Having traveled/lived a lot in Europe I have noticed that totally car-less city is something that actually is not necessary good, but 'limiting car travel' is.
Car based transportation is still needed for:
1. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....
2. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis, etc..)
Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only, and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).
Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off, and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....
Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on-street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major underground place).
Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.
I've been in Australia from 12 years, though an ex-pat from the UK. I visited Barcelona for the first time in a decade less than a month ago and coming from a country that's so very car centric (Australia), I found Barcelona to be an absolute delight for just walking around as a pedestrian.
Have you been to Cronulla near Sydney?
While not car-free by any stretch, it does have wonderful car-free areas that used to be crowded with cars many years ago.
Yup. London was actually fine, although still too many vehicles parked outside the City. One can set delivery times in the morning at 5 or 6 to 7 or 8. Pedestrian areas also need access for the fire departement, since they cannot carry the water/foam in buckets.
even though i'm currently living car-free, i'm with you on this. sure, i'd love to see cities invest more in human-centered design and planning, but include cars in that. they're useful! but i'm totally fine putting all the cars underground.
Call me the evil polluter, but I'm sorry I still find cars one of the best inventions humankind has come up with, and it could be a horse and a carriage for all I care. But the freedom of having your own horse/car won't be replaced with stuff like this imho.
If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.
However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.
Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.
I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.
I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.
I lived a no car life, where I walked to work, the store, everywhere. I have also lived the drive a long distance life.
My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.
Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.
A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.
> A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking
And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.
You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.
Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.
>You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute.
You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.
I live in a place where that is actually a thing, and let me tell you what happens then is that a new coffee shop opens and suddenly a two-lane road becomes a one-lane road. So too much freedom in that sense also hurts.
Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.
This seems related to the general decline in fitness of the American population, assuming OP is American. Grip strength has declined massively since the 1980s.
A short walk with bags shouldn't be hard or even unpleasant for the typical adult.
Fair point, I think most families of four might have moved out of my neighbourhood. There are a lot of families of three, but I think they move elsewhere once there is a fourth.
I don't think anyone is abolishing the suburbs just yet and I don't think most urbanites care that much about how you live your life out of the city.
It's most that for those who choose a fully urban life, when do we start to deemphasize these vestiges of auto centric culture that sort of took over before cities understood what they were doing.
I own one of those. They are great. I can buy a lot of stuff at the market around the corner and I don't have to endure my hands getting cut by my bags. I stopped shopping with my car as it is easier to walk into the kitchen with my shopping cart than loading and unloading my car and the elevator (my cart goes inside the elevator, so I don't need to unload it like my car).
The world simply can't afford everyone living as you do. Cars are like villas on the coast: they're great as long as not too many people have them, and not everyone can have them anyway.
So now the question is: on what criteria would you deserve this privilege more than others?
I thought a lot about this comment and I don't mean to insult you but- I think you could constantly optimize towards the convenient and it wouldn't solve any problems. For instance, perhaps you would prefer to sit in a chair all day being fed by tube?
Ironically, I think it's being almost fully remote that's made me appreciate cars so much. Driving becomes a pleasant activity when you have the freedom to only drive at off-peak hours, avoid all traffic jams, etc. It is also a great multiplier to the freedom that remote working brings as well as a partial antidote to some of the downsides of remote working - you are not stuck to a walkable radius around your home.
Cars have obvious downsides, urban sprawl and the resulting commutes are obviously out of control and the extremes of car centric city planning are obviously bad for society. That being said, the opposite extreme of striving to completely eliminate the greatest mobility tool ever invented strikes me as just as insane and depressing. City planning should work towards sensible compromise and incremental improvement, not wildly oscillate between opposite extremes every few decades as every generation of planners gets stuck on a new fad.
The problem is that after growing up with cars, I went and lived several years in China. I lived car free and the public transit system was actually top notch, but again, having to withstand cold days, extreme heat, carrying groceries around (first with a bag, then with a small cart), it was just incovenient.
Sure you can live like that, just like you can survive without electricy, but I honestly do not ever want to do that anymore.
When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".
I have an asthmatic child and I live in a big city, so yeah, on my list, somewhat curtailing your right to pollute around goes after my right to not have to bring him to ER with a crisis at 3 in the morning. That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
> That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
"Moving it around" here generally means moving it to electricity generation sites - ie places where people don't live. That's a huge benefit already.
And moreover it's much easier to de-pollute electricity generation infrastructure than to de-pollute fossil fuel cars.
