Paid parking is killing cities. Paid parking incentivises development investors to invest in an outdated infrastructure that does not produce anything, takes a lot of city centre space, while extorting productive people
In Portugal most parking is free as an extension of the businesses, that the owners have to consider. You can just leave home and not think about it while going about your business
In the UK most parking is paid, and there are hundreds of companies to manage parking lots, check the cars, to issue fines, to go after people that don't pay, a 60£ fine that is now 600£ because you have to pay the salary of the goons putting a wheel lock in your car, everyone in UK has paid a car park fine, it is a whole business in itself that is basically just a capitalist cancer
Seems like a bad implementation. In my city (Czechia) most of the parking lots are owned by the city, so it is fined by the city police. Cars are checked by cameras installed on the side of police cars, and in city centre its fully automated because there are cameras reading plates on each entrance. No wheel locks unless you are very bad offender.
Are you saying that parking spaces do not produce value? Just from the fact that people voluntarily pay for it, would suggest that this is not the case. Personally, I think it's good for parking to be handled by the free market and not the government.
In the UK you are very unlikely to be able to park anywhere in any city centre without paying. We often have these out-of-town shopping areas that have big grocery supermarkets, furniture and DIY stores, they might be free. High Street parking may be free for 20 or 30 minutes.
What ends up happening is, people in cars just avoid the city centre (who are usually doing several other measures to repel cars), and end up going to the out-of-town places instead. This fuels a proliferation of sprawl, of course.
My city has large parking lots just outside the city center, great public transport and the city is actually walkable. The city council limits the sprawl by ... not allowing it(sic).
We welcome many foreign visitors (mostly German) every weekend and they seem to have no problems with it.
Maybe in the US with your strange zoning laws. But not in the EU.
Here we take public transport, and in the case of London, there’s a green belt that prevents any further sprawl.
Another point worth mentioning, the EU is significantly denser and more built up than the US. We don’t have huge tracts of empty land around our cities, for the most part, it’s simply not possible to create a new suburb in many parts of Europe due to the lack of empty space.
I'm not familiar with London, but here in Paris, there's quite a lot of people who live outside the city limits, in the suburbs. The vast majority, actually. And if you live in the "greater area" (meaning in towns not directly touching Paris proper), life without a car isn't great.
Public transit is serviceable if you need to get to Paris and live in an area served by the suburban trains (or else you need to take a bus or two to reach the station).
But for your day-to-day needs, shopping malls are mostly outside the towns, and they're usually a hassle to reach without a car. There will usually be a bus service, but again, it will probably not be close to where you live, and going grocery shopping for a whole family by bus can't be particularly enjoyable.
The Greater London area has pretty great bus service everywhere, and TfL (Transport for London) have been investing in bus routes radial bus routes that can be used to move around the suburbs, rather than just the traditional transport options that only focus on moving people into and out of the city centre.
Shopping malls exist, but it seems the majority of the towns the make up the Greater London area have managed to preserve big chunks of their town centres, and recently it feels like there’s been an effort to build out those town centres. The town centres usually have every you need from big to small shops, and open late (the U.K. is a little unusual for Europe in that most of our store, regardless of size, are open late, with a substantial number being 24/7).
Driving into and out of these town centres is painful. Taking the bus and walking is much easier. And because shops are open late, doing small shops after work is very easy and extremely common.
Equally driving “out of town” is incredibly painful. For me, reaching the edge of London is a one hour drive in mostly stationary traffic. Far easier to walk or bike to our nearest town centre, assuming the nearest corner shop doesn’t have what we need.
> the U.K. is a little unusual for Europe in that most of our store, regardless of size, are open late, with a substantial number being 24/7
I think this is a very important point.
In Paris proper, only stores in "tourist areas" (as defined by the local authority — that's basically in the heart of Paris, and around the Eiffel Tower) may stay open late. It's fairly easy to find supermarkets open until 10 PM. After that, not so much. But "regular stores" (say clothing) usually close at 7-8 PM.
