People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.
I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab.
I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!
Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.
Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).
Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!
> there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff
That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
"This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab."
"Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time."
At the end of a rather long reply to throw0101a's comment on my original post, in passing I mentioned that things were somewhat different in Europe. (My reply to throw0101a was principally in reference to his link to the book High Cost of Free Parking by UCLA professor Donald Shoup who has an underlying Georgist philosophy in connection with these matters.)
My original post wasn't well accepted by about half the voters (upvotes and downvotes in about equal numbers) and I expected that when I posted it. I mention this specifically as my original comment was made from my perspective here in Australia; here the 'average' shopping conditions are very different to both the US and to much of Europe (I've lived in Europe and I'm also very familiar with US roads, shops and shopping conditions).
In essence, I've little doubt that the original story is correct when it comes to US conditions, and I've no doubt that your experience (and the article) are correct when it comes to your experience in Barcelona. Here where I am it's a mixed bag but the vehicle/parking/shopping problem is nothing like as bad as it is in the US (in that shops are far more accessible from roadside parking (despite my earlier cynical assertions seemingly to the contrary).
I'll avoid a lengthy discussion involving examples so I'll just say this. The issue that cars detract from spending in the US and the Barcelona setting is, I reckon, pretty clear-cut. It's not so clear-cut here and in some other European cities. For example, in a German-speaking city (which I won't name out of deference) where I was living for quite some while has shops with easy walking access à la Barcelona and people actually shop by walking around—and public transport is as good as it gets (I've seen no better anywhere). That said, the number of cars parked in the side streets (and anywhere else their owners can find to park them) is quite unbelievable—it's nothing to see cars parked at 45 degrees across the 90 degree junction of two sidewalks if that's the only space available—moreover, it happens all the time. Most people who live there DO NOT need a vehicle and yet they have an obsession to own one (seems as if their psyche remains unfulfilled unless they own a car even if they rarely use it). So much for eliminating cars by providing easy walking access to shops! Despite this and excellent public transport—which they all use with gusto—it still hasn't eliminated the vehicle problem.
It seems to me that we need to be very careful how we measure the benefits of planning our cities to be more human-friendly. There seems to be no one-plan-fits-all, generalizing seems a risky business. If there's an underlying car culture as there is there (and here where I am now) then the benefits of good planning and having ready access to shops by foot may be much harder to realize than it first seems.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the same problem arises when it comes to invoking Donald Shoup's underlying Georgist philosophy which underpins many of these new ideas about planning our cities. (I know, this is somewhat esoteric matter but unless we can genuinely equate it out of the discussion then it might come back to bite us).
This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes.
Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing?
"Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction."
It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
> I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to
Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way…
I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
> invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store
But that’s not how cities in Europe are laid out. The closest grocery store to me is 3 minutes by bike (1.19 km) and I live at the edge of my particular neighborhood (shops are usually concentrated near the center of neighborhoods). Even the city center (where the more specialized shops are) is only about 8 minutes by bike (or about 15 by car due to traffic).
Especially within the city a bike is always faster.
> I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store
All of your friends have to take highways to reach a grocery store? That's nuts! Is this some kind of international agrarian hermit club?
Or are you saying you don't have many friends? There are more possible friends to be made in more populous areas. Come, join us!
Not seeing it mentioned in the other replies, so I'll mention that (at least the way I read it) "our massive car addiction" should be taken as a societal addiction to cars rather than addiction of any individual. If someone lives in a place where a car is the only feasible way to meet their day-to-day needs, it's not fair to say they're addicted to their cars; however we might question why they find themselves in that situation in the first place. Often this comes down to societal pressures (zoning, lack of funding for other modes of transportation, etc.) which are largely outside the control of individuals. The challenge is to change the cultural mindset from "I need a car today, so cars are a necessity for life" to acknowledge that other options can be viable if we, as a society, are willing to recognize and seriously consider them.
> ... the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
Places like this already exist (ie. basically any major urban center), but I don't think the intent is that every place needs to be like that. Small steps toward better options (eg. allowing limited commercial redevelopment in residential-only areas, improving the safety/speed/accessibility of alternate transit options) should be the short-term goal, and we can work slowly towards them. But societal pressure (eg. from NIMBYs and zero-sum car-first people) often makes even small improvements glacially slow or impossible.
> invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean here, but my nearest grocery store in London is 3 doors away. My second nearest in 3 mins walk away. My 3rd nearest, 3 mins 30 secs away. My nearest big supermarket is 10 mins walk away. That's the alternative here.
It's not unheard of. I live in a Dutch city. There are five supermarkets within 1km from my home, a tiny one, two medium ones and two larger ones. Now that I’m working from home, I usually walk to one twice a week. When I worked at an office, I biked to the office and took a small detour once a week to stop by a supermarket. Also, they have flash delivery here where you can order groceries and somebody will bring them to your door in literally 10 minutes. Those use e-bikes. There's also regular grocery delivery, one company uses these tiny electric vans, another uses normal vans.
Flash delivery is only available in the big cities but the rest is pretty standard.
IMO you have to actually look at the current makeup of zoning. Plenty of places have great, amazing bones, because they were actually laid out in an age where people did walk to the grocery store, or maybe they took a streetcar, and there might have been a rail station in the middle of town that is currently only used for freight today. It's not a form of development that is specific to only new, dense areas, it was a form of development that was the standard everywhere in this country 100 years ago, and still remains. Look at some mid or small sized places like Pensacola FL, Sandusky OH, Corpus Christi tx, and hundreds more. They are gridded like the SF peninsula because 100 years ago they very much looked like the SF peninsula did 100 years ago, with dozens of street cars or cable cars and people walking with groceries. There are good bones everywhere, now lets shake off the dust and start improving things like bus service, affording a lane for a bike along these easy to navigate grids with commercial zoned relatively evenly throughout.
They seem to believe that by working to actively make roads and parking worse, then some sort of car-free utopia will emerge. Of course, the actual effect is that things are just worse.
I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
> “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.”
So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M.
Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.
I spent two years commuting by bike and bus and by doing so I was much more aware of the stores within a 5 mile radius of me. I wanted to stop and spend my money and time BUT it wasn’t worth missing my bus or risking my bike getting stolen so I never stopped. This was in Los Angeles. If buses were more reliable & enjoyable I would have stopped or gone back on weekends, and if I could trust my bike to still be there those businesses would have benefitted.
I do a lot of commuting via bus and bike in LA. You can always bring your bike into the doorway of the business and throw your ulock around the frame and rear wheel to prevent it from being ridden. I find if there are at least other bikes in the rack I feel better about leaving my bike out, and if its something like the front entrance or a parking lot where there is foot traffic I don't mind leaving the bike out on a rack while I'm inside and its during business hours, but I would never leave it out on a rack overnight.
The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.
I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places.
My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.
>Replacing kerb-side parking with bus or bike lanes does not hurt local businesses, and in some cases, it can increase patronage. Bikes and buses don’t kill businesses - parking does.
Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any.
What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?
> A study in Berlin found that shop owners believed only about 12 percent of customers lived within 1km of a shopping street when more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.
This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street.
This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.
It really depends on the context of the building imo. If you have a grocery store with like a few spaces that are always full, vs one with a bunch of spaces, someone who is planning a big grocery load will probably opt to drive their car for two minutes to the big lot one vs walk 10 mins to the one without parking and walk back with a gallon of milk and all their groceries for their family of 4 for a week.
What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.
1km is a good distance for walking, but you can expand it quite a bit if you have good bike infrastructure and transit. You can bike 5km in 20 minutes at a pretty leisurely pace, which I would gladly do for a good restaurant or specialty store.
Since this discussion is mainly US-centric, and not NZ centric, I feel at liberty to ask this question even if it's not strictly about the article:
I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated.
But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country?
Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value.
Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve.
I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.
It's a process that will take 50-100 years+. Like it or not there is no real incentive for people to stop living like they currently do. All you can do is tax fuel/carbon and stop adding car lanes to make people converge closer to the city.
In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
I'm from NZ, but live in the USA. The same car-centric issue talked about in the article is common both many USA cities as well as Auckland.
