Come to the Netherlands and see how it’s done. It was a car dominated culture till the 60s when they did the “stop murdering our children” campaign. Then, cities reorganized to minimize car use. I love not owning a car. So freeing.
The solution to the US' car problem is not as simple as "less cars is good! Just fix your cities!". Cities have been designed around the automobile for decades to the point where, in a lot of places, you literally can't do anything without a car or walking over a mile. NYC and DC manage fine because there's subway systems, but the vast majority of cities are not like that.
Like the parent said, there was a big push all across europe for cars to be the norm[0]; the US just had more space to continue this deleterious activity.
I think colejohnson66 is referring to cities that have sprawled in an uncontrolled way. e.g. Atlanta. “Solutions” coming from dense Europe are not really solutions there.
But they are. We have several a millenia of history on how to construct cities in a way that is scale appropriate to us as humans. We choose to ignore it, but that doesn't mean that applying the same principles, we cannot achieve the same thing in the US.
The formula is simple. Build out the core of each city that compromises a metropolitan area so that it is pedestrian first. You do that by building out multi family mixed used housing in the core. Then you ensure there are a lot of buses/bike lanes/trains that get you in and out of there, rinse, repeat. It tends towards happier, healthier people that spends more. Look up the statistics on that.
> If the formula was simple, it would have been applied already.
Unsure, people have really ingrained ideas about cars in the US, any attempt at discussing alternatives is met with emotional backlash and it's very difficult to talk passed this. It's actually very similar in the UK, though you can see a difference in cities with good public transport and those without, it's like we optimise for extremes in either direction.
Objectively if it was a good option (not arguing that it is right now) to have a solid public transport system; people are ideologically opposed because of the belief that public transport is inconvenient, unsafe, a loss of personal freedom etc; and it's hard to argue those points because they're coming from an emotional place, thus people cycle between those issues in an attempt to deflect direct refutation over each one of the points individually.
I think it's a little bit of a myth that it's impossible to serve low density neighbourhoods with public transport; there's a fair bit of research on the subject actually. (https://www.ptua.org.au/myths/density/) it's also somewhat self-fulfilling that the "cost of sprawl" is inverted in car-based communities, as you need to fan-out your infrastructure to avoid congestions of traffic and car storage, at least at the leaf nodes (IE suburbs).
Cycling infrastructure (as per Amsterdam), a healthy rail network (also NL) and a semi-competent bus and tram system are all parts of a larger picture when referencing public transport.
The solutions are similar, even if they're not the same, there is a lot of research on public transportation and what makes sense where, if one only looks.
Solutions are also complicated because "Atlanta" isn't a single city with a unified government. The greater Atlanta metropolitan region is composed of multiple separate cities plus some unincorporated county land. Residents of the suburbs and exurbs often have different priorities than residents of the urban core. So any major changes in housing and transportation policy would have to be driven at the state and federal levels.
The same issue applies to most other large US cities.
That's true in most metro areas. You don't need state and federal mandates you need local cooperation. Los Angeles is expanding light rail at a breakneck pace. Why? Because they have one dominant transit authority and a unified plan.
Compare that to the nine county Bay Area. There's nearly one transit agency for each county and a few regional agencies (BART, Caltrain) to contend with. The constant bickering and infighting is exactly why nothing gets done.
Another way to say this is a stubborn refusal to do things that do not "make sense" under the current model of economics (personal profit above all) because you revalue what is valuable in a society (eg social/corporate well being)
The model for American walkability and density is not DC or NYC, it's places like Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, the feel of older streetcar suburbs and small college towns, ... None of those have subway systems, all of them are aspirational urban environments. None of them ban cars, but in all of them car traffic is slower and and more gentle. Certainly, _any_ neighborhood built before the 30s can emulate those. Later suburban developments can dial in such densification as well.
The main issue working against this is that the public realm is completely degraded because it only accommodates car traffic. Other ways of getting around are bullied out by high speed, dangerous cars. It's a textbook example of a vicious circle. The fact that there are a few urban areas in the US where owning a car is a drag due to parking issues, should not hold back meaningful improvements and efforts to break out of it anywhere else.
It's why I believe L4 self-driving is the tech that will actually reverse car dependency. If robotaxi fleets become preferred to car ownership(which would occur through the resulting economies of scale in a centralized fleet driving people to save money), the aggressive drivers stop ruling the road, replaced with polite "Three Laws" drivers; then the traffic starts downscaling because most urban trip making will work in smaller scooter or smart-car style vehicles which will benefit from continuing improvements to EV tech, and the services will optimize to cost; you'll still have the larger options available, but they appear on-demand, which makes all the difference when you're thinking about how to service a family of four. Cargo trips are already shifting in favor of autonomous delivery; two weeks ago, Wal-Mart went from testing drone delivery services to expanding them to multiple US states, and they project making 1 million deliveries this year.
So some critical threshold will occur where it becomes obvious that you have a vast unused road infrastructure, because the total urban fleet has consolidated into something that is physically smaller and literally less road-dependent, and nobody is there to prop up car ownership politically except a few enthusiasts and people living out of their cars. At that point downsizing is imminent everywhere.
