In many areas, it would take a ton of work in the effort of making destinations closer to each other. Huge parking lots, setbacks, wide roads, and detached houses on their own quarter, or even eighth, of an acre lot make it so the choice between walking/bicycling and using a personal car is not much of a choice.
Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.
Sure, turning Houston into Madrid would be very hard. But this is one of the most incrementally solvable problems I've ever seen. There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better.
In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.
Lord help you if you need a variance, and I cannot even imagine what eminent domain on that scale would look like. I do not see how the change would even be possible without tearing buildings down and building new ones closer to each other, and to do it legislatively adds unimaginable legal expenses, I presume.
Edit: Also note the popular local opinion in many places is keeping a place car dependent means the population who cannot afford a car is kept out.
I meant stuff like city counsel passing a new zoning law. Maybe some concrete bollards to make a protected bike lane. Run a few more busses and trains. That kind of thing.
My point is that does nothing, because the root problem of destinations being too far from one another is not addressed.
A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it. You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car. The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.
And that type of frequency is simply not economical without density. Chicken and egg at this point. Best case scenario is to build outwards from already dense areas, but it will involve eminent domain and demolishing buildings and parking lots to make new ones that are pedestrian friendly and hostile to cars.
> A few more buses and trains are not going to cut it.
So add more buses and trains.
> You need to outcompete the convenience of a personal car.
More buses and trains will make this happen. More bike lanes will make this happen. With the proper infrastructure people can go longer distances without a car. All these things can be done incrementally and you're trying to claim they can't be.
> The bus or train has to run at least every 10min, otherwise one missed connection and you’re wasting 20min+ with your refrigerated groceries.
No it doesn't and your groceries are fine being out in the heat for 20 minutes. They won't go bad. They could be out there for 2 hours and be fine.
> Refrigerate or freeze perishables right away. Foods that require refrigeration should be put in the refrigerator as soon as you get them home. Stick to the "two-hour rule" for leaving items needing refrigeration out at room temperature. Never allow meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, or produce or other foods that require refrigeration to sit at room temperature for more than two hours—one hour if the air temperature is above 90° F. This also applies to items such as leftovers, "doggie bags," and take-out foods. Also, when putting food away, don't crowd the refrigerator or freezer so tightly that air can't circulate.
On top of that, this two-hour thing is a general guideline for maximum safety and is overly restrictive on purpose to avoid ambiguity. Realistically you could leave things out for longer but the FDA would never admit that because it sends mixed messages.
Another note on the refrigeration issue - I get around predominantly by bike, and if I need to I have a soft cooler (like delivery people use) that I can put an ice pack in to transport frozen goods. But last night I went out with just a backpack in 80F heat and bought ice cream that survived the 20 minute trip home just fine.
[0]> But fluid and traffic are not the same thing, as shown by 60 years of governments trying and failing to road-build their way out of congestion. The idea of induced demand – more road space brings more cars – has been known for decades, and it also works in reverse. This is especially so with bike lanes, which are such an efficient use of the same space that they can often mean the same amount of space carrying more people overall.
[1]> Yes, traffic jams have worsened in some cities where bike lanes have been built, but studies show this is largely down to other factors, for example the growth in the number of Uber-type private hire vehicles and Amazon delivery vans.
I agree with you, especially because the crux of the matter is convenience of car versus public transit.
Cars are VERY convenient, so public transit needs to be on time, frequent, and very close by to compete. The other option is to make cars inconvenient, which is politically unpopular.
Zoning changes and removal of parking minimums are the first steps towards bringing things closer together though, and that can happen at the stroke of a pen. Towns can't begin to densify until they're permitted to do so.
Allow someone to build an apartment building on top of that enormous parking lot next to a shopping center, and in many cases I don't think you'd need eminent domain; it'll happen simply because the apartment building is more profitable than the surface parking lot.
(Though a good form-based code might help to nudge things in the direction of walkability too.)
Zoning is how you start to fix density issues. And getting rid of parking minimums. Charging fair market rates for existing parking can funnel more money in to public transport while also making it the cheaper option. Dedicated bus lanes and signaling changes can make busses faster than cars. All of those can be done with words written on paper or paint on roads.
Where I live the city council deliberately rezones the city on a regular basis in a manner contrary to state law. Each time, it's overturned by the same group of citizens. It's a deliberate political tactic so they can tell voters "well we're trying to fix the issue but the awful government won't let us!". This way they can campaign on the same issues until the heat death of the universe. All the NIMBYs know in practice it is safe to vote for them, as they will never rezone the city.