Outside Paris proper, the situation isn't as good. Stores usually close around 7 PM and even supermarkets rarely close after 8 PM.
I think the issue is mostly political, there have been attempts to keep stores open later as well as on Sundays, but they have been shot down by local unions.
This assumes that your shopping needs can only be met by shopping malls.
I do all my daily shopping in local shops, I have 5 or 6 in walking distance, 20+ in bicycle distance. The last time I went to a mall was for a specific offer in a specific specialty store, which is certainly not a daily activity.
It's a matter of will and not killing off in-town shopping.
Where do you live? Your comment feels completely disconnected from the reality on the ground.
I agree that shopping malls have killed in-town shopping. But maybe there's a reason for that? In-town shops usually don't stay open late enough for people who depend on public transit for longer commutes, which is the case for many people living in the suburbs. Those people don't usually live there by choice, it's usually because they couldn't afford to live in the city center. That's the case for my parents, for example.
I don't doubt that there must also have been a comfort angle to that, it's easier to just drive to a big store, get everything you need in one place, and drive back. Also, malls are usually much cheaper that in-town stores. Which, again, is important for people who have to live in the suburbs because of limited means.
I'm in the same situation as you, probably even better. I have multiple shops open until 10 PM less than a 10-minute walk away. But I realize that not everyone can afford to live in the city center, so it's not just a matter of will.
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My parents live in a 20000 people town, so it's not the boonies. The closest non-bakery shop is 20 minutes away on foot. It's open from 9 AM to 8 PM, and it only has your basics. Want anything other than packaged sausage and cheese? Tough. The butcher and cheese vendor close at 7 PM.
By public transit, it's impossible for them to be home before 7:30 PM for my mom and 8:30 for my dad. They can basically only shop on weekends, so they'd have to haul provisions for the whole week. They cannot do "daily shopping".
Of course, my dad's commute is 1:30 each way by transit if there are no issues, or 30 minutes by car, which is what he ends up using.
I will admit that I live in a place that does it right, namely Copenhagen. There is plentiful public transit, local shops and the entire city is extremely walkable/bikeable.
I don't live in the city center, it's a 25 minute bus ride there if there's no traffic, but even here I have local shops everywhere, since we don't have zoning laws that restrict shops in residential areas. Shops are generally open until 21 or 22, some until midnight.
My point is that the dependency on malls is not inevitable, it can be prevented and/or remedied, and changing zoning laws is one of the ways to do it.
My girlfriend lives in a town of 1500 people, and there are 3 grocery stores, several pizzarias and bakeries, as well as other local amenities. Everything is walkable and they have both train and bus connections to the nearest cities. That's how to do it, not the like similarly sized village in Germany she came from, where there are literally no stores, no restaurants, no nothing, and the only transit they have is a bus that runs every hour between 8 and 17 on weekdays. No wonder that town is dead.
I'm not aware of any zoning laws in France, at least not the kind there seem to be in the US. There are technically shops close to where people live, the issue is their opening hours aren't practical for workers.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the "urban" area of Copenhagen is ten times smaller than that of Paris (292.5 km2 vs 2,853.5 km2). Not sure how comparable those are in practice. But a 25-minute bus ride with no traffic, in Paris, would put you inside Paris proper, not in the suburbs. Public transport is fairly good there.
The issue is many people live and work outside of Paris proper, and transit from suburb to suburb is poor. Most suburban trains go to Paris and bus routes are relatively short. They're working on improving things, but there's still much to do. So the issue is more one of time, rather than zoning per se. People don't have the time to go to the local shops were they live, so towns don't thrive.
Maybe if there was less concentration, so if instead of having one big city in the middle of an enormous suburb, there were multiple smaller cities, the situations would resemble that of Copenhagen. But for some reason, people insist on running all their businesses in the same few spots and bring people in from long distances (relatively speaking).