It only took 20 years for cars to overtake horses in the industrialized world, and the bulk of it happened in 10. It'll happen faster this time.
These cities removed transit systems and housing to build roads and parking. It will take time, but doing the reverse is totally possible. Most cities were filled with streetcars and dense housing at one point.
Without viable mass transit in most American cities the "less cars" mentality falls flat. As a society ruled by "NIMBY" we just don't have the social will, nor seem to care enough about one another to move anything productive forward. As another comment said, the nations that reduced dependence on autos did no decades ago. These towns/cities/suburbs were literally built around a society where everyone has a car. Very difficult/impossible to change at this point without a major catastrophe or other externally influencing event.
It's a catch-22. If you don't get cars out of the way public transit will fail. As was pointed out we've ripped up plenty of cities to make them more car friendly and we can absolutely do the same for people.
I don't think a major catastrophe is required at all. We're already at the point where a huge chunk of our infrastructure is already in dire need of repair and/or replacement. This is a perfect opportunity for improvement.
I'd guess the vast majority of cities Netherlands predate cars by centuries. They were already "designed" without cars in mind. That is not true in the US, and doubly so for the post war, suburban construction boon.
The US absolutely tore up cities to make them more car friendly. Redlining and slum clearing were used as justifications to knock down entire neighborhoods to put more roads in. Most old American cities started as port towns with streetcar suburbs, and then they tore the trains out.
We don't have medieval cities, but saying cities were designed around the car is patently false.
Yes, the fifties and sixties caused huge redesigns, but we can undo those.
> We don't have medieval cities, but saying cities were designed around the car is patently false.
It's not. Cities have literally been created from nothing in the last few decades. Just because NYC, Atlanta, DC, etc. are old are have a history of redlining does not mean that every city does. Case in point: the cities around where I grew up were built in the last 3 decades. Those cities didn't have a choice but to have zoning laws and miles of road.
I mean, sure. Some places have become urban centers recently and that's fair. But coast to coast, our biggest population centers were all established and built up before car centric planning.
I live in Seattle, for instance, which used to have a network of rails. They've all been torn out and we're just now putting them back.
Seattle is geographically constrained. Most/all of the old cities (and metros) have sprawled to ungodly degrees like atlanta or la. How do you undo 70 years of development (ie, tens or hundreds of billions of dollars) spent on sprawling?
I expect average household size to have decreased significantly, so it wouldn’t surprise me if at least 75% of inhabitants lived in post-war houses.
Because of that, I don’t see suburban construction as a major difference between the USA and the Netherlands.
A major difference likely is that the USA has room for sprawl, while the Netherlands doesn’t. Dutch suburbs likely are more dense than ones in the USA.
Don't get me wrong; I wish we were less car-dependent too, but it isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. Cars are too deeply ingrained in American culture, and Europeans bragging about their cities isn't going to change that. Not to mention how massive the US is! We have states (California and Texas) that are larger than over half of the European countries.
Based on the track record of most of the demographics I see pushing for improvement I fear we'll wind up with some hellscape that combines the worst of both.
Even if that was true (which it does not seem to be, given that the real estate values in neighborhoods most closely resembling the netherlands in the US are among the most expensive in the country) it seems like a moot point. The cities that are built this way aren't financially sustainable and that much car usage is basically incompatible with future life on earth.
> which it does not seem to be, given that the real estate values in neighborhoods most closely resembling the netherlands in the US are among the most expensive in the country
That statement assume "people like it that way" applies to all people. Even if 80% of the people preferred the suburbs/rural experience, the fact that city layouts are only available on a small portion of the land means that it will cost more.
Have they been exposed to anything else? Be honest. I was raised in the rural midwest where there wasn't even the concept of public transportation; now I live in NYC with no car, and I've never been happier or healthier.
Yes, I grew up in Moscow, USSR: while growing up not only I (or my family) did not have a car but none of people I knew had one. At the age of 20 I had about dozen car rides in my lifetime. It sucked: even when I lived in my parents flat close to the city center and a subway station, going anywhere was at least an hour in one direction. I've spent 2 hours every day going to and from school. Could go to movies/clubs on weekends with friends though. I moved to my own flat that was a 15 min by car from the center but it was 45 min just to get to the subway via transit (either by train or bus) so my life was essentially 3 hour commute to work and shopping for food every couple of days in the nearby grocery store. Going anywhere else was too exhausting and you cannot stay late because the transit stopped at 1 am (subway, buses and trains even earlier), the only friends I could hang out were the ones with cars, others living in similar situation (far from subway) were just too far to visit.
I now vastly enjoy living in my own house where closets are bigger than my flat's living room and driving anywhere I want. Everyone I know in the city is less than an hour away. I shop for groceries every two weeks and sometimes on the way from work. My commute is 20 minutes a day. I visit more different places in a month than in a year of living in the "walkable paradise".
I've lived in decently spaced suburban neighborhoods, tiny towns, rural areas, and big cities like SF, SJ, and NY. Given the option, I'll take anything other than the big cities every time, even though I enjoyed the ability to utilize public transportation.
Don't assume that, because you prefer living in a city, that anyone who doesn't is ignorant. There are lots of people that know exactly what living in a city is like and far prefer to not do so (and vice versa).
