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What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

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Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#121
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I would have to walk like what? 15 minutes with my kid who is crying, then wait another 10 to 15 minutes for a train to show up, then wait on the train for 15 to 20 minutes, then walk from the station to the hospital for maybe 5 to 10 minutes. So this is roughly 60 to 80 minutes, with my crying child, and all assuming a fairly efficient public transportation system. I think that's always the problem when we get pi…

There are many human-oriented cities around the world in which mass-transit reigns, and they manage to make life work. I've been in Hong Kong a lot, and I'm not sure I can pick two points in Hong Kong that are 80 minutes apart from each other. I mean, maybe getting to the New Territories from Sai Wan Ho or something, but they have their own closer hospitals, so... It's hard to explain dry land to a fish, but life wit…

> There are many human-oriented cities around the world in which mass-transit reigns

All of which are densely populated cities.

This concept simply doesn't work in majority of America, where the average city is sparsely populated and quite spread out.

People living in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Austin, Los Angeles, etc... quickly forget what life is like in say... Fiddletown, California.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#122
post #3

I'm so happy to see this idea starting to get mainstream attention. I predict that in 50-100 years we'll look back on the age of the automobile as one of the biggest mistakes in urban planning. Automobiles are dangerous, kill thousands of people every year, contribute significantly to pollution, and cause health problems by discouraging physical activity. They're expensive, inefficient, and cause more harm than good…

Automobiles kill thousands of people every day.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#123

I've dreamt about this. I would immediately move to the first US city that bans SOV commuters from a significant portion of the city (let's say, a couple square miles), and establishes superblocks where no vehicles are allowed whatsoever, with the old streets converted to green space. Of course, I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

Isn't the USA empty enough that you could still start such a city today?

When was the last time a city was incorporated in the U.S. that grew to a large, thriving population?

I'm guessing it's been some decades. I grew up playing a lot of Sim City and imaging building cities, but I don't think we build cities anymore - we just expand existing ones.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#124
post #76
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I would have to walk like what? 15 minutes with my kid who is crying, then wait another 10 to 15 minutes for a train to show up, then wait on the train for 15 to 20 minutes, then walk from the station to the hospital for maybe 5 to 10 minutes. So this is roughly 60 to 80 minutes, with my crying child, and all assuming a fairly efficient public transportation system. I think that's always the problem when we get pi…

If cars are banned everybody will seek the alternates: that means the walk to the train is much less than 15 minutes (unless you are a farmer - but farmers already have a 30 minute drive to the nearest hospital, and over an hour to a good one), and the train will come more often than every 15 minutes even at 3am. The train will also stop in the hospital, so that walk is less.

The big question with all these ideas is how to pay for it?

Economically it doesn't work in majority of the US. Some big cities might be able to pull it off - but even those often run at a loss and are subsidized by the city.

How does a small suburban area afford trains going all over?

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio Every two to five minutes a bus.

TransMilenio is definitely a nice system, but they built it because they felt it would be cheaper than a traditional metro system, like Medellin's. I definitely preferred Medellin's system over TM. But TM is definitely novel.

TM cost a very small fraction of what a metro system would have cost, it is not that they 'felt' that way, it simply is like that. They also did it pretty quickly and are expanding all over the city.

What drawbacks there are are mostly due to its success, overcrowding and so on. It's also not the safest place, but it being Colombia that not exactly news. Still, something like the TM would work just fine in many West European and American cities.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#126

I've dreamt about this. I would immediately move to the first US city that bans SOV commuters from a significant portion of the city (let's say, a couple square miles), and establishes superblocks where no vehicles are allowed whatsoever, with the old streets converted to green space. Of course, I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.

