I'm living in Barcelona, I don't own a car (and hopefully never will need to) and I'm a fan of getting rid of cars in downtown areas. But there are few downsides. Horrible pollution while they are making them, due to street closures (I'm right next to a new one under construction and I've never experienced air pollution this bad in my 20 years here. It's horrible walking my kids to school. And it will be a 9 month construction job). Also once the superblocks are built, crime increases (no traffic ie witnesses) and rents increase (pedestrian friendly area!). This has happened in other superblock areas near me.
Crime increase and rents increase? That's some surprising finding. What are those superblocks where that happened exactly? And where is the 9 month construction job?
I can definitely see rents increase. A walkable city is one where you don’t need a car (you only need to rent one if you go on a road trip or you can fly/bus to wherever you like) NOR car insurance. Given that, if you’re an apartment management company, and your prospective tenants have an extra $100-500 a month in change, would you or would you not raise rents, given the demand for an apartment in a walkable city is huge?
Given the state of rent prices globally in western countries I really have to question if the increases you're seeing are attributed to 'superblocks' or just general inflation. If the rent is increasing due to 'superblocks' it's going to be because people prefer living within them rather than traditional blocks, hence they can command more rent, not because there is suddenly spare change that was once spent on a car.
Also I don't think pollution is specific to this type of construction. Any type of full scale construction in urban environments causes terrible pollution and pest issues for the adjacent blocks.
Why can't it be both? By moving there, you're effectively signaling you don't have a car. Those without cars (all else being equal, not sure why it wouldn't be) will have extra money. If the place is desirable, what is to stop those with that new "extra money" from using that to outbid those with less money?
I don't at all doubt its also inflation at play. It seems perfectly reasonable tho that a place that generally has car-less renters would have higher prices as those without cars could afford that added price. To an extent of course.
So the problem is really that regulations have constrained the supply of housing to the point that rents are set as high as people can afford, rather than at the price of replacement.
Well, how much more could realistically be built? I agree, not a fan of housing supply being kept artificially low... but as they say "someone has to have the beach houses."
If there's only 100 units in a car-less block and 500 ppl that want them, what could be done if you've reached the limit of what can be built?
I guess you could go up, making sky scrapers... but now I have to admit I'm out of my element. Not sure if that's viable.
It's the idea of both at once that's implausible. Making it more walkable would gentrify it and raise rents? Sure, I can see that. But the idea that this would also somehow increase crime? Pedestrians are much more able to see or intervene in a crime than drivers are.
Muggers and burglars travel to gentrified neighborhoods to work, because it's a completely rational thing to do.
> Pedestrians are much more able to see or intervene in a crime than drivers are.
Pedestrians are easier to watch and carefully evaluate, also, and will not always be around; you can follow a target and wait until they are safe to rob. People in cars are a mystery, and near active streets a constant one.
I wonder if using tools like https://communitycrimemap.com would help with city design.
Just off the glances I've made: Most crimes happen in easily accessible areas with clear getaway routes, almost no crimes happen at the center cul de sac of a neighbourhood.
re rent increase - I wonder if the future is becoming a giant hyper-efficient machine meant to extract maximum value from "consumers"? basically efficient rent-seeking in the literal sense
Zoning fixes and dense, walkable city planning is the solution. It's just that there would need to be some law from the top level of government, eg. on a national or state level, to force cities have a certain minimum amount of high-density development every year. Because, right now, these cities adhere to their constituents who all would prefer if the supply remained stagnant so that their property values can continue to increase well past whatever they're paying for their monthly mortgage payment.
I’m staunchly opposed to a national or state government forcing a certain type of development onto cities.
Forcing the approval of some type of permits and permitting high density development in some amount/type of area is much more reasonable and executable. (If a city were falling short of the originally proposed mandated housing, what entity would have to make up the shortfall and how would you force them to build a development they’re not asking to build?)
One of the zoning fixes along the lines judge2020 mentioned is to remove the parking minimum requirements, which already forces a certain type of development onto cities.
Another is to remove zoning laws preventing secondary suites / in-law apartments / granny flats / etc. These also force a certain type of development onto cities.
I think that all of those examples are AHJs imposing restrictions on themselves, rather than someone else imposing restrictions on them from outside/containment.
I have no problem with cities imposing restrictions on cities, as that is amenable to democratic review by the voters in that city. Having a national imposition on a city would be objectionable to me on principle (and in the US, would very likely violate the 10th Amendment).
AHJ - authorities having jurisdiction, basically "whoever sets and enforces the codes"
The problem is that democracy doesn't seem to be working well on that level and is negatively impacting people outside that narrow scope as well.
If you poll people if we should build more in their city, you get a majority in favor. Then you get community meetings in which a vocal minority that can actually afford (typically better off and older) to go to community meetings and create pressure shoot down projects or cripples them.
On a larger scope you have folks who are denied economic opportunity due to housing policy that gets set by people who are already in, but kick away the ladder for everyone else. As a concrete example, I know lots of people who'd love to live (again) in SF in part due to the job market, but cannot or it would be super hard for them.
My point is that nothing will ever change if this governing structure continues. By law, cities only protect their constituents, so any high-density development is going to encounter insane barriers since the increased competition within the area would drop values of nearby single-family homes, and cities will be made aware of this by the NIMBYs that show up at city hall meetings to push back against the development.
I don't have a serious objection nor see a constitutional challenge to having a state impose restrictions upon itself or its cities. (The same thing done federally is the problem.)
That still leaves the problem in your original proposal of "how exactly do you plan to enforce the required level of high-density development if no one is asking to do it?"
The National 55 MPH speed limit shows the federal government, through the power of the purse, can have a strong influence on state traffic laws.
The history of zoning shows how the State Standard Zoning Enabling Act - a federal work - can influence the states to change.
There appear to be easy ways to tweak judge2020's proposal to make it better reflect demand, but I don't care to argue that issue.
> AHJs imposing restrictions on themselves
judge2020's point is that zoning laws support current residents, not future residents, so AHJs have a systemic bias against making these changes.
judge2020's proposal is to look towards the democratically elected bodies which have a wider scope.
As a concrete example, California recently made it easier to build mother-in-law units (ADUs in CA terms), by reducing the requirements cities and counties can enforce. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2020/03/12... . This law is why I mentioned mother-in-law units as an example.
That change in California law has no constitutional issues like what you are opposed to.
Just because it isn't easy doesn't mean judge2020 isn't right.
You said you staunchly oppose a state government forcing a certain type of development onto cities, without explaining why you oppose it, nor stating if you support the current forced state of development.
I don’t object to a state government setting restrictions on their cities’ zoning rules.
I do oppose states “[forcing] cities [to] have a certain minimum amount of high-density development every year” because it’s not at all obvious how to implement forcing development that is not supported or requested by developers.
I have no significant objections to the current level of state restrictions in my state of MA, in which no developers are forced to develop property against their wishes.
Another one that's obvious to me: Removing unit-size minimums. In places like SF people are defacto already hacking around the minimum by having room mates. If nobody wants small units, the market will not provide them.
Buy your own home.
Refuse subscription plans.
Refuse X-as-a-service offerings.
Don't buy products that you're not allowed to resell (digital games, software, etc).
Most of the 20th century has been a series of attempts to answer this question. We'll have another wave of attempts of a different sort over the coming decades.
I wonder if the crime increases in absolute numbers, but goes down per capita. This phenomenon frequently gives cities a bad rep, even though you might actually be safer.
Ugh, I read a few days ago that per capita crime is lower in cities. Tried to find numbers about it and you are correct. Kinda concerning that you got a bunch of downvotes for being correct and I got upvotes despite being wrong.
I wonder if they've tried putting up cameras everywhere? It made a huge difference in downtown Detroit. First the billionaire Dan Gilbert bought up most of the empty buildings downtown and put cameras everywhere. Course he hired his own quick response security force to arrest and hold criminals until the DPD could arrive. I've personally walked the streets near Campus Martius at 2 am and felt personally safe.