I'm no kind of electric car fan. I'd much rather see cars die off wholesale, leaving only well-invested public transport and personal transport for the less able. I don't own a car of any sort and plan never to live more than s 15 minute walk from my place of work. But electric cars are still a huge positive step for urban environments.
Just fyi the majority of particulate matter emitted by cars comes from brakes and tires, not gasoline (diesel changes the equation somewhat)
So electric cars still have a lot of particulate emissions, thought less so in environments where they have lots of opportunity for regenerative braking.
A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.
Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.
Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.
Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic.
Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight
Part of this is that we already spent a lot of deliberate effort on reducing emissions from engines. As the study notes:
> Before the introduction of air quality standards, exhaust emissions used to be a major source of PM, especially for diesel cars (Miguel et al., 1998). Since then, PM emission standards for vehicle exhausts have become increasingly strict and now all new diesel passenger cars are fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF). Bergmann et al. (2009) found that DPFs are very effective at reducing PM emissions, lowering the emitted mass of PM by 99.3%
>When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".
So go early/late. I used to exclusively ride the train and subway before I moved out of the city and I assure you rush hour congestion is not limited to cars.
>I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
Good for you. Observation indicates that that there are no shortage of people who find cars worth the trade-offs. The better public transit is the fewer a proportion of the population they will be but as long as we have roads we'll have cars. Subways and trams didn't eliminate carriages and I don't see why things would be different today.
>That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
"Stuff like this" you mean walking/biking/public transport? It's already replaced cars in many places, including what's in the OP.
I don't know if the personal automobile is one of the best inventions...it's built on the back of climate change and has led to less efficient infrastructure and less efficient society in the name of slight convenience. If carbon was priced properly based on its negative externalities, cars would be a LOT less attractive.
I think the personal automobile still is one of the best inventions. The failure is not the vehicle itself, but the fact that entire cities have been constructed to accomodate them, to the detriment of everything else (as discussed in this thread: pedestrians, cyclists, small shops, communities, health all suffer from car-centric city design).
Actually, replacing some cars with horses (though probably not horse-drawn cars) would solve some of the problems caused by cars, especially the damage they do to the environment.
Inside city bounds, small trucks could be replaced by horse-drawn carriages; they'd be clean (clean_er- horses still er, produce waste) and large trucks should never be allowed in the same areas as pedestrians and bicyclists anyway.
I'm not saying that the current pace of life in very big cities could be maintained in this way, but just the reduction in emissions would probably make up for any short-term financial loss.
Without regard to the actual topic there is a gem of wisdom that applies to a lot of hackers in "projects from hell": if you want to change something big way, do it in incremental steps, do what is within reach (in reach for the most stubborn/narrow minded opponent).
Just because you figured it all out don't expect others to listen to you lecture them.
A small step, easily digestible, that turns out to be useful, is much more useful than long rants: a) the actual goal is one step closer, b) people will start to really think about what you say once you delivered, c) you might learn you are wrong
It rains each three minutes, the sea is deep and wild and the water is cold as death. People talk in high pitch tones, are easy going and friendly by default with (civilised) visitors but also complex inside and sometimes release their sadness or little inner martian also. Is all by the weather
So is basically like the planet Kamino (de Santiago) but with really memorable food. I love it :-)
Here is the official unofficial anthem that explains everything about this crazy people:
I grew up in Galicia, my sister still works for child services there. I'll give you some of the cheer and awe, but will dispute the lack of discordance.
Based on [0], but it seems to be extremely ill-defined what a "car-free place" is. For example, in the United States, something like a single car-free street seems to fit this definition, whereas in Europe, you will find pedestrian streets basically in every town or village, but only the places where for example the entire city center / old town is carless appear in the article. I also tried to do a little manual disambiguation:
US 59
Germany 36
France 31
Austria 28
Switzerland 26
UK 17
Spain 17
Australia 16
Canada 11
Bulgaria 11
Italy 10
Portugal 9
Argentina 9
Poland 8
Netherlands 8
Morocco 8
Mexico 7
Belgium 7
Greece 6
Croatia 6
China 6
Sweden 5
Romania 5
Japan 5
Israel 5
Ukraine 4
Turkey 4
Russia 4
India 4
Brazil 4
Serbia 3
Denmark 3
Nicaragua 2
Lithuania 2
Lebanon 2
Finland 2
Vietnam 1
Urugay 1
UAE 1
Thailand 1
Nepal 1
Montenegro 1
Malaysia 1
Lybia 1
Latvia 1
Kenya 1
Kazakhstan 1
Indonesia 1
Hungary 1
Estonia 1
Cuba 1
Colombia 1
Chile 1
Sierra Leone 1
New Zealand 1
Czech Republic 3
Costa Rica 2
Burkina Faso 1
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1
One thing I was thinking of are university campuses, which tend to be more often be localized (not spread among a larger city) in the US. I'm sure there are some in European countries but I haven't seen it yet and I'm a student here. In most of these types of campuses that I've been to in the US, the main streets within the campus are therefore closed to non-essential car traffic.
