there is a sequel... recently. I'm wondering if they finally did start modeling parking. I think 'realistic parking' should probably be an option, like you said some people want the 'classic' sim-city experience and modeling. I'd hate to drive those people away from the 'cities' series, as it just seems to be sim-city without the EA enshittification. I think it could be re…
There is a sequel coming out in the next few months and the developers say that parking is modeled more realistically than in the first Cities: Skylines. In the first game, citizens did not park cars at all - cars appeared out of thin air, were driven to their destination, and then vanished again. Folks often called these "pocket cars" because citizens could put them into and take them out of their pants pockets. App…
That's also how SimCity did it, up until the bad EA one.
Traffic was modeled using the typical civil engineer math, rather than simulated one by one.
Moving to simulating actual trips made for very poor simulation performance
Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities. They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall. Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on…
> Make car life in cities miserable. Make life in cities miserable, is more accurate. The reason is that transit is worse than cars always . If you make travel in cars worse, then all you did is make life worse for everyone. And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
> The reason is that transit is worse than cars always
As long as 'always' is restricted to a certain lifestyle and worldview, and doesn't take into account the excellent transit systems that exist around the world.
> And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
That's incredibly naive, and I think a lot of European cities are direct counter examples to this. It often makes things a lot less miserable for the people who actually live in the denser urban areas that were previously overrun with cars.
Sold my car years ago and moved to Boston. I'll never go back to live anywhere that requires me to own a car. I bike or walk everywhere, and what makes me hopeful is that biking infrastructure in Boston (and neighboring cities like Cambridge) has improved dramatically in the years since I've been here and just keeps getting better. Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. B…
Don't you feel confined to your little area? In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town. I couldn't imagine giving up that kind of convenience and missing those kinds of opportunities. What if you don't live near a pool? Your kids just don't learn to swim? My local pool is a 15 minute drive, but a harrowing cycle route.
These are good questions. If you're a hiker/camper who needs access to a wide variety of remote locations, then that's a good reason to own a car. That said, from where I live there's plenty of green space that I can access without a car. At the end of the orange line (one of the local subway lines) is Forest Hills from which you can immediately access the Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park (not to mention a huge quintet of adjacent cemeteries). If you want more wilderness rather than manicured greenery, then the green line terminates tantalizingly close to Middlesex Fells (not quite as close as I would like, admittedly, it's still a ten minute ride from there to the green line). If you want to range further afield, the commuter rail spiderwebs out for 30 miles in every direction. And if you don't want to ride either a subway or a train, I can ride all the way from Boston Common (in the heart of downtown) to Concord (where Walden Pond is) using nearly 20 miles of dedicated bike trails (mostly on the Minuteman bikeway), which hits up plenty of state parks along the way.
The market allocates only as much as users can bear, which is about epsilon above the line of "for average user, the parking situation is so bad and unbearable that they chose to go without the service". Anything above it is money left on the table.
That's assuming there is a monopoly on providing parking spaces. Zoning notwithstanding, anyone can build a parking structure and rent or sell parking spaces. Tenants can choose whether to pay more for an apartment that includes parking or less for one that doesn't. The total cost of a housing unit with parking wouldn't be be more than it is now because the cost of constructing a housing unit with parking wouldn't be…
Fun fact - the city near me has a new zoning rule that limits the total number of parking spots in the city to something close to the current number of parking spots. If you want to build an apartment with parking, type find to need to tear down something with parking first.
So they're tearing down shopping centers, movie theaters, and grocery stores just so they can build apartments with parking. I have no idea where the people living nearby that don't have cars will buy food, but at least the new luxury apartments will have parking.
I wish I was further out of the city. I think if actual self-driving cars arrive, they will fuel sprawl like nothing else before. I wouldn't mind a long commute if I could sleep or work or chill out as my car drove me to work.
You're describing a train
A door-to-door train would be pretty cool, especially when my door is on a 10 acre lot 35 minutes outside of the city and I get a private cabin on the train that I can sleep in.
And the root cause of NIMBYism is the public goods dilemma. Everyone would benefit if more housing were built, but nobody wants more built near their land. The solution is not as simple as "Just stop electing NIMBYs!" because NIMBYism is a Nash equilibrium.
> nobody wants more built near their land Absolute nonsense.
Why is it nonsense? The existence of NIMBYs proves the statement that people don't want houses built near them. Perhaps I was being hyperbolic with the word "nobody", but the point stands.