The majority of people I've personally met who didn't like cities didn't like them because they didn't feel like they were safe. They're literally scared of people
Not a single person I've spoken to (that doesn't want to live in a city) has cited safety as a concern. That's probably because we've all worked in a city and know there are good areas and bad.
They often leave bc they can't afford to be further in, or the schools aren't good, white flight, or the love of a green grass yard (also btw not long for this world) Not because they dont like the density.
It's nearly impossible to have an objective opinion on something that one has no example or experience of. Medieval peasants would want supermarkets and modern living if they were given the change to experience it.
You appear to be claiming that Netherlands can achieve car free living because it’s tiny and flat, and yet you point to a U.S. city that has made car free living possible despite being nearly half the size of the entire country of Netherlands, and therefore massively bigger than any Dutch city.
So which is it? Is being tiny an advantage or is it a disadvantage?
Most US urban areas can easily achieve car free living the way the Dutch did. Obviously the suburbs cannot, but that does not prevent American cities from trying.
> Less parking improves density which can improve many other things, as well.
Less parking makes density higher, which is a bad thing, not a good thing. Why do you call it an improvement?
People are not livestock to be packed in a tightly as possible. Give me space to live. Everyone should have a basement or a garage where they can keep random tools for random projects.
People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
Are there actually people who prefer to live packed in tightly with other people, in tiny apartments with barely space?
Having less parking has nothing to do with “living in tiny apartments with barely space”. That doesn’t make any sense and those two things aren’t related at all. You can have less parking - like removing giant surface lots and not having mandatory parking minimums and have space. This isn’t an either-or scenario. In fact, it was the default for many places for a long time. In cities that got a start before cars became dominant you’d see tree-lined streets, beautiful large houses (along with smaller homes, townhomes, apartments, shops, and parks) and backyards for fun. In fact, this is still the default in Europe where so many Americans love to vacation to and talk about how great the towns and cities are.
It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it. So, in a way you’re advocating for cramming people together.
> People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
> People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
I think that sounds just fine. And you can do that in America today. What does that have to do with living in the city or in nearby residential suburbs?
> That doesn’t make any sense and those two things aren’t related at all
Sure it does, if you have a normal sized house, then you have space in front of the house, on the street where you can park. You also might have a driveway.
And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
> you’d see tree-lined streets, beautiful large houses
And in front of those houses is a place to park. If the house is properly separated from the neighbor you can even park along the side of the house (if you always put two driveways together from neighboring houses, then driveways save space relative to parking on the road).
> It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it.
The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
> Sure it does, if you have a normal sized house, then you have space in front of the house, on the street where you can park.
Yes. That’s not really under debate here.
> You also might have a driveway.
You could do that so long as you wanted to waste that space on your lot, but you don’t need that because you can park on the street near your house instead or in your garage behind your house (where the alley is). Personally I’d rather have more green space, or just to have a bigger house since I live at my house and my car is just some random machine that is fine sitting out all day and night in all weather conditions.
> And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
Right… yet that’s what mandatory minimums and car-first public transit are creating. That’s what we are complaining about.
> The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I’m confused about this statement. Where did I suggest we needed to get rid of cars?
> I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
I think that’s great! You can totally live in the country. I find it very appealing myself. Just stop the continuous public transit subsidies of highways when we already have more than enough for all future needs for the next 50 years. It doesn’t make sense for people who live 5 miles outside of downtown to have to drive a quarter mile down the road each way to get a gallon of milk. We can’t afford it and we are going to bankrupt ourselves and the planet with this asinine waste of energy. It also has personal benefits for you living in the country because you’ll have fewer people driving.
If people prefer that, they can pay for that. No reason to prohibit others from building denser. Nobody will stop you from buying a lot downtown and replacing the high-rise building with your single family home and adding a multi-car garage. On the other hand you will be stopped if you want to build a high-rise without parking even if lots of people want to live there.
Let's stop telling people what they should want and let the market build what people want. If "the market" builds what nobody wants, some folks are gonna lose some of their own money and someone else will make a profit from correcting it.
Why does @ars have to pay for the situation they want, but you don't? If @ars wants a less dense city, and you want a more dense one, why should you be able to force it on others, but not the other way around? Why don't you move?
The fact of the matter is: many people in the US like it how it is, even if we don't.
I never said someone should subsidize dense housing. I only advocated for removal of requirements that prohibit dense housing and mandate things like parking.
Edit: If anything we currently have the reverse case, with dense areas where infrastructure is shared by many subsidizing less dense areas where roads and houses serve much fewer people while providing less tax revenue. There have been some good articles on here about this over the years.
Everyone should pay for the resources they consume. Lower density requires massively more resources per person, so the people who want it should wind up paying more.
Nobody is advocating forcing everyone to live in dense housing. Our current political/legal system massively favors and subsidizes lower density. Removing that favoritism is not unfair at all.
I'm fine with this but be aware that the catch here is that if you aren't moving dollars around you can't attach strings to those dollars. Controlling funding by gatekeeping it with specific requirements for eligibility is a large part of how the feds control the states and the states control municipalities.
If you don't fund their roads you can't tell them "but you need a sidewalk".
