Not that it's any more or less tragic, but I've always been astonished that Silicon Valley is so car-dependent. We've concentrated the most brilliant minds in the world in this small area... and then force everyone to pilot two-ton bullets to pick up groceries?
Not all workers can demand decent living conditions, but you'd think the competitive draw for workers in Silicon Valley would entice company towns to, I don't know, add segregated bike lanes so programmers' kids can get to school safely. Add public parks and dense housing so you can walk down to the corner coffee store or take your dog for a walk. Ban cars from certain streets to encourage local commerce and nightlife. SOMETHING.
Google's at least trying to improve Mountain View with their new campus (and Apple is very much not trying to improve Cupertino). But what the hell. An international group of wealthy geniuses can't get it together enough to demand marginally walkable lifestyles?
And people wonder why everyone commutes from San Francisco.
Well, since software companies are so big and wealthy and seem world-dominating right now, people in this field tend to think of them as the greatest minds ever. I wonder where are all the Silicon Valley Nobel prizes, all the cure for diseases discovered there, etc.
There are some great, great minds working there, some geniuses no doubt. But their field isn't the end all for intelligence. Not even close, actually (to me), as I'd rather have advances in many other fields over IT, any day.
> Not all workers can demand decent living conditions
You're assuming that car-oriented urban planning is synonymous with poor living conditions, which isn't true. A lot of people (most?) in the U.S. actually prefer it -- for many people the perceived convenience of cars beats public transportation and biking.
I love driving, but man, it sucks to build a city around it. I'm living in SF right now, carless, and skate a lot. It's fun, but holy shit does it suck constantly having to dodge oblivious drivers, asshole taxis, and homicidal MUNI drivers.
I have a fantasy where the whole city is grass and bikepaths. All normal deliveries are by bike, & if you really need to move something big, you get a special permit to rent a truck that goes 10 MPH and beeps.
Whenever I hear the whirring of hybrid or electric car I realize that times are changing. It may be decades or more away, but I like to imagine what cities of the future will be like.
So quiet! So fresh! The rumble of a car engine and its smelly exhaust will seem quaint. Maybe like the feelings now of seeing a horse-drawn carriage, and seeing the horse shit in the street.
So much space! My street is walled in by parked cars. The driving lanes are wide to accommodate human error. Perhaps the outer parts of the road will be re-purposed as park space. Only two narrow lanes in the middle for the computer guided vehicles to travel on. Or maybe only one lane, since the cars can coordinate their directions on this rarely-trafficed street.
Of course things won't be all rosy, but it IS certain that the feeling of cities will be very different.
My fantasy is to build a city with lots of roads, but put them underground. Street level can be solely for pedestrians, bikes, and vehicles delivering things on that block (although most buildings would have underground road access).
London tried to have a form of that, where pedestrians could go on raised walkways, while the cars owned the roads underneath. Fragments remain around the Barbican in the City of London, and you can see blocked off unfinished walkways.
Underground roads are being suggested in many places as they free up land for buildings.
Dallas recently built a park[0] over a highway smack dab in the middle of the city and it has been a huge success. It would be great to do this in more places.
Don't worry, SF is terrible for drivers too. I'll just keep my truck in the south bay, where they appreciate it (kind of; why does caltrans forget how to design north of the grapevine?)
You're right. Most people in the U.S. prefer it. But that could be just from the crappy public transportation options, the crappy bike riding options, and from just growing up and living your whole life in a car oriented lifestyle. I'm with the poster below: I love to go on road trips, but man, being a pedestrian and having to deal with life-threatening drivers on a daily basis absolutely sucks. It is a poor living condition to me, no matter how much you make.
> for many people the perceived convenience of cars beats public transportation and biking.
That clearly proves the the public transporation is pretty bad, which is indicates that living conditions can improve.
The need for a car is also an indicator that living conditions can improve. I don't live in a very well-designed city (far from it!), but I seldom have to go far enough to require a bus or subway, walking being usually enough (plenty of restaurants and cafes in a 600 metre radius, for example).
I'm using SV as shorthand for the tech industry generally -- and Redmond is very much to Seattle what Silicon Valley is to San Francisco. Car-dependent suburbia that threatens the health, safety, and quality-of-life of everyone forced to be there. San Francisco is as walkable as the West Coast gets, which alone testifies to the disgrace of American urban planning.
Ey would have been killed long ago if he dared to ride a bike to work. If Redmond had been planned after Copenhagen's model, he would still be alive to make the world a better place.
I actually agree with this response. Because of Microsoft, Seattle has become Silicon Valley North, just the same as NYC has become the Silicon Alley and Chicago is... whatever they're calling Chicago now.
All of them are similar, heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans.
Google is trying to solve it by making smarter cars. How about we solve it by making our communities smarter instead?
