We Should Design Cities For Shorter Distances, Not Faster Speeds

Originally Posted by accord1999

It's easy to see from the housing conditions.

You mean as opposed to the increased health risks of living among the many car sewers (highways; multi-lane, high-speed stroads, etc.) that have torn apart our modern-day cities?

https://www.lung.org/clean-air/outdo...-risk/highways

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1971259/

https://www.epa.gov/air-research/res...-air-pollution

https://www.latimes.com/local/califo...htmlstory.html

https://eng.mst.dk/air-noise-waste/n...ects-of-noise/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0039283

They just keep going...

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by IWant2BeInSTL

Now compare transit ridership in US *cities* on average to that in European and Asian *cities* on average and omit all the commercial-related auto mileage (e.g. mail, deliveries, company vehicles, etc.)

And what we see is that cars are kicking ass everywhere. Even with 60+% taxes on fuel, and high vehicle purchase and use taxes, Europeans overwhelming drive to get around.

[mhays]

You didn't link a source, but I'll make some typical points with this sort of stat:

1. Cities would be fairly different from the national stats. Obviously transit would be much higher.

2. A drive with two stops will typically count as three trips. Transit won't, including transfers unless you go into a store. Walking will, but they likely use a distance figure that segments must each exceed...maybe a kilometer for example.

3. Due to the distance figure, a lot of walks aren't "trips"...the sort that urban people take frequently because things are close.

[accord1999]

The data comes from the UK Government at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statis...t-britain-2019

1) It's only significant for London, as even for commutes the car dominates everywhere else in the UK. Even with recent growth from massive investment into rail, UK public transit use in 2018 (116B passenger-km) is lower than it was in 1952 (130B passenger-km). And with the very long commute times of bus and especially rail, we can see that many workers in London live well outside of the core, for probably the same reasons that they do in the US.



2) The car has even higher modal share by distance (from the 2018 report) than it does by trips.



3) I think the UK data collection tries to account for that.

[mhays]

So you're saying that in a big city, transit can do really well!

Also....you're showing that places can look like British cities and still accommodate the car as the largest transportation share...they don't have to look and function like shit for people.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by accord1999

And what we see is that cars are kicking ass everywhere. Even with 60+% taxes on fuel, and high vehicle purchase and use taxes, Europeans overwhelming drive to get around.

This actually just proves my point. Proof that people can still drive cars while also living in environments that aren't soul crushingly depressing and designed solely for single use vehicles like North American suburbs are.

I'm not anti-car, just anti-awful urban design.

[dubu]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

This actually just proves my point. Proof that people can still drive cars while also living in environments that aren't soul crushingly depressing and designed solely for single use vehicles like North American suburbs are.

I'm not anti-car, just anti-awful urban design.

in the city in america, streets/ parking lots take up most the land. so i think i might be anti car. ive been walking my whole life and i owned a car for a little bit and i didnt like it.

[MolsonExport]

Sprawl begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads which begats sprawl which begats roads ...

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

This actually just proves my point. Proof that people can still drive cars while also living in environments that aren't soul crushingly depressing and designed solely for single use vehicles like North American suburbs are.

I'm not anti-car, just anti-awful urban design.

Exactly.

As I said earlier, we could have just continued building suburban communities where people can own cars along with using other transportation modes (oak park), but instead we ended up with suburban communities built EXCLUSIVELY for cars, and the craptacular "geography of nowhere" built environments that go along with that (schaumburg).

Whoops.

[dleung]

Suburbs started because cities were polluted back then and people with means wanted to escape. Now cities are much cleaner, and guess where the wealthiest live in most cities? Leafy inner-ring neighbourhoods a short drive away from everything. People only "choose" to live in scorched-earth power-centre exurbia because they can't afford the same things closer to the city.

The Life-Saving Car Technology No One Wants

Safety features that would make vehicles far less lethal to pedestrians exist right now. Why aren’t they required?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...to-pedestrians

[SIGSEGV]

imagine being the first manufacturer to use a car's smart features to disable speeding.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

imagine being the first manufacturer to use a car's smart features to disable speeding.

Probably not as a requirement like seatbelts, but I could totally see it happen as an option to vehicle owners, similar to channel restrictions on cable TV boxes. Why? Rental car companies, insurance companies, and parents with teen drivers.

[Acajack]

When I think of places that I've visited that have enthused me from a city perspective, the thing that strikes me the most positively in terms of transportation and getting around isn't a single mode like public transit, but rather the multiplicity of "options" and ways to easily get around.