> In the handful jurisdictions where I am familiar with zoning laws and the permitting process, low cost and low effort is not how I would describe any part of even a straightforward approval.
At what point can we as a people say: screw it, break the laws and just get it done. it'll be worth it in the long-run.
>"There are hundreds of low-cost, low-effort ways to start making things better."
I used to think this as well, until I started sitting in on HOA and city council meetings. Good lord, even the most seemingly simple proposals are drenched in red tape and artificial barriers imposed by busybodies. I'm not sure how to get around this, sadly.
Easy: drop the public commentary portion of development. Random old people with nothing to do all day shouldn't be allowed to delay a project by months because they want to complain about the orientation of a window on a project. If you don't own the land, weren't democratically elected, and aren't funding the property you shouldn't get a say in local land use. Ridiculous that we've even set up these systems.
What if that window is looking straight into your bedroom or bathroom? I'd want to at least voice some concern over that. It's then up to officials to ignore that complaint or not. Having no way to express such concerns is faster of course, but there's downsides too
Move out of the city, or put a blind over your window
Being able to see other people's windows from your windows is an inescapable consequence of living in a city. If that's not acceptable to you, then you buy an acreage in the woods somewhere. It's not a reasonable thing to be protesting a development approval over.
Which is longer than the elction cycle in most counties, not just the US. Herein may lie part of the problem: its hard to incentivise politicians to solve long-term problems when doing so does not help them get re-elected.
Key point: all of these "low cost, low effort" ways depend on people staying where they have influence. Any change to zoning laws, or to approve funding for bike and public-transit infrastructure, etc., requires residents who support those things. People who grew up in a city because that's where their parents lived, or who run away from the suburbs to the cities (or to other countries), have zero influence over the problem where it exists and therefore have little moral standing in these debates. Don't just make things better for yourself. Don't be a coward. Stand and fight.
Yes, some areas in particular the big box developments are almost a lost cause. What needs to happen to those first is large, dense development within the plazas. Build residential on top of the mall, remove parking lots (or move them underground), and densify first. Once you move that needle, you can focus on active transport options.
The type of development I describe is happening (two examples in my Canadian city). Ultimately the evolution of a poorly built model.
"Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.
There is a middle ground, I think.
I like individual houses with gardens (most people do, I think) with a size such that convenience stores are viable and reacheable on foot. It's like that in my area (England): good size houses but it's dense enough that I can walk to 2-3 different convenience stores when I need a few things, with a Post Office counter in one of those stores.
In Europe there are also plenty of small scale 'appartment buildings', say 3 to 5 floors surrounded by some greenery and a small carpark, which I think works well, too. A random example in France (near a world famous tourist site): https://goo.gl/maps/avKMYuRAfgxq3gvM9 (that area is also built around a big shopping centre, which is therefore within walking distance).
The bigger it gets the higher the likelihood that it becomes shit.
> "Densification" can eaily lead to poorer quality of life and oppressive housing, though.
Where I lived, there used to be tons of orange groves, beautiful natural areas, trails, and fields to ride your bike through. They all turned into suburban houses. Tracts of homes with huge offsets. Cars zooming by at 60 mph on streets so wide it takes half a minute to cross them on foot, all while dodging cars.
Some people try to make it sound like densification will lead to Soviet era buildings or everyone living in Skyscrapers. But it mostly just leads to the city staying in the city instead of spreading out like a cancerous tumor across farmland and nature.
The USA already has those btw, they're called "streetcar suburbs". They're also some of the most expensive piece of real estate in America, because they're the nicest places to live in.
If the goal is to diminish VMT, we need to be creative and add places to go to walking in suburban neighborhoods, as well as incentivizing people to walk/bike. It's not easy when all public meetings are at 2pm on a Tuesday and everyone who shows up is a 70 yold NIMBY who thinks that adding a bike lane will end the world.
What is your definition of a convenience store? To me, a convenience store sells candy, snacks, beverages, sometimes coffee and rather nasty hot prepared food, vapes and tobacco products. 95% of what a convenience store sells is stuff that you really should not be eating. Perhaps they'll have a small basket of apples or bananas, but they are a far cry from the small grocery stores I've seen in European neighborhoods that stock a reasonable selection of produce as well as meat, dairy, and dry goods.
In the USA, I think many people would view having a "convenience store" in their neighborhood as a negative thing. I know I would.