The most pragmatic proposals I've seen revolve around optimizing for the most common trips, rather than trying to completely eliminate cars. Optimizing for the easiest 80%, if you will.
For most households, the easiest 80% to mode-change would look something like:
- schools within walking distance
- shops/cafes/restaurants within walking distance (either by removing euclidean zoning, or creating new, small retail zones)
- better public transport specifically targeting the most common destinations (e.g. a central business district)
- improving walking/cycling infrastructure so people aren't risking their lives when doing shorter trips
People are still going to want/need cars to go to the beach, home improvement store, etc, but that's fine, because these make up a minority of total trips taken.
Auckland is very suburban outside the center, but the older and newer suburbs have mixed use zoning which manages to support a few cafes, restaurants, shops per suburb. The middle-age suburbs are the worst for walkability. The population of NZ is increasing, and most of the cities are expected to increase in density, rather than size, which should mean more retail can be supported within a shorter distance to everyone. It remains to be seen enough mixed-use/retail zoning gets allocated in existing suburbs though.
I'm not sure how this would play out if the population was stable though. Possibly then like belval says, it would take 50-100+ years as housing stock gets rebuilt in different configurations.
I've lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment.
It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen.
In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses).
Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway.
In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option.
The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost.
I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.
Cities and towns can update their zoning to encourage denser town centres that make walking and cycling viable. That doesn't amount to a radical restructuring of life and increasing dependency on cars, EV or not, is not a way out of the problem of spread out, lifeless towns.
Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
My wife and I live in Mountain View, which is arguably the heart of the valley. I had to buy a trickle charger for our car's battery, so we wouldn't have to jump it around once a month whenever we went to drive somewhere.
While thks article is quite interesting, I think it's worth pointing out the vast differences in non-car accessibility between countries, probably due to zoning laws. Large and low-density population places would require reliable modes of long distance transport (be it cars or buses or metro etc). From what I've heard North America practically requires car ownership outside medium sized cities. Here in the Netherlands you can mostly get anywhere in the country with a bike and a train (OV) card. Back home in India not too many people have cars so buses, trains and taxis and autorickshaws (aka TukTuks) substitute them. Not criticizing the point of the article, but I think a bit more nuance is needed when comparing Germany with Canada with New Zealand.
Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.
I have a theory: small shop owners are disproportionately likely to be car drivers, and when they say parking is essential for their customers, what they are really worried about is measures that will make it less convenient to drive them selves.
As a midwestern suburbanite, these threads remind me that urban dwellers spend a lot of time thinking about me and the way I live, while I never think about them at all.
People who are perplexed about why a business would not want a bike lane need to take a look at the history books. It was business owners who were pushing for streetcar lines to be paved over into stroads like Geary blvd in San Fransisco. They see their clientele as one traveling by private car over one reliant on public transportation, and probably feel they don't even want to be associated with public transportation and the image of who typically rides it.
You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.
Anyone who has visited major Asian cities already knows that grocery businesses and customers both prefer dense cities - because everything happens on an app and a delivery system.
You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology.
Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.
This is pretty obvious at least for some cases. Of course it depends a lot on the structure of the street / city. I haven't been much in the US, but I can imagine it's not affected by some issues as much as other places. It comes down to space, and how you use it. I spent a couple months living in a busy street of a European city. The amount of parking space took easily 2-3x that of the sidewalk which was only maybe 2 meters wide. It was a busy street for pedestrians also and it was pure hell even walking there, but especially just stopping to see a shop window. You would automatically become an obstacle for all the other pedestrians, so almost nobody would ever do it. You can imagine that this is terrible for business - cutting down on the parking space would give space to pedestrians and they would have an easier time checking out shops and spending money there.
A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don't they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores?
I don't know what bizzaro world those people live in where they will actually find a parking spot in the front of their destination. A given block has what like 10 spaces for cars? In a city with thousands of road users your odds of finding a parking spot that's truly convenient to the destination are going to be so low. I bet most everyone currently parking on the street is parking in some compromised somewhat inconvenient spot. That's why I find the strongest voices of people keeping the street parking are usually the abusers: that neighbor who has some hardly functional car they roll out three feet to take up two spots while they are away with the other car, and roll back when they get home, or that mechanics shop that parks customer vehicles out there at 4am when the spots are actually available and holds them in perpetuity or to use them for their own employees convenience.