That's what makes a great experience for me. Buses, subways, trains, walking, cycling, taxis and yes even private cars if that's what makes the most sense for going from point A to B in a specific case.

Too many cities only offer one (or sometimes two) way of more or less efficiently getting around.

[Doady]

Post-war subdivisions in Canada often incorporate TOD measures to reduce walking distances. Not just increased densities near arterials, but pedestrian walkways to the arterials to allow people to walk in a straight line to the nearest bus stop. As a result, even 90% post-war/suburban cities like Calgary (population 129,000 in 1951) have ridership competitive with US central cities and mid-sized European urban areas. Toronto is mostly suburban but TTC ridership is comparable to MTA in NYC. Pure suburban systems like Brampton Transit have 10 times higher ridership than suburban US systems like Pace. It takes very little effort to reduce these barriers to non-car travel, but US suburbs don't even try. Is it complacency, or is it deliberate? That is the real question.

Look at a place like Brampton, on the surface there are little difference from a typical US suburb. Brampton is clearly suburban, it is still largely built for the car, and yet Brampton Transit, serving a population of 600,000, got 144,000 boardings per weekday in 2016, more than St. Louis, Austin, San Antonio, Milwaukee, etc. Building new subdivisions for the car doesn't mean sacrificing permeability. So don't think of this a city vs. suburb thing, or a North America vs. Rest of the World thing.

The problem is not just that built form affects transit, but lack of transit also affects built form. You want dense, vibrant downtown with lots of pedestrians and cyclists? You want to reduce travel distances? Then you need to get rid of the parking lots. And to get rid of the parking lots, to reduce demand for parking, you need more people using transit. So if suburbs go out of their way to put up barriers to transit users from the city, or to discourage their own residents from using transit, then that will hurt the central city as well. We cannot think about the problem in terms of central cities vs. suburbs but instead as one urban area. It is all connected, and that's what this is all about, connecting not just people together but also places together. Ultimately, it is about unity, and the root of the problem in the US is it is just a deeply divided country. The poor transit ridership in the US, even compared to Canada, is mostly just a reflection of those divisions.

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

imagine being the first manufacturer to use a car's smart features to disable speeding.

Wouldn't be an issue if government passed regulations requiring it, but the auto lobby would fight tooth and nail because they might not sell as many absurdly overpowered cars to man-babies.

[mhays]

Those mode share numbers are basically right, but:

1. US metros can be comically broad vs. Canadian and European metros. Similar standards would narrow things at least slightly.

2. It's from 2011. To protect my own city's honor...we've increased slightly in both measures.

3. An argument I don't agree with but will place here is "Murica!"

But yeah, what counts for good here is usually pretty bad by world standards.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Doady

Look at a place like Brampton, on the surface there are little difference from a typical US suburb. Brampton is clearly suburban, it is still largely built for the car, and yet Brampton Transit, serving a population of 600,000, got 144,000 boardings per weekday in 2016, more than St. Louis, Austin, San Antonio, Milwaukee, etc.

Even if Brampton had a higher transit share than freaking new york city, it's still god-awful from a built environment perspective, for the most part.

There's a lot more to the overall quality of a community than how many people ride the bus, IMO.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Even if Brampton had a higher transit share than freaking new york city, it's still god-awful from a built environment perspective, for the most part.

There's a lot more to the overall quality of a community than how many people ride the bus, IMO.

Yeah, that's basically what I said, isn't it? It doesn't take much effort to get suburbanites onto the bus. Bus is just the first step toward cycling, and cycling is the next step toward walking, and thus true urbanity. Gradually reducing distances one small step at a time, no sudden complete transformation of suburbs needed, suburbanites are the easiest first pickings, as Brampton and its simple TOD measures show. Getting suburbanites onto transit is easy so it's puzzling that so much of US dismisses it and not even bother at all. If you talk about quality communities, transit is the foundation. What would happen to Chicago if there was no CTA? You can probably see some correlation between transit usage and walking/cycling on those charts as well. As I said, the urban area is one whole, everything connected. I think getting more suburbanites onto transit would help a lot in revitalizing and unlocking the full potential of US downtowns, but maybe that's just me.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Doady

Bus is just the first step toward cycling, and cycling is the next step toward walking, and thus true urbanity.

if you think a lot of suburbanites riding the bus are ever going to fix this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7442...7i16384!8i8192

then you have far more faith than i do.



it's great that a lot of choice riders use transit in brampton.

but i highly doubt it will ever evolve into a place that i would want to live in my lifetime.