What's the enforcement mechanism if the entity writing the rules doesn't control the purse strings? Tie them up in court for 10yr and then when you finally win they just do something marginally different to the same end (i.e. exactly what we see with civil liberties).
> if you want to build a high-rise without parking even if lots of people want to live there
Yes because those people still own cars and they park those cars in other peoples parking areas. The cars don't magically stop existing, the developer just has a better bottom line because they have been subsidized.
Is this a real problem that happens in reality right now? I regularly hear of entitled home owners putting up cones or other stuff to block street parking in front of their house. In fact this has become a popular meme on r/portland. I've never heard of someone parking in someone else's driveway (maybe blocking it, but parking enforcement seems to be a popular revenue stream) or front yard.
Also, if police cannot even be motivated to get cars off other people's property, that seems like a big problem that we should address, rather than restricting what we are allowed to build to work around the police not doing their job.
Find a space you enjoy. I enjoy getting able to walk to the grocery store, bookshop, several cafes, many restaurants, hair salon, library, tattoo parlor, beer shop, movie theater, etc.
How many of those places can you visit without a car?
I actually have a bunch of those places I can visit without a car, and I never do, because they are all small, and don't have the selection I want. The few I do visit are more expensive than they should be because their rent is very high.
So I drive about 10 minutes and go to the larger stores, the selection is better and the prices are better because the land is not so crowded.
I have family who live in a very dense city without a car - every time I visit they "stock up" and go on multiple car trips with me to visit slightly distant stores to buy all the stuff that is cheaper, or hard to transport without a car.
The car isn't going away because it's simply too useful. No matter how hard you try to make a city that supposedly doesn't need one, the car option is still better.
Heh the only one missing from that list in my small town is a bookstore; the Walmart book section doesn't really cut it.
One thing people can get confused on is that density doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with mixed usage - you could have relatively low density areas that are extremely mixed so there's always basically everything within 15 minute walk, and you could have very high density apartment buildings with nearly no services to speak of.
Suburbs are especially bad at this because they segregate the living and the sleeping areas far apart from each other (but relatively short by car).
I thought his argument was pro-parking. As such, asking about what he can get to without a car is irrelevant, because he doesn't want to _be_ without a car.
All of those things would be better able to be done if our streets weren't 50 feet wide on average (or wider) with acres and acres of land given over to parking.
Why do you think “more dense” automatically means “so dense your whole apartment is a bed”?
My house was built around the time the automobile became common, meaning long long long before parking requirements or even driveways and I have a yard… I highly suggest you take a look around - even within the US - at older neighborhoods and see how nice and quaint it can be without loud, smelly, space wasting cars.
The suburbs that you describe are terrible for the environment and are the reason why the US has by far the highest carbon output per capita. Better to have more land for parks and nature rather than desolate grassy lawns everywhere.
And reduces livability, I have a friend who lives 10 minutes away by car, an hour away by bus, and despite living in a nice neighborhood, people keep getting stabbed, shot, or mugged at or near the busy bus station nearby.
Last time she came to visit, somebody got stabbed at the bus station an hour after she passed through. Someone got murdered on a bus within a few blocks of me two months ago.
I'm living in a very walkable neighborhood with only a moderate parking availability problem and similar groups of people are encouraging the police to do nothing while encouraging density nonsense through restricting parking.
If you want to create dense slums where the only people who don't leave are those who can't afford to, this is exactly what you should advocate.
I don't want to live somewhere where I have to worry about a guest's safety, cars achieve that to a significant degree. Fuck everybody who wants to ruin cities by cramming people in as close as possible.
Enrique Peñalosa, Colombian politician and past mayor of Bogota, put it well: "An advanced city is not one where the poor can get around by car, but one where even the rich use public transportation."
Crime on public transit doesn't mean public transit is bad, it means that public transit is a last-resort option patronized by the most desperate members of society. If our cities were designed for more convenient public transit, more people would be willing to take the bus, and your average patron would be less likely to be one of the scaries that you and your visiting friend were worried about.
I took the BART for a year, unless it was really late, essentially nobody on the train was "scary".
It still smelled like a latrine (once I'm positive someone shit in a fast food bag and left it in the middle of the car sometime before my midday ride). BART wasn't a "last resort option" but an "only resort" if I didn't want to spend $100 a day on parking.
It's not even public transit, my neighborhood is past the point of "safe" especially at certain times of day where I don't want to subject anybody who couldn't beat me in a boxing match to walking around significant distances between sunset and 10am (lots of people getting mugged around 7 or 8 in the morning too).
To toss you a bone, it's true that many dense areas in the US don't feel really safe.
But it doesn't have to be like this. It's very possible to build dense living spaces that are nice to live in.
But more to the point, you are free to live in the middle of nowhere if you want to. If you don't want to live in a dense area, the vast majority of residential areas in the US cater directly to you. Personally, I'd like to live in an actual city, and I'd like to pay less than $5000/month for a decent 1 bedroom apartment.
I'm living in a dense-enough area, advocating against people that want to destroy it by getting rid of parking requirements and forcing further density on an area which has reached what I feel is the limit.
Arguably some of those problems would be solved by greater density, right? Density makes better public transit economical, density reduces homelessness by bringing down housing costs.