> where no vehicles are allowed whatsoever

Food (just to put an example) will pop up in the stores out of thin air.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars are going trigger a new wave of automobile growth, at least in the US. They won't be dangerous, will run clean, be super convenient and unbelievably inexpensive to own and operate. They are going to throw gasoline on the sprawl fire. There will certainly be some city centers and other areas closed to car traffic (although probably not most of Manhattan - delivery vehicles are a significant part of t…

> Self-driving cars are going trigger a new wave of automobile growth, at least in the US. They won't be dangerous, will run clean, be super convenient and unbelievably inexpensive to own and operate. My guess is that you are wrong. At least what comes to driving in cities. As the (current) main problem of cars in cities is not accidents, emissions, lack of convenience or even cost. It is the massive amount of space…

It is the massive amount of space one car takes[1].

That is a legitimate concern, but the kind of photo you linked to that is often used in advocacy is horribly misleading.

In reality, if cyclists rode anything like that close together, there would be accidents all the time because no-one would be able to make turns or travel at different speeds. The general advice to drivers here in the UK is that you should allow as much space around a bike as you do when passing a car, and authorities have conducted public education campaigns on this and even prosecuted drivers for passing too close. From a safety point of view, that advice is clearly sensible, as passing too close to a cycle is quite dangerous, particularly at higher speeds. But you can't have it both ways by claiming cycling is safer and healthier with that sort of space allowance but also that cycling is as space-efficient as it appears stacking bikes up close together like that. In reality, a bike is much smaller than a car, but in terms of proportions, a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it.

Buses are similarly very misleading in that sort of photo. That is partly because unlike typical car journeys they follow circuitous routes that may be 2-3x as far and as slow to get a single passenger from (somewhere near) A to (somewhere near) B. It's also because unless you're looking at an area with very high population density or very high usage routes/times, most buses don't travel anything like fully loaded but still take up the extra space whether they have 50 passengers, 20 passengers or none at all. If you're going to show a full-size car for each individual travelling, as these photos invariably do, why do they always show a single bus at exactly its maximum capacity? If you showed both at average occupancy levels, the photo would look very different.

This is without getting into the traffic modelling where you find uniform traffic speeds are much more efficient, but while cars can achieve something close to that on clear roads, it is heavily disrupted by both relatively slow-moving cycles that you might not be able to overtake and stop-start buses that might block a traffic lane while allowing passengers on and off.

There are very practical questions to be asked about why we still drive around in vehicles with space for 4-5 people and luggage capacity for going on a two week holiday even if we're travelling alone and lightly loaded, but a lot of the anti-car arguments made by pro-cycle and particularly pro-bus advocates using the kind of photo linked above are rather disingenuous.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Availability of land is the limiting factor inside existing cities, but not for the development of new cities. To build a new city, your limiting factor would be a self-sustaining cluster of economic activity that can attract participants. And that's difficult to bootstrap for a lot of reasons.

To get people to move somewhere, you mainly just need jobs. Everybody wants jobs. There's no choice, people have to go where jobs are because employers have much more bargaining power. So, create some large enough tax incentives for companies to move there, and people will follow.

> So, create some large enough tax incentives for companies to move there, and people will follow.

Except companies don't just go to places because of tax incentives. Indeed, many companies (and people) stick around CA despite the super high tax burden because it has so many other things going for it. Conversely, places with very generous tax incentives can sometimes still have trouble attracting companies because the reason their tax incentives are so high is because they are lacking in other respects.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the USA empty enough that you could still start such a city today?

When was the last time a city was incorporated in the U.S. that grew to a large, thriving population? I'm guessing it's been some decades. I grew up playing a lot of Sim City and imaging building cities, but I don't think we build cities anymore - we just expand existing ones.

On the flip side, though, there are some rust belt cities that have been hollowed out that could easily support 2 or 3x their current population.

Re: What happens when a city bans cars from its streets?

#130
The article's most prominent example of an idyllic, walkable, “car-free” city is Venice, Italy, whose residents do have motor vehicles with full access to the city; they just happen to run on separate waterways.

This would imply that the optimal land-based city could have cars, but they'd have to have their infrastructure more sequestered from pedestrians.

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