I am not sure the "building from scratch" approach can really move the needle in terms of livable and sustainable urban environments. Like, how many centuries before natural replacement rates would achieve a transition?
The key challenge much of the world is facing (certainly the most polluting part of the world) is to rehabilitate the vast numbers of existing housing stock, and reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them.
An exception where such green-field ideas could have impact would be in the context of developing world urbanization (i.e., how not to do the same mistakes others did) but there other considerations (cost) enter the discussion.
In most places in most American cities and towns, you can't just go build a commercial extension to your house like that, you have to jump through a lot of hoops, and for a low margin business, it's probably not worth it.
Making that kind of thing legal again (it used to be pretty much everywhere) will help transform more areas of more cities into something a bit more walkable.
You'd have to get past the lobbyists for the residential REITs and private equity lenders who don't want anyone to help with the housing crises because it'll cut into their profits.
In my experience doing work with a local YIMBY organization: it's mostly local NIMBYs. When there's a city council meeting about some housing policy, it's not some guy from New York in a suit who shows up, it's local NIMBYs. When there are proposed duplexes in a "nice" area of town, it's the neighbors who organize to stop them, not some far off corporation.
The positive aspect to this, though, is that a group of pro-housing locals can make a huge difference in the conversation and see real progress. It is really meaningful and fulfilling to see housing built that you helped advocate for.
take a look at the NIMBYs perspective. They have a house, neighborhood that they like. It has certain characteristics that makes it worth living in for them.from the few I've spoken with, the feeling seems to be that city centers are unpleasant and expensive and most importantly, if they wanted to live in a city, they would've moved into a city.
as long as you ignore their perspective, you will get pushback.
My objections are different from most. We need to re-wild as much as we can of lawns. We need to construct more wildlife corridors so carnivores like coyotes and foxes can come into suburban and urban spaces to feast on the mice and rats. we need to drop nighttime lighting down to much lower levels so that nocturnal creatures have a play second live and reproduce.
Oh, I hear their perspectives plenty. I just think we care entirely too much about them to the point where working people are pushed out of the city I live in because of the lack of housing.
Cities evolve and change, and if you prevent the physical form from changing, they still change. The composition of people changes radically, over time, as the wealthy are still able to move in, and the working class is pushed out.
Ideally, cities would change a little bit, everywhere, gradually, but we've prevented that from happening with zoning in so many places in the US that it has screwed so much up...
cities should evolve and change. Building should be torn down, roads/rail replaced or rerouted and new building fit to purpose should replace it. But they don't. Cities are locked in to their current form for a variety of reasons (economic, historical etc.)
The walkable city implementation should be the result of the demolition of an urban space and reconstructed in the vision of the 15 minute city. I take this view because I live in an old mill town in Massachusetts. Because of house hunting in the area, I would say a good half or more of the housing in town is really crap tenements with a thin layer of vinyl siding on it to make it look better. there is nothing you can do with these properties to make them energy-efficient or nice to live in without totally gutting the property down to including the exterior and roof. The area around these houses is not very livable as it's usually asphalt..everywhere. Not a spot of lawn or trees to be found.
instead of building over green fields, the city should use these Brownfield properties as a land for the 15 minute village. yes, this would push people out of the existing houses so prior to that demolition, they should be construction of social housing like they have in Helsinki to make room for the people displaced.
rebuild cities livable as defined NIMBYs and then you might find greater acceptance of what you propose to change.
I think this is somewhat questionable. California recently passed the laws to open the floodgates, so we'll soon be seeing how this plays out in reality. The points I've seen are:
* Modern requirements means building an ADU cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least here in CA).
* ADU significantly increase property value, and loan/insurance requirements are tougher for rental properties, making ownership harder.
* ADUs are rentals, which are 100% loss for the occupants. Building affordable condos would do much better at helping people build wealth. ADUs drive gentrification, from the point above, making ownership harder.
I'm reading Jane Jacobs right now- she's excellent broadly, but one specific thing she argues for that I found really surprising is a diversity in the age of buildings. It's one way to make possible the diversity of uses and financial needs that are an aspect of vibrant neighbourhoods. In her analysis, older buildings tend to have paid off their capital costs.
This is across-the-board important - because you can rarely "build new" what poorer people need. For example, nobody can "build used cars" - you need a vibrant car market that has used cars available at price points that others can afford.
Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price.
Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.
This is exactly right. Like most things, looking at topics as "supply and demand" enables the right understanding. New luxury construction takes demand (and thus dollars) from the next-best-thing so it becomes less expensive. That enables the people who previously could not afford it to seek it, which makes the next-next-best thing less expensive in turn.
The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
that's true you don't think that housing is subject to induced demand. I think more housing built in an area will increase the demand for housing in that area. It'll never stop.
another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
If demand is really infinite then your logic applies but I see no reason to think that it's the case. How does building new buildings increase demand? Only by making housing move available and thus dropping the price.
In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will".
What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
I see this comment all around me. The cheap apartments around me are the fancy apartments from the 80s. The midrange apartments are the fancy apartments from the 90s and 00s.
Ah, you live in an area there they were still building in the past thirty years, I see. In no-growth parts of California, the cheap apartments from the 80s are sky high in prices, while the decrepit apartments from the 60s and 70s are merely very expensive.
Seconding this. Affordable housing mandates are counterproductive. Let developers put property to "the highest and best use". Those who are rich/gullible enough to buy new "luxury" units will benefit by getting the luxury properties from 20 years ago.
This is the right answer, but it's only the right answer in the face of sane zoning that ensures it's usually cheaper to upgrade lower to much higher density rather than knock down/renovate old high density to create new luxury high density. If you have the north american situation of the vast majority of residential being zoned single family then you will never get cheap high density for long because it will always make sense to upgrade or demolish and rebuild high density luxury on that scarce high density zoned land.
My personal opinion is we need to get rid of the split zoning and instead have the higher density residential zones include the allowed uses/buildings from the lower density and then get rid of single family altogether and have the lowest density zoning be something like a 4 story town house (while allowing someone to buy that land and build a single family home if they want). We also need to make the split much less harsh between that zoning and much higher density zoning so there's always an excess of land zoned for higher density but occupied by lower density, older buildings so that every time we tear down something old and cheap to rent we end up with more luxury units that will transition into more old and cheap to rent units over time.
You need something like "ratcheting zoning" - if someone wants to redevelop a single-family plot into a duplex; by default it should be allowed; encouraged.
If they want redevelop a 4plex into a single-family home; that requires more investigation and a variance.
I don't agree. If someone wants to do that they should be allowed to without extra government interference because if they are doing that because it's profit maximizing then we screwed up in our zoning already. Our problem isn't the one off (probably rich people) going against the profit maximizing trend on development (probably because it's their own home and they are willing to forgo profit for other benefits like a bigger yard). Our problem is that we have a cascading scarcity of dense land zoning so at every level above single family it almost always make sense to renovate or tear down to be able to charge luxury prices instead of doing basic maintenance to maintain habitability while charging lower and lower rent as the building degrades over several decades before finally being renovated or rebuilt decades later than they are now.
So what you need is for the city to ensure there's always a decent supply of excess land zoned for each density level owned broadly enough that oligopoly BS doesn't come into play so that the profit maximizing choice is to always buy a plot of land with less density or with an actually uninhabitable building on it and build more density and they need to do this at every density level in their code. That's the big picture problem with North American cities. There are sub problems to this (like how we are providing parking wrong, suboptimal public service design, especially transport infrastructure) but the above is the big picture biggest problem
Is there any system where relevant/affected parties (e.g. neighbors) could sell-off their rights to exclusive zoning? e.g. Neighbors complain about the extra traffic, shadows, or diminishment of "character" that new zoning would bring, so they can get compensated for their vote to allow it? Maybe a similar example is where NYC buildings sold off their air rights to allow for supertall buildings by Central Park?
Except such mandates never exist, the only mandates on unit sizes are minimums, not maximums.
Though I do propose such changes as part of my "urban planning is 100% wrong, simply replace the direction of every single cap and you will get a better result plan", this has not caught on with anybody but me.
Also, rich people still get around maximums by joining together adjacent units. For example, SF board of supervisors (think city council) member Aaron Peskin did this with two units so that he could have a bigger more luxurious living space, even though nobody else is allowed to bend the permitting rules that way. (SF has permitting rules that disallow making two units into one, but it does not have any limits on maximum unit size, as far as I can tell.)
That seems mathematically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Imagine a common scenario in my city where the prospective buyer/renter of one of those new apartments is considering tearing down and older multi-unit structure to build a single-family home. In that situation, the availability of an larger unit could result in more total housing units. Because they have financial incentive, developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
>> developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
Ignoring what the market wants doesn't work. If you maximize the return on investment of building more housing, then more people will build houses.
If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses.
Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply.
That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
Well, history has not shown that. There are countless situations where large houses have been surrounded by legions of the working poor unable to afford living spaces. Or where vacation homes sit empty, owned by people living far away, while cities struggle to find local accommodation for working people.
Neither of those issues have anything to do with housing supply, and they're either be unaffected or exacerbated by affordable housing mandates.