It worked so well that the city and the DPD started the Green Light program. They worked with gas stations putting up cameras and put together teams of dedicated officers for a quick response. The result was that it drastically reduced car jackings and gas station robberies. Now they've done the same thing at liquor stores and are talking about expanding it to other cooperating merchants. Cameras only work if they are being monitored and the police respond quickly.
Crime follows money. Wether going to better-off city parts or even travelling internationally. Not only targets are more wealthy, but „you don't shit where you eat“ is important too. You don't want to accidentally rob a friend's friend's friend...
For example here in bum fuck eastern europe, after we joined Schengen, street crime dropped in no time. Lots of „street professionals“ went to much more wealthy Western europe. Some packed up and left. Others leave for tours and come back home to live on income from stolen stuff.
> Crime increase and rents increase? That's some surprising finding.
Same in the UK, rent is up all over the country, breaking in, flytipping, private and public areas devastation is up. Local media don't even care to report on knife attacks in major cities.
> rents increase (pedestrian friendly area!). This has happened in other superblock areas near me.
This happens whenever you improve anything in a city. The solution is to make the improvements everywhere if you can. We obviously can't stop making nice things just because it makes some areas more desirable.
The Henry George Theorem states that when there are government improvements (which I would probably expand to any improvements), then the land rents increase at least as much as spending.
The remedy (at least according to Henry George) is to not only continue improving, but also to tax away the land rents, and most likely distribute them equally to all residents.
This also means that whenever there's an improvement to, say, transit that is actually beneficial to the community, it can be more than self-funding by taxing land rents.
I'd be willing to bet that the air pollution from a 9 month construction job is outweighed by the air pollution from steady car traffic for years. And as someone who has been robbed in traffic multiple times, I don't think traffic witnesses stop crime. Pedestrian witnesses and good lighting might though. Yeah, property values and rent might go up, but that's hardly an argument against environmental improvements.
I envy you a bit. Living in an urban residential area i'm just now getting to the end of 2.5 years of poorly managed construction by the private landlord next to my own home. I got to the point of initiating legal action before they decided to cash out their investment and sell the property to a charitable foundation, who have been far easier to deal with.
I do feel you on the problems, but the idea of the construction job being complete in only a 9 month timeframe sounds like a luxury.
Superblocks seem like they would be super-fun for a 24-year-old single or someone visiting on holiday, but would be a logistical nightmare for a young family. Is this so? or am I a frog stuck in a car-dependency well?
Ugh that youtube video made me so angry and is seriously making me reconsider my current job options (one is based in Europe), as I have a kid on the way. However, I feel that what is healthy for active people and kids is too demanding for, say, my elderly parents. This summer I spent a month in Europe and definitely observed very few elderly persons and many times where I had to walk or climb stairs.
Some superblocks sometimes have parks or playgrounds, you never have to worry about your kids getting run over or thrown in the back of a van, more people hang out outside because it isn't sulfery or loud.
I lived in one super-like-block in Poland and noise was the reason I had to move out. About 200 flats facing each other, you need only one person to ruin day or night for everyone there. One party at night and you have 600 people who couldn't sleep. One specific neighbour was listening to music from loudspeakers literally all day causing echo in the block. She turned volume up when cleaning and vacuuming, she had to still hear the music WHILE vacuuming. Never want to live to such block ever again, not anywhere close.
I live in a city now, but the closest supermarket is 6km away. I hear no loud noises, unless it's dogs barking, cats fighting or deer barking. Population density in this area is (probably) a 600x smaller, so I'm less at risk of hearing someones' music while they are vacuuming, losing my mind and not being able to work. Absolutely never going back to dense population and blocks with noise and crime.
i never want to live around kids or playgrounds again though. right now families dump their kids into the streets after school. its a nightmare to live around. the noise is non stop
Might be unpopular but completely agree. I once lived next to a dog park. I love dogs... but damn, lol. People yelling at their dogs. Dogs barking at other dogs. Dogs whining, dogs howling... it was awful.
As the parent of a young child, I wish very much for more car-free space around my house. Otherwise I need to pack her in the car to get some running-around space.
I'm not sure if chopped corners area a required feature of Super Blocks but man those are annoying zebra lines... You have to walk 10 meters more to use the zebra line on each intersection!
And I thought 2nd paragraph from Wikipedia offers an interesting insight on cultural priorities:
> It was first used in Canada and the United States in the late 1940s, but it later fell out of favor with traffic engineers there, as it was seen as prioritizing flow of pedestrians over flow of car traffic. Its benefits for pedestrian amenity and safety have led to new examples being installed in many countries in recent years
I think they still do, but they at least used to have this in the SF Financial District, it was always fun walking out to lunch with hordes of people all crossing the street whichever way they wanted, including diagonally through the intersection.
In big eastern US cities, there's been much more of a "whatever won't get you run down" approach to intersections than was historically the case out west. At least a couple decades ago, western cities had a reputation for ticketing pedestrians for crossing against lights that would have been laughable in e.g. NYC.
9 years ago when I worked in Downtown Seattle, crossing against the light could get you a ticket, even at 630 in the morning. Nobody was driving, and they still insisted that you wait.
> man those are annoying zebra lines... You have to walk 10 meters more to use the zebra line on each intersection!
Unless you are trying to cross perpendicularly, then you have to walk 10 meters less. Averages out to being similar (and isn't annoying to use in person).
Regardless, it shortens the crossing length, and puts crossing pedestrians at a perpendicular angle to turning drivers, both of which drastically increase pedestrian safety.
No, they are replacing cars (who solely look at the road ahead of them) with pedestrians (who are actually using the space and looking around).
In fact, there will be more people on the streets. The lack of cars makes it possible to use the spare space for playgrounds, skate parks, outdoor restaurant seating, additional shops, et cetera. And the streets don't suddenly narrow: they are still 70 feet wide, they don't magically turn into tiny alleyways the second you remove car traffic.
I can tell you from experience that many well-designed parks are even very busy after nightfall. No reason to feel afraid when there are literally a hundred people within eyesight.
Much of the point of the idea is that you can fit more humans in the same street space by not having each one drag their own living room around with them. And a pedestrian is in a much better position to notice (or indeed intervene in) a crime than a driver is.
You know that you can design pedestrians areas that can accept emergency trafic ? Most European city centers that are closed to individual cars still accept emergency vehicles, buses, and even delivery trucks (generally during a fixed span of time in the day) and taxis.
One solution to this is to have special vehicles to take emergency workers or doctors from their home to the hospital or where ever they need to be. It's also better than just them driving to the hospital. They don't need to worry about traffic and such
> One solution to this is to have special vehicles to take emergency workers or doctors from their home to the hospital or where ever they need to be. It's also better than just them driving to the hospital. They don't need to worry about traffic and such
That doesn't solve the problem, which is OK, in that I don't expect people here to understand how being on call works.
Basically, it's like a leash centered on the hospital: You can be anywhere, as long as you can get to the hospital in a certain amount of time when you get called in. This roughly correlates with distance, but not entirely: When my dad was on call in a town with a railroad track running through it, he had to stay on the right side of the tracks because a long coal train would blow his response time. (It was a small town.) The point is, though, they aren't fixed at home when they're on call, and being fixed at home would destroy their lives. My dad had to be on call fully 50% of the time when he lived in aforesaid small town, because he was 50% of that town's total anesthesia providers.
Therefore, unless you propose a chauffeur, they will be driving their own vehicles while they're on call.
On a deeper level, changing how being on call works would require changing how small of a town people are allowed to live in. This seems like a common problem: People come up with something that they might be able to make work in New York City, and think they've Solved The Problem, blissfully unaware of St. Louis, let alone Du Quoin.
I mean the topic is about places with dense residencies. You asked specifically what the rules could be for emergency vehicles/people working for emergency services. I wasn't proposing a solution for small towns.