> High Street parking may be free for 20 or 30 minutes.
There's a surprising amount of free street parking in San Francisco, although it's often possible to see a meter maid waiting patiently on the sidewalk for the street to go into "no parking" mode, at which point everyone is ticketed immediately.
The parking problem seems to be the exact opposite in many European cities. New apartment blocks are build without providing the required parking, and people aren't willing to pay for parking when visiting the city center.
Some people really do need a car to get to work, but if they also want to live in the center of a large city, then they are frequently not even given the option of paying for a parking spot. The city of Copenhagen famously sold more parking permits than there are actual parking spaces to people living in the city center.
For when you're just going to a cafe, restaurant, or shopping, I don't get why people can just pay the parking fee, it's often not nearly as expensive as people make it out to be.
> New apartment blocks are build without providing the required parking, and people aren't willing to pay for parking when visiting the city center.
What exactly is the “required parking”? Here in london most new developments are prohibited from building parking, and are also frequently ineligible for parking permits, because we want less cars on our roads not more. The roads are already full to bursting, and you can’t build more of them.
The number of people who need a car to go work in London is minuscule. We have fantastic public transport, and rapidly growing cycle infrastructure. Today travelling by bike or tube is normally twice a fast as a car. And when I say bike, I don’t mean Lycra clad speeders, I’m talking about casual cycle through the city in normal clothes and no sweat.
> For when you're just going to a cafe, restaurant, or shopping, I don't get why people can just pay the parking fee, it's often not nearly as expensive as people make it out to be.
Most on street parking is
1. Full, so you probably can’t park. Not an issue with a bike, bus or tube.
2. Strictly time limited. Unless you wanna move your cat every hour or two, parking probably isn’t going to work for you.
Does it need to be on street parking though? I'd argue that most new building should just be built with a parking basement. Under ground parking can provide most, if not all of the parking required within modern cities. Developers just don't want to add them, due to cost of construction.
There are a few new apartment building going up in the city center 20 minutes from my home. Each apartment is required to provide 1.7 parking spot per apartment. It's not required to be on street, or even above ground.
To be clear, the restriction is no parking, not, no on street parking.
The city wants these developments to add exactly zero parking or cars to the city. Underground or otherwise.
Parked cars don’t pollute or cause traffic, the issue is when people start driving them.
In my new build the developer was restricted (not required to build, a maximum allowed to build) to 0.3 spaces per apartment. That was two years ago, in one years time, a new build here will be restricted to zero spaces per apartment.
> Some people really do need a car to get to work, but if they also want to live in the center of a large city,
Why does someone living in NYC, Chicago, London, Paris need a car to get to work? There are some very rare cases yes, but the vast vast majority don't need a car, they want a car.
> The city of Copenhagen famously sold more parking permits than there are actual parking spaces to people living in the city center.
I would almost always expect that to happen. There is far more demand than there is parking, and a permit doesn't give you a right to a space. I would also be hugely surprised if much money (if any) was made from permits. (Enforcement of the CPZs being a different thing that almost certainly does make money).
> I don't get why people can just pay the parking fee, it's often not nearly as expensive as people make it out to be.
It's £4.50 per hour in the city center here, (plus £0.20 to pay by card - and this is a recent option too. 2-3 years ago it was coins only), and most areas have a 2 hour limit. For anyone actually living in the city, it's almost certainly cheaper to get an Uber each way.
> Why does someone living in NYC, Chicago, London, Paris need a car to get to work?
There are more cities than that, and many have terrible public transport, even in Europe. I live just outside a city with around 125.000 people. Public transport is terrible, it takes an hour or more to use the bus for traveling 15km (I need to leave home at 6:30 to be at work at 9:15, if I take the bus, but it's a 20 minute drive). Also most of the jobs aren't actually within the city center. Many can bike and do so, but that's not an option for everyone, especially during the winter and autumn.
