The title and website headline are misleading, this isn't going to be car-free, it's going to be _no privately owned cars_.
> We’re bringing together services like ridesharing, bikes and scooters, and same-day grocery delivery, so zero private cars means zero hassle.
Here's why this matters from someone who lives here: 4 months out of the year Tempe's average temperature is above 99F. This means one of the following:
1. Residents will heavily use ride sharing and delivery during the summer, just "in place of" owning a car.
2. Culdesac will install a ridiculous amount of outdoor cooling for its residents, one might imagine this will require a fair amount of water.
Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea, but is Tempe the right place to do it?
There are many options like semi-underground homes that could have been trialed here which would have fit the local climate; but they aren't doing that. Seems like they are trying to create a one-size-fits-all solution which IMO will not work outside of California.
Not quite 99F (which is like 37C) but Singapore is VERY humid compared year round (as opposed to 4 months) of ~90 F (32 C). On many days I've seen "feels like 39 C" on google weather. Despite all that, car ownership is 12 per 100 people. People rely heavily on public transit, which is air conditioned (AC seems to be their sin, but it's definitely more efficient than AC in every car on top of burning gas to get it to move around).
I think as you allow as a possibility in the end of your reply, it's not like it can't work, but non-ebikes and scooters might become a bit much for some people unless there's copious cover.
Riding an ebike in 39c is uncomfortable but not unthinkable. I do it semi regularly. If your trip is >10km it's not that bad at all. You will probably have to shower when you get home but it's still better than owning a car.
Being on a modern E-Bike in 39C is definitely way more comfortable than walking. You can adjust the power settings so you barely have to touch the pedals to move, it's less effort than walking, and you'll be traveling at up to 25 km/h so you'll get some air cooling you wouldn't get if you were just walking.
I've ridden mine in up to 35C and it's like stepping into an oasis compared to standing still in that temperature, more so if you wear clothing like loose fitting cotton clothing that benefits from the increased airflow.
>so you'll get some air cooling you wouldn't get if you were just walking.
39C is well above skin temperature so you're only going to get evaporative cooling and the effectiveness of that depends on humidity. It's possible the heating effect of the hot air blowing over your skin overwhelms the evaporative cooling and you are actually getting net warming.
Even if the humidity is low if you're not already drenched in sweet, it's going to feel awful.
In my experience this would be air heating and not air cooling because the air temperature is higher than the skin temperature, unless you're already sweating and being evaporatively cooled from that.
> Billions still do all over the world in similar climates.
Yes. And it sucks. There is a reason the founder of Singapore said it “made development possible in the tropics.” We don’t “need” indoor toilets either. But they’re pretty great. So are cars. Big SUVs with the AC turned down to 65.
It doesn't suck. It's just a temporary discomfort. I feel like the discomfort is actually somewhat beneficial. When I get home after cycling on a really hot day I immediately take a shower and then feel great about how comfortable my home is. Better than if I had taken an air-conditioned car/bus back. I think maybe we have too much confort all of the time and it makes it harder to appreciate than if we get to experience discomfort some times.
You mean the first world privilege of "Big SUVs with the AC turned down to 65"?
Yes, it is stunning.
Especially when its being confused to something like a basic human right -- that everybody should just adopt, instead of the spoiled result of a consumerist society, enabled by first world wages and cheap energy (subsidised by exercising global power).
As is the idea that the lifestyle of your country (or your adopted country) is the best in the world, and everyone should follow suit, with big SUVs and AC to 65" -- and if they don't do it, it's only because they can't afford it (never mind that places that can very well afford SUVs and full-on AC blast, like in most of Western Europe, happen to shun both as tacky).
>We don’t “need” indoor toilets either. But they’re pretty great. So are cars. Big SUVs with the AC turned down to 65.
Even more so a livable planet, and we're running out of that just so some cushioned entitled people can have "big SUVs with the AC turned down to 65", 24/7 burgers, and other BS...
Exactly. There are a lot of things we can do without - refrigerators in every home, laundry in every home, AC, etc. But they make life way better and very few people are willing to go without.
Can't edit my comment now, but that's what I meant. Normal bikes in 39C is something I might do with a tank top or something, e-bikes seem neccessary there. I also implied scooters = bad but I take that back, scooters and e-bikes seem good, it is manually driven transit in 39C seems like it would be sufficiently uncomfortable.