OK, I went off on a tangent there, but I figured the question I asked wasn't going to get an answer and I started talking about a larger trend I've noticed in this general space. (The other trend being people ignoring and downvoting questions they can't engage with without poking holes in their utopia.)
> Do people who have to take call to provide emergency medical care still get to use cars?
That is a good argument against shopping malls or high rise buildings, as they are bigger and vastly most inaccessible than superblocks. If shopping malls and similar structures are safe, superblocks are safer.
> Do people who have to take call to provide emergency medical care still get to use cars?
It's 5pm Friday in NYC, you're 10 blocks from the hospital and get paged? You walk or ride a bike. Any city not built in the American car centric design, biking is faster
cars or other vehicles required to provide services prohibited. The aim is to make people use other modes of transportation than their cars in these areas.
Pedestrian areas basically always allow vehicles for emergency services, deliveries, tradespeople, etc. where practical. And there can actually be a fair number of vehicles especially at certain times of the day.
I'm a huge believer in the superiority of walkable cities (the single main reason I left the U.S since outside NYC they don't exist in the U.S), but superblocks aren't my favorite approach. To me it makes everywhere look the same and kind of boring. I prefer how they do it in Asian cities like Seoul and Tokyo where they just have a lot of pedestrian streets and multistory buildings. Virtually every major European city is walkable, and I find it significantly more interesting to walk through cities like London or Paris than the boring grid superblocks of Barcelona (though I still like Barcelona).
I think this is a really common misconception around Barcelona's superblocks.
When people hear "Barcelona superblock", I think they're thinking of the individual city blocks which to be fair, are already huge and modular. (this is at least the confusion I originally had)
The idea with superblocks, is to take a cluster of city blocks and not allow through traffic in that block, instead guiding that traffic to flow around the perimeter of that cluster. Nothing here requires the city blocks to be built or look the way Barcelona's city blocks are built and look. All that's required is changes to the roads, and to try and encourage each cluster of blocks to have a mostly self sufficient set of amenities like a grocery store, cafe, etc.
In unicode art, if □ is a city Block surrounded by roads (-- and |) being used by traffic,
The US has lots of "self sufficient" (in that you can live in walking distance and do all your retail, grocery, cafes on foot) micro-areas like that. They're called more like "mixed use malls," though.
So yeah, that's not exactly what a "superblock" is - because very few of them exist without parking. Doing both parking + easily walkable gets expensive.
Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks.
All that to say: if the superblocks don't solve the need-for-a-car problem, they aren't gonna do much for the traffic or car-centric problem. And a mall surrounded by parking garages isn't exactly the walkable old European city people are wanting. So we're back to needing transit first. And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.
If you don't start by pushing the cars out of the neighbourhoods and making them more human-friendly then transit is DoA - no-one will choose transit over driving door-to-door when they don't have to pay for the externalities of the latter. Yes, you probably do have to include some amount of parking at the edges of the superblock initially, and you probably have to build up your transit network in tandem with making your city more walkable. But small walkable neighbourhoods that you gradually expand are the only way to bootstrap it.
Note that you don't have to replace car commuting to reduce car use on the margins. Most car journeys are short, e.g. going to the nearest shop, or taking children to/from school, and a superblock with parking on the edge can mean people don't drive for those journeys even if they still commute by car. Getting a household to go from 2 cars to 1 is just as much of a win as getting a 1-car household to eliminate it completely.
> And then if you have the transit, do you need the superblocks - lots of walkable cities with streets open to cars.
Such as? Where I live (Tokyo) most streets are "open" to cars in that a car can drive down them, but they're narrow with low speed limits and cars are expected to give way to pedestrians, which is much the same as on the inside of a superblock. You can't make a walkable city without putting walkers first.
I love how Americans insist that systems not designed around cars won’t work to the people who are happily living in the systems not designed around cars.
I think it's more an argument about how to refactor from one to the other. If you think of the current state of US vs European cities, you can think of it it as a long series of decisions in a tree, where largely EU has taken one path, and US has taken quite another divergent path.
It's somewhat obvious how to go from village, to hamlet, to town, to city with horses, to city with trams, to cities with a modern multi-facted public transit system. It's also pretty obvious how to go from horses to car dependent hellscape. It's not quite so obvious how to go from an extremely car-dependent hellscape like Houston or Atlanta or LA, to a walkable and bikable city with a modern public transit system like Amsterdam or London or Berlin.
I'm kind of overselling the thesis here some, because from one perspective, the Netherlands did go from quite car dependent to its current state in the past 50 years...on the other, the Atlanta and Houston metros each have 1/3 the population of the entire Netherlands and LA has 2/3.
Anyway, point being, the disbelief is in refactoring from Houston/Atlanta/LA to non-car designed cities, not so much in understanding how they can exist in the first place.
Superblocks make it possible to separate high-speed and low-speed traffic: cars go in between superblocks while bikes go through them. This makes it way faster and safer to travel by bike, making it a viable method of commuting.
Furthermore, the increased walkability reduces the number of bus stops needed and makes it way easier to construct bus lanes - which can get absolute priority at crossings.
Walkable cities which are open to cars are a contradiction. Cars are absolutely massive and need a disproportionate amount of space. As long as you need to sacrifice half your neighborhood to cars, it is not going to become walkable.
> Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks.
You seem to be stretching really hard here to try and conflate "no driving through them middle of the superblock" and "people in the superblock aren't allowed to have cars", but those aren't the same thing at all. You just put the parking in centralized places at the edge of the superblock, where economy of scale can apply.
If everyone still needs cars, you gotta put them somewhere. And the roads have to be big enough to accomodate the commuting and the inter-block traffic. If you put them on the perimeter and route the cars around the perimeter, you don't have a walkable city, you have a car-centric city of high-traffic roads people drive on to walk around little walkable islands. *Same even if you put them under the superblock.* Tons of these sorts of mini-downtown walkable areas in LA, for instance, but nobody's calling LA walkable.
Transit, transit, transit. You can't superblock your way around the need for it. "Walking to a car to drive to another part of town" instead of "Walking to a train to get to another part of town" is going to give you a dramatically different experience, since one of those is far, far more friendly to low-density SFH surrounding development than the other.
>Getting rid of the parking doesn't work because I've never seen one of them "self sufficient" to the point of most people not having to commute (either to there for those who work there or from there for those who live there). Even if you find a job and a place to live in the same superblock, people are gonna (a) want to have options to leave that job in the future and (b) know people outside of those blocks.
> To me it makes everywhere look the same and kind of boring.
You're misunderstanding what a superblock is.
The blocks in Barcelona that look the same predate superblocks. The idea of a superblock -- making an NxN grid of blocks impermeable to through car traffic, basically -- could still be done in other cities with more irregular block patterns. It would be a little more complicated, of course, but it'd still be doable.
Chicago definitely uses a lot of ground space for surface parking; used to live in the South Loop, and the grocery store in that area is just all parking. There is also an irritating walk across a railroad yard if you want to go to Whole Foods. You really have to bike and not walk to cover the distance. I biked a ton when I lived in Chicago; the distances were just long enough that walking was a pain but biking was trivial.
In NYC, there are plenty of places exactly like Chicago. Not everywhere is a walker's paradise, and even in areas that are, car traffic is a dominating part of your life. NYC is great, but I am very jealous of Barcelona and even Paris. Very excited about congestion charging.
Lived there for many years, it's about as good as you'll get in the west coast (setting a terribly low bar here), but still not in the same league or even universe as Tokyo (where I've moved to and the commenter mentioned).
All of SoMA is dominated by huge, high-speed pedestrian hostile thoroughfares; trains only go through one corridor so most of the city is excluded from connectivity (Muni is horribly slow and unreliable so you can't actually depend on it in daily life), not to mention the slow frequency, ear-splitting volume and noxious odors; affordability is downright awful so anyone middle-class couldn't experience it; and the whole city is filthy and dangerous so if you aren't a 20-something able-bodied large male walking in the middle of the day who ideally isn't a minority, you can't really make use of the freedom anyway (and even if you are crazy people will still try to pick fights with you for no reason... yeah never again). In SF's defense the bike-share more or less works given how tiny the city is. But don't ride your own bike or it'll be stolen in a week...