The one large house + not enough houses problem is due to income inequality. Making houses scarce increases the price of houses for everyone, so it exacerbates income inequality (it is hard to increase your income and educate your kids while living in a tent). Worse, most affordable housing projects that are currently being proposed deed-restrict the housing (otherwise, unless the initial purchaser is an idiot, they'd immediately sell at a large profit). That prevents poor people from profiting off of the appreciation of property in their neighborhood that and therefore increases long-term income inequality. You also get situations where the low income housing owner can't afford to use local amenities, or maintain their house (which they bought for far less than the cost of initial construction).
The second issue (hoarding of vacant houses) can be solved with a vacancy tax.
History supports both those arguments. Can you name an example of a city where supply has exceeded demand (measured in months of housing inventory on the market) for an extended period of time (multiple years, so longer than the 2008 crisis), and that also has a housing affordability and homeless crisis?
Similarly, can you cite an example of a market where housing has been freely built and sold at a profit over the long term, and that also has a housing supply problem?
One difference between now and Jane Jacobs' time is that you can build housing that poor people need, by allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing. While you can't build affordable 4 bedroom single family houses at 5 per acre, you can build affordable 700-1000sf 3-4 bedroom apartments at 40-60 per acre.
In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
Basically everywhere in the USA (and I believe most of the world) has restrictions on minimum house size, maximum building coverage on the lot, height limits, setbacks from property lines, room sizes, etc, etc, etc.
Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
The restrictions are ones of practicality. There's a "minimum code" house you can build (that has the minimums required wherever possible) and it will be a certain price.
But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible.
Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
Utilities are a great point. Running water, sewer and electric to a house doesn’t get any cheaper past a minimum threshold that is suitable for a broad range of house sizes.
The only way to save on utilities is to “bundle” a bunch together as is done with a large apartment building (which often has one or two large commercial utility connections, with their respective costs and maintenance).
But for a given building “type” (single family home) the utilities are basically flat rate, with maybe electrical being the only one really increased, at not much cost.
Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.
You need to do both by changing the building codes/zoning laws/public infrastructure best practice documents (think the things used to guide road design, etc). Then all greenfield construction ends up looking much more like the awesome Netherlands and every time anything is built, or public infrastructure is renewed in a brownfield area it is brought up to the standard. It didn't take that many decades for the Netherlands to go from terrible to awesome using this method.
The transition to suburban living happened within only a few decades, so it’s not unreasonable to think we could undo a lot of the mistakes within our own lifetimes.
> They did not bulldoze vast swaths of urban to make room
They certainly did, depending on your definition of vast. "According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide because of the federal roadway construction."
The difference is that it won't take much space to replace the suburbs with low-car or no-car living. Doing infill housing in metropolises is many many times more efficient in terms of land use, infrastructure demands, etc.
We don't need to make new cities from scratch at all, we simply need to allow gradual redevelopment of the urban cores.
Exactly! Merely allowing a tiny fraction of already developed land to be redeveloped at what were natural rates 120 years ago would mean that the suburbs would be almost completely untouched while those who want something different can also get what they want out of life.
It’s also possible to simply abandon undesirable neighbourhoods and leave for someplace better. In the most extreme example, in the second half of the 20th century, half of Detroit’s population rapidly left the city, as quickly as they had arrived in the first half of the century.
It’s quite possible that some suburban areas will experience the same boom and bust, now that dense cities are no longer polluted industrial hell-holes.
With modern zoning, NIMBYism, the reliance of housing as a form of retirement and investment, greater regulation, etc - no chance.
Housing in general is screwed in the US because of the investment angle. Both companies and regular citizens alike will fight fiercely against anything that could decrease the value of their homes - no matter how much it is in the interest of the long-term health, happiness and finances of their city.
I would argue the opposite: it's far easier for people to move where they have a job, access to food, and a community. Starting a new city is really hard, and not many people have the excess savings to do that or the will to be so isolated for so long.
I'm not talking about building a new city tabula rasa style, the suburbs weren't starting a new city merely expanding it so the jobs, food access, and to a lesser extent community were provided by the city they were moving away from initially then shops moved into the area for the newly minted customers. The increased distance didn't matter so much because of the exploding prevalence of cars shrinking distances.
My hometown was founded by romans, and during the last 10 years the local government has made big efforts to make the city more walkable and pedestrian friendly.
If a 2000+ years old city can do it, surely American towns can.
A 2000 year old city has a much better chance of being walkable than an American city. Take a look at something like the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s an enormous sprawling web of low density suburbs. To make it walkable would require a very large amount of effort and that effort would likely be wasted due to the climate. Even a five minute walk down the street is going to leave you exhausted and dripping with sweat on most summer days there.
Making "Dallas/Fort Worth" walkable would be a multi-decade, multi trillion dollar project. But if it were legal for small scale, local changes to be made, then the market would 1) experiment, 2) pay for it, and 3) more closely match what people desire and what's feasible.
1) While, I can't personally speak (much) to walking around Dallas, I can speak quite a bit to walking around Austin, Texas. Walking around on a day that is 110º is doable, because the humidity is rarely ever that high, when the temp is.
2) Shade trees lower the temperature for the air under them, by as much as ten degrees.
I'm not arguing there shouldn't be trees,at at least where I'm at in DFW there's tons of them, I'm just arguing that dropping the temp from 110F to 100F still doesn't change the fact walking around in even 100F at decently high humidity will render most people a sweaty mess in a block. We had weeks where the heat index was around 120F this summer.
Even just sitting around outside in a shady backyard with lots of vegetation, a pool, and umbrellas we were still sweating profusely this last summer.
Ok, but you're still going to be a sweaty mess just walking a few blocks when its 110F and 50% humidity, and probably not going to walk even a few blocks in that kind of heat when you can otherwise traverse that with air conditioning.
I'm not sure what the GP's city is, but many old cities in Europe were torn up in the 1960s-70s for freeways and parking lots, because the future would be the age of the automobile.
People look to Amsterdam now as a pedestrian and bicycle paradise, but that's a recent development; until a couple decades ago it was as car dependent as anywhere.
This was on a 16 acre site in the middle of Tempe (a city with over 25,000 acres, for reference). That is any given cluster of 10-50 houses in suburban areas. The USA has ~30 million acres of suburbs.
While the design and execution of the project look great, the key is that it's legal. If building like this was legal, by right, in more places, then the market would naturally transition to something like this if people desire it. Right now, any deviation from zoning has to be fought for with time and money, and as a rule of thumb, everything that gets built will stay that way forever. If successful, desirable, small scale projects like this lead to zoning being loosened, then hopefully the existing urban layouts will no longer be stuck.
Agree. Dreams of "starting from scratch" are directly analogous to programmers who don't care to learn the existing business situation or read someone else's code.
> reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them.
They are most certainly not.
Many car-dependent cities, large and small, are depopulating, quite rapidly. (Some at over 10% population loss per year!) This depopulation doesn't come from a city's urban core(s), usually; but rather specifically from the areas of these cities worst affected by car dependence — the sparse fringes of suburbia, and the exurban developments. (The people living in these places have the most car-centric, non-urban-infrastructure-reliant lifestyles to begin with; so when they get a better job offer somewhere else, they are unfettered from simply packing their things in their car and moving. This makes these suburban fringes and exurbs much more vulnerable to depopulation during low-employment periods, housing-affordability crises, etc.)
For many cities, these depopulated fringes and exurbs have nobody left in them at this point to care what happens to the area; and so, in response, these cities have often been literally shrinking, de-incorporating these exurbs from themselves, in order to avoid paying infrastructure costs indefinitely for roads and pipes and wires that nobody is using.
And after 10-or-so years of this state of de-incorporation and abandonment, there is nothing of value left in these places to directly move into and reuse. A perhaps-surprisingly constant amount of maintenance is required, both of buildings and of infrastructure, to keep both from falling apart.
• Suburban SFH homes in North America — usually stick-built, and usually in boreal-forest conditions — that have gone un-lived-in for more than five years or so (and not left in the hands of any bank’s or property developer’s maintenance company), are almost always a total write-off, not worth attempting to repair: they're inevitably mostly rotted, the rain having gotten in at one point and made a home for humidity and mold/fungus, destroying the structural integrity of the framing. (You might be able to save homes that have sat in desert climates like Arizona, but these have their own problems related to fast oxidation of metals, incl. electrical and plumbing. Maybe concrete+plaster Mission-style architecture can be saved; but after 10 years of disuse, you'd still need to gut the building to get it livable again.)
• An exurban "low-CapEx high-OpEx" asphalt road grid, that hasn't been driven on in 10 years, is no longer drivable: asphalt does not survive 10 years without maintenance, even if nobody is driving on it. It's likely been undermined over time with huge numbers of small sinkholes — sinkholes that will become innumerable potholes when the first person brave enough to drive down the weathered road runs over them. The roads would need, at least, to be mulched up and spat back out by a road re-paving machine (with a refill and resurface of the undermined subbase + subgrade layers in between) to make them safe.
If you're going to have to do both of those things to make conditions livable again in that area — raze all the buildings, and recycle all the asphalt — then you may as well do all the razing and asphalt-mulching all at once, first — and so end up with a fresh and empty terrain and a pile of materials, ready to be re-laid out in whatever (hopefully more compact!) fashion you choose.
from a european perspective: thats so blatantly obvious, I am kinda baffled that this is even news :-(
isn't the "third place" concept not widely known/accepted? (1st place: work, 2nd place: home, 3rd place: communal spaces) The availability/quality of these 3rd places _directly_ correlates with QoL/happiness of people. I would get severe depression when I only swap between home/work/car, thats not a life, thats surviving, in isolation.