The US has a lot of small cities/towns, where it's arguably easier to implement this sort of thing, even by accident. The US also has a lot of old cities/towns (or sections thereof) untouched by the World Wars, and thus having missed out on the "opportunity" to rework things for cars without having to demolish perfectly good and usable (and now historic) buildings.
There are also quite a few golf course / country club / equestrian / etc. communities where there's some other mode of transportation (e.g. golf carts or horses) that's common enough to make car access less necessary.
You know what very famous city is completely car-free? Venice.
That's no joke. Venice has canals and all the vehicle traffic is restricted to the canals, but, well, that's exactly it. Vehicle traffic and pedestrian traffic never have to cross each other's path, in fact they physically can't [1]. There are large areas, especially in the interior of the main island, that are naturally only for pedestrians, areas where only small canals reach that are not accessible by motorboat, areas where you don't hear a vehicle for hours on end.
And just to answer the concerns of people who wonder how commerce would continue if delivery trucks are not allowed to enter a pedestrianised city- Venice is a huge commercial zone where everyone sells everything to everyone else. Free trade doesn't need cars, people.
________________
[1] Unless a pedestrian falls into a canal; or someone like Ottobre Nero, an infamous gondoliero, manages to get their vessel on land which is not impossible with a bit of motivation.
I'm from a town nearby Pontevedra. I lived in the city, and outside. I really like carless cities, and move almost everywhere by bike where I live now (Coruña).
Pontevedra is great, and I really like how the city center feels, it got super friendly to walk by foot. But every time I see news like this I get a little angry because they don't talk about the real experience of commuting to the city or its crazy development.
Regarding development: The city has very few parks inside it compared to other Spanish cities. Mainly because they don't save spaces for them, the ones that exist have 30+ years. Building development is crazy, you can build virtually everywhere. You can see new buildings leaving very narrow alleys (example in [1]), tons of new buildings with no single "green zone" nearby (example in [2] where the only planned "park" is the little one by the roundabout)
Regarding commuting: Doing so from the multiple towns around is not easy and got way worse. . Many kids go to study to Pontevedra from 20+ km around. The road from my parent's house from my mothers job has 40 road bumpers in total. She does 4 trips a day counting 160 bumps a day. It gets old quick. The "deterrent parkings" are poorly located to avoid crossing the city and the main one we can use looks like a swamp when it rains, as you can see here: https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA
I just want to put our two cents on a different side on the story, I wish they implemented some more policies for outsiders that work / use city services. I hope more people get the whole picture from this.
There's an intentionally old-timey place in Michigan called Macinac Island (pronounced mackinaw), which has been automobile-less since I can remember. Fun place to go for a bit, get some fudge, go for some nature walks, get a horse drawn carriage ride, etc. Haven't been since I was a kid, so it's hard to say how the experience holds up.
Likely a much, much lower population density than any of these current urban experiments, but I still think of it every time I see the "no cars" thing being done.
I was lived in Spain for some time not too long ago. Wife and I visited Pontevedra and we fell in love. I wish there were some way for me to get a good remote job and live there.
The article makes it sounds all positive, but I'd love to hear from a local that's been through the transition. Surely the local businesses cannot be all positive about this.
I mean, a car comes with a trunk, where you can put your shopping in. Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.
On the contrary; walking encourages foot traffic to small shops. If you're in the car anyway, you're likely to go to the big mall outside the city instead.
Having to carry stuff a bit is not a huge problem, that's what personal shopping trolleys are for.
I'm not from Pontevedra, but close, and I know some locals and I've been there.
Complains that I remember.
- People from outside the city has problems to move apparently. They say that there aren't parkings enough in the city borders, so they have to go for one that's roughly in the center, through very slow traffic lines. That induces them to go less frequently.
- Businesses like bars, chocolate shops and so on flourished (leisure oriented), but others like hardware stores, furniture stores, two law firms, and a Cinema closed.
The problem is when you follow that logic to its conclusion, then everyone needs a car, streets are replaced by six lane roads, and only giant big box stores are left.
> Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.