Sure, but the person I replied to said _large_ city. 125k is definitely not a large city, and having grown up in a similar sized one (~100k) they're poorly served. This is (anecdotally) because those towns and cities used to be small enough to not warrant mass transit, and now that they are people are convinced that it's not worth it because it's slow.
125k is rather large where I live, large enough to make it one of the countries four major cities. But fair enough, if you talk about large cities as Berlin, London and other cities with millions of people, the argumentation changes.
This may not translate to London etc., but remember that NYC is a lot larger than Manhattan. There are large parts of NYC that are not serviced by trains/subways, and the only option is a bus.
My wife would take a train to a train to a bus to get from one part of Queens to another. 90 minutes on a good day. Driving - 25 mins including finding parking.
Ignore the next sections, I can’t read and the comment is just wrong.
This is a thread about parking in European cities. Experiences of NYC aren’t exactly useful data points.
Also as a related point. It’s a real shame that the US doesn’t invest in proper bus lanes and busses. Buses don’t need to a shitty form of transport, it’s really on in the US where busses are worse than driving in city centres.
Parent comment asked: Why does someone living in NYC, Chicago, London, Paris need a car to get to work? There are some very rare cases yes, but the vast vast majority don't need a car, they want a car.
I'm positing that the assertion that the vast majority don't "need a car" is incorrect, certainly in NYC.
There are reasons for needing a car other than “work”. Getting your kid to doctor’s office, taking your kid to school, taking your kid to daycare, visiting family, fitting all your bikes/kayaks/gear to go outdoors, groceries and errands, etc.
Note, I live in Chicago with 2 kids under 5. Neither my wife or I drive to work and we have one car.
Here in Norway, and also in the UK, free parking is killing cities too but the free parking in question isn't in the cities, it is in out of town shopping centres. People go there instead of to the cities partly because they will not have to pay to park and not have to rush back to the car when the ticket runs out.
> Some other parking reform efforts are trying to take cars more fully out of the equation. In car-heavy Phoenix, real estate developers are building a 17-acre neighborhood called Culdesac Tempe that won’t have any parking, period. (Residents and visitors will have to bike or take public transit.)
Isn't this focused on the young, single, and healthy? I can't imagine having multiple children and living with no car. You cannot bike your 3 kids to schools and hospitals during rainy autumn days. The bigger part of the proposal actually read like it has a big blind zone about the needs of families - having a family or children weren't even mentioned.
EDIT to address some repeating replies:
- Some form of "school" starts at around 2-3 y/o. 2-3 year olds cannot take a bus.
- There is winter, heavy rains, and wind. In most places you cannot rely on a bike all the time.
- In most cities people work far from home, and the early schools the kids go to are also far away. A young family with two 2-5 y/o children will not be able to rely on a bus and a bike, unless they live in some expensive area where everything is nearby and are lucky to have jobs at the same place.
This is a common viewpoint in the US, mostly because we're brought up not knowing alternatives.
It might be worthwhile to check out how cities are planned elsewhere. My wife and I recently moved to the Netherlands because we think the way they do things is much better in this regard. I would highly recommend checking out the Not Just Bikes YouTube Channel, as well as Bicycle Dutch.
Here are some videos that might be of interest to you:
I am not from US. I also grew up without cars and without tap water even. But it circumstances were different. For one - my parents worked 500 meters away from our home, second - my grandmother lived nearby so I didn't have to go to kindergarten, and third when I started going to school it was close enough to reach by walking.
After I started my family and moved out to a bigger city, all of these things changed. Your parents cannot help with the children because they are in another city. For me and my wife it takes about an hour both to reach our jobs. And the kindergarten we were taking our kids to was about 30 minutes (by car) away. The ones that are near our house or near our work-places had 3-year waiting lines.
And then there are winters and heavy rains. And you might have multiple children all of whom need to be taken someplace in the morning. It's just not realistic to bike, unless you somehow have everything nearby.