I live in an admittedly more rural part of the USA but one of the things I love doing is hopping in my Jeep and going out into the many thousands of miles of off-road wilderness to camp, go shooting, or go for a hike, where more often than not I never have to interact with another human being.
My "quality of life" is 1000% better than if I required a crowded train to take me to an urban "communal space" in order to enjoy nature.
Your own single-family home but so close to the neighbors that it's basically "I'm not touching you!" with enough space for the HOA-paid lawn service to squeak their mowers through twice a week.
Perfectly manicured grass, and no trees except a few sproutlings along the road because they were all cut down to raise the fill for the new roads and houses.
Your friend could live half a mile away as the crow flies, but they live in a different gated HOA community than you do, and you'd have to trespass through yards to walk directly there, so the route by road is more like 5 miles.
Every task you may want to do requires getting in your car and sitting at three traffic lights minimum.
The car pickup line at the elementary school overflows onto the main road everyday at 3pm with hundreds of Chevy Tahoes each picking up one child. These children may live within a few miles of the school but sending them out to walk or bike along the 50mph six-lane road that connects all of the gated communities is of course outright dangerous.
Shops and restaurants are dominated by chains because there's so little spontaneity of finding a new place, and not enough concentration of population or foot traffic for cool local businesses to find a niche.
...
I'm totally cool with living out in the woods, in a true rural lifestyle. I also like being places where maybe my personal living space is a bit more closed in but I get something in return for that. Walkable amenities. A sense of neighborhood or town community. Walking and biking trails. Cool local restaurants and shops and breweries that couldn't survive in the low-density rural environment or in the suburban hellscape.
It's that weird in-between that the US loved to build for the last 50 years, and is still building in a lot of places, that just seems dystopian to me.
Edit: And ironically lots of us Americans love visiting both of those other ends of the spectrum, and talk about what a lovely time they had, and then go back to their gated HOA suburb and get ready for the next day's school run.
I’m currently living in a place a lot like you describe, and I hate it, but for now it’s the only economically feasible option for my family. Walkable neighborhoods in my town are outrageously expensive, and while I could appreciate living in a more rural setting, anything reasonably close to my town that would allow for reasonable commutes is also outrageously expensive. The current economic climate kind of forces people into these suburban hellscapes :/ I would move in a heartbeat if there was an economically viable option.
> Walkable neighborhoods in my town are outrageously expensive
Yep, bingo. People asking whether we really want these kinds of development only need to look at the price of housing in desirable walkable town centers. The home-buying market craves more of it.
I’m in a fairly small town but the price of a townhouse walkable to downtown is easily double an equivalent single-family detached suburban house a 10 minute drive away.
That is not the alternative being discussed here. 80% of the US population is urban. We could not undo that without a huge degradation is quality of life. Cities are incredible engines for wealth creation. The alternative more or less imposed by law is suburbs that don't have access to communal space or nature.
I'm referring to things like single-family zoning, minimum parking requirements, and the subsidization & forced construction of highways through city centers. The situation we have today isn't some spontaneous expression of consumer preference. Federal, state and local governments have made building walkable alternatives nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive.
This is an interesting set of points, thank you. But they seem a bit orthogonal to the conclusion. For example - the town I live in is fairly compact (.15 acre lots, people can easily walk to main st.) but does not have a lot of multi-family. When the state attempted to push through multi-family zoning, the town and every other town like it pushed back. Because it is our preference to live in this style, and we're not eager to lift zoning even if it can eventually mean I have to walk 5 mins to a Starbucks rather than ten.
One town over has many more 6+ story buildings and townhouses. So folks over there have made a different choice about what kind of situation they want to live in. Is their town more walkable than mine? Not really but it does have even more variety on Main St due to increased density - great. They were clearly able to do the thing you're talking about because they wanted to.
Sounds like you live in Long Island. You seem to admit that if not for the local government putting restrictions on how people use their land, individuals would choose to build multi-family structures. It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.
// It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.
I think we agree here, the point is that the law aligns (rather than contradicts) the desires of the local population. Which is different than people dying to replace their colonials with tenements but the government not letting them.
To some extent "everything" is compelled choice. I am precluded from building a cement factory in the middle of Bryce national park, but that probably is in line with the majority of people's desires.
The original comment above asserted that laws are forcing our communities to look as they do. My point is that the laws seem to by-and-large enable us to have our communities as we wish them to be.
> the town I live in is fairly compact (.15 acre lots, people can easily walk to main st.)
This type of construction does not fit in the zoning requirements of many American suburban areas. That is a walkable community by your own description.
Building walkable communities does not require high rises.
That doesn't make a ton of sense. Zoning is controlled at a very local level (NY and CA had recent controversies with state attempting to claim that power.) My town is zoned for small single fam homes so people who want that kind of life come here. The town next door is clearly zoned for higher density, so has more apartments and townhouses. A different type of people live there. If you want more density, you go another town over and now you're in Queens, and you can keep going until you're in Manhattan with one of the highest densities in the world.
Seems like zoning reflects people's desires and provides a diversity of lifestyles which is good. If a community/development wanted to be more walkable, they can make the zoning call on a very local level.
What if more people want to live in a place like Queens than there are housing units there?
Prices increase, and some people cannot afford to live there. Where do they go?
If they move to your town, they are now "dissenters" for being the less-than-50% part of the population that might vote for things like higher density or mixed-used developments.
It's difficult to vote your choices in a place you don't already live.
You also describe a spectrum of types of places to live in a close geographic area that is not at all representative of most of the US. Being two-towns-over from Queens puts you in a majorly urban metro area with a level of density somewhat unique to older American cities and the Northeast in general.
In my experience the towns and neighborhoods with close density building (not necessarily high-rises, you can get way high density with single and double story development than the average Target/Costco suburb), are seen as very desirable in the housing market and generally command very high prices. Places with a Main Street, with local shops and restaurants, with walkable housing and mixed development.
These are the "cool neighborhoods" that people visit but often can't afford to live in. If supply of these places met or exceeded demand I would think they would be more affordable to buy housing in.
Move to Ottawa Canada to get the best of both works. Gatineau Park, which contains hundreds of kilometers of wilderness trails is 3 miles from the Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa, population 1 million. You'll meet people at the trail head but it's easy to hike 20 km without seeing another.
If you work a "normal" job eg one that requires proximity to people this is basically a role play lifestyle. Subsidized by the cheap gas and roads that make personal vehicle use affordable. We'd all love to cut out to nature at will, and we should build infrastructure that does allow us all to.
The issue with third spaces in the US is making and keeping them fit for purpose. When they tend to be commercialized, squatted on, or otherwise put to exclusive use they are often no longer useful third spaces.
What we tend to have is third spaces that are policed in some manner. Often by commerce, as that does a pretty good job of keeping away those considered undesirable without literally calling police. Some call this privatization, which is accurate but overlooks that the money-based gating of access is a key feature.
Commerce doesn’t do away with the undesirables. Target sees theft get higher they respond by putting the deodorant under lock and key and keep the same staffing level.
I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is.
At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out.
Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?
> most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is.
Playgrounds require you to have children with you - for example I don't think it would be socially acceptable for a group of unaccompanied adults to show up to a playground and sip some beers while they chat amongst themselves, like you might do in a public plaza in Europe.
Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.
Its usually not literally just a playground. Its usually a whole park which happens to have a playground or two. For instance, this last weekend I went to a park with some adult friends which had playgrounds, but we were there for the disc golf. There were other adults having some kind of cookout at the grills and picnic tables. There were adults playing soccer in one of the fields. Then yes, there were kids and parents at the playgrounds.
The vast majority of parks I see around me aren't just a playground. Those mostly seem pretty rare.
Most parks with playgrounds in America are, by area, 90% park and 10% playground. Or something roughly like that; the playgrounds are designated areas tucked away into some corner of the parks.
Except you're probably not allowed to drink beer there anyway, because a law against drinking in the park provides a convenient excuse to keep the park clear of homeless so everybody else can enjoy it.
> But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds.
Reality disagrees with you. Just search for parks on Google maps for SV and you will see so many where playgrounds are just a small part and the rest of the park is for everyone - https://www.google.com/maps/
My favorite ones: Las Palmas, Cuesta, Washington. And if I want to drive for ~15-20 min: Shoreline, Rancho San Antonio, Baylands.
I don't get why so many in the comments think suburbs only have strip malls as the places to go. I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. In my current suburb almost all of these kinds of features are connected by separate bike trails and transit.
There's a city park at the end of my suburban street with pavilions, playgrounds, a fishing pond with a dock/platform in it with picnic tables, picnic tables and grills dotting the tree line, a paved running trail, and a few different sports fields. No driving, not a long walk. This is the experience for pretty much my whole suburban city, not some one-off thing.
> I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc.
Indeed, that suburbs offered better access to many of those things than did cities (especially poor parts of cities) used to be one of the big arguments offered against suburbs. The argument was that suburbs had those things due to racism--suburbs were mostly white and so governments built those things in the suburbs.
> I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc.
Yes, but I'm only including free/government subsidized places, places that aren't expecting to make a profit off you being there.