The answer is you shop differently, and the shops are set up differently. I remember one residential area in a Spanish city where there were huge numbers of small fruit and vegetables shops, almost kiosks, which popped up during the morning, there was one just round the corner from where I was staying, and probably 5 within a 5 minute walk. You can literally just go downstairs and pick something up, so that’s probably a third or a half of the shopping weight on your doorstep. Then there were small supermarkets dotted around, and you’d just pick things up on the way back from the bus stop. The whole concept of a huge fortnightly shop is based on a car culture.
This is terrible. I read the article and thought “wow this would really work for Vilnius”. Something I’ve thought for last year matter of fact. Initially ai thought some car traffic could be replaced with e-scooters, but cobbled roads wouldn’t work well for it.
Turns out Vilnius (old town I presume) is already “””car free”””. In reality there’s about 3-5 streets that mostly take tourists and locals around. There are no good reason to keep them open. I really hope one day this changes. It would make city so much quieter and nicer.
This list is much longer than I expected but still so small. It will eventually have to contain almost all places or, rather, be replaced by a wiki page with the "list of places that still have cars". That future seems so unimaginable to most but it needs to somehow happen in a matter of decades, if not years.
One fact I noticed traveling through europe, the small quaint cities that couldn't accomodate cars well... were designed and built for pedestrians and horses in the first place.
Interesting to read this one, as just last night I was having dinner with a friend and discussed the topic of car-free cities, driverless cars, etc, for about 2 hours.
It is such an interesting topic, and there's so much assumptions that we always take for granted that prevent us from having a smart conversation about it. And then, of course, there's regulation, which essentially kills any idea almost instantly.
An example? In the US you need to have a rear mirror in a car. A driverless car doesn't need one... But without the mirror, it can't pass the test to make it compliant and allow it to be on the road.
>many streets are designed as loops, making it impossible to use them to drive from one end of the city to the other. This solved a major problem—before the redesign, some streets were choked with nearly 30,000 cars a day, most of them simply passing through. Now, Lores told Citiscope, “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
They got away with transient traffic and are now generating their traffic in adjacent communities. Smart.
What's the point of driving to X if you know you can't get to X by car? The 'adjacent community' traffic surplus idea is bogus. At most you'll generate some short term need for added parking space in adjacent regions.
At least in Europe, many cities have large parking spaces at the city borders where a parking ticket is automatically a public transportation ticket to the car-free city center.
I think you misunderstood it. Take a look at the map and you'll see pontevedra is tiny, a circle barely 2km wide. Car owners obviously don't work there but commute somewhere else (most probably Vigo in the south). Story goes, their roads where clogged with passing traffic, commuters passing by pontevedra going somewhere else. Then pontevedra got rid of all roads and made a big ring road around the city. So they turned their city into a proverbial cul de sac to escape from other people's traffic. If every other community in the way did the same around them guess what.
The old city center is a warren of narrow streets and must have been hell to navigate. Seems that it was a dying city center slum and this was a key step in gentrifying it.
And how many of these responses do we need on each one of these posts? I find it fascinating that articles talking about the benefits of car-free places make some people so viscerally upset. Why does this strike a nerve so much?
They show a b/w picture from the 1970's to demonstrate the "before" situation with passthrough traffic (https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/10...). If you look at maps, you will see that since then the AP-9 highway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9) has been built around the city. So that situation was clearly resolved otherwise. It has nothing to do with the current Mayor's expensive actions to make the city more easily overrun by tourists.
Having traveled/lived a lot in Europe I have noticed that totally car-less city is something that actually is not necessary good, but 'limiting car travel' is.
Car based transportation is still needed for:
1. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....
2. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis, etc..)
Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only, and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).
Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off, and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....
Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on-street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major underground place).
Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.
I've been in Australia from 12 years, though an ex-pat from the UK. I visited Barcelona for the first time in a decade less than a month ago and coming from a country that's so very car centric (Australia), I found Barcelona to be an absolute delight for just walking around as a pedestrian.
I agree with your sentiment wholly.
Have you been to Cronulla near Sydney? While not car-free by any stretch, it does have wonderful car-free areas that used to be crowded with cars many years ago.
I've not seen much of Sydney besides the inner city for travel got worj, the Northern beaches are beautiful but not for many years.
I'll be sure to check it out.
I’ve been to Cronulla recently and it’s nothing like Barca. We really liked Bundeena tho, which is where we took ferry to Cronulla tho.
Yup. London was actually fine, although still too many vehicles parked outside the City. One can set delivery times in the morning at 5 or 6 to 7 or 8. Pedestrian areas also need access for the fire departement, since they cannot carry the water/foam in buckets.
even though i'm currently living car-free, i'm with you on this. sure, i'd love to see cities invest more in human-centered design and planning, but include cars in that. they're useful! but i'm totally fine putting all the cars underground.