We managed to save our local mall before it completely died, and now it thrives. They turned it mostly inside out, there's still halls inside but all of the popular stores now face outward so you can park right in front of them.
I just got an ebike with the intention of riding to and from work. So far I have chosen not to do it for the 5 work days I’ve had the bike:
Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold?
First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon.
I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else.
Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid.
The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.
Raining and cold on a bike are just issues of wardrobe. Typically, a cycling cap, windbreaker, and gloves are perfectly adequate for most dry days above freezing.
The most bike commuting city in the world is Copenhagen, Denmark. They manage the winters just fine. That said, getting from here-to-there is challenging for most novice bike commuters, and having experience friends in the transit alternatives community is the only way for this knowledge to be passed from one person to another.
In effect, the fact that the dressing for weather has been nullified by cars for three generations has effectively hamstrung us all because of the loss of cultural knowledge.
Not all your trips can be replaced with a bike, but if some do that's still a win. IMO there is a ton of low hanging fruit. For example, in rush hour traffic when I drive to work its 35-45 mins, because you are crawling at 16mph. On a bike it actually takes the same amount of time or less sometimes, because I can split lanes and come up to the front of lights vs having to wait through multiple cycles sometimes. Sure you are working but IMO the cardio is probably better for me than sitting for 45 mins straight. Ebikes are great too if you have some hills but imo even with just a road bike you can go for pretty far on flats without getting sweaty without having to be in great shape thanks to the gearing and how light the bike is. A ride able old schwinn road bike might only be $50 on craigslist too, so pretty disposeable if they get stolen often. You can throw your bike on renters insurance too if you werent aware for your ebike, maybe homeowners too.
[+] [-] Toutouxc|4 years ago|reply
People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas.
If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.
[+] [-] tomkat0789|4 years ago|reply
I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!
Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.
Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).
Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!
[+] [-] udkl|4 years ago|reply
That's probably why the concept of malls is popular in the US. Get to a single shopping destination and walk around the complex for variety.
[+] [-] hilbert42|4 years ago|reply
"Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time."
At the end of a rather long reply to throw0101a's comment on my original post, in passing I mentioned that things were somewhat different in Europe. (My reply to throw0101a was principally in reference to his link to the book High Cost of Free Parking by UCLA professor Donald Shoup who has an underlying Georgist philosophy in connection with these matters.)
My original post wasn't well accepted by about half the voters (upvotes and downvotes in about equal numbers) and I expected that when I posted it. I mention this specifically as my original comment was made from my perspective here in Australia; here the 'average' shopping conditions are very different to both the US and to much of Europe (I've lived in Europe and I'm also very familiar with US roads, shops and shopping conditions).
In essence, I've little doubt that the original story is correct when it comes to US conditions, and I've no doubt that your experience (and the article) are correct when it comes to your experience in Barcelona. Here where I am it's a mixed bag but the vehicle/parking/shopping problem is nothing like as bad as it is in the US (in that shops are far more accessible from roadside parking (despite my earlier cynical assertions seemingly to the contrary).
I'll avoid a lengthy discussion involving examples so I'll just say this. The issue that cars detract from spending in the US and the Barcelona setting is, I reckon, pretty clear-cut. It's not so clear-cut here and in some other European cities. For example, in a German-speaking city (which I won't name out of deference) where I was living for quite some while has shops with easy walking access à la Barcelona and people actually shop by walking around—and public transport is as good as it gets (I've seen no better anywhere). That said, the number of cars parked in the side streets (and anywhere else their owners can find to park them) is quite unbelievable—it's nothing to see cars parked at 45 degrees across the 90 degree junction of two sidewalks if that's the only space available—moreover, it happens all the time. Most people who live there DO NOT need a vehicle and yet they have an obsession to own one (seems as if their psyche remains unfulfilled unless they own a car even if they rarely use it). So much for eliminating cars by providing easy walking access to shops! Despite this and excellent public transport—which they all use with gusto—it still hasn't eliminated the vehicle problem.