There are a few restaurants and a corner store at the edge of my neighborhood. I can hop on the bus right outside my house and go to several different supermarkets, a farmers market, several cafes, several different kinds of bars, loads of restaurants, trampoline parks, movie theaters, arcades, bowling alleys, classical/music theaters, and more.
Connecting from the bus to the light rail, I can access the sports complex downtown for my favorite teams, a nice zoo, a few different universities, several suburb town center areas, the large state fairgrounds, a few different bar scenes, and one of the largest airports in the country.
Were you really trying to suggest suburbs don't have grocery stores?
> I think most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is.
The place where I grew up had a town center with offices above shops, and plenty of open areas for people to gather; it was designed for being a "third space."
Then (a few years before COVID), it went under new management who was livid that so many people were spending time there without shopping and they did various things to make it much less desirable to go there if you aren't shopping. About 30% of the stores/restaurants went out of business in a year. Turns out, for the right sized pies, a large slice of a smaller pie is worse than a small slice of a larger pie.
> most people in the suburban US have no idea what a public, car-free, communal space where people can casually gather without buying something even is.
You haven't really lived in US suburbs then. I live in one and within 0.6-0.8 mile radius, we have 3-4 parks and 2-3 libraries. Within 15-20 min driving distance, we have amazing parks. We meet other people regularly in such places without having to buy anything. And thanks to California weather, those are accessible except when it is raining.
What does this mean? I recently moved from NYC to a near-suburb. My town has parks, a library, a band-shell, a town pool, a few synagogues and churches, etc. Unlike NYC living, I actually know the people I run into in these places. This seems pretty typical for small towns - what are Americans missing out on in terms of communal spaces, in your opinion?
That's because they don't turn a profit, or enough of it to justify the rent.
American third spaces used to be bowling alleys, community centers, and Elks / Masonic Lodges. There's a shift away from those and now our third spaces are gyms, McDonald's, and malls.
Wherever old people congregate is a de facto third space.
I think he means communal spaces in densely populated urban areas, not national parks and forests that are remote enough to keep most of the antisocial scum away.
Take for instance, Pioneer Square in Seattle. If you look at the structure of the parks, buildings, sidewalks and streets it should be very nice. Lots of nice trees, wide sidewalks and it's pretty flat and easy to walk around. But in reality it's filled with awful people which ruins it.
How does the concept of the 3rd place combine with walkability?
I actually am not a particular fan of most 3rd places, but ok, I used to love to pop out to play soccer outside of my flat, or walk to a local bar for board games, but on the other hand there was no escape if I wanted to open a window in summer and a loud soccer game was going on, or if there was a late night party at the bar. These days, I like climbing so (in urban context) I drive to the gym, and I drive to a library (or take an uber/sometimes bus to a bar) if I want to play boardgames. I still have the 3rd places, but I don't have to live next to them.
Thing is there are enough people who lived at several places and have real experiences and funded opinions.. some say there exist even people who do this kind of objective studies, etc. Crazy world! No need to stick and believe in bubbles, it seems.
> Or you know, we had different lives and it made us have different opinions.
They said “from a European perspective”.
A Minnesotan would probably get upset if a Floridian said that living in a humid, tropical climate was the American experience (directly or indirectly).
People have a strong preference for privatized spaces because truly public spaces are unfit for purpose. A coffee shop has a right to kick out protesters that a town square is lacking, as one of many examples. People value that lack of disruption in a very noticeable way.
In most of the world, most of the time, people peacefully coexist in public places with little or no disruption.
If a person insists on zero disruption, they likely will avoid shared spaces all together, since even shared private spaces can't provide protection from all disruption all of the time.
I spent a week touring Rome and didn't see a single public bathroom.
Every society makes its choices and some of those seem weird when you look on the other side of the fence. The US is unique, sure, but so are other countries.
As we discuss this topic, can we keep a few things in mind?
Density does not mean Manhattan levels of density. Manhattan has 28,000/km^2, Atlanta has 3,500/km^2. That's an order of magnitude difference.
I mean this with all of the respect I can muster. If your first thought is "I prefer to live in a rural space where my nearest neighbor is half a kilometer away" Congratulations. You live in a RURAL place, this does not apply to you. In fact, you should be cheering for denser living spaces. It is not the five-over-ones that are taking over the precious rural landscapes, but the endless sea of concrete and asphalt that is suburban living.
To non-North Americans. The standard U.S. and Canada experience of "living" in a city, is you live in a quarter acre of land in a winding suburb where it's at least half a kilometer to get out of your neighborhood onto the local collector. It's going to take you at least another half kilometer to make it to the arterial that takes you to the giant box store that has a bunch of stuff you need.
It is impossible for a plurality of people in North America to get the basic necessities without a car, let alone any other niceties.
I'm from a Spanish city that for the last few years has invested heavily in infrastructure. One of the most controversial decisions was to pedestrianize big chunks of the old town. Despite concerns about traffic, I have yet to meet a single person who doesn't love the idea. What used to be mazes of roads and cars are now public spaces, filled with parks, art installations or events. People can walk or cycle safely, and bars and cafes have large terraces for people to sit. More cities should give this a try.
The mission is cool, and I definitely agree with the assertion in the title.
We lived in the suburbs of Houston for two years, and it was terrible. Nothing was walkable. The community had a walking path around a drainage reservoir, but walking to a business? lol, I hope you have two hours to spare.
Roads were HUGE and empty but had low speed limits, so most folks sped and drove dangerously. By dangerously, I mean "driving 20+ above limit with one hand on the 12 and scrolling TikTok on the other".
Nothing but chain restaurants for miles, with some exceptions here and there.
Basically zero sense of community unless you had kids or went to church. Meetup events? social sports leagues? Events around town? lol.
We moved into Houston proper this year and it's been unbelievably refreshing. I'm typing this from a bar that's five mins away walking distance. I can run and ride my bike to places that are interesting. Shit, I can run and ride my bike without worrying about a distracted driver mowing me over. There's stuff to do here. There are events for everybody. It's great.
I do take issue with one statement:
> “We look back nostalgically at college, because it’s the only time most people have lived in a walkable neighborhood."
Come on, dudes. The reason why people opine for their college years is because they were younger, didn't have to work, didn't have families and could spend most of their time having fun.
I really don't see how this is necessary. I'm in what I would consider a walkable neighborhood right now. In fact, I walk all the time. The biggest reason I still have a car, that I almost never use, is going to medical appointments. Nothing can ever make that walkable when they're 20 miles away and I have to get there during business hours. Before working from home, it was needing to drive to the office, which you can do away with by having metroplex-wide public transit that spans an entire city and its major suburbs. There isn't shit you can do at the neighborhood level.
Getting rid of cars is not necessary. New York City is probably the most walkable city in the United States and it's full of cars. But the sidewalks are enormous, consistently open, construction projects are required to provide routes for pedestrians. I grew up in a place in Southern California that was pretty walkable, but most of Southern California is definitely not. The biggest difference wasn't whether or not cars existed. Aside from the sidewalks, it's more that you need to limit the number of arterial roads, their size, and the blocks a vehicle can expect to traverse before hitting a stop. Aside from everything being so far away, the biggest factors preventing people from just going for leisurely strolls without a specific destination is the danger posed by roads that take a long time to get across and cars doing highway speeds on those roads. It worked out where I grew up, even though it was a suburb, because the roads were small, we weren't near any highways, plus I lived on an actual cul de sac, but the end of the road only blocked cars from going further, not pedestrians.
I spent a month in downtown major city this summer and I loved it. I could walk to work, walk my kids to summer camp, we all took the subway and walked sometimes back home. They loved it, and I loved it, despite being on a crowded subway or street car. Just the sheer human interaction and people watching made it so much more enjoyable than spending our time in a car isolated from the rest of the world. Yes, I wasn't accustomed to the noise and the ambulance and police sirens, but overall it was amazing and will try to do it next summer as well.
I was car-less until I was 27. I lived in cities with crappy public transit and great. I even lived in France for a summer. I continue to say that I like towns that are "bikable". I hated being in the heat, the rain, and the snow without a car. It's infinitely more comfortable, but I don't want to _forced_ to drive everywhere. I honestly hated the kind of mixed use that true urban mandates.
I like where I live now. A proper town that got eaten by a major city so it's a "suburb". Because it was always meant to be a functional stand alone city, it has everything you'd need within a reasonable walk or bike. You can bike the whole town. I can walk to 3 grocery stores and the basics, but there's a proper (in my opinion) segregation of concerns. I think the town could use a basic bus system for the kids in town and then it would be perfect, but NIMBYs alas.
I'd honestly prefer something like this. Which i guess when why I live in a small town. I really prefer driving everywhere. I like space, but I don't like the idea that lacking a car means you starve to death.
I was curious to see what this looks like, so I clicked the link.
All of the pictures in the article totally tell me a different story: it looks like a generic concrete wasteland. The hero picture has an ugly chain link fence and what looks like a parking lot in the foreground. The picture of the interior of the model apartment is nothing more than an arty shot of a door (?)
I'll be honest, it looks like a post-apocalyptic brutalist concrete jungle to me. I wanted to like it, but there's no way I would live in this place.
This isn't about a city banning cars - it's about a 16 acre development that without garages or street parking. So it's right up your alley - an effort to allow building more types of development to out compete the status quo.