Just wanted to say thank you for using Celsius in addition to Fahrenheit. I don't understand why people only use Fahrenheit without adding the equivalent Celsius value.
People that use Fahrenheit as a measurement by default tend to be people belonging to countries where they typically don't consider the rest of the world outside of their own borders. Celsius on the other hand, is used by most of the world.
I'm very interested to see if this is true. Seems like the US (take it you mean US, not all of Americas?) is about 4% of the world population, so my guess would be that there is more non-US residents on HN than US residents. (but I don't actually have any insights into it)
By US residents I mean people who live in the US culture. I would guess, but like you I have no insights into it, given the topics we discuss here and the ancestry of the site, that most of the people here are either Americans or spend most of their time in America. In other words, people on this site are likely pretty comfortable with the Imperial system.
> By US residents I mean people who live in the US culture
Usually resident refers to people having their domicile somewhere, not just being influenced by something like culture. I think many countries around the world follow US culture, but that does not mean they automatically know imperial system.
Nice, getting closer. I think US is the only country in North America that uses Fahrenheit so one could say then that less than 50% of people on HN are from the US.
You don't want to be building anything underground in Tempe. There's a nasty layer of natural concrete called Caliche about a meter below the surface in much of the area. Archaeologists hate the stuff because it's so expensive and time consuming to dig through.
The local indigenous people have been building sustainable apartment blocks called pueblos for a long time though. They're surprisingly nice during the summer (approx. 80F inside), even without AC.
And no mention of how they plan to ward off Uber's killbots, known to roam Tempe. Given the opacity of the financial system, how do we even know this is being developed by humans? The whole thing could just be a setup to lure more fleshy targets out into the open.
As a resident of Phoenix, I can see this working 9 months out of the year. But, June can reach 120f, and I’m cursing just by the time I walk from the grocery story through the parking lot to my car. July and August have random monsoons which aren’t navigable on scooter or bike.
If you added golf cart paths, the community becomes much more attractive. I’d take a golf cart 1/4 mile to an air conditioned bus stop/ride share stand.
Notice that this arrangement is quite unlivable for people with babies. Walking a child in a stroller 1/4 mile in 120f, to meet a ride share.... with what car seat? It would take any affluent new parents just a month before they nope’d out of that.
Why are people living there if they can't even step outside an air-conditioned environment for two minutes? Might as well be living on the moon in a pod at that point.
Because that's only a few months out of the year, and even during that time it's better at night.
Also people live in cities up north that are much closer to living on the moon in a pod during the winter months. People live near jobs, family, housing and community regardless of how pleasant the weather is.
As someone who used to live in the Phoenix climate, and now lives in one of the furthest north cities in the US:
The middle of winter here is much more 'moon-like' than the middle of summer ever was in Phoenix. I basically have to don a space suit to go out in below 0 weather!
Well the highest temperatures in Tempe in the summer are closer to the highest temperatures on the lunar surface during the lunar day than the lowest temperatures in the Northern US winters are to the lowest temperatures on the lunar surface during the lunar night.
So depending on how you slice it, Tempe might in fact be more moon-like.
Because it's actually a pretty nice climate for a lot of the year and it doesn't get snow. And I'm not sure the hot Phoenix summers are really much worse (if any worse) than the humid southeast. When I lived in New Orleans my recollection was that a lot of short walk from AC to AC went on, especially during the day, as well.
And obviously people can adapt (although the native peoples tended to be at higher altitudes in the summer). There are also construction techniques that mitigate the heat to some degree--but you're not going to see those in use at the local big box store.
I was born and raised in Miami, in a house with no A/C. But the house was also built in the 1950s before A/C was commonplace.
You mention "the native peoples" (though I think you don't mean that as the indigenous people who lived there, but rather the more recent immigrants who have been established there for decades)? I know that I got used to the heat. And now when I visit, I find I have lost that ability.
I think one of the long-term failures in US construction has been 60+ years of eschewing vernacular architecture in favor of nation-wide standard building styles, and trusting in cheap power to work around any problems.
It's clearly possible to live in New Orleans w/o A/C, as that's what people did for centuries. The buildings can be designed to help with the heat, with high ceilings and ways to improve airflow. The culture can change to avoid being active in the middle of the hottest days (think 'siesta'). Even simple things help, like not walking fast, and wearing thin cotton clothing.