I really strongly believe that city centers should ban cars completely with the exception of taxis, service vehicles, and special permits. In some cities, it might mean investing more in public transportation infrastructure, and parking on the outskirts of town at public transportation terminals. But it many cities it's very rare that you would actually need a car while in the city.
I lived in a city with argubly the best public transportation in the world. there were still plenty of times a taxi was needed. going somewhere when public transportation stops
is one. Another is when carrying something large. when going to something formal in bad weather, when too sick to walk, ...
I don't see it reasonable to ban private cars and then allow rich people to use taxis. Everyone should be treated equally in this case. Meaning no private transport for anyone. And basically there is always the option not to go when the weather is bad or there is no public transport. Which I think would be entirely valid choice to force on everyone. Also there is ways to move large objects without any powered tools.
The rich are always going to have advantages over the poor. The point of banning cars isn't to punish the rich or to make everyone equal. The point of banning cars is to reduce the traffic and pollution on the street and make the city more livable and healthy.
There are less abled people for whom you'd need some form of frequent or on-demand transport close to their position. Taxis fill that role in the current system.
Wouldn't those be inefficient? Isn't it better to force absolutely everyone to bigger units thus taking care of unit economies in emissions. Like full-sized busses going every 20 minutes to hour just so they will fill up.
Perhaps, but why would banning taxis(and cars in general) necessarily be one of those requirements? Seems to me a better and more pragmatic way is to dedicate more resources to electrifying the transports and banning the use of fossil fuels as soon as possible.
I believe that for a modern society to function a point to point family sized vehicle is required somewhere there in the mix.
So why not fully embrace them then in cities? Allow everyone to have their own private family sized vehicle? With designated free parking spot too to allow the convenience. Ensure that there is plenty of road capacity and that the travel is not impeded by those with lesser energy requirements for starting and stopping like pedestrians and people using bicycles.
The description in the article about what "superblocks" are, is, I think, wrong.
It's not a binary thing "cars" vs. "not cars at all". Inside the "superblocks" is possible to use the car. Is just that you can't go anywhere except around the super-block and you have to drive in a slow pace.
Parking is also restricted to neighbors and short times for loading and unloading goods or people.
All that, disincentive cars going there except for specific needs. Also a lot of space is take away from cars for common pedestrian spaces and cycling.
It's essentially a car free zone but residents can own a car and get out of the area. As an outsider the space is not accessible by car. Which is really how it should be. We might not have the whole country hooked up to amazing public transport, but we don't need to provide car access to every single space.
Yeah (but as another commenter says, a cul de sac only for cars, not for bicycles or walking).
It's not designed for stop traffic totally, just to disincentivize some (most maybe?) kind of traffic. The idea is also make those areas kind of "independent". In the sense that they should have most of all necessary services. Places for buying your groceries, medical services, small business..
Of course, in practice it's not ideal, they are still learning.
Cul-de-sacs block all through traffic, not just through traffic by cars. This typically makes getting around impractical without a car.
Superblocks to my knowledge do not, you can exit anywhere on foot or by bike. Basically it makes getting around outside a car the more convenient option.
Not always. I've seen neighborhoods where the end of the Cul de sac connects out to walking/bike paths and green space behind the houses. So bikes and pedestrians can cut through at those points but through traffic for cars is killed, meaning only people actually going to the homes on the street actually drive there.
I'm not sure that the super blocks are that great. From my experience they basically turned the shops, residential, and commercial into cookie cutter outlets from the block. You didn't get the unique architecture that you see in other cities, everything HAS to fit in that block.
Additionally it felt like they were often far away from public transit that you needed. (The train stop may be 3 blocks away or better)
It sounds like you're not talking about superblocks, you're just talking about the existing blocks of Eixample.
The superblocks concept is that they'd be grouped together into 3x3 grids, by changing traffic rules and building urban furniture to block off streets, creating new squares and one-way systems. The goal being that everything would be far more walkable and you'd see far more local community - i.e. less of the cookie cutter shops you describe.
At least in Barcelona, the blocks are already there and have been since the end of the 19th century - they are just grouping the blocks into superblocks where through traffic is only allowed on (on average) every third street and the rest are car free (I imagine residents can still use them).
That issue seems orthogonal to creating superblocks.
Superblocks just means that within a grid of NxN regular blocks, you limit car traffic and instead prioritize walking and biking. It's true that the blocks of Barcelona tend to be same-y looking, but that issue predates superblocks.
Yeah, it may be a better idea to instead go for something between this and soviet style microdistricts. Slightly larger areas that don't have to be copy-paste fixed size units, roughly a 5 min walk across. Each having its own bus stop and a node of other utilities.
There was a Strong Towns article recently with a similar exploration. Their proposal was that this is actually an economically viable approach for developers to rebuild an entire block.
This is already being done in a lot of places in the American Midwest, such as my city and the neighboring city where my partner lives. The form it takes is a lot less glamorous than Strong Towns disciples probably want:
An entire block gets leveled and filled with cookie cutter 5-over-1s. The neighboring block also gets leveled to provide a giant parking lot for the residents. This happens even in city centers and near universities.
Indeed, but you can expect the architects and developers to still call themselves progressive urbanists, conveniently leaving the parking crater out of frame in all of their renders.
A major problem, IMO, with mixed-use projects is that developers don't create a good mix of commercial spaces, and city planners don't differentiate. The vast majority of spaces are too big and expensive.
Cookie-cutter isn't necessarily a problem. Though they can look quaint, even most old walkable neighborhoods contain nearly identical assortments of businesses. Most of those businesses require only very small spaces, and could never generate the revenues to pay for larger spaces while competing with big box retailers. You need many small, cheap spaces. Over time you'll eventually start to see a handful of quirky establishments pop up. But if your aim is just for the quirky establishments, setting aside only one or a handful of cheap spaces, with most targeted at chains or otherwise too large and expecting too much rent, what you'll likely end up with is a bunch of vacant commercial spaces and low foot traffic.
Nothing wrong with 5 over 1 buildings, IMO. What's wrong is that the first floor invariably will have N commercial units, all too large, when they could provide 3N or 5N, all significantly cheaper and capable of supporting small proprietors. Moreover, with a larger number and assortment of businesses, that ground floor will begin to look and feel much less cookie-cutter.
But I guess it's probably difficult to raise money using a pitch that features comic book stores and flower shops, rather than one that imagines a CVS or Walgreens as a tenant.
People call themselves all kinds of things. I fail to see why I should disregard good ideas because someone cynically used the same name for a bad thing.
Same here, in Boston I randomly stumbled upon a street shut down along the entire length of the Back Bay, not for any particular event or anything, and it was like a spontaneous mile-long carnival. Washington Street at the heart of downtown has been car-free for as long as I've been here. Over in Cambridge they shut down the major road along the river every weekend in the summer and it's a delightful time to go for a bike ride or just hang out on the riverfront without the constant noise of cars.
Newbury Street was already a pretty narrow, notoriously parking unfriendly street--with a lot of stores/restaurants--so selectively making a street like that pedestrian only makes a lot of sense. Minimal impact from a traffic and parking perspective and a win for pedestrians. It also directly connects to parks.
Shutting down (a small section of) Memorial Drive on Sundays in the summer also seems like a win. There's a parallel road on the other side of the river that can pretty much substitute at a lower traffic time, but you almost certainly wouldn't want to cut that capacity at rush hour on a weekday when both sides of the river are already horrible in terms of traffic capacity.
So you're saying special events, which are intended to attract crowds, are more vibrant when times when there is no special event? Perhaps we should just schedule never ending special events? This deserves more study...