After decades living in real car-only cities (Atlanta, Miami, Sao Paulo), I'm glad to live car-free in NYC. And considering family and small child.
While gentrification continues to push people away from Manhattan, you still have decent options of public transportation to everywhere around here.
We can criticize NY for many things, but being a 'car city' is not one of them.
Anyway, I really wish more cities in the world could offer similar life style, allowing people to leave their cars behind and use public transportation. It would save lives, the environment, and increase everyone's happiness.
It would be nice if NYC laws were as friendly to pedestrians as public transport is. Most pedestrian deaths in NYC occur in cross walks where we have the right of way. The charges for a car running a person over in a cross walk can be as little as a $300 fine and are often not much more than that.
Underneath the sea of yellow cabs you have a very efficient subway system, connecting the entire city to its 5 boroughs. And you also have a decent railroad system, connecting Manhattan to nearby cities.
It's true that some areas are not properly served through subway, and you have to rely on bus. But it is still an order of magnitude better than some of the cities mentioned above.
Actually, self-driving cars are the only proposed solution to automobile accidents and related deaths that seems like it might work. Laws don't work, education doesn't work, and even the safest, most careful drivers can and do have accidents. Let's be clear. In the US, at least, cars are not going anywhere unless costs become as prohibitive everywhere as they are in NYC. Even then, they're still not going anywhere (NYC still has a ton of cars obviously). I have no idea what making communities smarter means. What exactly are you proposing?
Generally he means addressing the problems "heavy car usage, not enough walking, and no safety for humans". Optimizing city design for people, and not for vehicles. This is generally done by increasing density, and requiring mixed-use buildings with commerce on ground level, and more public spaces and wider side walks, and dedicated lanes for bikes and public transportation.
Cars aren't going anywhere anytime soon in the US because sadly you can't function without one in the vast majority of places. It's far easier to implement this design philosophy for a growing city[1], but really hard to change the layout of a mature one, though it can be done thoughtfully [2].
We call it the "Silicon Forest." I remember Redmond when it was still just a small town whose claim to fame was a TV production lot for Northern Exposure (I grew up in Bothell just north on 405).
That Boston managed to avoid this is a very big reason why I don't have much interest in living anywhere else. In Somerville and Cambridge, I feel exceptionally safe, even around cars.
Chicago here... it's anything than "car city". I haven't had a car in a decade. I'm not sure you've actually lived in any of these areas. It's possible to live without a car in only a few cities, and Chicago and NYC are two of them.
I live in Seattle and work in Redmond and do both solely via public transit and walking. Redmond has a large number of bike lane miles (as does Seattle, and many of Seattle's are protected, separated bike lanes) along with fast, frequent, and long span-of-service transit to places like Seattle and Kirkland and Bellevue. Microsoft has even helped with that by funding things like Overlake Transit Center, a street and pedestrian bridge over highway 520, an upcoming pedestrian-only bridge over 520, pushing for light rail to Redmond, and even both providing tap-to-use transit cards to everyone who holds a badge and partially funding the switch to that system (the ORCA card ). Yes, the property improvements benefit Microsoft in addition to the public but Microsoft was under no requirement to help pay for them.
People take transit a lot in the Puget Sound region but it, like many places, still has a stigma associated with it. Seattleites voted last year to tax ourselves more to provide over 200,000 hours per year of more transit service; the rest of the county had its chance before that and voted no. It's not that transit doesn't exist, it's that getting people to use it and agree to make the investment in it (beyond billion dollar light rail lines, because buses are apparently "icky") is difficult even if the system does work well for the commuter crowd. I don't even commute regular hours and I can get everywhere I want to go via our transit system.
Cycling on roads is extremely dangerous. Every single person I know who commutes by bicycle has been hit by a car at least once. One of my colleagues was killed cycling to work when he was hit by a semi truck. Another woman was recently killed by a box truck cycling to work a block from my office.
I thought this too, but after looking at data it doesn't really seem any more dangerous than driving a car. I think the reason it sounds dangerous is that when it happens everyone hears about it and talks about it a lot more than car accidents.
Mrmoneymustache did an analysis and if you define 'safety' as 'expected life span', cycling is actually safer than driving a car.
To be clear, there are actual costs involved that affect these dynamics. Property values anywhere near a transit line go way up. For many years I rented and biked to work, but when looking for a house it was massively more expensive to get anywhere within a reasonable bus ride of Redmond. I ended up to the north, where it's still not a bad bike commute (an hour, but mostly on dedicated bike trails instead of roads), but the fastest bus ride is to go west above the lake to downtown Seattle and then east back across the lake to Redmond.
That wasn't my experience, but I'll grant that maybe I got lucky. I also live where it takes a transfer (a local bus that comes every 15 minutes to downtown and get on the 545) and, at least in the case of my coworkers, a lot of people are vehemently opposed to transferring. A bike commute would be awesome if I could make it up that hill to the IH-90 bridge...
