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People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

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51–60 of 345 posts

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#51

Not even sure how you'd start off hating the idea. Less noise, less pollution, shorter commute, cheaper infrastructure, more green, more walking, improved health...I mean...just off the top of my head I'm thinking of tons of advantages. I can't think of a single disadvantage. The only reason I need a car is because the city / neighbourhood is configured around the expectation that everyone has a car.

In the place I love in now, there is a shoprite right across but I can't walk to it cause a highway cuts across. Google maps says there's an alternate route. Tried to walk through that route but had to give it up when I saw a pedestrian don't cross sign

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#52
post #25

There's probably also a bit of selection bias going on. People who prefer car usage will be less likely to go live in places where car ownership is difficult. The longer a city is "car-free" the more of that bias will accumulate. There's really not much in the article to suggest that the same people are first against and later in favour. It shouldn't be surprising that some people prefer to live in car-free places, b…

People tend to gravitate to what's easy for them. I live in a Boston exurb and I decided to pass on a dinner get-together last night because I just didn't feel up for over 2 hours of driving roundtrip and parking to go into the city.

I'm sure if I lived in the city, I would still own a car but I'd probably be much more inclined to do urban activities on the weekend than getting out my car and driving it someplace. And I'd favor a job that I didn't need to drive to even if it came with trade-offs.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#53
post #35

I'd quibble with the title. Based on my experience in London, most middle-class/white collar workers love car-free living. Most blue-collar workers don't like it. They continue not liking it once it becomes reality. (Although maybe they realize that it's not as bad as they feared). I think this is basically another example of political polarization, combined with employment patterns. White collar workers broadly spea…

I don't think most advocates for reduction in car dependency in urban environments think that trades people shouldn't have vehicles to carry tools and materials around in.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#54
post #49
post #14

I would have expected the article to give some clear pool/metric/statistics about "people hate the idea ... ". There are indeed loud people and big interest groups that oppose car free cities, but I am not sure about "people" in general. Sure, you need means of transport and to be able to live, and you can't change things over night, but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away o…

> but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away or one 20 kilometers away" I doubt anybody would say "no I want only things far to be forced to use a car". For most people it's not about the supermarket. Those are a dime a dozen and all the same. It's easy to provide those in sufficient amounts everywhere. Now try it with jobs. Not any job, but your job. Is it possible to have you…

Sounds like moving should be made easier.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#56

Not even sure how you'd start off hating the idea. Less noise, less pollution, shorter commute, cheaper infrastructure, more green, more walking, improved health...I mean...just off the top of my head I'm thinking of tons of advantages. I can't think of a single disadvantage. The only reason I need a car is because the city / neighbourhood is configured around the expectation that everyone has a car.

There are certainly disadvantages.

I live in a very car-unfriendly city that invests heavily in public transport. Amongst other things, this implies that they don't invest in things like car parking space. Most residents don't have cars and cannot have cars because there are far fewer parking spaces in apartment blocks than the number of people living there. Problems include:

1. My wife (who runs a small service business) is constantly having customers miss appointments and explaining it as "I spent 30 minutes trying to find somewhere to park, failed, and had to return home". Being unable to actually use a business at all because you can't park anywhere isn't an issue you see in most cities, but here it happens all the time. You might wonder why don't they just park on the outskirts and take public transit the rest of the way, and the answer is that train stations don't have much parking either, and at any rate public transport is usually 2x or worse slower than with cars (best case), so often they just don't have enough time in their lunch breaks or after work to do that. With a car friendly city, people can pop out to a local business and back in the time they have available.

2. The city is also very keen on recycling. Bin bags are extraordinarily expensive because they are heavily taxed and it's illegal to use any other kind of bag. Fine for small objects, but what about when it's time to recycle something large like a TV or a carpet? The actual solution they push on you: there are special trams that a few times a year park at certain stops, and then you are expected to just carry the full recycling load down there with your arms. You could also buy a little trolley and use that. Is it raining that day? Maybe you're traveling and away from home? Too bad, wait another 3-4 months or so and keep the junk in your apartment whilst you do so. With a car: put the stuff in your boot and go to a fixed recycling point that's always open. Easy.

3. Car-free cities become completely dependent upon the goodwill of their public transit unions, who then exploit that dependency to earn themselves vast salaries and perks. Tube drivers in London can earn more than senior software engineers and have final salary pensions, even though the job is mostly automated and on many lines consists of pushing a button to move to the next station.