I'm pretty sure these "never ending special events" are called pedestrian streets which have been studied and to my understanding and are quite productive commercial areas and are very pleasent to be in
There are plenty of places where streets are made pedestrian-only once per week, or even multiple days per week, for farmer's markets, flea markets, etc. and they reliably bring a crowd.
In a way, getting rid of cars is the special event: increased foot traffic, food vendors, outdoor seating, and other events like markets and live music tend to follow on naturally.
Apart from pedestrian streets, you also see this in well-integrated urban parks and plazas like Union Square, Washington Square, or Bryant Park in NYC.
Except it's been implemented / studied for decades in European cities, and in many American cities for the last two years. Also, road closures aren't shutting down residential access, just allowing more foot traffic in light commercial downtown areas.
What I want more than a car-less city, is a city that properly separates out walkability from drivability. Use the superblock approach, but mandate all buildings have to be the same height and are connected to a public skyway network like so: https://i.imgur.com/hYGpQp4.png
You can make these roofs a proper public space rather than just being unused as they are today, and you don't have to worry about crosswalks / mixed pedestrian + car usage for roads.
This exists in places like Calgary (+15 Skywalk) and Edmonton (Pedways), and underground in places like Toronto (PATH) and Montréal (RÉSO) to try and separate pedestrians from snow and being sprayed by slush from cars.
From a weather perspective, they're pretty nice in the winter, but they suffer from a number of problems such as weird hours, lack of step free access, and fundamentally removing you from the urban fabric of the city. Oh, and they meander everywhere so it often takes a lot longer to use them. You end up with odd liminal spaces that can sometimes feel quite dangerous.
It has been tried, but it quickly turns into a dystopian hellscape. If you don't have people on the streets they turn into crime dens. Meanwhile, the skywalks are not visible from the buildings so they lack social control - and are completely unreachable for emergency services. Not to mention that the main benefit of pedestrian areas is the wide-open spaces connected to a dense network of local infrastructure, which such a skywalk would not provide.
The only way this works is by separating out the cars - like highways are doing. Due to the lack of physical space to exist and the huge speed difference they are completely incompatible with non-car traffic.
There's a neighborhood in Helsinki that's built like that called East Pasila. Most people hate it. Its constantly rated as one of the least desirable districts in the city.
You could probably get even better walk-able integration by connecting together multiple floors worth of hallways, one above the other. That could approach a 3D city a little bit more.
I think the notion of enclosed area without any traffic that is not local just works at any scale. In US, there's (very rarely) courtyard housing. Where I grew up, it looks like this: https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=38aa3a47-56e0-4667-a6b1-3ebed... (somehow on Google maps the setting to disable labels is not preserved in the link). These buildings are 17 stories tall and while you can drive inside the squares there's absolutely no reason to, unless you live there, and you can probably go 10 mph/15 kph if that. So, it's basically a little enclosed park for each giant building, occasionally with some services.
These days, I have become enlightened and actually prefer car-centric living - in North America, but also in Western Europe from my impressions as a tourist, dense car-free areas only have any advantages whatsoever for drunk people and kids; but if I were to live in a dense place I feel like some variation of this design, with "local" space that is intentionally separated, is far superior to the kind you get in e.g. London/Munich where "local" space seems to simply be a path to get to the subway, or e.g. Vancouver (where I did live) where there simply isn't any.
It is not just Barcelona. I live in a medium-sized town in Argentina. I have food stores, general shops, bakeries, breweries, drugstores, ice-cream shops, etc., even a school, all at walkable distances.
In 1970, the pioneers of Cancun (Mexico) designed the initial city landscape using the supermanzana pattern. This design pattern is similar to the superblock design in Barcelona. But it is better in reducing noise of traffic thanks to “bended” blocks.
You can find them in the old areas of Cancun (downtown) on Google Maps.
Sounds great. But good luck implementing it within the legal framework that exists in most nations, for existing cities. Plus this analysis fails to account for the environmental cost of tearing down existing structures and constructing the new ones. It's really only applicable if you are planning a new city with strong central control and sparse existing structures.
It would be much simpler creating a walkable area as part of a large scale urban renewal/redevelopment project than trying to retrofit an existing area. I wonder why there is so much focus on transforming an existing area. People should all want to buy/invest/rent in these areas designed with walking, biking, and expanded green space in mind.
Real estate value in cities rises because of scarcity and demand which then makes any sort of redesign prohibitively expensive. Instead we opt for half-assed approaches like ADUs to provide increased density with substandard units in areas that aren't capable of handling the increased density.
A better approach, if we could muster the political will, would be to raise the large amounts of capital needed to transform large swaths of low-density suburbia into a comprehensively planned neighborhood. Otherwise, short of bombing the US back to the stone age and starting again, we will be trapped by the layouts of the 20th century.
There's a cool approach called Transit Oriented Development[1]. You build a corridor of public-transit, and rezone the area around the corridor for higher density. Then it becomes economically viable for developers to build higher density in those areas and the urban infill can occur more organically.
Where were you when the cities were altered to be more car friendly. Those car owners should just have moved to some place where their cars didn't bother others /s
"Superblocks are a relatively new urban planning concept that has been pioneered in Barcelona, Spain."
No, they're not new. They've been tried many times. Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan has "superblocks".[1] That might be the first large development like this. The units near roads, not the ones facing the green spaces, are considered more desirable.
And that's in Manhattan, which has really good public transportation.
Peter Cooper Village in a collection of near-100% residential highrises. It is completely lacking in shops, restaurants, or bars at street level. When it comes to amenities, it is a virtual desert. Despite the lack of cars, you still can't really walk anywhere you want to go to.
Due to the large number of highrises the access streets are still very car-focused and hostile to pedestrians.
Additionally, the remaining space is filled with small closed-off snippets of high-density greenery. The large amount of trees block any kind of visibility from the residencies, greatly reducing safety.
It reminds me a lot of the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood in Amsterdam. Constructed in the 1970s it is best-known for being unsafe and undesirable - until a massive reconstruction starting around 2000.
At a glance this seems quite a bit different: much larger than a super block, and with almost no ground level retail, which means being in the center places you quite a ways from stores/restaurants.
I'm always shocked at how other people live. Not in a bad way though... but I just do at least a handful of things weekly that just wouldn't work, living in a place like that.
By all means tho, if people enjoy them and they 'work' then keep building them.
- playing guitar with amp (yea, you can w/o but less fun haha)
- loading up all our bikes to go to a scenic trail (getting cold, so also packing heavier clothes takes up space)
- transported a ridiculously heavy side table, picked it up from friends house.
- 3D printing. I suppose could be done but the fumes get unpleasant after awhile, best in a shed or garage.
- bulk buying groceries to save money (technically my wife handles this but I've done it before)
I'm sure I could think of a few more and I do have "edge cases" that come about because I just like to build things (usually involving PVC pipes, lol). I guess my point is that I just couldn't do many of these things in an apartment, I certainly tried ahah.
It seems like you just have different priorities, which is fine. Other people may prefer being able to walk to a bar instead of having to take an Uber, or being able to meet up with friends without having to make it a planned-for event, and so on. The thought of optimizing my life around loading side tables seems bananas to me, but it isn't to you, and that's cool.
Rather interesting (disingenuous) take away from my comment, ahah.
That aside... is that not what I mostly said in my first comment? I totally agree. I don't enjoy bars. If you do and want to pay the premium for that, totally fine by me.
There's a premium to be paid either way. If you live out in the burbs, the premium is that transportation costs are usually much higher (you generally need one car per adult, and you drive quite a bit). Sometimes there's also a premium in terms of time, depending on commute or how often you want to go to events or things located in the city.
When our family of three was living on the outskirts of Munich, our local transportation costs were low, since we used transit + bikes (including an electric cargo bike) to get around. It was much cheaper than even having one car like we did/do in the states.
Well sure, there are costs to transportation. Only in the most extreme circumstances could you make them close to equal tho, all other factors staying the same.