Call me the evil polluter, but I'm sorry I still find cars one of the best inventions humankind has come up with, and it could be a horse and a carriage for all I care. But the freedom of having your own horse/car won't be replaced with stuff like this imho.
If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.
Nobody is questioning the convenience of cars.
However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.
Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.
I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.
I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.
I lived a no car life, where I walked to work, the store, everywhere. I have also lived the drive a long distance life.
My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.
Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.
A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.
> A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking
And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.
You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.
Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.
>You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute.
You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.
I live in a place where that is actually a thing, and let me tell you what happens then is that a new coffee shop opens and suddenly a two-lane road becomes a one-lane road. So too much freedom in that sense also hurts.
Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.
> Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close.
Are we talking 3-5 min walk close? Just want to establish whether you actually lived in the kind of place people are talking about here.
A 5 min walk with groceries shouldn't be burdensome. A 25 min walk would be.
He's complaining about having to carry groceries from the car to the elevator, so I don't think he would consider a 5 min walk with groceries "fine".
True.
This seems related to the general decline in fitness of the American population, assuming OP is American. Grip strength has declined massively since the 1980s.
A short walk with bags shouldn't be hard or even unpleasant for the typical adult.
I am shopping for a family of four, and often have two small children with me.
It was a lot easier when it was just for me. I now get enough groceries per trip that there is no way I could carry them all home by myself.
Fair point, I think most families of four might have moved out of my neighbourhood. There are a lot of families of three, but I think they move elsewhere once there is a fourth.
I don't think anyone is abolishing the suburbs just yet and I don't think most urbanites care that much about how you live your life out of the city.
It's most that for those who choose a fully urban life, when do we start to deemphasize these vestiges of auto centric culture that sort of took over before cities understood what they were doing.
The personal grocery cart is a thing.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Personal+Shopping+Carts
I own one of those. They are great. I can buy a lot of stuff at the market around the corner and I don't have to endure my hands getting cut by my bags. I stopped shopping with my car as it is easier to walk into the kitchen with my shopping cart than loading and unloading my car and the elevator (my cart goes inside the elevator, so I don't need to unload it like my car).
The world simply can't afford everyone living as you do. Cars are like villas on the coast: they're great as long as not too many people have them, and not everyone can have them anyway.
So now the question is: on what criteria would you deserve this privilege more than others?
I thought a lot about this comment and I don't mean to insult you but- I think you could constantly optimize towards the convenient and it wouldn't solve any problems. For instance, perhaps you would prefer to sit in a chair all day being fed by tube?
Ironically, I think it's being almost fully remote that's made me appreciate cars so much. Driving becomes a pleasant activity when you have the freedom to only drive at off-peak hours, avoid all traffic jams, etc. It is also a great multiplier to the freedom that remote working brings as well as a partial antidote to some of the downsides of remote working - you are not stuck to a walkable radius around your home.
Cars have obvious downsides, urban sprawl and the resulting commutes are obviously out of control and the extremes of car centric city planning are obviously bad for society. That being said, the opposite extreme of striving to completely eliminate the greatest mobility tool ever invented strikes me as just as insane and depressing. City planning should work towards sensible compromise and incremental improvement, not wildly oscillate between opposite extremes every few decades as every generation of planners gets stuck on a new fad.
The problem is that after growing up with cars, I went and lived several years in China. I lived car free and the public transit system was actually top notch, but again, having to withstand cold days, extreme heat, carrying groceries around (first with a bag, then with a small cart), it was just incovenient.
Sure you can live like that, just like you can survive without electricy, but I honestly do not ever want to do that anymore.
When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".
I have an asthmatic child and I live in a big city, so yeah, on my list, somewhat curtailing your right to pollute around goes after my right to not have to bring him to ER with a crisis at 3 in the morning. That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
[1] Related: Molecules of Freedom https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-depa...
> That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
"Moving it around" here generally means moving it to electricity generation sites - ie places where people don't live. That's a huge benefit already.
And moreover it's much easier to de-pollute electricity generation infrastructure than to de-pollute fossil fuel cars.
I'm no kind of electric car fan. I'd much rather see cars die off wholesale, leaving only well-invested public transport and personal transport for the less able. I don't own a car of any sort and plan never to live more than s 15 minute walk from my place of work. But electric cars are still a huge positive step for urban environments.