This article is being flooded with weird anti-car hate. Yet, my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first.
Given that I don't drink very much and then only at home (a sixer lasts me about a season, sometimes half a year) that means my car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone. Odd how there's no anti-alcohol hate here on HN, yet its the alcohol doing the actual killing.
If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs. Perhaps we need a war on bathtubs. Because nothing is ever a drunk's fault.
...dude. No, you don't have to be a drunk going 100mph before you kill someone with your car. That you "don't drink very much" doesn't mean that your "car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone."
Your car is an extremely heavy, extremely fast machine that will crush anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. That includes not only incompetent/incapacitated/elderly drivers, but also dumb accidents and unaware pedestrians. You will easily kill a child who tries to play in her suburban street even if you go 10mph -- not because you're a drunk, but because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000. [1]
The question is not whether you enjoy driving. The question is why cars are entitled to the vast majority of public space -- not only for parking (often for free or nominal fees), but also for individual transportation that endangers the lives of pedestrians and cyclists. Please take a look at this illustration to get an idea of how much land your car takes from everyone else. [2]
Do you really think a kid trying to bike to school should have to risk his life every day... because you feel entitled to barrel through his home town?
"because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000."
Check the per-vehicle-km rate. Denmark isn't safer because they drive less.
Unless I'm reading the table wrong, US is still at 7.6 deaths per billion km, while Denmark is at 3.4. That's more than a 1:2 ratio. I'd certainly say that's safer (even if the difference is smaller than GP indicates).
Scbrg beat me to it, but Denmark is still twice as safe as the US when you consider kilometers driven. Keep in mind that this means cars-vs-cars.
And more to the point, take a second to think about what you just said. Denmark is nearly four times as safe as the US because they gave people lovely cities like Copenhagen where kids can safely bike to school and adults can walk to work or to a local restaurant. This means...
...yup, that they don't risk their lives every day in cars and thus the per-vehicle-kilometer rate isn't terribly useful in assessing a walkable lifestyle. The kids that bike to school in Copenhagen don't die in automobile wrecks and aren't exposed to risk on a per-vehicle-kilometer rate. Those dangers are for American kids.
Even when you disregard the safety/quality of daily life for urban Danes and use the car-vs-car per capita per-vehicle-kilometer rate, it's astonishing that Denmark's excellent urban planning has even influenced Danish drivers, in that it's more than twice as safe to drive in Denmark as it is to drive in the US. Contrary to your last statement, Denmark is RADICALLY safer because they drive less. Even drivers are safer because of the superior design of Danish cities and streets.
> If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs.
In case anybody actually thought this might be true, here are some statistics that show it almost certainly isn't.
Accidental motor-vehicle crashes account for slightly more deaths than accidental drowning and falls combined; in America, about 35,000 people were killed in car crashes in 2013, while about 33,000 died by falling or drowning [0, 1]. Alcohol was involved in less than a third of traffic fatalities in the same year [2].
Meanwhile, figures for 1990–2010 show that only 9.7% of accidental drowning deaths occurred in bathtubs [3]. So roughly three quarters of all fatal falls must occur in bathtubs if we're going to reach the number of deaths caused by car crashes in which everybody involved is sober. I can't find figures, but the number of total deaths that occur in bathrooms suggests that it's not close.
I saw a girl on a bike get hit and killed by a taxi trying to beat a light. She was going across even though the light was red, as is common in China. I'll never get the "crash" out of my head.
I don't really blame the driver, but the whole system is crazy: you have tons of cars and tons of non-cars (bikes, electric bikes, pedestrians) mixed up all together with limited infrastructure, these things are just bound to happen. I can't wait for self driving cars to be a thing, they'll be able to handle this much better.
I agree, it's the drunk's fault. But that's irrelevant if you're trying to stop people from getting killed, instead of just trying to assign blame. What matters is what we can do about it, and pushing for a reduction in car usage is an effective way of reducing vehicular manslaughter.
Being drunk is not the only way to kill someone while driving at 100mph. As someone who was in a car when the steering wheel simply stopped controlling the wheels while we were in a road with heavy traffic, which culminated with it rolling over 270°, I can guarantee you that (nobody got killed, but it was pure luck).
"What matters is what we can do about it, and pushing for a reduction in car usage is an effective way of reducing vehicular manslaughter."
Let me play a bit of devil's advocate here. Where are you going to draw the line? All too often I see people talking about reducing this, preventing that, etc. However, everyone does so with all sorts of weird convenience and funding constraints/caveats, effectively reducing the problem to "how far can we take this before it becomes too inconvenient/expensive for us".