Yes, unfortunately it takes much more than just designing a car-free village. You need good infra like public transport, more and smaller schools and kindergartens, etc. But it absolutely exists in Europe.
I live 4 km from work and take a bike most of the year, otherwise it would be the tram or maybe even a walk if time permits. I don't have kids but usually the next elementary school is a 15 minute walk tops, there is one across the street for me actually. Kindergartens are even more ubiquitous. This is a city of ~250k. So obviously, you don't just transform an existing city into this by banning cars. And there are plenty of car-first cities in Europe still. Living in the countryside without a car is certainly very inconvenient.
Also, if the health system in the US is really as bad as it always appears to us, having good coverage of family practitioners might be off the table, and I'd certainly feel uncomfortable with the hospital being an hour away if I had toddlers around, and an ambulance either taking forever to arrive or being prohibitively expensive.
Pretty key point right here: it takes a lot of infrastructure spending over a long time to build a city. Can't just snap your fingers and change how that money got spent.
Plenty of the pedestrian-friendly cities with good trains and all got built up during times when there weren't any automobiles.
They're nice to look at and great to live in. But it's not possible to transform Salt Lake city or San Antonio into New York City with the snap of a finger. Takes capital, takes time, and people need to live their lives in the meanwhile.
Transit around here is good in some bits, bad in others. House prices are about double, maybe more, if the house is walking distance to good transit. And transit isn't free. Better economics to own an inexpensive car and drive it. For a lot of people, money's tight and need to put food on the table for the family.
> Pretty key point right here: it takes a lot of infrastructure spending over a long time to build a city. Can't just snap your fingers and change how that money got spent.
Your not wrong, it’s take the Neatherlands 30-50 years to transition from a car centric culture that would make even an American blush, to the cycle centric one they have today.
But as with trees, the best time plant one was ten years ago, the second best time is now. If we keep using the excuse that you can’t build people friendly infrastructure, because there’s no other people friendly infrastructure for it to work with. Then you’ll never build people friendly infrastructure, and you’ll be forever stuck in a car dominated hell scape, where a 30 min drive to do anything is an inescapable reality.
As someone who lives in a major city in the US with a dense walkable city center, the health care system in cities is frequently a mess of bureaucracy and completely overwhelmed by demand.
The suburbs (not rural though) have much more accessible… everything really. Go to a Target (a “basically anything that’s not food but also some food” store) in an inner city and they’ll either be out of half the things you need or simply not stock them at all. Suburban stores are fully stocked and prices are lower, with larger sizes available.
The same dynamic exists in healthcare to the point if I actually have real healthcare needs, I go out to the suburbs. I went to the ER in the city one time because I had cut myself pretty badly while cooking. The person who was stitching me up had to stop halfway through to rush and deal with 3 gunshot victims who had all come in at the same time. I sat there with a bleeding, half-stitched hand for 2 hours until they could get someone else.
Much of this was driven historically by racism, redlining and white flight, but it still doesn’t change the fact that health care in cities is more expensive, significantly more burdened and way more of a bureaucratic machine.
> And then there are winters and heavy rains. And you might have multiple children all of whom need to be taken someplace in the morning. It's just not realistic to bike, unless you somehow have everything nearby.
This depends on the country planning. In at least some European countries, the state guarantees enrollment to kindergardens/schools close to the family residence.
I actually wonder how cities (countries) that don't make such guarantee (and are not car-centered like the US) can actually survive. Assuming that all the families with multiple children use the car during winter in the morning (you've described it as a necessity), that would make the city traffic completely stuck. I don't doubt that this may be the reality in those circumstances.
I remember similar descriptions about cities like Rome, where people use the car comparatively more than other European cities. Indeed, traffic in Rome is hell, and ultimately, it boils down to insufficient city infrastructure/planning (the official take is that they can't build underground lines due to ruins), so even willing citizens have very little wiggle room.