Just fyi the majority of particulate matter emitted by cars comes from brakes and tires, not gasoline (diesel changes the equation somewhat)
So electric cars still have a lot of particulate emissions, thought less so in environments where they have lots of opportunity for regenerative braking.
That's really interesting. Could you cite that for me? I had a quick look around but didn't see anything super reliable.
Sure. There's: http://www.soliftec.com/NonExhaust%20PMs.pdf (2016)
Study highlights:
A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.
Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.
Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.
Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic.
Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight
Part of this is that we already spent a lot of deliberate effort on reducing emissions from engines. As the study notes:
> Before the introduction of air quality standards, exhaust emissions used to be a major source of PM, especially for diesel cars (Miguel et al., 1998). Since then, PM emission standards for vehicle exhausts have become increasingly strict and now all new diesel passenger cars are fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF). Bergmann et al. (2009) found that DPFs are very effective at reducing PM emissions, lowering the emitted mass of PM by 99.3%
>When everyone uses "their freedom"[1] every workday at the same time, suddenly no one (including those how choose the bus) has "their freedom".
So go early/late. I used to exclusively ride the train and subway before I moved out of the city and I assure you rush hour congestion is not limited to cars.
>I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
Good for you. Observation indicates that that there are no shortage of people who find cars worth the trade-offs. The better public transit is the fewer a proportion of the population they will be but as long as we have roads we'll have cars. Subways and trams didn't eliminate carriages and I don't see why things would be different today.
>That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
The solution to pollution is dilution!
Electric cars would be a massive improvement.
"Stuff like this" you mean walking/biking/public transport? It's already replaced cars in many places, including what's in the OP.
I don't know if the personal automobile is one of the best inventions...it's built on the back of climate change and has led to less efficient infrastructure and less efficient society in the name of slight convenience. If carbon was priced properly based on its negative externalities, cars would be a LOT less attractive.
I think the personal automobile still is one of the best inventions. The failure is not the vehicle itself, but the fact that entire cities have been constructed to accomodate them, to the detriment of everything else (as discussed in this thread: pedestrians, cyclists, small shops, communities, health all suffer from car-centric city design).
Actually, replacing some cars with horses (though probably not horse-drawn cars) would solve some of the problems caused by cars, especially the damage they do to the environment.
Inside city bounds, small trucks could be replaced by horse-drawn carriages; they'd be clean (clean_er- horses still er, produce waste) and large trucks should never be allowed in the same areas as pedestrians and bicyclists anyway.
I'm not saying that the current pace of life in very big cities could be maintained in this way, but just the reduction in emissions would probably make up for any short-term financial loss.
Without regard to the actual topic there is a gem of wisdom that applies to a lot of hackers in "projects from hell": if you want to change something big way, do it in incremental steps, do what is within reach (in reach for the most stubborn/narrow minded opponent).
Just because you figured it all out don't expect others to listen to you lecture them.
A small step, easily digestible, that turns out to be useful, is much more useful than long rants: a) the actual goal is one step closer, b) people will start to really think about what you say once you delivered, c) you might learn you are wrong
It rains each three minutes, the sea is deep and wild and the water is cold as death. People talk in high pitch tones, are easy going and friendly by default with (civilised) visitors but also complex inside and sometimes release their sadness or little inner martian also. Is all by the weather
So is basically like the planet Kamino (de Santiago) but with really memorable food. I love it :-)
Here is the official unofficial anthem that explains everything about this crazy people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t02dFZI7nw4
I spent a lot of my youth there, yet didn't know Siniestro! Thanks for that!
Galicia is a great region, you feel like you're living both in the past and in the present at once, without discordance.
I grew up in Galicia, my sister still works for child services there. I'll give you some of the cheer and awe, but will dispute the lack of discordance.
This is such a cool publication, by the way. Founded by David Byrne of Talking Heads.
I'd love to see a ranking by country of the most carless cities.
Based on [0], but it seems to be extremely ill-defined what a "car-free place" is. For example, in the United States, something like a single car-free street seems to fit this definition, whereas in Europe, you will find pedestrian streets basically in every town or village, but only the places where for example the entire city center / old town is carless appear in the article. I also tried to do a little manual disambiguation:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_placesUS having a first place looks strange given how car-centric it's culture is.
One thing I was thinking of are university campuses, which tend to be more often be localized (not spread among a larger city) in the US. I'm sure there are some in European countries but I haven't seen it yet and I'm a student here. In most of these types of campuses that I've been to in the US, the main streets within the campus are therefore closed to non-essential car traffic.
The figures are not per-capita. That's why.