That's crazy that people are getting murdered at your bus stop though. What city do you live in?
People getting murdered, assaulted, and robbed isn't a homelessness problem (it is quite hard to survive winter being homeless in Minnesota) it is a gang, poverty, and policing problem. Part of it is accepting a large number of Somalian refugees, a small but significant number of whom disproportionally contribute to crime, but it's not exclusively that group.
Despite the business robberies, gun shots, assaults and murders blocks away from me, my rent is still $2000.
I'm also near that area, but outside the city and an entire house and yard and car is less than your rent. Luckily I don't need to commute into town, and it's pretty apparent that many who can leave the city are moving to areas like Stillwater and Woodbury. Too bad those cities don't have useful transit connections, though we might get something into Hudson soon.
Yes I'm paying a premium for space and location (having recently left mountain view also helped making everything seem very inexpensive), not having a family and wanting to be close to things to do contributes much to this.
However the "was that a gunshot or fireworks" question nearly daily with about a 50:50 distribution is not good for my stress levels or general sanity.
Highly recommend spending some weekends exploring the areas around MSP, there are lots of former small towns that are now basically exurbs or even part of the city, and depending on what you're looking for you may find something that fits better.
But trying to go entirely car-free is a pipe dream; but "car reduced" is possible.
Stillwater and Hudson both have park and rides (basically a parking lot stop for a bus dedicated to suburban 9-5 commuters), but unless you're willing to put up with doubling or tripling your commute time to take a bus into the cities, you're still better off just driving in and paying for parking.
What would be roughly a 30-40 minute trip by car becomes an hour and 20 minutes by bus, if you don't need to change buses too many times to get to your destination- and that's by ideal conditions (bus isn't running late, etc) (that example used stillwater park&ride to the north loop).
Higher density areas zoned for mixed use are the only areas of modern american cities that are revenue positive for the city. Suburbs and other less dense developments are massively subsidized by denser developments.
Density also makes services like policing cover more ground for less money. Japanese & european cities are often much denser and face lower crime rates.
Those statistical arguments I wouldn't trust until I'd seen a red team try to pick them apart, it is very easy for your biases to leak in especially in ambiguous things like claiming costs based on area. (example, how do you claim police charges, by the area or the actual number of calls? a highrise with hundreds of people has a very small footprint but likely quite a few emergency calls, vs a few suburban houses which might go decades with 0)
This analysis wasn't from team blue, and it wasn't made to score political brownie points. It was paid for by struggling american cities in states like Louisiana to help stabilize finances & avoid bankruptcy. It measures the budgetary balance in each area of providing infrastructure & services compared to tax revenue recieved. Lafayette used the analysis to shift zoning laws towards higher density zoning across the city core and the city's finances improved.
The uniquely north american model of cities oriented around sparse car centric growth is just not sustainable in the long run. Every metre of asphalt paved & pipes placed is a metre of commitment to eternal maintenance, and when that metre connects to a tiny suburb of 15 people that can't remotely afford the bill for the infrastructure that supports them then you have a cities that grow over the long run towards massively subsidized development, soaring property taxes, & growing debt.
That seems more like rural. Every suburb I've lived in has been on the order of 5,000-40,000 people (and that's one town, with towns not separated by anything but an invisible line).
Yeah, I'm always highly suspicious of that "fact" thrown around, since urban areas always seem to be exceptionally expensive compared to actual rural towns (now suburbs may be a different deal) - said towns which pay for their own police, etc.
Yeah they don't. At least not the way you're implying. e.g.:
- That rural town in Maine (Passadumkeag) that basically shut down because its sole clerk couldn't survive on $13,000 annually.
- There's plenty of state and federal money in local government. Texas, for instance, will use state funds to ensure a minimum level of school funding even in rural areas.
- Some places don't have much in the way of services. For e.g. Timathy Taylor in Klamath County, Oregon. The sheriff there has three (3) officers to patrol 6,136 square miles.
I want this mostly because it will give a reason for people like this to care about the city around them in a real way, and act to make it better for themselves. Rather than consider its problems not their responsibility because they can avoid them by using a car.
It sucks to access things without a car because we made it that way, it's not an inherent quality of dense environments.
It's worse, because those who are rich and can afford cars don't get affected by the problems and can ignore them as they ride past in their steel chariots of doom.
But I think the correct place to do the revival is not at the city centers but at the edges; we could reduce the "land use" of suburbs by 50% or more without diminishing the quality of life, and suddenly things that don't work because the density is too low would start to make sense.
For example, it's insane that I have to have my front wall set back 40 feet from the street, which itself is 50 feet wide to allow for parking on both sides - I'd much rather have a street with no parking that was maybe 20 feet wide in total, and allow the front of the house to be right up against the sidewalk on the same lot - get more useful backyard and reduce street speed too.
Nothing you do to my city planning will make taking the bus at temperatures -20 and below a pleasant, desirable experience.
Everything where I live is accessible, but there's nothing you can do to make a bus schedule beat a car trip, and it's ridiculous that somebody a couple of miles away needs to be an hour away to justify a tiny bump in density for idealists.