Where I come from, big city etc. there seems to be not much time advantage of taking a car vs. taking a bike. After all a bike is very easy to park close to your destination and it's not affected as much by traffic jam (due to rudimentary cycling infrastructure and the ability to use side streets that are too narrow for rush hour drivers to consider).
WRT child transport: child transport bikes are seeing a rising adoption here, so it is feasible to bike to work and drop of your kid on the way. Kids will stay dry below the bike's rain cover, though of course the parent who cycles will need some upgrade to his clothing compared to what's needed when going by car (finding cloth that is both rain-tight but doesn't cause sweating takes some experimentation).
If you want to look at the spectrum of possibilities, have a look at e.g.
(just enumerating what bikes I see on a regular basis, this list would go on and on)
PS: you may also want to factor in the time spent on maintenance and bureaucracy (dealing with car insurance etc) and the extra monetary effort involved with owning a car vs owning a bike.
I checked out the second link and this is IMHO an interesting and thoughtful YouTube channel. These are not words that I co-locate often.
The linked video discusses the deep effect that urban planning can have sociologically; e.g. if a neighbourhood isn't walkable, kids don't walk, and if kids aren't out walking, kids not being out on their own can become normalised, and even lead to censure/punishment for children's independence.
Which seems crazy (to me, anyway) and very much at odds w/ what we want kids to grow into, e.g. that they be independent and active.
That is true. Oslo unlike Amsterdam is not at all flat, with many having 100-200m of height to climb on their way home if going downtown for work or shopping.
However, electric bikes are changing that equation drastically. With an e-bike those climbs are not an issue at all. So there's been a good uptick in people who ride bikes here.
Of course, e-bikes are quite expensive compared to regular bikes, but compared to owning a car they're quite cheap. So for someone living in Oslo, having an e-bike and renting a car a few times for the long trips can be a very good deal.
That's correct. Biycle paths are very well kept. Winters in the Netherlands are pretty mild though, temperature hovers around 2-6c the whole time, and it only snows once or twice a year. The hard parts are the wind and rain.
> You cannot bike your 3 kids to schools and hospitals during rainy autumn days.
Two of the most cycling friendly cities in the world are also cities with a lot of rainy days (Amsterdan and Copenhagen). A lot of people with kids there will disagree with you.
It seems to me the biggest issue people who never cycle think stops people from cycling is weather, while in reality it is unsafe infrastructure. Build the infrastructure, people will cycle and will not bother about the weather.
The Netherlands had a relatively large cycling population even before they built paths everywhere, the new infrastructure only contributed to a modest increase in numbers over the last four decades. Some new towns in the UK instated very high quality cycle paths in the 1960s, but to this day they are very lightly used.
Overall I think it's a cultural/convenience thing.
Indeed. Is it raining? There's raincoats to wear, covers for your bagage, and there's even retractable covers for childrens seats on bikes. Is it snowing? It's easy to get wide tires or ones with spikes in countries that have a lot of snowfall. Is it windy? Just switch to a lower gear and get a bit more excercise. Electric bikes help a lot as well nowadays, making it easier to bike in heavy wind or in hilly areas.
having biked to/from school for many years, a bigger issue is that kids don't have a fixed amount of things they need to transport every day and the upper bound (instruments + art/science project + sports gear) quickly limits the distance you can realistically travel. injuries are also a factor, all it takes is a sprained ankle to take biking off the table for several weeks.
also as an aside there's a lot more potential for variance in travel time on a bike and if a school has punitive tardiness systems, this will get taken out on the student a lot.
Having biked to school my entire life: Bikes have a luggage rack... You can easily fit one of those three items on there.
I can't think of many situations where schedules collided to the point where I needed to take several bulky items home and back on the same day. And worst case, I'd just leave my sports kit at school overnight perhaps? Or get a lift on that one day. Or take the bus!
I can't speak to large instruments though, that's a bigger (although fairly niche!?) problem.