I'm a huge fan of walkable cities (generally the norm outside the U.S) but the article doesn't actually any good pictures of the neighborhood, and the few pictures look terrible.
The framing of this story is so weird (and I think meant to trigger conspiracy nuts.)
The story of culdesac is about parking not about banning mobility!
Parking is insanely expensive to build. The only way the city would let them not build parking was for residents to agree to not own cars. (I think this is a clear 14th amendment violation but thats just me.)
Wouldn't this self select people who are willing to ditch vehicles.
Shocking that folks selectively willing to live in an area with specific rules are happier living in the area with specific rules they self selected into.
I am all for people being allowed to self select into communities that fit their lifestyles.
Well, yes. It's a sort of inhabitable theme park. “It’s positively European, somewhere between Mykonos and Ibiza,”, per article - it does indeed look like all those holiday photos of Mykonos or Corfu.
To be clear: this is a compliment. I think it's good that people are allowed to have a variety of living environments and try things every now and again.
Yeah while I applaud new ideas, and them actually designing for the site, this is basically an apartment complex with no parking. It's not a neighborhood, it's in an existing neighborhood. The addition of some commerce is nice, but this is not some self contained destination.
Tempe, Arizona is not a practical place I'd want to be without a car, due to the high heat.
You're well below average if that's true. AAA reports the average annual cost to own a car is around $10,000 - that's all inclusive - purchase, financing, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc.
In my area, an Uber trip from my house to the grocer, my office, or the local school is $10-$15.
Allowing access to city services (street parking) based on land ownership (or lack there of) seems (to me, a software engineer, not a lawyer) like a violation of the equal protection clause.
Where the SCOTUS said yeah this is bad but it's okay because we want to encourage non-homeowners to take the bus. This was decided before there was lots of clear research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Allowing homeowners free and easily accessible on street parking encourages more car ownership.
From my understanding, there's nothing saying that Culdesac residents can't park on public street parking, it's just that the development doesn't have any street parking. So that case (which was about restricting access to existing street parking) doesn't seem relevant.
Unless you're claiming that the 14th amendment would require the developer to include street parking? But that seems like quite a stretch.
The residents of culdesac have to sign a lease that states that they are not allowed to park on the streets. This was a condition of the city to allow the zoning variance for culdesac.
At 170M development cost for 1,000 residents, a break-even point of $170k per resident seems quite high for Phoenix. This unfortunately looks like a luxury product. Hopefully future costs come way down as they figure out the formula and can make this accessible to more people, as it’s definitely a much more human-scale, healthy, and pleasant way to live.
There may be a cultural component. A few very poor 1st-generation immigrant Dominican and Cambodian communities near me are actually super walkable (e.g. grocery store and schools within 10-15 min walk). Same with the much richer historic downtown. It seems that the white and 2nd+ generation Hispanic upwardly-mobile middle classes actually have the most car-bound lifestyle around here. Maybe being able to afford an isolated yet stroad-surrounded single-family home is kind of a trap in the long run.
Not particularly. Large apartment buildings would be ~1/4 that cost, and this consists of much more infrastructure that would need to be built. Seems like a reasonable cost for something that would have much better opportunities for extra value generation (shops, activities, etc) for the development itself.
It's basically an apartment complex, smack-dab in the middle of the city. They just don't have parking (and I am suspicious that this will eventually cause an issue, but we'll see).
Living in New York City, the most walkable city in the US I believe, was the unhappiest I've been in my life, and I know plenty of others who feel the same way. So, there's that.
I think the fact that it is NYC might have a more outsized effect than it being walkable. Tokyo felt like a very walkable city, whilst still being so densely populated...in conjunction with its amazing public transport it was a wonderful experience.
Of course, I prefer walkable environments as well in the right conditions, but the headline implies that they are strictly superior, which isn't true when your society is low-trust and anti-social, and most walkable US city neighborhoods, or at least the ones that are affordable to people who are not very well off, are that. Today I live in a suburban area, and the calm and safety more than make up for the low walkability.
Absolutely. Anecdote but yesterday I was at a light on an off-ramp from a highway and a guy got out of the car next to me, and my first reaction was that he might have malicious intent(turned out he was just checking the front of his car because he may have hit something). That was definitely a low-trust moment! Walking around NYC is similar, I am trying to make sure not to get pickpocketed or worse.
In a weird way I've never considered NYC to rank highly on the "walkable" scale. There are too many other people out walking, and too many cross streets where you are constantly waiting to cross.
IMO, "walkable city" means not just that you can technically walk to a large number of places, but that you can do so relatively unimpeded.
truly dystopian to live in a VC backed neighborhood where you don't own anything... Maybe if you were recent graduate for a few years. The whole idea of not needing a car is also not even that exciting. You don't exist in a vacuum in your tiny neighborhood in a larger city, you still probably need to get to work, US does not build good enough public transportation especially in these less dense cities. If you want to get out anywhere else in city or leave you'd probably want or need a car. Most people who live in NYC live close to people and surprise also do not need cars.
It seriously depends on who you talk to. Places like r/fuckcars do not give the same impression as your comment. On that topic, I immediately discard the opinion of anyone who uses the word "stroad"
I don't know r/fuckcars but I can imagine the tiny fraction of people who frequent there don't like cars. And the tiny fraction of a fraction of those that post and comment there dislike cars even more.
I don't think that view should become the basis for anyone's understanding of people's general view.
It is sort of like browsing r/qanon and thinking that's conservatism.
> On that topic, I immediately discard the opinion of anyone who uses the word "stroad"
Isn't a "stroad" just a name for a street designed like a road? Is it inherently a negative word or does it just seem that way due to the anti-car context in which it typically appears?
A road is to connect remote places, it is to be used by cars and they travel fast.
A street is the space in between buildings of a town or city where people go about their business.
Some use cars, preferably most don’t cause they take a lot if space. But the street is for people, the inhabitants of the town.
A stroad is a place where people live in terror and then die.
I like cars, I have one, regularly drive it and like to go fast when on highways and such.
But they are dangerous and terrifying tools in the context of a town/city, especially for kids.
If I’m driving near people, I drive carefully, slowly and the street needs to be designed in such a way that it induces that kind of driving.
> his enthusiasm for car-free living was born, he said, from living and traveling in countries such as Hungary, Japan and South Africa
I don't know about Hungary or Japan, but South Africa has extremely high car usage. Unless he lived in a very expensive area where you can also work (e.g. Melrose Arch or Parkhurst).
Sure; he could've got round in a taxi (as in a small white bus, rather than a private taxi), which a lot of people do, but I wouldn't say that's where car-free living would be fallen in love with. It can be pretty dangerous as they drive on the pavements (or just the side of the road) a lot.
I lived without a car in the Western Cape for years. I had a shopping center, day care, and office all within ten minutes of where I stayed.
Yes it was expensive, but car free living is going to be expensive until cities actually prioritize it. We've already funded car infrastructure for so long, and urban cores directly subsidize the rest of the area, even in areas where the urban core is poor. It's not absurd to expect a redistribution of funding.
Well, the Western Cape you can do it at a stretch, if you get lifts or don't have friends who live far. Same as Durban; if you live close to everything then it can work, but it's rare.
As regards funding: the Gautrain cost a fortune for the number of people it serves! Funding would help, as it would help anything, but I don't know if it's the base problem.
Culture and attitude are a billion times more important than city planning when it comes to happy communities. Anyone who has traveled can tell you this. According to all these stupid blog articles from Americans, I have lived in 7 different heavens, but the reality I experienced was markedly different.
Just because people live densely packed together does not mean that they will decide to strike up a conversation and get to know each other. It does not mean that there will be five people lending a hand when you need help. Quite the opposite. Americans take for granted their culture, which in these aspects is better than what you will find in many European cities.
Actually thinking about it, packing people densely together might even foster a culture that is more insular, cold and hostile than what the typical American is accustomed to.
I live off a street that put up barriers during covid to radically slow down car traffic, and its stayed that way. People still can get cars in and out to park, and delivery vans, contractors and trash pickup all still work fine. But no one uses that street as a throughway because it just takes too long.
Because that street is filled with people jogging, taking sunset walks, and children playing. People sitting on chairs in the shade talking.
We're supposed to reject this because we need to support the freedom for people to barrel down residential roads.
This seems like you reduced traffic from your own street for your own benefit which presumably comes at the cost of some other street with more traffic which will not benefit people that live there.
> well, sure, nearby there are roads where people drive 45 and they're really difficult to cross. they were already there.
That begs the question of why people were driving down the residential road if there was a faster more efficient road available?
In my personal experience this has happened in my neighborhood. For context there are two main roads get congested at rush hour so drivers take residential roads.
Some of the residential roads had speed bumps/the zigzagging blocks to slow traffic added during Covid. This caused drivers to divert more traffic to the residential roads where there are no road impediments. Getting road impediments on residential roads requires money or political clout to get the city to do it so it’s only on the roads with really nice homes around me that have them in place.
I'm not sure how this article would be any different if Culdesac had written their own "journalistic" article about itself and paid The Guardian to publish it.
Walkable cities and public transportation based cities sound good but require you to trust the others on those streets and vehicles and you usually can't at all if a city is super bad and the city itself has no intentions of fixing this. This is the perspective of an Alabamian who was blown away when an Australian I knew could just walk to a store to get stuff.