4. Transit systems are very centralized and prone to widespread system failure due to poor maintenance, e.g. if points or signaling fail at a busy junction half the city can grind to a halt. Roads are more robust because cars can normally pull over if they have problems, and people can drive around the rare car that's got stuck in the middle. Roads degrade much more smoothly than railways do.

5. Public transit systems invariably run at a loss because ticket prices are set too low for the actual overheads involved. Roads usually raise more in taxes than they cost to maintain.

6. Obviously, there's all the practical downsides that come from not having a personal space like sometimes not being able to sit together with your family, or sit at all.

Don't get me wrong, there are many positives and conveniences but it's silly to say there are no disadvantages to going all-in on public transport. There are many serious disadvantages which is why cars caught on to begin with.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#57
post #28

Not even sure how you'd start off hating the idea. Less noise, less pollution, shorter commute, cheaper infrastructure, more green, more walking, improved health...I mean...just off the top of my head I'm thinking of tons of advantages. I can't think of a single disadvantage. The only reason I need a car is because the city / neighbourhood is configured around the expectation that everyone has a car.

If your entire life is based around your car, it's your most important and powerful symbol of autonomy, wealth, and personal liberty. The prospect of someone in government deciding one day that the life you live is no longer welcome and your touchstone is evil is incredibly jarring, at the very least. If you also live in an area where you cannot imagine how you could possibly live without using your car frequently, t…

> it's your most important and powerful symbol of autonomy, wealth, and personal liberty

Cars as virtue signaling? I'm not quite sympathetic to this case. This person's liberty is causing harm to everyone else and I don't care for their symbol of wealth. I'd like to say, "get off my lawn", were the lawn is actually my city. My liberty of not being polluted by noise and fine particles, and of easily and safely moving on as a pedestrian or biker, and of my earth's climate not being harmed is important as well.

People could have their cars outside the city, reachable with good public transport, so it's not even like they couldn't have their symbol of wealth somewhere.

It would also make sense that people don't have their personal cars in cities. We could have car sharing systems like we have for city bikes, which work great. Most cars sleep most of the times, this doesn't make quite sense. We could have fewer cars achieving the same usefulness with better a organization less focused on the individuals.

Maybe a solution is that the car stops being seen as a symbol of wealth and liberty, and more like a liability / necessary evil, because this also doesn't make sense.

Wanting to look wealthy is already a cursed concept. Why should anyone care that anyone looks wealthy? This is not what's important in life. What you think and what you do matters much more.

Of course, this is a very good point, and this needs to be addressed. To be clear, I'm not arguing with you, I'm agreeing.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#58
post #49
post #14

I would have expected the article to give some clear pool/metric/statistics about "people hate the idea ... ". There are indeed loud people and big interest groups that oppose car free cities, but I am not sure about "people" in general. Sure, you need means of transport and to be able to live, and you can't change things over night, but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away o…

> but if you would ask people "would you prefer to have a supermarket 5 minutes away or one 20 kilometers away" I doubt anybody would say "no I want only things far to be forced to use a car". For most people it's not about the supermarket. Those are a dime a dozen and all the same. It's easy to provide those in sufficient amounts everywhere. Now try it with jobs. Not any job, but your job. Is it possible to have you…

This is the crux of the matter - when people worked at a company for life, they could build their life around it.

If you know you’ll be commuting to The Factory for the next forty years, you can happily take the bus or train or whatever to it. You buy your house and put down roots.

Now cities are larger and your job changes every five to seven years and either you move each time to be near enough, or you let your family stay where everyone they know is, and take the commute on the teeth.

The solution is smaller cities; not larger ones, or going back to longer term employment.

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#59
I dont want a car free city, buti desperately want a car de-emphasized city where for most trips the car is an option but its not the beat option vs walking/biking/transit with this idelly achieved by making those other methods of trnsit dramatically better not by making cars dramatically worse. Kind of like what they have done in the netherlands

Re: People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

#60

I dont want a car free city, buti desperately want a car de-emphasized city where for most trips the car is an option but its not the beat option vs walking/biking/transit with this idelly achieved by making those other methods of trnsit dramatically better not by making cars dramatically worse. Kind of like what they have done in the netherlands

This describes Chicago.
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