There's a different set of techniques for living in the desert SW. Thick adobe is the traditional method to delay heat transfer so the day's heat doesn't reach the inside until the cooler nights. Open the windows in the morning to cool the house, then shut them for the rest of the day.
However adobe specifically is more expensive than stick and frame construction methods, and requires more maintenance than slapping on a bunch of insulation and installing a big-ass A/C. There are other approaches than adobe - I'm have only rudimentary knowledge of the topic though, mostly a grab-bag from living in New Mexico for 7 or so years.
No I actually did mean indigenous peoples who often moved seasonally.
But you're right. Especially for a dry climate like the Southwest, there are a lot of construction/architectural techniques--especially for standalone dwellings--that can go a long way towards eliminating/reducing the need for A/C.
In general, climate control is also just more of an expectation these days for many people. I live in an old farmhouse in central Mass where you get maybe a couple of really hot spells over the course of a summer. And additional fairly hot/humid days.
I have a small window unit I sometimes put in but a lot of people almost can't believe I don't have whole house A/C which I would consider largely unnecessary.
Back in the 1980s there was an ad campaign for Miami - "Miami, see it like a native." That didn't refer to the Tequesta or the Calusa, nor even the more recent Seminole, but to long-time residents, primarily European-derived.
FWIW, what you wrote about going to higher altitudes in summer made me think more of (rich) people in NYC or Boston going to the Catskills and Berkshires for the summer. Related to that, my family spent several summer vacations in the Appalachians of North Carolina, or visiting family in Michigan. There's also the many snowbirds who winter in the Sun Belt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbird_(person) ). There's also the farmers who bring their cattle to the summer pastures, though transhumance isn't common these days.
Native "peoples" almost always refers to the indigenous population. $STATE native, on the other hand, means that you were either born in that state or have lived there long enough that you consider yourself a "native." Language is funny.
I lived in Montreal for three years and for at least eight weeks of the year the air outside was so cold that it hurt my face and made my eyes tear up. It is also a beautiful city and was a great period in my life.
This is... ambitious. Very ambitious. Tempe is not a pedestrian mecca. And while it's nice that they're planning on bringing in some retail and grocery and entertainment options into the community itself, people obviously want variety and light rail only gets you so far here.
They're apparently intending to supplement this with car sharing spaces, which might help, and if you _work_ along light rail, this might be doable. They also mention they'll still have parking spaces for guests and such, so that means, ostensibly, they'll need to police them? Or just because they're not reserving spaces for residents, the demand will always outstrip the supply.
Either way, while I agree that transitioning away from dependence on individual automobiles is a noble effort, this concept has its work cut out for itself here. That being said, I have several friends who go car-free here, so...
The way it's done in Vauban in Germany is that there are big quads with cycle paths around them and then outside the main body of the development there is a multistorey car park that residents can rent a space in. There are also popular car rental services. This means that if you need a car you can have one at extra cost and you can't normally bring it right to your building.
What's wrong with just charging market rate for parking and road usage, i.e., just enough to so that there's always a few free parking spots and traffic flows at capacity?
That involves city law, and it's political suicide to do it everywhere, so it doesn't happen. You need bootstrap efforts like this so people can know what the alternative is like.
I believe this neighborhood has already received special exemption from the city to not build normally-required parking with new apartment buildings. Logically, parking prices and road-usage pricing can be hyperlocal, so it seems very feasible to just use it in this specific neighborhood.
Not at the particular development, but everywhere in the city, which is what I think he was implying.
Imagine that the city started charging for the 'free parking' everywhere, either through permit schemes or parking meters, created photo enforced no stop tolling for major highways and busy commuting corridors and reduced property taxes w/ low income exemptions for the new driving fees.
You would get a revolt even with the tax reductions.
Small localized new greenfield experiments like this is not political suicide for a city to approve.
This isn't a thread for your general complaints about cars. This is a thread about the Culdesac's building project. As described in the article, the neighborhood is already going to have roads necessary for delivery vehicles, carshare vehicles (Uber, etc.), and the private vehicles of visitors. So your second and fifth points are off-topic. The other three points are easily covered by an already-mentioned road-usage charge.
A more terse mission statement from a linked job posting:
“Culdesac's mission is to build cities for people, not cars. We're the first post-car real estate developer, and our goal is to build the first car-free city in the US. We're starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch - that's Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-person neighborhood that opens Fall 2020.”