According to the article so far 36 people live there.
out of the expected 1.000 people who will reside there
when the development is finished in 2025
I think you should wait till everyone has moved in,
and then give it a year or two, and then write an article
about how people are much happier there.
I have confidence that results probably would not change that
much since the development is custom built and hyped
as a car-free place to live.
It will attract people who are looking for that and you would
think they would be happy.
However, you cannot use this as an argument that people in general
would be happier with such changes, since you start out with
a highly biased sample.
I have nothing against walkable neighborhoods. It is nice
Personally, I have zero desire to live Phoenix Arizona without a car.
I have lived there, and it gets insanely hot during the summer.
(a side note: Arizona already has major trouble getting enough water
for everyone who lives there already. I dont think expanding the
population is sustainable idea)
The population of Arizona is expanding one way or another. But you can see houses with lawns less than a mile from Culdesac, so development like this would bring the per capita water usage down.
The expansion has to stop and people need to be encouraged
to live somewhere more sustainable both as far as
water and energy are concerned.
The amount of electricity people need to run AC is enormous.
Which might at times be a matter of life or death.
When I was there I believe a law was passed that it was illegal
to shut off electricity if the temperature was above a certain
threshold since some people were not able to handle the heat.
Heating cold areas takes a lot of power too, and often it can't be made "green" as easily as electric AC. Also, AZ and most of the mountain west use the vast majority of their water for agriculture that would not be financially sustainable without water made artificially cheap by government subsidies in the form of overbuilt dams/reservoirs. (AZ infamously gave a sweetheart water deal to a company that grew alfalfa exported to Saudi Arabia.)
Using energy is fine, it's burning hydrocarbons to produce energy that's the problem. We shouldn't be shaming people for running their AC, we should be encouraging them to install solar to power it.
Controlling expansion is key in most cities.
The city planning office must approve construction.
(or some part of the government has to approve it)
With that it would be natural for the party wishing to construct to
detail how they will ensure the water they need.
Many cities are restrictive as to how much construction they will allow.
There are already recently constructed houses in near PHeonix that presently
does not have water.
They have been cut off by the city.
This is due to a disagreement on taxes, city zones and a few other things.
That community must now pay to have tank trucks come by, and a tank truck
can haul a lot of water, but when you must supply it to a whole community
a tankers worth does not last that long.
This is why I prefer the East Coast of the US to the West Coast -- many cities on the East Coast matured before the dominance of the automobile, which makes them slightly more walkable. The West Coast is just car culture down to it's bones.
Even on the East Coast, however, people will drive 50 MPH down tree-lined residential streets, such as the one I currently live on in Lancaster, PA, and there are plenty of people here who drive massive pickup trucks that never seem to be picking up anything.
It's a time honored tradition here in Lancaster. One must have speed to vault over the potholes.
Though I will say that while Lancaster city itself and a lot of the surrounding townships are themselves walkable, they're like little islands of an archipelago. It's not easy to get between one or the other without using a vehicle because of the stroads and highways.
Are the people that live in walkable neighborhoods wealthier than the average US citizen? Maybe it’s not the neighborhood but the freedom from financial stress.
Yeah, they are called small towns. I've lived in two small towns in the last decade. One had about 5,000 people; a grocery stores, bars, churches, post office, and a small movie theater all within a mile end-to-end. The other, an even smaller town of ~800 had a dollar store(not a real grocery store), old downtown with various small businesses and a vibrant community. All within about a half a mile end-to-end.
Small towns have much less wealth than metropolitan areas.
Yes, but a huge reason for that is that they're so rare that there are way more people that want to live there than the supply, so they fetch a premium.
Seems to be plenty of support for this kind of technocratic authoritarianism on Hacker News, based on the comment voting.
Is there an alternative venue similar to HN where people who value freedom and individual liberty can discuss topics like this without getting demoted and silenced?
Culdesac seems like just an apartment complex. Of course i'm happy too being able to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen instead of taking the car.
What happens when someone needs to go get groceries at a walmart? Or go to a la fitness? (i'm using brand names on purpose instead of grocery or gym since a "local bodega" that could be able to fit in the complex would unlikely have what i need). Merely having a checkbox saying that thing exists within the 15 min radius isn't enough.
tbh i just don't see high quality of life coupled with car-free happening in the USA due to how big it is.
High QoL car-free or car-reduced is perfectly possible in the USA, but it usually involves living in a more semi-rural area (a small town of 8-15k) - because by definition those are small enough to walk across.
Yeah its possible but you'll have to give up freedom. We already have "15 min cities", it's called a military base. Everything is supplied to you but you don't really have any choice.
I wouldn't call those places walkable. 15 mins is 1.5 mile radius.
This seems plausible to me, but the principle holds here that correlation is not causation.
"People are happier and healthier, and even wealthier when they’re living in a walkable neighborhood."
From my experience(so sample size 1), walkable neighborhoods in the US are usually not the affordable ones.
Banning cars seems like a bad design...just design cities where cars are de-incentivized(small lanes, less parking, high fees, special permits, whatever) and provide some infrastructure for those that really need them.
Wealthier people are happier, build thing that can only be used by wealthy people - voila! A happiness machine!
Public transit takes decades to take hold - because you have to build the lines and then wait for the density to increase around them. If you try to go the other way, the people have to use cars first and then the car is perpetual.
But if you are willing to work those decades, you can finally get something pretty impressive - the San Diego Trolley runs 7.5 min separation on its main line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BDMmgpvIDk
Public transit in the US takes decades because it already starts at a disadvantage vs European/Asian countries due to public perception. It takes decades because the procurement process is mired in red tape.
"The best time to start something was yesterday, the 2nd best time is today" can be applied here. If something taking a long time is a deterrent, it will never get done(or take 20 years to get it done).
The average cost of car ownership is somewhere around $10k/year (from AAA). That buys a lot of extra stuff in a higher COL area (but no, it's won't close the entire gap between a rural town and SV or NYC).
In addition to cutting car ownerships costs borne by residents, there are savings at the community level. Less road maintenance, less real estate used for parking (and put to better economic use), etc.
Very few people want to literally ban cars at neighbrhood/town scale. Most just want them de-emphasized, with certain roads closed/redeveloped for foot/bike/transit.
I'm totally onboard with you, not sure if you're re-affirming what I said or interpreted it differently, but in this case the developer literally wants to ban cars.
Roads still exists, but they're only used in emergencies or by people with special permits (e.g. disabled). Walkable communities are more dense and with less traffic, so emergency vehicles can reach destination faster in most cases.
i know of a cohousing nonprofit that did this in central MA in 2007: big parking lot down at the end of the drive, then it’s about 35 houses with footpaths and green space and common areas and whatnot all built together; motor vehicles are not permitted.
it’s a nice place! the biggest thing i notice is that there are a few packs of kids running around all the time, and nobody has to worry about anyone getting hit by a car.
I can be flexible on urban planning topics, but empirically folks with the "they don't know what's good for them, but I do" take on the world should be kept as far away from power and influence as possible - regardless of topic :)
I wonder what you are supposed to do when you have bigger errands to run. Buying groceries for a family for whole week, get new furniture, going on vacation trip, etc.
I mean, yeah, it's great that you have everything necessary within walking distance, but sometimes you simply need to make larger trips...
I feel like there should be some kind of middle-ground...
That's the thing: when your grocery store is a short walk away, you don't buy groceries for the whole week. You just duck into the store on the walk home or you walk over at lunch. You buy things for that evening or a few days at most. Having to plan for a whole week of meals seems normal to us, but it's an adaptation to the fact that we live too far from grocery stores. With our large fridges, cabinets, pantries, and chest freezers, we basically turn part of our homes into well-stocked convenience stores so that we can go out as little as possible.
A lie. I have literally my entire adult life lived walking distance from the grocery store and I've even walked to the grocery store and I have always shopped weekly. Being able to cook daily is a luxury of time and energy. I don't bulk buy, but I definitely only have a weekly pit stop. It's not as cumbersome as the person you're replying to thinks. A week of groceries is only like 3 shopping bags, but still it doesn't make financial sense to go grocery shopping literally every day. Buying tiny amounts of groceries just doesn't make much sense with how things are sold, especially if you're a single person.
Having a grocery store a short distance away is not contingent on eliminating cars. However, modern grocery stores are massive. An increase in clusters that service smaller areas would necessitate smaller stock. We have convenience stores of course, but what do people buy there? Junk. If they're all specialized, then it means more stops and consequently more time invested in daily grocery runs.
I don't think this is a common setup for any developed country with 2 income households. Likely the daily-run for groceries occurs in areas where women are homemakers. Is that part of the pitch? There's no way we're going back to that, or daily grocery runs.
Every major city I’ve ever been to in the US, Germany, Portugal, Spain, etc. all had smaller grocery stores that sold real produce. It’s very common, not a big deal. And it doesn’t require women to be homemakers, good lord.
I'm aware of some of those in major cities. Produce does not constitute the whole of one's daily diet (overwhelmingly). Hence, specialization.
Also, having these small produce-oriented grocers does not imply that people are doing daily runs. In my city I only see them in posh, upscale neighborhoods. In some larger metropolises like NY I've seen them also in less gentrified places, but they tend also to be specialty stores.