Outside of major cities and very rural areas maybe. NYC lives and breathes on bodegas. Many very small towns will probably ONLY have a 'convenience' store, with an actual grocery store being many miles away. My family's mountain cabin is 5 miles from a convenience store, but 25 miles from a grocery store.
In these situations Convenience stores probably have a very small section of fairly durable produce, maybe some frozen meat but probably some lunchmeat, certainly things like toilet paper, bread, cheese, eggs, snack foods, household cleaners. Certainly not the kind of selection you'll get out of your kroger's but enough to get by. (the place near my family cabin also has a small selection of fly fishing gear during the 'season' swap for some wintery items during the winter)
I live in a suburb in Oregon and our local convenience store, within easy walking distance, is a small market. Half dozen aisles, perhaps 2500sf of floor space. Yes they have some traditional 'convenience store' items like you describe -- mediocre hot food, fountain drinks, and snacks. They also have a decent selection of all the usual things you find at a larger market, just without the same variety of each item. Milk, eggs, meat, dry good, etc. Marked about 25-50% compared to the nearest large store, but for that I'd have to drive.
I sometimes get the impression that HN folks think there's only one kind of suburb in America.
At least in the UK and France, a fair proportion of "convenience stores" are owned by the big supermarket chains and stock a subset of the products that you get in a large store.
Rather different in the UK, more like a small supermarket (often Bangladeshi or Pakistani run), sweets & tobacco but also lots of tinned goods, small selection of breads, often fresh vegetable in packets ... and rice, Indian pickles & sauces, you can live out of these places.
I was on holidays in Sardinia 15 years ago, and around the corner from the place I was staying was a corner shop that sold the usual sweets and tobacco products and wine and bread ... and a zillion other things, including live fish (for eating).
The British terraced house to me is basically perfect urban development.
Terraced housing allows places like London with a fully functioning public transport system whilst also allowing for a civilized home life, hobbies, gardening etc.
It's one of the best things about UK cities IMO. I feel like people who are obsessed with towerblock apartments miss the forest for the trees.
That looks exactly like the type of row houses that have become extremely popular in the US over the years. At least in my region. Especially close to light rail and bus lines.
In the parts of Europe I lived in (France, Switzerland, Sweden) there is one additional important thing: there is usually at most one parking space per apartment. This makes everything already a lot denser.
So remove parking, then hope something comes in to fill the need for transport?
Some of us like big vehicles and the freedom that enables. The last thing I want to do in a Houston summer is carry groceries to a bus stop in 102 degree temperatures and then spend 30 minutes riding a bus when a car does it in 10.
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
I see this repeated whenever pedestrian fatalities are brought up, almost like clockwork. Is this really an epidemic of phone-gawkers that is causing a consistent increase in instances of cars killing people for their crime of entering a roadway on feet instead of wheels? I suppose it's a possibility. What I know for sure is that since the inception of the automobile, car companies have been extremely successful in shifting all blame and responsibility for cars killing pedestrians onto pedestrians. This talking point stinks to me as more of the same.
In the case of SUVs and trucks, we are talking about a few tons of steel accelerating to speeds that easily break bones, maim, and kill people with the slightest of errors. If you are going through neighborhoods or places with high pedestrian traffic at a speed that you can't reactively stop on a dime, and/or are driving a vehicle that has poor line of sight especially for small humans, that is a problem.
Maybe there really is an epidemic of people walking into the street without looking, I've just never seen it happen personally. In any case, if pedestrians are guilty of walking into traffic while looking at their phones then I can almost guarantee that drivers are even more guilting of staring at their phones while driving through neighborhoods and other areas where pedestrians are likely to be. The notion that distracted pedestrians are more of a problem than distracted drivers does not come close to passing the smell test for me.
> In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedestrian accidents.
From what I understand, trucks, including pickups and SUVs, don't have to meet the same safety requirements as regular cars, which is just insane, when you think about it. They are already bigger and heavier and therefore more dangerous, and on top of that the safety rules are looser?!
Big trucks require a special license, but small ones can be driven with a regular license. Maybe that needs to change. Either they should follow the same safety rules as regular cars, or they should require special training and a stricter license.
"He was right, dead right, but just as dead as if he had been dead wrong."
Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.
The 'you can be right and dead' trope is so tired.Of course we should always be looking to mitigate dangerous and distracted drivers.
>Outside of HN, in real life safety is a responsibility of everyone.
The person driving the gas propelled two ton vehicle has more responsibility to avoid hitting things than pedestrians have to avoid getting hit.