To get a rough comparison in context, a co-housing development in a suburban area (a mix of three-story flats, townhomes, and a common house) ranges from 9-44 households (so 50-80 peopl) over 2-4 acres arranged in a more cul-de-sac feel (buildings/etc center around a common walking area). So, my first take on this is like having ~10 cohousing communities + some businesses
"which will be on 16 acres near Apache Boulevard and River Road" ...okay, so roughly in line with what I was thinking, though even more dense. https://goo.gl/maps/yDu9Zt96GKAi4KfR8 is the location. Judging from the satellite view it looks like it'll be spread across the four areas around that block (with some of the old existing structures getting torn down). If you've never visited Tempe, there's been a lot of recent new downtown development ~3 miles west of this location.
"The project falls within one of Tempe's opportunity zones, which could allow investors to take advantage of federal tax breaks." ...Interesting, the deadline for these projects (i.e. for investors to fund them and get a capital gains deduction) to get funding into a QOF-registered LLC working in a Qualified Opportunity Zone is 12-31-2019 from my understanding, so that's why it's happening now.
"An apartment development with no parking for its expected 1,000 residents..." This is where I'm a bit questioning on whether this will really be a place one wants to live in over the long run. It seems like solely a large distributed apartment complex rather than a community/neighborhood with stakeholdership.
I sold my car years ago and it is one of the most liberating things I've ever done. Yes, I live in a posh metropolitan area that makes it unnecessary to own a car and yes my housing is a bit more expensive, but I'm happier and have way more free time. But I have to say, Tempe isn't a place I'd want to walk around most months of the year, so unless this is high-rises, low-rises, skybridges, and tunnels, no way would I be on onboard.
For such a big, international and tech city as San Francisco to require a car to feel free reveals how poorly organised the US are in terms of public services.
I guess the public transport system is almost non-existent.
I'm glad my country isn't an oil producer. We're less rich, but if the GDP per capita difference all goes to buying a (30k$ berline electric) car to feel free...
To clarify: I bought the car after I moved out of SF. I didn't need one while I was there. But I still think being trapped in the city was unhealthy for me.
Choosing not to own a car creates its own demands (on your time, your comfort, your freedom).
Anecdote: my brother-inlaw lives in Chicago (one of the places in the US where not owning a car is quite practical), and purchased a car. Why? Because he attempted to do a home renovation himself over the course of a winter without one. Hauling around tools, materials, and himself on a bike in snow and slush was not something he ever wanted to repeat.
Even something simple like grocery shopping is a pain without a car. And delivery services (someone else’s car) or a nearly daily shopping trip are the only alternatives.
Plus, Chicago is a place where it’s far easier to be car free if you’re wealthy. The north side is where most of the density is, and the highest real estate prices.
I judge Chicago (minus the extensive suburbs) as more of a one car per family situation. Which is better than most of America but not car free.
"Requires a down payment, finance payments, registration and taxes, dmv lines, insurance, maintenance . . ."
Does life not involve responsibilities? How does this imply OWNERSHIP over oneself? Tally that actual amount of time all of these responsibilities actually involve rather than assume that the rest of us are overwhelmed by your exhaustive list.
It didn't take long before you had to stretch to find these nearly insurmountable obstacles.
"Now you need a better job and probably stuck in traffic more often in service of the car."
Did you stop to consider that this better job that wasn't available without a car might be a reason why you also have a higher standard of living and more liberty to spend your newly acquired free time doing what you enjoy?
"No wonder rideshare and rentals are taking over"
Ever heard of buses, trains, and taxis? It isn't like these things never existed as options that people -- including car owners like yourself -- have used before.
"I have a very old car. . ."
So does it OWN you? The point of contention here is ownership. Before the car, people may have owned horses. Owning a horse involved a lot of responsibilities as well, but it also provided a service for people. That doesn't imply that the horse owned the owner.
It’s an expression to warn a young person about the reality of car ownership, that you become a slave to it. It requires a certain amount of imagination. Cars are not a barrier to good jobs, one simply moves to where the commute is acceptable.
People underestimate their ability to live car-free.
I have never learned to drive (35). As a California resident, I've only been in a car twice in the past three months. From January through April, I wasn't in a car whatsoever for 3.5 months.
~"The only problems cars solve are problems cars cause."