How do you figure? Only way this seems plausible is if you constantly opt to buy two brand new cars as soon as you finish paying them off, for the rest of your life.
In my searching for a place, you're looking at a 1.5-2k premium for a comparable place _in_ the city vs 20-30 minutes out of it. That's roughly $20k a year in just rent alone, which is the price of a decent car.
> In my searching for a place, you're looking at a 1.5-2k premium for a comparable place _in_ the city vs 20-30 minutes out of it.
This is like looking at potential living costs in Tokyo by calculating how much it would cost for 2+ cars and a big single family home with two large yards while eating peanut butter and drinking root beer every day.
This is a common fallacy that people engage in when comparing urban vs suburban areas. The suburban advantages can be had in urban areas for a large price (e.g. big house, multiple cars to the extent that this is an advantage), whereas urban advantages are more often things that you can't buy in the suburbs for any price, like walkability or decent transit or cooler local events/stores/restaurants. Thus, you end up comparing an urban area with suburban advantages versus a suburban area without urban advantages. That's obviously not fair, so the logical thing to do is to look at how people actually behave, how they actually spend.
I agree with what you're saying. There are things exclusive to each location.
I guess that's why I say "all things the same" because well, for us at least, we spend a lot of time at home. I wasn't even factoring a yard and garage etc. Just normal square footage and general "quality" of the place.
All things not being equal tho, I totally agree with you :)
That's the premium you would have to pay for a comparable place, but a comparable place is actually not that comparable. Urban lifestyle is fundamentally different from suburban lifestyle, focusing more on doing things outside your home. A better comparison would be based on what urban people in your social class are paying for housing.
Much in the same way, it's not reasonable to compare suburban and rural costs of living by assuming similar homes. For example, beachfront properties tend to be quite expensive in the suburbia, and private lakes even more so.
>but a comparable place is actually not that comparable
I can agree with this. I mean like you say though, its a location premium. All things being equal, a beach house will cost more than a normal house. All things being equal, 1000sqft in the city will be more than 1000sqft out of the city. To some, being able to walk to a restaurant is priceless. Other's could care less. At the end of the day, there's a premium for proximity.
Yup, doing all of those in an apartment would be...difficult. Some of them a townhome/duplex would probably handle fine though, and note that superblocks still allow residents cars, they just have to drive really slowly within the superblock, and you can't really cross through it, so you can still do things like transport heavy tables.
Point 5 is what I love about my home in India. If we needed to buy in bulk we would take the car and head to the city. But otherwise almost all kind of groceries is like a few mins walk away from my home. It's hard to find this kind of flexibility in the US
Wow, I do this shit all the time in my apt and its literally never been thought for me.
- playing guitar with amp - I do it just fine, i just use headphones during the night, during the day I dont turn it to 11
- loading up all our bikes to go to a scenic trail - not a issue, have multiple bikes stored and fits into a rental just fine. Done it many times to go upstate and do 30+ mile bike rides to NJ
- transported a ridiculously heavy side table - Simple. get a truck and a buddy.
- 3D printing own 3+ 3D printers. Not an issue printing.
- bulk buying groceries - Cart + bag. Eat 2 weeks at a time with one trip. Takes 20 minutes
I dont think you tried very hard to actually make things work
>I dont think you tried very hard to actually make things work
Why should I have to try harder to make things work, when they work just fine as they are?
All of your proposed changes involve spending either more money (renting a place w/o paper walls, renting a car, renting storage) or rely on luck/circumstance (if everyone followed your advice, there would be no "buddy with a truck" - lol).
>Not an issue printing.
Are they resin printers? You _could_ do that printing in an apartment but you're looking at having to run a ton of fans and hope you have good circulation. I took mine to a friend's house and it unfortunately smelled like plastic for longer than we wanted and just not nearly as easy as having a table/bench in a shed or garage.
>bulk buying groceries - Cart + bag. Eat 2 weeks at a time with one trip. Takes 20 minutes
Wym? You mean you take a cart to the store, from the apartment? Or a cart's worth of groceries?
Just a minor aside on 3D Printing- if you use PLA, it doesn't release anything nasty like ABS does, and it smells vaguely of popcorn, which is kind of nice.
Traversing multiple blocks straight requires diagonal zig-zags eating 10% of time and you could easily lose orientation, especially if you jump into a shop on the corner. Also it’s simply annoying to see your straight path ahead and having to wave around it and then wait on a traffic light.
USSR had implemented this idea and it worked fine while factories / companies were providing accommodation in the walking distance along with all the necessary services - schools, hospitals, kindergartens and shops.
I doubt that it would work in a modern Capitalist society unless we all work from home.
USSR had chronic shortages in basic consumer goods like toilet paper, steadily fell behind the West in emerging technologies like semiconductors, and eventually went bankrupt [1], so I don't think you could describe anything in its centrally planned economy.
Japan has many highly mixed neighorhoods, but unlike in the Soviet example, they emerge organically, because zoning restrictions are lax.
I'm confused, are you insinuating that Barcelona isn't real or not part of a modern capitalist society? These superblocks already exist in the city. This urban design has been around longer than the USSR.
Barcelona's blocks are nice but won't work as a mostly pedestrian self contained urban unit. People have to work and get social services outside those blocks.
If you scale them up a bit, add infrastructure, add workplaces and make it 10-15 walking distance and add public transit links to other such places that will do it.
Not seeing a lot of evidence that this is similar? For example, the sections without roads don't necessarily look easily permeable to walk/bike traffic, which is a relatively defining trait.
Edit: well, in some sense yeah it's a huge block and thus a super block, but in terms of Barcelona-style super blocks with similar aims...
> "restrict vehicle traffic to the streets on the perimeter" (keyword restrict, not solve)
> Thread is full of opinionated people who probably never lived there.
> ...used a computer algorithm to analyze data from the...
So many red flags. I hate this kind of thing. Go ask the people if they like to live long term over there. I mean real people not some politicized whacko that happens to agree with you.
I live in a post communist country near one of such similar places. In fact there are only 2 places in the world that have been designed with such planning and attention to detail. The aerial pic on that article actually resembles a lot the area I'm talking about. I've sent the picture to my brother who lives in the other side of the pond and he said it looks like a presidium. That area also has a really bad reputation.
Having a bad experience when you are in a car is an natural result of mass-transit/walking oriented cities. By focusing on non-car transport, you are going to end up sacrificing things that are good for car tansport. In fact logically car must be the worse experience if we're expecting folks to make other choices.
Just from personal experience, but NYC, SF, and many European cities are cheaper and faster to navigate without a car from within the city. Sometimes it depends where you're going within the city, though, for example outer brooklyn to outer queens will be faster via car, but williamsburg to midtown manhattan you'd be insane to drive during rush hour.
NYC, absolutely. When I lived near NYC I would drive in, park the car in a garage for the whole weekend and never had any need or desire to use it.
SF, not really. Public transport is too fragmented and limited. Most of the time there's no convenient way from point A to B other than to go get the car and re-park elsewhere nearby.
Notwithstanding the obvious subjectivity of such a perspective, presumably you haven't been to NYC, Tokyo, Taipei, London, or basically any modern metro outside America?
Oh I have, I've visited, and I've even lived in those places and gone without a car.
No more. Public transport is horrible, and I'll never again agree to live in a place without private transport. It doesn't have to be a car - but it needs to be exclusively under my control, and it needs to be close to my front door.
And I don't care that I'm getting non-stop downvotes for my posts in this thread, someone needs to speak to reality rather than utopian dreams. I don't care about the votes, but it's prettyu uncool that downvoted posts are greyed out and hard to read - aren't downvotes meant for offtopic messages? Or is the goal to have a uniform hivemind?
The problem is the attitude and not the message. That's mostly the reason why you're getting downvoted. I myself don't agree with you but didn't downvote. Just a heads up.