I say, if you want to prevent/fix something, do it. Throw money/laws at the problem until it goes away or is near-zero. I genuinely used to say that, and believe in it. These days, with my eventual political beliefs, I hope it gets taken seriously so we can all realize the futility in it. Like grasping a balloon in a fist.
I view it in the opposite way - to me, there's nothing weird about stopping when it becomes too expensive; nor do I see a need to draw a line - each possible measure has a different line over which the costs are higher than its benefits.
I don't want to "declare war" on drunk driving. I want to take small and measurable steps that achieve a sustained y/y reduction in those deaths.
Alcohol? For me, every time during the day that I see a car doing stupid things (i.e. stuff that can kill me on my bike) they are on their phones. Looking down, driving erratically, either too fast or too slow, etc.
I still can't believe its not illegal to use the phone while driving on many parts of the US (and where its illegal, its just a slap on the wrist)
According to NHTSA, 39% of all traffic fatalities in 2005 were alcohol-related. Your car is not "perfectly safe", not to you and certainly not to non-drivers around you, no matter what you would like to convince yourself.
If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs.
If you remove a major cause of road deaths, road death becomes less common? You amaze me.
my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first.
Absolutely false. Everyone is capable of making mistakes, you and I included. You can be a perfect driver 99% of the time, but that one time when you look down because your phone went off, or because there was a noise on your right, or the guy coming the other way has his full beams in your face, or... you're deluded if you think you cannot possibly crash your car unless you are drunk.
We've created a national infrastructure that IMO nearly requires driving to be a civil right. That sucks. But I really don't have an answer to this problem when proposals to address this are either voted down or end up ridiculously over budget.
Considering the sheer vastness of the continental US, it's not surprising to me that there haven't been many good plans to remove our dependence on cars. The only options, really, for good nation-wide transport are trains and planes. Trains have an incredibly expensive infrastructure, especially the high-speed trains needed to traverse the thousands of miles between the East and West coasts. Planes are slightly less expensive, but the pain of needing to show up three hours early for a one hour flight, risk of lost luggage, and general fear now associated with traveling by air make planes a less than attractive option.
The US "sheer vastness" is irrelevant. Most of the US population live in states with a population density higher than countries like Norway, which have good public transport (only 10 states, with an aggregate 12 million people, have a lower population density).
Nobody cares if "empty" areas in places like Alaska have poor public transport. You get 90% of the benefit if there's decent public transport in the higher density regions.
Most transport is not nation-wide, but short distance commutes anyway. Even places with very low population density tends to have some places where public transport is useful. It's not about eradicating car use, but to reduce the number of journeys for which they are required.
EDIT: And the US as a whole has a population density twice that of Norway.
EDIT: And before anyone brings up the oil: Most of Norways transit infrastructure predates the oil with a significant margin.
Long-distance and regional transport needs are significantly different from local ones, and different land-use and activity patterns can hugely reduce transportation needs. The fact of a large country doesn't mean that individual urban areas can't be designed for mass transit or walkability.
If you can find shopping, school, recreational, and work activities within a few blocks (or at most a few miles) of one another, then a car becomes more a nuisance than a requirement. The exceptions become trips out of town -- the outdoors, visiting friends, etc.
Shopping can be dealt with through deliveries (scheduled and bundled, or online). Or local pick-up and a cart, wagon, or bike trailer.
Trades and crafts will still likely require transport, but that becomes an outlier exception.
Depending on what long-term fuel and economic trends look like, I suspect the US will see either regional high-speed rail or plain-old conventional slow rail. Aviation with expensive fuel becomes an expensive proposition. Roughly half a large jet's take-off weight is fuel, and for an efficient airliner at 40 passenger miles/gallon, a 3,000 mile flight involves 75 gallons of fuel -- at 6.8 pounds per gallon, that's 510 lb. of fuel, 2-4x the weight of a passenger. And while trains can be electrified, the options for doing so to aircraft pose a few larger technical hurdles.
But people don't commute across the US, just like they don't commute from Brussels to Madrid. Cities in the US are crap for a variety of reasons (racist zoning, defunding of transit, forced car infrastructure in the form of parking minimums, absurd NIMBYism, etc.)
You get a job at Google or Facebook in part so that you can buy a nicer "two ton bullet" than you otherwise could. No one wants to walk out of necessity, and that will not change anytime soon.
Not all workers can demand decent living conditions, but you'd think the competitive draw for workers in Silicon Valley would entice company towns to, I don't know, add segregated bike lanes so programmers' kids can get to school safely. Add public parks and dense housing so you can walk down to the corner coffee store or take your dog for a walk. Ban cars from certain streets to encourage local commerce and nightlife. SOMETHING.
Google's at least trying to improve Mountain View with their new campus (and Apple is very much not trying to improve Cupertino). But what the hell. An international group of wealthy geniuses can't get it together enough to demand marginally walkable lifestyles?
And people wonder why everyone commutes from San Francisco.