People also overestimate other people's ability to live car free.
I have 40 kilometers to work and bus density here is never more than once an hour. If I want to be at work on time I have to leave on the last bus the day before work, or I'd have to be late every morning. Even in that case of leaving the same day and accepting being late to work I'd be away from home for 14 hours at minimum.
I have 10 kilometres to the nearest grocery store, and like I said bus density is not great. Even if I planned to do all my shopping on days of I'd be away from home for three hours at minimum, instead of a round-trip time of around an hour by car.
That's just for easily planned daily things. Doctor, dentist, bank, etc? Forget about it.
Not everyone lives in a place where being car-free is an easy choice.
But don't you think that living in a place that requires you to commute for so long is a situation you would not be in to begin with if cars were not an option? And I don't mean it just as a personal choice but as a urban planning strategy.
It seems to me a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
I'm a strong proponent of decentralised planning of society and subsidised costs of local infrastructure to facilitate car free lifestyles.
Part of the current mess is almost certainly due to the low cost of transportation and society pushing the cost onto future generations, but people literally can't live car free in some areas of the world right now and you need to pony up the dough to fix infrastructure etc. first before people can give up their cars.
Otherwise you exacerbate an ongoing socioeconomic divide between the rich and the poor.
Hence, people overestimate how easy it is for others to live car free.
Bingo. It would certainly be wrenching for GP to move from their current life to somewhere less car-centric. But the issue (predominantly in the US, apparently) seems to be that a car-free life simply isn't on the menu when people are making the lifestyle decisions around settling down. Or maybe HN is poorly populated by the people who choose a car-free life.
The difference in living costs of having your home close to work is often ignored. It’s frequently cheaper to pay for the car, gas, and maintenance than it is to live that 40km closer.
Not to mention, there are other things, such as green spaces, good schools, and work for spouses, which make living “closer to work” impractical.
I think you nailed the most fundamental economic forces at work here. The total costs of operating a household - including opportunity costs - will keep pushing people into situations where a long commute is unavoidable.
The only way to green that up in the long run (besides carpooling), I suppose, is doing something crazy like making cars accessible to everyone that run on sunlight and last a million miles.
> People also overestimate other people's ability to live car free.
Here in Belgium there was this funny event where someone from the green party would do everything by bike. She would give it as example that it was definitely possible for everyone.
Once she was elected in the government, she started using a car because "the job required it". So yeah, what about the rest of us?
I mean in her defense most of us work a 9-5, M-F where we travel 2x per day, and the car sits unused 95% of the time. Some jobs do not have the luxury of sitting in an office. In those cases using a car makes perfect sense.
My local representative uses public transport, and recognizes 30% of the populace does not currently drive.
If you have to drop off your kids in the morning and go get them in the evening, and a ride with the car to work takes you 45 minutes, it's pretty simple to choose that over taking 90 minutes to work without taking the kids on the way over.
And yes I know the usual argument that everybody should be living in the city.
In my opinion, the issue is generally how uncar-free cities in the US are. In cities or near them, there is no excuse, but we hallow them out to accommodate those who want a yard outside the city limits by making conditions worse for those of us who live in cities.
For people in rural places or exhurbs, sure live out of your car.
To some extent the fact people live so far from work and family is caused by the car, if it hadn't been available people would have made different choices.
> „The only problems cars solve are problems cars cause.”
Looks like it’s closer to:
„Cars solve lots of problems, e.g. they give us more options for choosing a place to work or a place to live; at the same time they cause problems too.”
As an alternative view, when I visit California I’m most certainly not renting a car if I’m going into the city in business. But most of the recreational activities I want to pursue require driving and many of them are not practical for reasons of distance, cell phone reception, and so forth. Of course you can just depend on others to some degree or simply decide that you’re willing to forgo activities (and living or work arrangements) that require owning a car.
I know a couple who sold their cars when they moved to SF. But they still use short-term and daily rentals a lot.
In Sacramento. ~5 mile commute to work. Occasionally I ride 20 miles each way. I rarely use public transport, though I lived in SF for ~6 months and used it a lot, along with my bike.
"We’ve pulled out the parking lots to make room for acres of greenspace, friendly courtyards"
Having the stuff they're talking about is commonplace in some countries (eg. Netherlands, Denmark).. but for the services, trains etc. to work, the whole urban area needs the right (high enough) density. I'd like to see a plan of this.. The quoted sentence does not inspire confidence in me.