>. You are careful when you drive, careful when you walk. You don't text while driving, you don't text while crossing the street. Everyone stays safer.
Pedestrians *should* be able to text while they cross the street. The only reason they can't/shouldn't is because American drivers are largely allowed to operate their machines in a negligent manner at all times.
Walking is an inherently safe activity. Driving is an inherently dangerous activity. Drivers should have more a burden for safety than walkers. You, as a driver, should expect things to enter the road. That's why we have speed limits. That's you watch the road instead of playing on the road.
In every city I've lived in the US jaywalking is actually illegal, perhaps it should be legal and even encouraged in your opinion but until it is - it's your responsibility to follow the rules.
Sure! And motorist need to follow the rules of the road. Unfortunately when they break the rules, which they do most of the time, they can easily end someones life.
I'm guessing you're one of the good ones who definitely doesn't speed every time they are in the car.
The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words. Please don't try to ad hominem, it just shows that you don't have any arguments of substance and degrades the discussion.
> pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words
This is... not the definition of jaywalking. It is legal to use one's phone while crossing the street.
Aside - history of the term "jaywalking," from Wikipedia: "The word was promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, according to historian and alternative transportation advocate Peter D. Norton. Today, in the US, the word is often used synonymously with its current legal definition, crossing the street illegally."
It depends on the state, I guess, in which state you can walk into traffic without paying attention, with or without phone, legally? Please be specific. And yes, I've seen this article in Wikipedia, it forgot to explain how pro-automotive interests managed to enforce that in USSR, for example.
You're the one that brought up jaywalking when that wasn't the crux of the argument, are confused about what jaywalking actually entails and then you accuse them of trying to ad hominem.
> The conversation is about pedestrians walking into traffic while staring in their phones, jaywalking in other words
Sorry, you are not understanding what jaywalking is. If you can find a definition of jaywalking that mentions phone, I'll concede your point, but you can't, because it has nothing to do with phones.
Sorry, the rules don't work like that. Jaywalking with a phone is still jaywalking, same as speeding with a phone is still speeding or littering with a phone is still littering. Here is the definition from Wiki:
Jaywalking is the act of pedestrians walking in or crossing a roadway that has traffic if that act contravenes traffic regulations.
Please show me how using a phone suddenly stops contravening with traffic regulations or whatever definition you believe is true that cancels jaywalking somehow when you stare at a phone.
I think it's difficult to make cities more dense if viewed as just strictly taking the current cities and trying to condense them, but that also seems like the less productive way to do it
First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput
The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing
As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes
It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.
The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is
I love how even people with radical anti-car discourse just shrugs it away and never even stop to think that half of that catch-22 problem can be solved by just the government spending some money on running empty buses.
No social reorganization, no legal change, no non-popular choice; just spending what is pennies compared to transit infrastructure.
And make those buses have dedicated lanes cars can't use. It is amazing how nice a bus can be when it's not stuck in the same shitty traffic as all the cars.
I am speaking more to the political possibility. Things like increasing car parking costs, removing car parking, and spending money on more frequent buses is feasible, but politically impossible.
Sufficient voters will have sufficient resources to own and store their own car, and they are going to want to use it, and they are not going to want to spend money on empty buses.
One of the most important factors in whether someone will vote for a transit tax if is they can imagine riding it themself. Since the current system sucks people can't imagine that and they vote no. Which keeps these networks starved of resources.
Meanwhile legislators approve billions for highways every year. Zoning laws and minimum parking laws are kept in place. Every time gasoline prices increase politicians seek to sooth voters/motorists.
> Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
I think it depends on where you are, but useful public transit is very possible in most places. Low frequency is the result of poor planning, not a requirement of public transit.
I'm treating them as one and the same here. My point is more that it's not endemic of public transit itself, but the way it's implemented (and supported and funded).
Fixing bad infrastructure takes time, but you don't even need that to reduce pedestrian deaths. If only people had smaller vehicles the rate of survival would go way up.
I could pretty easily imagine a sliding vehicle tax scale where safer, more practical sub-compacts and minivans are subsidized by the mega-lifted land yacht SUVs and pickups. Sure it doesn't fix the design problems of cities, but it at least means the vehicles that are traversing them aren't as likely to kill and maim people while we sort out the other problems.
We wouldn't even need to change taxes if we just stopped subsidizing gas. Fuel would cost about $12.75 per gallon, naturally making the Prius significantly cheaper to operate than the F-150.