It's more attractive than driving when the bus runs every ten minutes in a dedicated lane, and the car user has to pay the real cost of parking rather than have the city provide it. I know because I lived in a place like this. I used the car to leave town and for some larger shopping, everything within a few miles I accessed on foot, bike, or transit. With fewer people using cars for short trips, all of those things become a lot more pleasant.
>It doesn't even have to be much less, just no longer require it and it starts to solve itself.
This will never happen because the bulk of the people pushing for less cars a) see regulation as an inherent good and would rather regulate toward the outcome they want than just dispose of bad regulation and watch it happen organically b) wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with libertarians.
If a house wasn't seen as a way to get rich we would have more housing. Everyone could put their savings into other investments and pay a pittance for their home.
You can buy a cheap house. The catch is: it's in a remote town in Ohio.
If I could have bought my 4 bed house with average garden on the outskirts of London for £50k, I wouldn't have bought it. I'd have bought an 6 bed house with a swimming pool, huge garden, double garage and driveway in central London instead, for the price I paid for my house. Not to get rich, just because I'd like more space, a pool, a big garden and a short walk to one of the world's best city's centre.
It's a physical impossibility to build everyone a large detached family home in the city centre, and most people don't want to live in apartments forever.
I believe the real solution is allowing small towns to grow into cities, and building a ton of very fast and effective rapid 24/7 transport so you can ferry people into the urban core of large cities from those cheaper smaller cities. We can scale out fast trains in a way that we can't scale out cycling, walking and cars.
In my mind, the ideal model for a livable megacity is an extremely large conurbation of individually small, walk/cyclable cities with low to mid-density housing, with the cities separated from each other by large public green spaces and all linked together with rapid public transport, and huge disincentives for cars.
> most people don't want to live in apartments forever.
I believe this would not be the case if we built apartments better.
For my personal take I'd need a communal workshop / garage to store and work on my motorcycle, far better sound deadening, equivalent square footage of personal space, a nice playground for my kids, affordability to move to N+1 bedrooms when N+1th child arrives, and that fresh clean air feeling that the suburbs has which downtown SF's crap and urine infested streets do not... oh and as affordable as the suburbs (net of benefits of being central)
Apartments could definitely be a lot better, but at least personally speaking, I don't think I would likely want to live in one again, even if it was one of the super luxury ones.
I have a full sized private garden that I can grow plants in, keep a large bunny enclosure, shed, and let my dog run around in unsupervised. I spend a lot of time in my garden.
I can just drill holes in my walls without asking anyone and never have to share a lift with neighbours. I can hand out keys to whoever I want without building management getting on my case, or indeed replace the keys with a non-key entry system. I don't need to spend 2 minutes waiting for a lift to get downstairs, or longer if someone's decided to block the lifts while they move in/out, or climb 15 floors because they broke the lifts.
Personally, moving from an apartment to a house has been the biggest QoL improvement in my life since I left home 15 years ago.
There is a significant portion of the population that believe that everyone wants to own a home, nobody wants to rent ever, and all landlords are direct relatives of Satan. I'll note from personal experience that, on places like Reddit, mentioning that some landlords are great and sometimes renting is a good option... has a fair likelihood of causing an outpouring of downvotes.
yeah that's a decent point, it's completely possible to amass the same amount of equity in a different asset class and use the proceeds from that asset to pay your rent. That's approximately the same as being mortgage free & having the taxes & maintenance covered...
You do get less freedoms as a renter though. Like I've never had the option to choose any kind of paint, tile, carpet, on demand water heater, reverse osmosis water line etc etc.
> it's completely possible to amass the same amount of equity in a different asset class and use the proceeds from that asset to pay your rent.
It sounds like a Fat FIRE concept that is out of reach of most people. Or at least something the average person would only be able to access later in life.
> You do get less freedoms as a renter though.
But you also aren't responsible for all the things that can break. And natural disasters.
I have heard of many renters painting their apartments.
> It sounds like a Fat FIRE concept that is out of reach of most people. Or at least something the average person would only be able to access later in life.
It's not that far off the amount sunk into a equity+interest view of a mortgage ... eg a $500K house would be about $1M after interest. A $1M portfolio would provide about $2500-3300 a month in passive inflation proof income[1]. A quick rule of thumb is a place should rent annually for about 1/19th - 1/20th the purchase price which conveniently is about ~2200 a month...
So overall if someone could afford to buy, they likely could also afford to choose a portfolio and a reasonable rent.
[1]: we'll have to wait and see how true this remains through the kind of inflation we're seeing lately though...
> I have heard of many renters painting their apartments.
Yes, but they likely either were renting a place that had terrible paint (doing their land lord a favor) or had to return it to the original colors at the end of the lease, else face "repair" costs
But you get other freedoms, like being able to move without having to go through the pain and cost of selling you house. That being said, I do agree that "all things being equal", it's better to own than rent; but there are certainly cases where renting makes more sense.
Plus I don't think all landlords are evil. I've had a number of them that were fantastic people; more than the number of bad ones I've had.
Whether you live in a car-dependent suburb, or in a city, real estate that lets you save time when living will always be more valuable.
In addition, low interest rates might be the reason people CAN buy houses with enormous valuations. Not just housing is overvalued, but companies' stocks also.