Also, just for example Amsterdam is uniformly medium density until you reach the edge of the city where it immediately turns to farmland. There is no useless low density suburban sprawl, in which services cannot function (because there would not be enough people living in its catchment area)
AKA off campus dorms. This isn't targeting the urban professional, it's for those who want to continue the dormie lifestyle. One of the biggest universities in the country is just a couple stops away on the light rail.
Bingo, when I first moved out here I lived a couple blocks west of this place. It was 70% college kids. They also have a massive park and ride garage there, so I think I know where all those car free people will stash their cars.
Which says nothing bout car-less lifestyles. I went to grad school in a smallish town in a mostly (upscale-ish) rural area. I was mostly fine without a car. I lived mostly on-campus. I had friends with cars. Activities were mostly structured around the idea that students wouldn't have cars. Etc.
But, if I'm living/working there, I probably have to drive to my job, for far greater access to stores, to outdoor activities, to visit friends who are more spread out, etc. Sure, you can sometimes extend a college lifestyle for a few years but, for most people, that doesn't really work long term.
1. Here's some sample temperature data for Tempe: https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/tempe/arizona/united-s... If I leave my house in 90+ degree heat to go somewhere that's 10+ minutes away, I'd much rather be in an air conditioned car. With that being said, I could probably adjust to the heat and would be fine.
2. How would I travel from Tempe to the outside? Would I walk to a location where my car's stored (e.g. outside Tempe) or would I take public transportation?
If only someone could design some sort of self-balancing, two-wheeled scooter that people could use to get around, entire cities could be designed without cars!
Slightly OT - it has always amused me that “cul-de-sac”, commonly used in the UK to denote a street with a dead end, literally translates from the French as “arse of bag”, which I guess is accurate in terms of its shape, but I’m sure many people think of it as a rather fancy name because it’s French without knowing the meaning.
Car free often means family free. See that there are no kids in their illustrations but 2 dogs and a bunch of young people?
People need to wake up to the reality that kids demand cars. How will school pick up and drop offs work? How will you take your kid to lessons? What about that play date you setup? What about going to school at your kids school for an early pickup 4p from office?
You can make it work without cars if you are fit, are lucky to have your office and kids' school in the city near to each other - but often "time" is a critical factor and you need the flexibility that a car offers.
> People need to wake up to the reality that kids demand cars.
That is ludicrous. We've only had cars for a hundred years.
The fact that it's difficult is BECAUSE we built cities around cars. Schools normally have districts so that they're nearby to the kids, if your kids school is in another suburb then frankly that's your poor planning. If you set up play dates with kids two 'burbs away, again, why did you do that? Places like Japan have no issues with no or low car families, the kids take public transport, walk, or take their bikes. You can ride your bike with them or join them for the train ride if you want to make sure they're safe, but the idea that kids need to be transported around in cars is ludicrous.
> but often "time" is a critical factor and you need the flexibility that a car offers.
Public transport and biking is often faster than cars in denser car centric cities, and good public transport is on time so you can plan accordingly. Not all cities have good public transport, I get that, but that's the problem we need to solve. We've already tried cars, it's not working.
The issue isn't that we need cars, it's that we need a better city built around moving people without cars. You're looking at the problem in the wrong direction.
People in America live in such a bubble and just think that anything that doesn't work in America can't possibly work at all. A common post on HN goes along the lines "trains are shit and could never be seriously used. I took a train once and it was dirty and slow"
It's more of a design problem in american cities than anything else. It's hard to get public transport working well in cities - as a result less people use them - as a result they are slow - as a result they are dirty and not well taken care of.
No it is not like that. I know you want to fit things to your narrative but honestly what we are asking here is to completely redesign cities from ground up and it is not going to happen anytime soon. Europe works since it has a huge history to it when cars weren't there and thus a lot of roads/lanes were built accordingly. To suggest US should do the same seems improbable to me. We should build for the future vs. the past. So the question I will ask what is next after cars? My mind goes into ideas such as aerial transport vs. walking/biking.
Also, I would be very curious how many folks commenting here have kids vs. single men/women who ride their bikes and hate that they have to share the road with cars.
Oh, yes it is. I see comments on the internet like, "bike friendly? But what about kids??" as if kids explode if they get too close to a bike, all the damn time.