As true as that is, I'd be happy just with attention being paid to sidewalks and protected bike paths. I live in an area with a grocery store that is well within biking distance. But it is on the other side of a four lane road and there's no safe way to get a bike across it. In other parts of the state, there are housing developments within walking distance of grocery stores, but no sidewalks.
It isn't uncommon to see people get in their car to go to the mail kiosk 2 blocks away, in part because of the lack of sidewalks.
In this analysis, pickup trucks and SUVs are identical, in that they have high vertical grills that obstruct the driver's view of the area immediately in front of the vehicle. This vehicle configuration is the major cause of the increase in pedistrian accidents.
However I was surprised the article didn't mention pedestrian behavior at all, which is clearly increasing the risk of pedistrian accidents in recent years.
My experiences with pedistrian near misses have been when people step in front of my car while staring at their phone. The worst cases being mid-block, at night, while the pedestrian was wearing all black.
Walkable cities are awesome! Unfortunately in the US the overwhelming majority of places offer very poor, or no, mass transit and cars are still the only practiucal means of transportation.
There is so much land available in the form of parking lots, and so much unmet housing demand, that you could reasonably infill your standard mall or big box lot if zoning allows.
A lot of malls have been doing this since retail has been in free fall for quite some time.
Pedestrian and bike bridges are car infrastructure. You can tell because they make the person who is moving under their own power, climb a set of stairs, walk across the bridge, and then walk down the stairs. In the meantime, the most vulnerable road users (Disabled people) have to cross 2 miles down the road at a deadly intersection. All the while, people who are sitting in air conditioned motorized vehicles have a straight level crossing.
In my opinion, if you can't afford to build an at grade crossing for pedestrians with a car underpass, you should close the road to cars, or lower speeds 15 mph with chicanes and raised crossings. Making people climb stairs to cross the road is insane.
Considering how much of the country is suburbs with large streets or freeways separating housing tracts from shopping centers, is your proposal really to close those freeways and arterial streets down? Or just demolish all the homes that are there and move those people to higher density areas?
I'm sympathetic to the idea of building new large developments in a non car centric fashion, but how do you do this with the majority of existing areas.
To be honest, the majority of existing areas will probably go bankrupt as densification happens, plunging the value of cookie cutter, match stick homes to be bulldozed and hopefully re-wilded. Most of suburbia is already going bankrupt. The roads, sewers, pipes, and electrical wires are falling apart because they are too expensive to maintain. All it takes is one company to move out or the land to run out before they start to spiral. San Bernardino CA is a good example.
I’m highly skeptical of the core thesis of the “strong towns” link, and cherry picking a few examples certainly doesn’t convince me.
I can cite plenty of small suburban areas that had an influx of demand without “growth” and the subsequent increase in tax revenue.
Even if you are correct, what time frame do you think this will happen? Will hundred of millions of Americans living in the suburbs be in bankrupted cities in 20 years? 40? 60?
It is already happening, with the pending commercial real estate crash I expect a lot of the big ones will be looking down the barrel soon. Most cities are propped up by short term gains. Foreign investment, capital firms, large business offices, etc.... It won't take much to tip them over. We're sitting on a ticking time bomb trying to add seconds to the clock instead of disarm it.
In my opinion, yes. At its root, it’s simply physics. Once the distances between destinations becomes sufficiently large, it is impossible, especially for the elderly or children.
Search for Target/Costco/Best Buy/Walmart/Kroger/mall and do a street view in US suburbs and see if you can walk those distances carrying things.
You could easily be looking at a quarter mile just from one store entrance to its adjacent store entrance, or even crossing the road which is usually 8+ lanes.
Lot size isn't really the issue, it's having big swathes of land zoned all-residential or all-commercial. We live in a small college town with mostly half- to one-acre lots outside of the downtown core, but we walk and bike everywhere most of the year because it's an actual town laid out before cars, with pockets of not-housing spread out among houses, and no wastelands of giant retail parking lots.
I would really like to get more infill development and smaller lots, personally, but just for the sake of preserving open space. It's easy to walk and bike in actual cities and towns already. Suburbs are the issue, because they are entirely planned around cars.
Public transportation is also not an option due to how inconvenient it is due to how infrequently it would run, and the cost of missed or missing buses/trains, which again, run infrequently due to lack of density of people.
Plus the separation of commercial zones and residential zones mean public transport is always going to one specific area, and so if you have any interest in traveling outside the central core, you are once again depending on a personal car.