Housing anywhere is expensive for the remote worker that doesn't need to be close to the city because property has dramatically increased in price relative to wages.
> Not just housing is overvalued, but companies' stocks also.
The minimum parking space requirement is what existing residents, who rely upon on-street parking, ask so they are not negatively impacted by dense housing proposals. This is especially true in areas where it's still near impossible to operate without a car. There is a mitigating factor of these larger housing units: mixed zoning with commercial space on the ground floor helps reduce the need for a cars in the first place.
Some guidelines assume two working adults per unit, each with their own car. However, we're finding less spots are needed. With local commercial development, one car per unit is turning out to be more the norm for some areas and even less with greater density, since public transit is often better. Having satellite parking /w shuttle might also be a solution for those who only "need" a car for weekend travel.
I think 2 per residential unit is quite high. Probably too high, but on other hand 0 or lot less than 1 isn't generally working out too great in many places yet. People will find places to park their cars first filling the legal assigned and then moving to what is available and eventually even breaking rules.
It’s understandable that current residents demand that concession. However, minimum parking space rules subsidize and devalue parking spaces below their real value by essentially placing an artificial price cap on them.
People don’t want to pay for parking even though that land has inherent value, and American city planners for years have been overproducing unproductive land just to park vehicles, and it’s literally bankrupting them.
In California, it is illegal for cities to establish combination resident-preference and paid parking, and it is also illegal to charge more for residential parking permits than it costs to administer the program. It is probably also illegal, based on the opinion of the state AG but never tried in court, to discriminate between "existing residents" and everyone else when handing out parking permits. I would add that it's also totally unethical.
Mostly what the people in my California city who "rely" on street parking need to do is stop hoarding and clean out their garage, and stop collecting used Volvos to store in their driveways.
It's intense that the goal has to be implementing changes while also not negatively impacting car owners at all, and is a significant factor in why change on this front is so rare and so small in the US.
The fact is that yes, people who want to live in city cores and own cars there are going to have compromises. Parking needs to be less common and more expensive. Driving will become a slower, less appealing option as speed limits are reduced and more space given to other forms of transit.
These are necessary to reduce the negative impacts already experienced by people trying to use other forms of transit, or even just safely move around their neighborhood on foot. These changes will also benefit car owners! I assume y'all walk sometimes and want to have useful places to go, want to be able to cross the street without stress?
It would be a socially good will step to instead adequately compensate car owners for their respective losses under legislation -- random eg: Maybe offer to buy their car off them for a lifetime of free bus passes, or whatever makes them not lose while society wins.
Property developers will give you "just enough to not get fired" and people grow accustomed to the worsening conditions until they hit their tipping point and leave for much less environmentally friendly suburban sprawl because of the human-hostile policies being pushed that are only tolerated by the young, the poor, and people who just don't care about space (likely without families).
I almost never see small children in my neighborhood and there are a good set of reasons why.
That tipping point came last year for me and I moved to suburbia for exactly the reasons above. Zero regrets and I get to have space to have a real garden and fruit trees on my property. Couldn't ever get that in high-density housing environment.
+1 and i still live in a condo complex. But my rent is only 66% what it was, my place is 10% larger, yes I spend a tiny bit more on car costs. But frankly I am happier here than I was living downtown San Francisco.
If the government wants to solve the housing affordability crisis it needs to eliminate policies that increase house prices and keep wages low, then it needs to build houses and increase minimum wage. Everything else is a distraction.
Does anyone find the specific distances problematic? Half a mile to the nearest bus seems awfully far for not needing parking. My guess is that this leads to dramatic increases in street parking.
10 minute walk, time it wrong, wait half an hour for next bus. Travel 10-20 minutes Then go to wait next bus wait for an other 20 minutes, then 10-20 minutes more and finally an other 10 minute walk...
Around where I live, there's a lot of pressure to get rid of at least surface lots, because the land they're on is just too valuable. Not just the demand for new housing, but commercial development continues--there's a bunch of massive biotech complexes under construction nearby right now. With lots being sold at $30 million an acre, even the cost of burying parking underground is trivial in comparison.
Some simple changes to bike lanes and street/lane design in NYC is drastically reducing cycling deaths. It took the city less than a decade to make a big difference.
A lot of change is actually well within reach even in sparsely populated suburbs.
What’s really happening is that cars are subsidized and encouraged. Make people pay the real costs of driving and parking and replacing bad zoning rules and development practices and you’ll see steady progress.
Mandatory parking minimums are effectively a price cap. We don’t even cap the price of healthcare, why are we capping the price of parking?
There is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem though; the infrastructure for cars makes things less dense. Without removing minimum-parking laws (which is what TFA is about), it will be extremely challenging to build walkable areas.
My parents live in a fairly dense part of Northern Virginia, and we walk a lot of places. More than 50% of our walking distance is across or around parking, in some cases much more.
Getting rid of parking doesn't magically also get rid of the need for a car. And no, having public transit within half a mile does not replace a car.
All that's going to happen in these places is they'll make people miserable as they drive in circles looking for a parking place, or they'll park several streets over, making those neighbors annoyed they can't find a place, then they introduce residential parking permits, to make sure only the right people park.