Somewhere in the commenter's mind, they're aware that there are bike friendly places where people have kids, like the Netherlands, and it works just fine. But they don't want to admit it, so they pretend they don't know. If you point it out to them, they'll find whatever the most obvious surface differences are between that place and where they live and insist this makes it impossible to draw any lessons.
I have a kid and we live car-free in Munich. We use walking, biking (including an electric cargo bike), buses, and trains. Works great. I don't dispute that sometimes it would be nice to have a car for the convenience, for things like going to Ikea or ski trips, but overall it's worth it for us to avoid the hassle and expense of car ownership.
On the other hand, I accept that when we move back to the states, unless we're in NYC we'll probably need a car. Oh well.
The problem with this line of argument often is that you are transposing solutions that work elsewhere piecemeal vs. looking at things holistically. For example, public schools in cities such as SF could be quite far away from people's homes. And public transport in SF sucks. Likely very few people in Munich travel to suburbs for work (since many companies in the bay area are headquartered far away from SF) and there are parents who have no option but to make that travel happen.
As such, this line of reasoning that if it works in Netherlands will work here seems vacuous. You need to consider the realities on the ground vs. making one off statements.
”to completely redesign cities from ground up and it is not going to happen anytime soon”
So, better start now. The longer you wait, the longer it will take.
”We should build for the future vs. the past.”
A future where we have to significantly decrease energy use in order to limit global warming?
”who ride their bikes and hate that they have to share the road with cars.”
Who says cyclists have to share the road with cars? Any decent infrastructure has separated cycling lanes wherever cars go over 20 miles per hour.
Kids in particular, have a lot to gain. A bicycle has thrice the speed of walking, so riding a bicycle makes a kid’s neighborhood about ten times as big (when comparing road system built for cars with one built for people, the difference is even greater)
And with it, their parents have a lot to gain, as kids riding their bike to school/friends/sports means parent do not have to drive them there.
I grew up in a European city and never once took a car to school. I walked to primary school, junior high and high school. Then I took public transport to university.
I know most cities and neighborhoods aren't set up for that in the US, but if it can be done in Europe it can be done elsewhere.
Walking to primary school at 5yrs old is not going to happen. I don't know which primary school you were in but sending your kid alone to school at that age seems improbable.
Why not? Excepting the differently abled, most 5yos are perfectly capable to walk to a bus stop or less than a mile, I sure was. The streets are safer than ever in history despite the fear-mongering you see.
If america has a problem, it is 'protecting' its youth from the 'big bad world' rather than helping them to explore it.
I’m pretty frustrated by the thinking behind this entire comment, but I’ll address only one point
> People need to wake up to the reality that kids demand cars.
Public transport may take more time than driving, but the time spent with kids can be considered quality time, and the overall stress of the parents is likely to be lower.
edit: but good catch about the marketing fail that is not showing any families with kids
Stress is definitely higher with public transport. THe challenge is that time is the constraint. Parents need to drop off their kids and be in their office by a certain time and do the reverse in the evenings. If you are proposing public transport as the solution, then that eats time thereby creating stress as everyone worries to reach their destinations quickly.
You can be frustrated by the comment but please try to grow empathy for parents. Raising kids takes a lot out of you. You are juggling n number of things and time becomes a major constraint. So unless everything (home, school, office) is nearby within walking distance, the number of viable solutions beyond cars go dwindle down significantly.
You can do all of these things just fine on a bicycle or with public transit.
School drop off and pick up is even easier because you sail right past the massive traffic jam at the school from everyone trying to do this in their personal cars.
I would even go so far as to say that this whole "kids demand cars" mindset is a part of the problem.
> We’re bringing together services like ridesharing, bikes and scooters, and same-day grocery delivery, so zero private cars means zero hassle.
Here's why this matters from someone who lives here: 4 months out of the year Tempe's average temperature is above 99F. This means one of the following:
1. Residents will heavily use ride sharing and delivery during the summer, just "in place of" owning a car.
2. Culdesac will install a ridiculous amount of outdoor cooling for its residents, one might imagine this will require a fair amount of water.
Don't get me wrong, this is a cool idea, but is Tempe the right place to do it?
There are many options like semi-underground homes that could have been trialed here which would have fit the local climate; but they aren't doing that. Seems like they are trying to create a one-size-fits-all solution which IMO will not work outside of California.