It seems to me that we need to be very careful how we measure the benefits of planning our cities to be more human-friendly. There seems to be no one-plan-fits-all, generalizing seems a risky business. If there's an underlying car culture as there is there (and here where I am now) then the benefits of good planning and having ready access to shops by foot may be much harder to realize than it first seems.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the same problem arises when it comes to invoking Donald Shoup's underlying Georgist philosophy which underpins many of these new ideas about planning our cities. (I know, this is somewhat esoteric matter but unless we can genuinely equate it out of the discussion then it might come back to bite us).
[+] [-] rtlfe|4 years ago|reply
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/04/08/city-dot-still-mum-on...
[+] [-] silverpepsi|4 years ago|reply
"Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction."
It's especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don't personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a "reasonable alternative" to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1/10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
[+] [-] ericmay|4 years ago|reply
Right. That’s like calling water wet. Of course we live this way, we designed our cities to make us live this way…
I’m not sure what you’re talking about w.r.t Europe. Even if you have friends that drive everywhere that just is not how most people live day-to-day.
[+] [-] Aaargh20318|4 years ago|reply
But that’s not how cities in Europe are laid out. The closest grocery store to me is 3 minutes by bike (1.19 km) and I live at the edge of my particular neighborhood (shops are usually concentrated near the center of neighborhoods). Even the city center (where the more specialized shops are) is only about 8 minutes by bike (or about 15 by car due to traffic).
Especially within the city a bike is always faster.
[+] [-] drewcoo|4 years ago|reply
All of your friends have to take highways to reach a grocery store? That's nuts! Is this some kind of international agrarian hermit club?
Or are you saying you don't have many friends? There are more possible friends to be made in more populous areas. Come, join us!
[+] [-] rogerdb|4 years ago|reply
> ... the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.
Places like this already exist (ie. basically any major urban center), but I don't think the intent is that every place needs to be like that. Small steps toward better options (eg. allowing limited commercial redevelopment in residential-only areas, improving the safety/speed/accessibility of alternate transit options) should be the short-term goal, and we can work slowly towards them. But societal pressure (eg. from NIMBYs and zero-sum car-first people) often makes even small improvements glacially slow or impossible.
[+] [-] rtlfe|4 years ago|reply
Generally people who want to reduce car dependence are advocating for this zoning alongside their advocacy for transit and bike lanes.
[+] [-] rowanajmarshall|4 years ago|reply
I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean here, but my nearest grocery store in London is 3 doors away. My second nearest in 3 mins walk away. My 3rd nearest, 3 mins 30 secs away. My nearest big supermarket is 10 mins walk away. That's the alternative here.
[+] [-] user_7832|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruuda|4 years ago|reply
Flash delivery is only available in the big cities but the rest is pretty standard.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cbdumas|4 years ago|reply
Exactly.
[+] [-] readams|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|4 years ago|reply
I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
[+] [-] robocat|4 years ago|reply
> “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.”
So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M.
Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.
[+] [-] angmarsbane|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
The bus is pretty annoying for getting things done, however. You can't exactly string together multiple errands unless shops are nearby, but luckily LA is dense enough where I can find redundant shops of a given category in every neighborhood. The bus was great for my commute though. No transfers, 30 mins on a bus that comes every 10 minutes vs the 20 min drive where I didn't have a parking space at work (and thus had to hunt or pay). It was on a route with a rapid and local bus line too, so really a bus came every 5 mins due to them being staggered. Transfers really kill a bus commute but sometimes even with the transferring, it remains the fastest way around. Certain parts of LA like the less bar heavy portions of the west side, you could be waiting 30 minutes at least for your ride to even be accepted, then it might be 15-20 mins before they slog through traffic to get to you. Rideshare is pretty spotty in LA outside of Santa monica, downtown LA, lax, weho, or hollywood, because the drivers rarely want to venture out beyond these areas and would rather stick to where the ride frequency is the highest due to the traffic. I do use the bus quite a bit for going home at the end of the night since its so cheap compared to surged rideshares. It seemingly runs until 4am and there are a surprising amount of people using it still at that time (I assume mostly third shift workers but a good amount of people who clearly are coming from the bars like me).