Eventually home prices and types adjust so that only low income people who can't afford a car park there, or the opposite happens: they knock down a house or two, turn it into a parking lot and rent those spots out, increasing the cost for anyone who wants to live there.
I've lived in a place like that - not having a car was not an option, but it was all apartment buildings with no parking. They gave us a paper with the names of several local places with lots where we could rent a parking spot, which is what we did.
We moved away as soon as we could - who wants to live in a place like that?
You can easily live in Seattle city limits without owning a car, and our transit story is pretty bad. In a city that really funded transit it would be trivial.
Why the condescending state-the-bleeding-obvious question? Renting and sharing makes little sense for me personally. I answer a similar question here re taxis and public transport: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690450
It also means more houses closer together which I don't really want. I want to be far from my neighbors and even a wave is hard to spot from the distance. I'll keep my car, thanks very much.
> Citing environmental concerns and a lack of housing, an increasing number of cities and some West Coast states are reconsidering mandates that all homes, offices and businesses offer a minimum number of parking spots for residents, workers and customers.
> "Most Americans drive to most places, and that's going to be true 20 years from now, there's just no way it isn't," Herriges said. "But we desperately need to make the alternatives more available to more people and at a price point that's available to more people. Parking is the biggest obstacle standing in the way of that."
No, it's really not. Local governments and NIMBYs that control them prevent changes to zoning laws that could actually help alleviate housing issues. How about letting MFHs go up in your SFH zoned neighborhood? How about getting rid of arbitrary limits on how high you can build up?
> "If you have more compact, walkable, mixed-use areas and you eliminate or reduce those off-street parking requirements, people drive less," McCurdy said. "They might not need to own that second car. Or a car at all. And they certainly use it less often and drive fewer miles. So it's kind of a win-win all around on housing affordability and climate."
I think this hits the nail on the head. Mixed used areas should be present pretty much everywhere. I lived in Germany for almost ten years and I've never encountered a town in the US much like the ones there. I lived in a single family home, but right next door was an apartment building, and on the same exact street at the corner was a Totto Lotto. On the street perpendicular to the one I lived on was a bakery, a clothes shop, a gas station, a small grocery store, an asian food restaurant, and an ice cream shop. I could easily walk to various shops because the zoning laws allowed for it. In Japan even the most residential of zoning still allows for shops to be run out of them. In the US we hardly allow businesses to be in vicinity of housing.
I do think it's fair that we do need roads for large vehicles because we can't magically transport bulk goods from warehouses into local shops, but there's probably a better solution than what exists currently in most American cities. There could maybe be better bifurcation on the use of roads that still allows safe pedestrian/bicycle traffic.
I also do think that parking lots are a waste of space, at least the surface level ones. I just don't know that I agree that it's a low hanging fruit like these people do. You can't get rid of them until you alleviate the need for them. You can't do that until you make changes in policy through the government or a broad change in requirements for commuting in the first place, like expanding WFH.
Although I would prefer to see more dense housing (taller and more MDUs) I really do prefer the single family home lifestyle. That said living in an MDU (apartment, inlaw, condo, whatever) in a city was generally more pleasant than the equivalent in the burbs. I can tell you from living in a relatively low density part of San Francisco that a lot of the long time residents don't want more people. They wield terms like "manhattanize" as pejoratives.
While I do think my old neighborhood should be densified at least a little bit I think you really hit the nail on the head with mixed-use zoning. I had restaurants, transit, libraries, retail, police, schools, parks, pools, etc. all within a stone's throw of my apartment. It was amazing. I'm currently in suburban hell and it's just bleak and depressing.
> I can tell you from living in a relatively low density part of San Francisco that a lot of the long time residents don't want more people. They wield terms like "manhattanize" as pejoratives.
Yes, they are NIMBYs, and they are hugely prevalent in low density housing because they bought that single family home for a reason.
I get the desire for that sort of life, especially when you’re raising young children. I just don’t think single family homes should be what much of our land should be zoned for.
We have to remember that fundamentally this all boils down to economics and rate of return on capital. There's (engineering wise) nothing stopping many communities from either adding more space underground, or above ground by building more levels. It's simply the demands of capital (and workers) that makes it unprofitable to do. We could have parking stalls and walkability and bicycles if capitalists didn't demand the rates of return on money, or workers didn't cost as much as they do, or land was more reasonably partitioned across the populace rather than grand fathered in from antiquity.
> We could have parking stalls and walkability and bicycles if capitalists didn't demand the rates of return on money, or workers didn't cost as much as they do, or land was more reasonably partitioned across the populace rather than grand fathered in from antiquity.
When the three options you offer are "rich people being okay with less money" "forced labor" and "redistribute land more equally" it seems like a rather thinly veiled push for Georgism...
one concern/thought that quickly comes to mind is "What about compounding value of the created?" . This seems increasingly relevant as wealth is increasingly derived from the created rather than basic underlying resources. Eg: should we land tax the rents from the metaverse?
A fundamental idea of Georgism is that the land belongs to everybody, so rather than owning land, one essentially rents it from the people. More desirable land is rented at a higher rate. If the land you are renting could be making someone else millions with a higher productivity use, then you need to pay for the privilege of not using it for that higher productivity use.