The US has a lot of small cities/towns, where it's arguably easier to implement this sort of thing, even by accident. The US also has a lot of old cities/towns (or sections thereof) untouched by the World Wars, and thus having missed out on the "opportunity" to rework things for cars without having to demolish perfectly good and usable (and now historic) buildings.
There are also quite a few golf course / country club / equestrian / etc. communities where there's some other mode of transportation (e.g. golf carts or horses) that's common enough to make car access less necessary.
You know what very famous city is completely car-free? Venice.
That's no joke. Venice has canals and all the vehicle traffic is restricted to the canals, but, well, that's exactly it. Vehicle traffic and pedestrian traffic never have to cross each other's path, in fact they physically can't [1]. There are large areas, especially in the interior of the main island, that are naturally only for pedestrians, areas where only small canals reach that are not accessible by motorboat, areas where you don't hear a vehicle for hours on end.
And just to answer the concerns of people who wonder how commerce would continue if delivery trucks are not allowed to enter a pedestrianised city- Venice is a huge commercial zone where everyone sells everything to everyone else. Free trade doesn't need cars, people.
________________
[1] Unless a pedestrian falls into a canal; or someone like Ottobre Nero, an infamous gondoliero, manages to get their vessel on land which is not impossible with a bit of motivation.
I'm from a town nearby Pontevedra. I lived in the city, and outside. I really like carless cities, and move almost everywhere by bike where I live now (Coruña).
Pontevedra is great, and I really like how the city center feels, it got super friendly to walk by foot. But every time I see news like this I get a little angry because they don't talk about the real experience of commuting to the city or its crazy development.
Regarding development: The city has very few parks inside it compared to other Spanish cities. Mainly because they don't save spaces for them, the ones that exist have 30+ years. Building development is crazy, you can build virtually everywhere. You can see new buildings leaving very narrow alleys (example in [1]), tons of new buildings with no single "green zone" nearby (example in [2] where the only planned "park" is the little one by the roundabout)
Regarding commuting: Doing so from the multiple towns around is not easy and got way worse. . Many kids go to study to Pontevedra from 20+ km around. The road from my parent's house from my mothers job has 40 road bumpers in total. She does 4 trips a day counting 160 bumps a day. It gets old quick. The "deterrent parkings" are poorly located to avoid crossing the city and the main one we can use looks like a swamp when it rains, as you can see here: https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA
I just want to put our two cents on a different side on the story, I wish they implemented some more policies for outsiders that work / use city services. I hope more people get the whole picture from this.
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4267082,-8.634709,761a,35y,2...
There's an intentionally old-timey place in Michigan called Macinac Island (pronounced mackinaw), which has been automobile-less since I can remember. Fun place to go for a bit, get some fudge, go for some nature walks, get a horse drawn carriage ride, etc. Haven't been since I was a kid, so it's hard to say how the experience holds up.
Likely a much, much lower population density than any of these current urban experiments, but I still think of it every time I see the "no cars" thing being done.
http://www.mackinac.com/about/history/no-cars
> automobile-less since I can remember
Sept 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence-motorca...
For some reason, this feels like a real tragedy.
I was lived in Spain for some time not too long ago. Wife and I visited Pontevedra and we fell in love. I wish there were some way for me to get a good remote job and live there.
I'm working remote from a near village, and it's soo awesome!
Which one? I'm from Moraña myself
The article makes it sounds all positive, but I'd love to hear from a local that's been through the transition. Surely the local businesses cannot be all positive about this.
I mean, a car comes with a trunk, where you can put your shopping in. Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.
Here's a study looking at that: https://bicycle-research.ucdavis.edu/bicyclists-as-consumers...
Found bikers basically spend as much as drivers... they spend less per trip but make more trips.
On the contrary; walking encourages foot traffic to small shops. If you're in the car anyway, you're likely to go to the big mall outside the city instead.
Having to carry stuff a bit is not a huge problem, that's what personal shopping trolleys are for.
I'm not from Pontevedra, but close, and I know some locals and I've been there.
Complains that I remember.
- People from outside the city has problems to move apparently. They say that there aren't parkings enough in the city borders, so they have to go for one that's roughly in the center, through very slow traffic lines. That induces them to go less frequently.
- Businesses like bars, chocolate shops and so on flourished (leisure oriented), but others like hardware stores, furniture stores, two law firms, and a Cinema closed.
Imagine that you were going to the hardware store. It's either impossible to park near it https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4264585,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,1... or difficult/forbidden/very slow traffic https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4304871,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,1...
Exactly the commuting problem from my comment. Thanks!