[+] [-] CommanderData|4 years ago|reply
I've seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can't imagine the costs to outfit some of these places.
My thinking was the area just isn't right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|4 years ago|reply
Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking "kills" businesses -- I read the article and don't see any.
What about businesses whose products are too big/heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?
[+] [-] belorn|4 years ago|reply
This seem to imply that shops don't benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that's the definition of local businesses then I don't see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn't with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street.
This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
What you find in other countries that are denser is that people not only buy less things per trip and take more trips, but they are also cooking fewer meals at home than Americans and tend to eat out more for their meals. I think two things need to happen for that behavior to happen with Americans: shorter commutes so you actually have time to run to the grocery store more often than once a week, and more buying power from wages so you can actually regularly afford food you didn't personally prepare. Until those things happen, most americans will continue doing their errands once a week when they finally have time, and saving money making things at home vs ordering more prepared food and having a therefore smaller need for so many groceries in the first place.
[+] [-] rtlfe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated.
But given that that it is already the case, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country?
Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value.
Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don't have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) actually have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn't "yeah: Europe!" because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won't solve.
I'm not arguing that cars are great, I'm just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking / science fiction, versus whether there's a serious plan behind it.
[+] [-] belval|4 years ago|reply
In practice though, this is where remote work can help. Most traffic in a city isn't people going shopping. It's people going to work. If we push for remote work as an alternative, and improve the quality of transit, the situation will improve.
[+] [-] potatochup|4 years ago|reply
The most pragmatic proposals I've seen revolve around optimizing for the most common trips, rather than trying to completely eliminate cars. Optimizing for the easiest 80%, if you will.
For most households, the easiest 80% to mode-change would look something like: - schools within walking distance - shops/cafes/restaurants within walking distance (either by removing euclidean zoning, or creating new, small retail zones) - better public transport specifically targeting the most common destinations (e.g. a central business district) - improving walking/cycling infrastructure so people aren't risking their lives when doing shorter trips
People are still going to want/need cars to go to the beach, home improvement store, etc, but that's fine, because these make up a minority of total trips taken.
Auckland is very suburban outside the center, but the older and newer suburbs have mixed use zoning which manages to support a few cafes, restaurants, shops per suburb. The middle-age suburbs are the worst for walkability. The population of NZ is increasing, and most of the cities are expected to increase in density, rather than size, which should mean more retail can be supported within a shorter distance to everyone. It remains to be seen enough mixed-use/retail zoning gets allocated in existing suburbs though.
I'm not sure how this would play out if the population was stable though. Possibly then like belval says, it would take 50-100+ years as housing stock gets rebuilt in different configurations.
[+] [-] danbmil99|4 years ago|reply
It's nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen.
In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn't even have licenses).
Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway.
In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There's no other option.
The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost.
I think that's the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.
[+] [-] multiplegeorges|4 years ago|reply
Suburbs are antithetical to good communities and the faster we can develop away from them, the better.
[+] [-] kijiki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_7832|4 years ago|reply
Also, I'd highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more "radical" r/fuckcars on reddit.
[+] [-] jimmytidey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randyrand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melenaboija|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|4 years ago|reply
This is probably dangerous.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. "Who is going to even use it?" the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don't want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn't currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.
[+] [-] nine_zeros|4 years ago|reply
You don't even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology.
Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.
[+] [-] locallost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlospwk|4 years ago|reply
I've never even gotten an answer, just silence.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
We managed to save our local mall before it completely died, and now it thrives. They turned it mostly inside out, there's still halls inside but all of the popular stores now face outward so you can park right in front of them.
[+] [-] nelsondev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwighttk|4 years ago|reply
Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold?
First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon.
I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else.
Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid.
The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.
[+] [-] scoofy|4 years ago|reply
The most bike commuting city in the world is Copenhagen, Denmark. They manage the winters just fine. That said, getting from here-to-there is challenging for most novice bike commuters, and having experience friends in the transit alternatives community is the only way for this knowledge to be passed from one person to another.
In effect, the fact that the dressing for weather has been nullified by cars for three generations has effectively hamstrung us all because of the loss of cultural knowledge.
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Misdicorl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwighttk|4 years ago|reply