Public transport is not horrible, but sure you can have other alternative forms of transportation like bicycles, scooters, long boards, segways, horses, etc... The cities that permit non-car modes of transport are nicer to visit and live in.
I think in theory I agree with you. I would _prefer_ private transportation, but if I was stuck between private car and public transit, I would pick public transit because the alternative of sitting in a car commuting every day is dreadful compared to the few thousand steps I could get from walking to/from public transit.
Why do you think public transport is horrible in comparison to cars? Do you feel that e.g. the environmental or cost benefits of public transport are outweighed by whatever cars have going for them?
Public transit takes longer, is less reliable, doesn't let you leave when you want, is often dirty, is harder or impossible to bring a lot of stuff on, and is more likely that you'll end up a victim of a crime on it than while driving.
None of this is true for somewhere like Tokyo, except for the 'harder or impossible to bring a lot of stuff on'. You could say many of the above for cars depending on the place (try driving through Jakarta for speed and reliability or many parts of India for safety).
Paris, Madrid and Manhattan aren’t utopias, you just don’t need a car to get around the majority of the city. Metro, bus and walking/biking can get you almost everywhere.
In NYC a car is definitely more trouble than it's worth for a lot of us. I think the same is probably true in cities with a well functioning train system.
The number of car owners in NYC tells me that this isn't true.
If even in NYC people still want a car, even with all the trouble, what does that tell you about public transport?
And I'm speaking from experience here - I have a ton of friends in NYC who all started without a car "who needs it", and over time every single one bought a car because it's simply too hard without it.
NYC is simply too dense, people need space, there's no reason to jam them all in small homes with little space. Although I suppose some people like that.
I'm also speaking from experience. Anecdotally I know a couple people with cars and both are kinda deep in Queens. In a pinch I can rent, but 95% of the time the subway works. In some cases a cab/uber is a time saver or helps move something heavy. Parking is expensive, or you're spending a lot of time looking for a spot. Time is money.
Only 22% of people in Manhattan own a car, and that’s inflated by a weird swath of the Upper East Side. Most car owner in NYC live nowhere near the subway.
Higher obviously, but less than 20% in lost zip codes on train lines which is the relevant thing here. Staten Island is like 84% but there’s basically no transit there, and outer Queens is similar. Deep South Brooklyn also has higher car ownership. The Brooklyn neighborhood I live in looks more like Manhattan in terms of car ownership.
As someone who lives part time in Barcelona and NYC, and who is from NYC, the people who end up "Needing a car" usually live deep in Queens, or Staten Island. For those who are lucky to have a place where there's parking, they use their vehicles to basically escape the city, not to drive around inside the city.
> The number of car owners in NYC tells me that this isn't true.
What is the number of car owners compared to all NYC residents? Of course, there will always be car owners and starting with a population in the millions is going to make that number appear large.
You know, there are peopling living in these blocks with their kids. So you have at least two parties to consider: people trying to get from A to B and people living where people travel from A to B. In Barcelona and many other places many have decided, that by making life for people going from A to B via car a bit more miserable, people living in these places will have a significant improvement of their living conditions.
I'm really looking forward to superblocks being established in my district in Munich. It would be so nice if my kids and their friends could play in front of my appartment house without parked and moving cars everywhere.
> Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
No one is spending any effort to make anyone unhappy. This is about giving a slightly less enormous amount of consideration to people who want to drive everywhere, so that more consideration can be given to those who are willing to use other modes of transport.
Maybe no city has managed to make public transport better than a car in every circumstance, but many times public transport is better. In fact, nobody would take public transport if it wasn't better for them.
In cities where public transport sucks less, there's more circumstances where it is better, and so more people use them.
> Why are we devoting so much energy to making people unhappy?
Few things in life make me less happy than the externalities of car culture. It fosters among other things:
1) Disconnection from one's community and the natural environment
2) Noise and air pollution imposed on one's neighbors without their consent
3) Worse collective physical health due to replacing walking trips with car trips
4) Excess consumption of all goods, including fossil fuels
5) Risk of serious injury or death for both drivers and pedestrians
6) High stress due to the inevitable presence of traffic
7) Environmental degradation and expansion of the urban/wilderness frontier
8) Repressive political regimes propped up by oil exports
Of course there are positives to cars too but many of the positives only exist due to the problems that the widespread deployment of private cars caused in the first place. We need cars to visit our friends and family or go to work because we constructed a society in which we don't actually live in the same communities as our friends, families and employers because the car allowed us to. We buy things that we don't need because the car allows us. Consumerism fills the void of meaning in our lives that is in no small part due to the disconnection that the car created in the first place.
Personally, although driving a car can be great fun under the right circumstance, I find most of the time it is either tedious or stressful. I would almost always rather be walking, which engages my body and allows my mind to wander without fear that I might seriously injure, or even kill, someone in a moment of inattention. At the same time, whatever mode of transportation I am using: car, biking or walking, I know that I am at risk of being hurt by an inattentive or reckless motorist, of which there are many.
I am making a distinction between private vehicles and vehicles in general. Obviously we need some vehicles to move crucial goods and people with limited mobility. And to occasionally make long journeys. Since the pandemic began, I have been only been in a car about a half a dozen times and I have experienced no material deprivation whatsoever. Of course I have been reliant on trucks delivering groceries to my local stores and the occasional home delivery (which again does not require a private vehicle).
Your fear does make me optimistic though. It suggests that people are waking up to the catastrophe that widespread deployment of private cars has had on human life.
Most German cities make public transit a lot easier than driving cars and figuring out parking. Their stations are serious, and their alignment with other transportation systems (bus and ice) are very serious.
If you're going to compare random mostly unused point to point, that's not what public transit is for.(That is something a car or taxi is needed for)
Some of the lines are extremely uncomfortable in summer afternoon (was there July 2019 and there was a heat wave for a week with temps of over 100 F), but that was record setting at the time and I was only a tourist.
Not worse that before and, anyway, who cares? This is about making people lives better not improving car traffic. Two goals that, in my opinion, are in opposition.
Point is they havent made people’s lives easier since so many still need to drive cars. Barcelona is anything but a good example of how things should be.
Most people that live on those areas are pretty happy with the changes, and people that is just passing around those areas are pretty happy too.
By the way, you don't need a car if you live and work in Barcelona. In fact, most people that own a car don't use it if they are moving inside the city.
Issue tho is that barcelona has plenty of satellite towns and villages, so your comment proves my point. What i want is an actual solution that takes people out of their cars in a meaningful way, not just hippies that have no other choice due to poverty. Proper public transport is in everyone’s interest.
Google public transport directions show me it's 2x as slower than cars, but 4x faster than walking from the airport to Sargada Familia.
In my city in Romania, public transport is about the same speed as walking. So I'd say Barcelona has great public transport, based on this limited analysis.
Hence, citations neede. What exactly was bad? Did you only try driving?
I mean compared to romania, particularly to poorly managed cities such as cluj napoca indeed barceona’s public transport is a blessing. But unfortunately locals dont commute to sagrada familia on a daily basis. Commuting to and from el prat or other office areas is a nightmare, as is reaching to smaller businesses around town. Pulling out stats without actually having been there is misleading as you risk thinking everyone is a tourist taking trains to attractions on the regular, which is what most public transport was designed for - its basically their economy so naturally it will be biased towards that.
El Prat is not Barcelona, and, still, you have train, metro, public and private bus as an option to arrive from downtown.
The idea that public transport has been designed for tourists is preposterous. The network of public transport extend far away from the touristic places.
Most tourist, and most expats in my experience (I'm thinking in those that don't bother to learn any local language), stay in three or four neighborhoods and think that that's the city and get their impressions from those few areas.
That's the reason you always hear the same histories: pickpockets (stealing from tourists), dirty (drunk tourist peeing in the streets), etc
>Google public transport directions show me it's 2x as slower than cars, but 4x faster than walking from the airport to Sargada Familia. ... So I'd say Barcelona has great public transport, based on this limited analysis.