The problem is when you follow that logic to its conclusion, then everyone needs a car, streets are replaced by six lane roads, and only giant big box stores are left.
> Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.
The answer is you shop differently, and the shops are set up differently. I remember one residential area in a Spanish city where there were huge numbers of small fruit and vegetables shops, almost kiosks, which popped up during the morning, there was one just round the corner from where I was staying, and probably 5 within a 5 minute walk. You can literally just go downstairs and pick something up, so that’s probably a third or a half of the shopping weight on your doorstep. Then there were small supermarkets dotted around, and you’d just pick things up on the way back from the bus stop. The whole concept of a huge fortnightly shop is based on a car culture.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places
This is terrible. I read the article and thought “wow this would really work for Vilnius”. Something I’ve thought for last year matter of fact. Initially ai thought some car traffic could be replaced with e-scooters, but cobbled roads wouldn’t work well for it. Turns out Vilnius (old town I presume) is already “””car free”””. In reality there’s about 3-5 streets that mostly take tourists and locals around. There are no good reason to keep them open. I really hope one day this changes. It would make city so much quieter and nicer.
This list is much longer than I expected but still so small. It will eventually have to contain almost all places or, rather, be replaced by a wiki page with the "list of places that still have cars". That future seems so unimaginable to most but it needs to somehow happen in a matter of decades, if not years.
One fact I noticed traveling through europe, the small quaint cities that couldn't accomodate cars well... were designed and built for pedestrians and horses in the first place.
Interesting to read this one, as just last night I was having dinner with a friend and discussed the topic of car-free cities, driverless cars, etc, for about 2 hours.
It is such an interesting topic, and there's so much assumptions that we always take for granted that prevent us from having a smart conversation about it. And then, of course, there's regulation, which essentially kills any idea almost instantly.
An example? In the US you need to have a rear mirror in a car. A driverless car doesn't need one... But without the mirror, it can't pass the test to make it compliant and allow it to be on the road.
Makes sense, driverless cars can still be driven manually right now. So it needs a read mirror.
Jane Jacobs has this all figured out in 1960!
>many streets are designed as loops, making it impossible to use them to drive from one end of the city to the other. This solved a major problem—before the redesign, some streets were choked with nearly 30,000 cars a day, most of them simply passing through. Now, Lores told Citiscope, “If you enter by the south, you leave by the south.”
They got away with transient traffic and are now generating their traffic in adjacent communities. Smart.
What's the point of driving to X if you know you can't get to X by car? The 'adjacent community' traffic surplus idea is bogus. At most you'll generate some short term need for added parking space in adjacent regions.
At least in Europe, many cities have large parking spaces at the city borders where a parking ticket is automatically a public transportation ticket to the car-free city center.
I think you misunderstood it. Take a look at the map and you'll see pontevedra is tiny, a circle barely 2km wide. Car owners obviously don't work there but commute somewhere else (most probably Vigo in the south). Story goes, their roads where clogged with passing traffic, commuters passing by pontevedra going somewhere else. Then pontevedra got rid of all roads and made a big ring road around the city. So they turned their city into a proverbial cul de sac to escape from other people's traffic. If every other community in the way did the same around them guess what.
The old city center is a warren of narrow streets and must have been hell to navigate. Seems that it was a dying city center slum and this was a key step in gentrifying it.
I would say that 50% of the people that live in Pontevedra city work in the city itself (mainly gov administration).
IOW, they fixed their congestion by building more roads (the AP-9 highway).
There has been an suspiciously steady spate of anti-car posts on HN in the past month.
Because use of private transport has to decrease. It is neither sustainable nor healthy. Even if it's a Tesla.
How many of these posts do we need a day? They have long ceased to be "news" or interesting. The only real variation here is that it isn't citylab.
And how many of these responses do we need on each one of these posts? I find it fascinating that articles talking about the benefits of car-free places make some people so viscerally upset. Why does this strike a nerve so much?
> How many of these posts do we need a day?
Who is "we"?
> They have long ceased to be "news" or interesting.
To you, apparently.
> The only real variation here is that it isn't citylab.
Indeed. That's why I filter out citylab references on HN in my feed.
There's a little "hide" link beside each story you can use if you want to see something else in its place
Typical disingenuous car-hater article.
They show a b/w picture from the 1970's to demonstrate the "before" situation with passthrough traffic (https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/10...). If you look at maps, you will see that since then the AP-9 highway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9) has been built around the city. So that situation was clearly resolved otherwise. It has nothing to do with the current Mayor's expensive actions to make the city more easily overrun by tourists.