Groceries in cities sell meat and bread, etc often too, they’re no different than normal grocery stores, just not as big as a supercenter.. I feel like you’re overcomplicating this due to lack of familiarity. And sure, maybe you don’t go to the grocery store literally every day. Maybe you get two or three days worth, what’s comfortable to hold or to push in a cart. Sometimes you order takeout. This is normal stuff in places that aren’t rural areas where the only option is to drive 5-10 miles to a grocery store.
They're a fraction of the size. If average weekly needs and wants were met by those, that's where people in those neighborhoods would shop all the time. Everything else would be redundant. But instead they seem to fill a missing middle.
> maybe you don’t go to the grocery store literally every day.
Chicago, NYC, Lisbon, Berlin, Barcelona, etc. They all have their versions of these stores. You don't need to go anywhere else unless you want to for some reason.
Lots of us do that in the suburbs too. I live close enough to walk, just over 1/2 mile, to a Safeway but usually choose to drive out of convenience. I’m at that store nearly everyday, sometimes multiple times if I forgot something or need something else.
Part of the implication is that your habits would change with different transportation - for example a fairly common response about groceries is buying them in smaller quantities every few days at the (likely smaller and/or more specialized) grocer convenient to your home or transit stop; renting a truck or cargo van to self move furniture as needed if you can’t get it professionally moved (which probably isn’t a bad idea even if you do primarily use a car!); renting a car for a road trip or being able to use transit to get there instead; that kind of thing.
The issue is that habits only change so much, because people are reluctant to give up all of the convenience of personal transportation just for the sake of "going car-free".
For example, not havig a car is fine until your place of work is 10km out and using public transportation takes 1h whereas driving by car takes 10 minutes. Taking a bike or e-bike works, of course, unless it's raining or snowing or stormy, in which case you really want a fully enclosed (and heated) ride.
I'm sure you can find some "but in that case just do X" for all those cases, but the point still stands that all these issues only exist because you ditched the car, even if it's just a small electric one.
Designing a city/suburb/community that outright bans cars (by not providing any parking spaces) only works for a very small minority of the population
You buy groceries more frequently as it's more convenient to stop in on your evening walk or bike ride.
Bulky purchases are relatively rare and can be accomplished by delivery service, renting a van, or using a cargo bike (one of which makes groceries and transporting small children easier as well).
Vacations - rent a car, take the train, etc.
Anyways, few people want to outright ban cars. Look at the Netherlands - most families still have a car, it just doesn't get used daily. It's a convenience instead of a necessity. Maybe they use it to commute, but not to take kids to school or run small errands.
The average cost of owning a car in the US is around $10,000/year. Even the ability to cut from 2 cars to 1 car (for a typical family with two working adults) is a MASSIVE economic benefit.
> You buy groceries more frequently as it's more convenient to stop in on your evening walk or bike ride.
There are efficiencies both in terms of time and money that come from bulk shopping that you’re not considering.
I lived car free for about 5 years in Seattle and it fucking sucked walking to the grocery store every day or two. In the winter it rains frequently so my groceries would always be wet by the time I got home which added even more time to dry everything off.
And I'm not claiming car-free is a panacea. I just want to stop subsidizing car-based infrastructure to the extent that we do.
Hell, we still own two cars for convenience (though I walk to work and my wife rides a bike). Though when the next car ages out, we'll probably trade it for an electric cargo bike.
as I understood it, culdesac doesn't even provide parking for your car, and parking your car 5 miles away is the same as not having a car at all (at least when it comes to vacation, family visits, larger purchases, etc.)
Keep an eye on Culdesac's career page - I expect positions to be posted in the near future with terms such as: spark, data warehouse, redshift, AI/ML, etc. This experiment will come with mass data mining and analysis to "better serve" its residents. HARD PASS on living in tech corporate controlled "neighborhoods".
The car free idea is great, but this looks like it's inevitably gonna turn into a dystopian nightmare since it's actually cut off from the rest of the city.
The great thing about good cities is that they make it easy to meet people, but they're also decently large so there are enough sub communities that you aren't forced to conform entirely because you might otherwise get kicked out of the only community available to you. This is a village problem (although villages being far less dense make it easier to hide the non conformist stuff you might be up to).
This development combines the worst of both worlds. It's too small and cut off from the rest of Phoenix to give residents access to a large set of sub communities, and it's too dense to keep your stuff to yourself.
Hopefully developments like this will encourage the provision of good public transport.
Ideally they would be built around transport hubs. A lot of the outer London suburbs originated as basically railways stops in fields, where the suburb grew around the station.
Public transport is so inconvenient, even in the best cities. Your life revolves around transportation schedules. We walk several miles in our neighborhood every day. Yet we love the freedom a car gives us.
Schedules are irrelevant when frequencies are high enough. If you look at the most successful public transport systems (e.g. in London, Paris and Berlin) trains frequencies are often at least every ten minutes off-peak and can be every two-three minutes in the peak times. At those frequencies you can literally just turn-up and travel.
This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.
Seattle has a pretty good bus system for the US but a pretty mediocre one globally.
When we talk about “frequent enough” 15 minutes is an eternity, honestly it is the bare minimum for what could be considered frequent.
Frequent is every 5-6 minutes. I’ve had commutes where the headway was 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the train/bus is late or doesn’t show up at that point.
There is this really strange mythology that persists around this. America is not built on small towns or cities any more than other countries, in fact it is generally much less so.
80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas. [0]
Your citation is counting towns, but that doesn’t reflect the way Americans actually live, and if you think about it, that makes sense, the US can’t have millions of million plus cities. City population size is going to follow some sort of geometric/power law distribution.
To answer your question, no one is advocating banning all cars outright.
If you looked at the article I referenced, only 40% of the population lives in cities larger than 50k (census.gov). I'd imagine it is a bit less than that if you look at cities over 500k which are still small in comparison (and would struggle with the public infrastructure being proposed here).
Urban could mean anything and is not defined in the wikipedia article explicitly ("definition needed"). The article even says it's changing constantly. So it's not very useful when they give %'s without even saying what it means.
Edit: Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying. Also the MSAs are defined as 10k or above. That's a really small tax base for such large infrastructure. Even my city of 250k would struggle a LOT providing any level of service like you are talking about. You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
That’s because municipal boundaries are arbitrary, and a poor way to analyze human settlement patterns. Most of those small cities still lie within larger metro areas.
Don’t be disingenuous, that was never my point. As stated in my other comment, 223/331 million people lived in metro areas over 500k as of the last census, aka 67%. most people live in reasonably large cities.
>Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying.
I’d recommend you look a bit deeper into how public transit is funded, because this is patently false. The largest transit agency in the us, the NY MTA is a state agency. Public transit systems are generally funded by a combination of federal, state and local funding, often that local funding is a county or some other metropolitan transit funding district.
>You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
Easy example of a city that has good public transit and is less than 1 million: Bern, metro population of 660k (just checked google maps and saw multiple bus routes with ten minute or less headways, along tram and trains networks).
Oh so you have to steal from the surrounding communities to support your urban utopia. Got it. What if they need funds too from the state?
I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
Edit: Generally state funded projects benefit everyone in the state, including the interstate system. A local transit project that only affects one city not so much.
This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
15 minutes isn't frequent enough if you live a block or so away from the bus stop, but it's pretty damn frequent if you live on the same road as the bus stop. If they can figure out how to make buses that aren't loud enough to wake the dead then I'll change my mind.
BTW I'm talking about diesel buses and electric trolley-buses. They're all loud.
They should ask Berlin for advice. I've got a tram like right outside my window, and the trams are only audible right before the rails get ground back into shape; busses pass me regularly and I don't notice unless I'm looking.
The sirens from the emergency vehicles on the other hand, those are probably part of the reason why I'm tired all the time.
Emergency sirens being so loud is an unfortunate consequence of how good sound isolation is in contemporary cars.
Unfortunately I don’t know of an easy solution to this. Perhaps vehicles should be required to rebroadcast emergency sirens internally? Or maybe it will solve itself when electric cars reduce road noise.
That's not a good public transit. Personally I wouldn't consider any city in the US to have good public transit. Traveling around in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai for instance, I never even look at the train schedule unless it's very late at night (to make sure I can catch the last train).
Buses typically aren't frequent enough except on the most popular routes to just turn up without planning. Subways / light rail systems usually are frequent enough.
I have found the opposite. Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, all of them public transportation was way way WAY more convenient than a car. Lived with a car the first 16 years of my adult life followed by 16 years no car. The no car years were better. Now I live in SF with car. SF might be considered to have good public transportation by many in the USA but it's shit compared to those other cites and it's not convenient. It's really only useful if you live really close to one of the tram lines.
Further, in those other cities, public transportation is clean and something everyone uses. In USA cities outside of NYC, public transportation is largely considered a service provided to those too poor to own a car. As such it's always shit.
Because looking for a parking place is so much better...
There are places where a car is nice, or even necessary (sports requiring large equipment for example, trips with the family), and then there is over using cars and building cities that require cars even if it can be done differently.
In our city of 500k (which is arguably small, but honestly I think it's the perfect size) we never have to look for a spot. There's always free parking available.
A great example of this is the size of parking lots for sports stadiums.
There's also several stories (I believe SimCity might be one?) of video game developers attempting to make representations of places in their game - and then removing all the parking lots as they realized it would make a boring experience.
