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Cars Kill Cities

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Re: Cars Kill Cities

#201

Post by pouetpouet »

ctdonath wrote: post #109
jseliger wrote: post #34

If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general. Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: htt…

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it? (correction applied) Because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want, with my whole family (pets included), with a trunkful of cargo, as I see fit. I keep a bunch of gear in my car which makes me pretty much independent. No way I'd be hauling "go camping on a moment's notice" stuff and other equipment everywhere on the bus. Nor would I have the basic equipment…

I, too, like to go wherever I want. But it doesn't mean that every active member of the society HAS TO own one. I adore the freedom it gives me on nights/week-ends. But we don't need 2/3 cars per family. Carshare has something to offer too. I am not against cars, but it's way too unbalanced towards cars. Drivers should bear the costs of their habits and not out-source them. City centers must be made more liveable for urban dwellers. That means less surface parking, reducing parking minimums, paid parking, more bike paths, street designs with lower deisgn speed... Some want to live in the suburbs, no one can oppose that, we are free to do so. But if you want to live in a liveable urban neighborhood, this choice needs to be catered too.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#202

Post by pouetpouet »

WildUtah wrote: post #111
jseliger wrote: post #34

If you're interested in this topic, Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City are both worth reading. The former explains how "free" parking isn't really free and how it distorts a lot of behavior, and the latter is about what cities are good for and how to build healthy cities in general. Personally, I wonder why people would want to own a car if they can avoid it: htt…

While I love Shoup's work, I'm not enthusiastic about Glaeser's work. In particular, I observe that Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona, and Mexico City organize people at adequate density to obtain all Glaeser's benefits without much of his beloved skyscrapers. Because of the shadows, streets, elevator columns, and infrastructure that skyscrapers need, they don't add much to urban life. A comfortable 15k/km^2 density (like Toky…

Tokyo has lots of high rise. But that's not the point. Lots of medium to big cities do it without high rise buildings. I have lived in a 7-8 thousand poeple/sq mi neighborhood. It's not NYC. It was only 5 levels/4stories high. It feels familiar, it doesn't blocks too much sunlight and it is perfectly livable.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#203

Post by hoers »

prawn wrote: post #141
vacri wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience, if you're working outside peak commuting hours, public transport is horrible. Take a cold winter, services 20 minutes apart. One service is missed, cancelled, whatever, you're now there for 40 minutes waiting for your bus. Of course, you don't know that the service is missed, you're just waiting at a pole. And in my case, it was a connecting service, so repeat the process for the second leg of t…

If there were more users of public transport (e.g., less parking available, etc), it's likely that service and intervals would improve.

This. I live in Berlin, which invested heavily in public transportation over the decades, leading the majority of my friends to not even having a drivers license (me included). You can get anywhere pretty much anytime, often considerably faster than taking a car, especially on day time when you easily spend 30min just looking for a spot.

Plus if you combine public transport with a decent bike - no car will ever beat you in this city.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#204

Post by dllthomas »

lambda wrote: post #192
dllthomas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some areas, rent to medallion holders might end up being the biggest proportion in the final price...

According to [this resarch]( http://www.schallerconsult.com/taxi/taxifb.pdf ), 57% of the fare (including tip) goes to the driver, 24% to vehicle and gas, 15% to the owner, and 4% to other expenses. So, the driver is a pretty substantial portion of that. Taking the driver out of the equation would substantially reduce the costs. If you increased medallion availability as well, and the owners were able to work with lo…

Nice!

"That would be a huge difference in affordability for everyday use."

Very true.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#205

Post by phaer »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #157
phaer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true, you can't say that about all european cities. Vienna has excellent public transport for example.

Public transportation sucks at a fundamental level. It's a graph with an extremely limited number of nodes on a completely fixed schedule. That's clearly inferior to free travel from any point to any point. Given equal travel time I'd pick an autonomous car over train or bus 100% of the time. I'd pick a self driven car 100% of the time when not inebriated. For the most part faster travel time in a train or bus isn't…

Cars suck at a fundamental level too, because only a quite limited amount of people can move from "any point" to "any point". Otherwise there everyone is stuck for hours. That does not happen nearly as often with public transport or bikes. You also need to sacrify a fair amount of your cities to cars, parking alone takes a lot of space.

Your infrastructure argument works in both ways: The fact that there's no city with working public transport in the US is a result of communities who primarily plan for cars, nothing more.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#206

Post by mikeash »

robomartin wrote: post #193
mikeash wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Inverters aren't all that expensive and will run all those basic necessities you mention from a normal gas-powered car.

Something like a Tesla has some 80+kW available at 500V. This is very different from running an inverter off a 12V lead acid battery. This is power at an entirely different scale. As battery technology evolves I can easily see cars, and particularly trucks, having far more than 80 kW available. A household with a couple of cars would, effectively, have a roving UPS that could provide lots of power during any time of…

The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So again, I don't really see the advantage here, since both can do the job fine. One major difference is that when your electric car runs out of electricity you are screwed until the power comes back on, while a gas car can potentially be refilled. Even if the gas stations are down, you can stockpile gasoline, while you can't really stockpile electricity.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#207

Post by oftenwrong »

msandford wrote: post #159
VLM wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the price delta between my Yaris and a gigantic 4x4 crew cab pickup truck, including capital cost, interest, insurance, gas, maint, tires, if I buy a small car I'll never, ever have to buy anything used again off craigslist. This is stereotypical penny wise pound foolish behavior. WRT to OP's relative hauling some plywood occasionally, for the price difference between a commuter car and a monster truck he could f…

Sure but you're calculating the ideal case for you and worst-case for the truck. Not everyone buys a gigantic 4x4 crew cab pickup. There are plenty of regular bed length, single cab RWD pickups on the road and they don't cost $60k to buy. The Ford F150 base model goes for $25k or so. http://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/pricing/ A base model Yaris goes for $14k. http://www.toyota.com/yaris/#!/Welcome And that's presuming…

I think you proved their point. An $11k premium in addition to lower gas mileage.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#208

Post by cylinder »

jstalin wrote: post #35
Anechoic wrote: post #21

FYI, the author of that post address self-driving cars in his next post: http://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/self-driv...

That betrays the basic attitude of these anti-car folks. It's not the cars, but the freedom to live where you want that they detest.

They're free to live where they want. Just stop expecting the rest of us to pay for the ever-expanding roads and freeways that they feel entitled to reach them.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#209

Post by lsc »

saraid216 wrote: post #171
lsc wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries. Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying' My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave&allowed_in_fr... Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant". The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice…

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#210

Post by robomartin »

mikeash wrote: post #206
robomartin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like a Tesla has some 80+kW available at 500V. This is very different from running an inverter off a 12V lead acid battery. This is power at an entirely different scale. As battery technology evolves I can easily see cars, and particularly trucks, having far more than 80 kW available. A household with a couple of cars would, effectively, have a roving UPS that could provide lots of power during any time of…

The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So agai…

I know it's kWh. EE, so I get it.

Don't know where you live but "a few hundred Watts" would only power my computers.

I keep a couple of deep cycle 12V batteries fully charged in the garage. We typically use them as power sources for chargin LiPo's for electric model aircraft at the field or to power the glider launch winch. A nice side effect is that the are available for emergency power if ever needed. I still have a 4 kW propane generator because the 12V batteries are simply not enough. I say this from experience not conjecture.

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