That doesn't sound all that great to me. Here in Tokyo, driving is generally not significantly faster than public transit, though of course it can vary a lot depending on your two endpoints. And of course, if you add in time to find parking, that usually makes driving very unattractive (though this doesn't affect taxis of course, so those can be attractive for some routes if you have tons of money you want to waste because they're not cheap).
Assuming that i am in favour of cars in cities is plain wrong. Barcelona still having traffic means public transport is not great, even if it looks good, and the so called superblocks are not of much help either. I am for solving traffic and pollution issues but not following barcelonas example.
The idea that you can drive your car to my street, generating noise and contamination and park it there using space, where the kids could be playing, just because you can't be bothered to take a bus is kind of tyrannical too, in my opinion. And it has nothing of utopian.
Park in front of my house all you want. I have a big backyard my kids can play in and wouldn't ever want them playing out front unsupervised regardless cars or not.
Man, I wonder what its like to post this unironically, and not realize what a complete knob you are. You sure did seem to make it though your kids growing up in an isolated sandbox environment.
Really evokes some stupid philosophical thoughts I have about "reproducability", free will, and the human experience. But you clearly have it thought through. Lucky kids.
"we want to prioritize walking over huge single occupancy vehicles that kill the environment and instead invest in public infra" is tyrannical? Oh man, I don't even know where to begin. I'm sorry, if I'm not misunderstanding it's just hilarious.
I guess none of you live in Barcelona. This crap is sickening to most residents who have to deal with the chaos this city has become. I left after a decade living there, so I don't have to worry about it anymore.
Counter example: I've lived here for most of a decade, and I'm a big fan of the superillas, ejes verdes, and other plans.
There's definitely some short term pain from all the construction works, but they're making steady progress, the city has already become noticeably more walkable & cycleable in many places, and I'm quite convinced that moving away from cars within the city is the right direction in the long term.
Somehow I doubt that people hate the city becoming more walkable and bikeable as much as you claim. Are there polls indicating that people hate the superblocks?
They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things better?
I also have zero interest in walking 2 blocks to my car when I need it, nor do I want to carry my items that far from my car.
I especially like: "or reducing the number of parking spaces or the number of traffic lanes, for example—actions that might catalyze bigger, more permanent changes in the future."
Yes, let's make people miserable now, because it might possibly make some change later.
The concept of first make things better seems to have escaped them.
I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars.
I suggest, respectfully, that you make an effort to understand the wider context before you make such an aggressive comment.
Many people in BCN do not own a car. If they do own one, it is used almost exclusively for getting out of the city at weekends. For journeys within the city, the public transport system is excellent, and the climate lends itself to walking, cycling, and scooters. As such, parking two blocks away is not much of an issue.
Finally, as a resident you are still allowed to drive within the superillas to access your building’s car park, if it has one, and also for loading/unloading.
The superillas were controversial at first but now they are very popular the people who live within them.
> They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things better?
Very few people in Barcelona own cars. Residents will have access to drop off things, but not parking.
> I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars
European cities tend to be pretty miserable places for cars by default, for the anti-car advocates it would generally be enough to stop subsidising cars.
The point is that some car-friendly infrastructure does make the city worse for everyone not in a car, and that includes on-street parking, surface parking lots, wide streets, driveways in medium to high traffic streets, highways cutting through cities and a lot more.
The current strategy most places is effectively make people too miserable _not_ to own a car. The idea here is to give those who would prefer not to depend on one (i.e., don’t own one or have one they don’t need to use all the time) a pleasant life, subject to less of the negative side effects of cars.
In some specific cases, I agree. But life should not be optimized for specific and unusual cases.
I've transported bulky cargo further than two blocks, by the way. I'd rather suffer in those cases, but keep the streets relatively free of cars for the more common cases, like pedestrian quality of life.
Just last week I bought ~2500lb of lumber to bring home (rebuilding a fence). If I had to park two blocks away and carry that by hand I'd be in a world of hurt.
That, and also 2 blocks is a ridiculously short distance.
I can't help but form a terrible impression of anyone not willing to walk two goddamn blocks to their car. Even carrying bags or whatever. It's a short walk!
What cars are you fighting? I've been to lots of major cities in the US and Europe and never felt threatened once by cars. You just follow the laws and have a good time. No need to act like there is some conspiracy to keep people off of sidewalks.
> I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars.
Agreed. Trying to drive change by making others miserable is hardly ever a winning strategy.
Instead, we need to make it easy, convenient and fun to both get around without a car and to reduce how far one needs to go in day to day situations (i.e. have lots of small shops near housing).
That will make many people prefer to not use cars (most people don't actually love driving) and those who want to drive can still do whatever they like but it'll be a much smaller population.
Indeed, they're really just turning cities into the human equivalent of factory farms. I haven't been to Barcelona but some other cities in East Asia which are like that, and once you get over the novelty, you realise how suffocating it feels to live in such an environment.
No thank you indeed; I normally stay far away from the cores of cities precisely because of that atmosphere, and if stuff like this keeps happening to them, it looks like I'll remain so for the forseeable future.
I'm really tired of motorists decimating our environment and wasting 40,000 human lives every year. But I guess we have different values. For example, having my car less than two blocks from me has almost no value in my view. Maintaining a livable planet and saving human live tends to have a lot of value in my view.
But how many lives are saved each year by the internal combustion engine (or it's electric successors)?
Not just emergency services - more mundane things like, getting food and care to the elderly, getting workers and tools where they need to be to maintain infrastructure, produce food, and much more.
You could say the same for the horse when the transition to cars happened. We can't just think of the advantages we have now, but what we could get in a more practical system. All of the things you describe could improve in an environment that not based on the car model, but because we live with the latter our outlook is dominated by it and we can't conceive of the alternative anymore than a regular non-Jules Verne citizen in the 1880s can visualize massive clover highway connectors
I'm really sick of city-dwellers telling the rest of us how to live.
Yes, many city-dwellers can live without a car. But not everyone lives in a city, or has any desire to live in a city (especially during a time of decline and perpetual crisis of one form or another)
Those who wage such vitriolic war on the car rarely consider small towns and rural areas, where public transport isn't efficient/practical, where no car often means no job.
Living outside a city doesn't mean you get to roar through it in your SUV and park a step away from your destination. A city has a lot of important services, but it is also a place where people live, and those people get to make choices that put their community first.
But while we're on the topic of rural areas having terrible public transportation, I think that's a really important one. Switzerland has a smaller rural-urban divide (which is really where this whole "war on cars" thing comes in), in part because it is actually practical to move between rural and urban spaces on a regular basis. That isn't because the cities are more driveable, or because they build a highway through Bern: it's because they invested in public transit that actually works. This kind of talk benefits everyone.
Europe figured this out a generation or two ago. Visit Barcelona or Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Also, I live in NY and public transit here is certainly good enough. Where did you get the idea it is not?
> Then come up with a better way to get people where they need to go.
It's called walking, biking, transit. These things all work. If you don't wanna walk a couple blocks to your car, sorry but that's not worth killing the planet and your neighbors. Cars have SO many externalities: air pollution that affects climate change, pollution that makes the air less breathable, noise, danger to others, takes up far more space leaving less room for other modes, etc.
I use it constantly, never notice the dirtiness (dirty compared to what?), rarely have to deal with late trains and it moves a hell of a lot faster than cars a lot of the time. There's plenty of routes where I don't even bother looking at driving directions/Uber because I know that no car can possibly beat the train.
I'd guess you've lived in NY for a long time and have forgotten (or never had to suffer through) how bad public transit is in most US cities.
NYC subway system is dirty, lol. I love it, but it's old and dirty.
(I live part time in Barcelona and the rest of the time here in NYC. The BCN Metro is very clean by comparison.
It is quite slow compared to other cities with metro I visited. I think mainly due to too many stops. On some parts I got impression than metro platforms take more than 30% of the line fragment which is ridiculous.