My city is less than half of that size. It's impossible to find a parking spot and parking is only free on Sundays.
To make more parking, they'd have to tear down buildings or take away roads. Combined with a poor bus system, it ends up being a bad experience.
I'd much rather have a better public transportation system in my city, it'd be much easier than having to tear things down. More people in the city are pushing for this, so hopefully it'll get better.
That’s why you ideally have a city with a good public transportation schedule - it’s not like having a car makes your transit planning immune to external factors anyways.
Even in average cities like Melbourne, you don't have to know a schedule at all. Trains run every few minutes most of the day. You just show up and get on.
>The car free idea is great, but this looks like it's inevitably gonna turn into a dystopian nightmare since it's actually cut off from the rest of the city.
This kind of thinking makes no sense, you can have public transit (or even private taxis and bus lines) that fully solves this issue. Heck, many NJ beach towns have private "Jitney" lines that do well.
Yeah considering that we know it's possible to have walkable neighborhoods and cities without being outright hostile to vehicles (see: Japan), I don't see much value added.
Japan facilitates that with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car , which is the exact opposite of the US tax incentives to make bigger cars so they can be labelled "trucks".
Many of the proposals I've seen for car-free neighborhoods in the US have parking at the edges. You can't drive to your house, but you can drive to a parking structure 1000 feet from your house.
Let me just tell my disabled wife that she has to walk a fifth of a mile to the house after she parks, she'll love that on the days when the fatigue is bad or her feet feel like pins and needles.
God forbid we have the absolute luxury of parking by the door.
That’s definitely a concern. Considering that 60% of all car trips in the US are less than six miles, the goal would be to provide alternatives so she doesn’t have to drive.
Unrelatedly this is actually the irony of the 15 minute cities fracas in my mind: america is already full of fifteen minute towns. 15 minutes from leaving the door to your destination in a car. That kind of thing can feel freeing, but it is really a prison that ties you to making money if you want mobility. In contrast I see older folks and disabled folks moving around all the time in my walkable city with ok transit. Their mobility still requires money, but much less money.
Then just don't live there? It's not for everybody and that's OK; nobody's forcing you to live there. Fewer cars on the road will make the roads emptier and more usable for the people who do have to use cars.
Ironically, self-driving cars are probably the most realistic route to walkable neighborhoods. Self-driving cars are much better road citizens (obeying traffic laws and driving courteously) and don't require any of the parking that human-driving cars do. If the self-driving cars become widespread for human transportation and deliveries, we will be shocked at the amount of free space have that can be put to better use.
Questionable take. The best road "citizens" are trams, trains, and subways. They all obey traffic laws and are reliable. Self-driving cars don't exist in any meaningful way. The most realistic route to walkable neighborhoods is good public transit, bike infrastructure, and repealing of restrictive zoning. Walkable neighborhoods already exists all over Europe and work today unlike the pipe dream of self-driving cars.
There are definitely situations where legacy public transit makes sense, but at up to $1 billion/mile for urban railway that doesn't seem a practical future for the US. I'd love to snap my fingers and make more cities in the US to be like Amsterdam, but there are hundreds of historical, political, and climactic reasons why that is not a feasible path for US cities at this point. The consistent and deliberately boring progress of Waymo has me very optimistic that there is a better way. For tech crowds, the best analogy I have is the switch from dedicated copper to packet-switched networks. We're on the verge of unleashing dramatically more efficient utilization of existing pipes (road infrastructure).
> Self-driving cars don't exist in any meaningful way
Agreed, but I wouldn't call them a "pipe dream" — Musk's timelines may all be pipe dreams, but the tech exists (and isn't just from Tesla) and can be used where legislation allows. On the scale of changing urban infrastructure, even if these take another decade, I'd expect them to be widely available faster than new train and subway lines.
Bike infrastructure should be an easy win, if only it wasn't for the political aspect that makes many see cyclists as "other". I'd be inclined to vote for people who promise more of it.
How do they not require parking? What do you do with them when people aren't using them? They're either parked or circulating idle. If they're circulating you can only have a more walkable neighborhood by excluding them, which means they are elsewhere and making those neighorhoods less walkable.
In some ways rideshare has given a preview of this model and it simply is not the future. Cars can't save us from cars.
A self-driving car that sits idle is a wasted resource, so the owner will always want to put it to some profitable use by moving people or goods. Contrast that to human-owned vehicles that spend 95% their life parked: https://www.reinventingparking.org/2013/02/cars-are-parked-9... That's a tremendous amount of the earths mineral resources that were mined, processed, and transported (at great carbon expense) to sit around doing nothing.
> A self-driving car that sits idle is a wasted resource
This is also true of non-self driving cars, yet we structure our resources around this case. Car use has extreme & predictable peaks with long down periods between them. If we couldn't prevent it the first time what are we doing differently to prevent it the second time?
And again rideshare has given us a slight preview of this. The taxi constraints incentivize having cars near their predicted users. We'll either need to build and maintain waiting-car storage in central areas (eg parking), or accept idle circulation in down times.
Who is going to use these cars when everyone is in school or at work or sleeping. This will not solve any issues since most people follow the same schedule.
Transportation demand would still be "lumpy", but surge pricing would encourage people to shift their transportation needs to save money. Deliveries would probably be one of the common uses during the workday. Utilization would not be 100%, but it's certain to be more than the 0% productive use that parked cars currently have.
self-driving cars are also much worse at handling the ambiguity of mixed vehicle-human spaces. They work best when the infrastructure is specifically dedicated to them - a place designed for cars.
This is definitely a huge challenge, but the progress that Waymo is making (stark contrast to Tesla or Cruise) is very encouraging. An attentive driver can definitely handle the most confusing situations better than the current self-driving vehicles currently, but attentive and courteous drivers are rare in the US.
You can actually design roads to encourage attentiveness - by using road trees, narrower lanes, roundabouts, non-straight roads, or obstacles like bollards or similar. These aren't popular though because people want generally want to zone out and move fast.
Courteousness is a bit more difficult to address with just road / public space design, but designing to encourage more driver / non-driver interaction can help.
edit: a very non-american way to force people to pay attention on country roads is to make them BARELY wide enough to accommodate two cars. This forces attentiveness, because you don't want a head-on collision. Sounds problematic, but actually kinda nice in practice.
Agreed. In their quest for efficiency, American roads have had some huge unexpected externalities. I love how the central areas of Europe chaotically blend pedestrian, car, and bicycle traffic which causes everyone to be more attentive and careful. In the US, our cities were built in the era of cars and not cows so conversion is cost prohibitive. For the US, I think "smart endpoints and dump pipes" (where self-driving cars are the endpoints, and existing roads the pipes) is the more promising way to a better future. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/running-conta...
> and don't require any of the parking that human-driving cars do
Could you unpack that? It doesn't make much sense to me. We don't want them driving around all day, we don't want them to drive home, and if it's a communal usage type thing they need to be stored outside of peak hours.
Like a taxi, an autonomous car that's parked or not carrying a passenger is wasting money, so owners will want them to be productively utilized for paying trips as much as possible. Other than for charging, there's no reason for a self-driving car to sit in one place car to wear it self out driving around empty. This means that roadside parking and parking lots will be dramatically less useful for their original purpose.
So instead of using parking, they will use road space while cruising around. That is worse, parking space is valuable, but road lanes are even more valuable. Unless you are suggesting taking parking for road, which is worse for pedestrians. Self-driving cars don’t help if everybody is stuck in traffic caused by empty cars.
If freedom to move about freely is a desirable thing (think: making more jobs accessible to people without their own car without an hour-long multi-stage commute), this is a great outcome! A self-driving rush hour would also be very different from the ones we know today. No irritated, distracted, or road-raging drivers. Immediate and safe yielding to any pedestrian who used the road. As a regular urban cyclist during rush-hour, I would instantly trade a road full of distracted commuters juggling a cup of coffee and looking at their phone with self-driving cars. Further, surge pricing would discourage people from traveling at peak times. I know of no public transit system that has anything like surge pricing, which therefore means that the systems must be overbuilt for peak capacity.
I wish all anti-motorist activists could go live in this utopian city and be happy, as opposed to lobbying for measures that make my family life more difficult.
* My parents live 50 miles away, impossible to reach to on public transport with kids and related paraphernalia
* My young kids are in different school/childcare settings requiring us to drive
* We do regular large supermarket/DIY shops that cannot be taken on public transport
* We explore different rural and coastal areas with our kids that aren't practically reachable by public transport.
In the UK, anti-motorist lobbyists have been successful in pushing for punitive measures (e.g. roadblocks AKA "LTN", road narrowing, modal filters, road closures, mass-surveillance-based road charging AKA "ULEZ", absurd blanket 20mph speed limits on inappropriate roads) and we need to push back.
Reject propaganda pushed by The Guardian and similar metro-leftie publications. It's deeply unrepresentative and manipulative.
I am not sure the "building from scratch" approach can really move the needle in terms of livable and sustainable urban environments. Like, how many centuries before natural replacement rates would achieve a transition?
The key challenge much of the world is facing (certainly the most polluting part of the world) is to rehabilitate the vast numbers of existing housing stock, and reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them.
An exception where such green-field ideas could have impact would be in the context of developing world urbanization (i.e., how not to do the same mistakes others did) but there other considerations (cost) enter the discussion.