Another huge problem with bikes is that in my city your bike is basically public property. At any moment in time someone could just take it with no repercussions. No amount of locks it chains seems to be effective. So you don’t want to invest a lot of money into having one properly outfitted unless you have some place secure to store it on both ends
> Isn't this focused on the young, single, and healthy?
No?
Cars are expensive, and they're not accessible: vision or motor issues will ban you from car usage (and rightfully so). They are also a major and active danger to everyone outside a car. Even more so these days as ebikes, motorized wheelchairs, accessibility scooters, and cantas are more available than ever, and public transport has much improved in their allowance for those (except cantas I guess). I can certainly say that around here, 20 years back, the odds you could get a wheelchair (to say nothing of a motorised one) on a bus were essentially nil.
Limiting cars and improving alternatives makes the entire thing less dangerous and more accessible to everyone.
> I can't imagine having multiple children and living with no car. You cannot bike your 3 kids to schools and hospitals during rainy autumn days.
So… are you saying that the Dutch don't have rain or that they don't have children?
My family, and many families near where I grew up, didn't have cars.
It does plan you build with this in mind -- in the UK it is assumed kids will walk to school, or take a free bus (which is provided by the school). Most schools strongly discourage parents from driving to school, as it causes road blockages and the chance of accidents near the school entrance.
My parents had cars, and took me to and from school in the car most days.
I hated it.
At primary school, if I visited a friend after school we could walk through the park, or the playground, or the library, which was all much more fun than being in a car and then at home 5 minutes later.
At secondary school all my friends took buses, and had the wonderful freedom to take the next bus, or the one after. The playground didn't have the same appeal, but there were shops, cafés and so on.
> in the UK it is assumed kids will walk to school, or take a free bus (which is provided by the school).
The journey will be free, but in larger urban areas (especially London) it's also common for the children just to be given a pass for the city buses.
I lumped nurseries, kindergartens, and pre-schools under "school". 2-5 year olds will not walk and will not take buses. Also if there is a nursery nearby it would probably have long waiting lines just to get a spot for your child, so in most cities it's essential to be able to choose from at least 4-mile radius.
> I lumped nurseries, kindergartens, and pre-schools under "school". 2-5 year olds will not walk and will not take buses.
For as long as I was in daycare, I was walked there by my parents. When I started school, I first walked, then biked there. It was not until I started grade 7 where any form of transport was necessary, and since then I took public transportation until I graduated.
This was in the suburbs of a mid-sized city (~100k) in Sweden, with comparatively bad public transportation.
A 4 mile / 6 km radius is a huge. I assumed you lived in the US when you wrote miles, but your profile says Lithuania. A 6km radius covers most of Vilnius, and plenty of pre-schools.
But about Vilnius - public pre-schools in Vilnius are well placed, but they have huge waiting lines. If you want to get one in time realistically you would have to register your child before his/her birth, which is of course impossible. So most people join the line after birth and when the child reaches 2 years old they take them to a private one, until they reach their place in line and can transfer.
But let's say you get a place for your children 1-1.5 km away and you have a job that takes 30 minutes to reach by car (which in the morning is quite optimistic due to traffic). So to take children and go to work for yourself would take, say, 40 minutes.
One alternative to cars - biking. Only possible in summer days and warm autumn/winter days, and when it's not raining. So maybe 50% of the year. So the bike would take you probably 1.5 hours. Add this time for also going back and its 2 additional hours lost per day, and only on those good sunny days.
Another alternative is a bus. In non-corona times some busses in Vilnius are so crowded that you cannot get in and have to wait for another one. Nobody with young kids even tries to get there. But assume you live in one of less crowded places. Then the question is - how far the bus stop is from your house, how far the bus stop is from the kindergarten, and how far it is from your place of work. And how many different busses you will have to take in order to reach everything, and the waiting and travel times between transfers. So this scenario depends on luck.
That's just how I see it from my perspective here in Vilnius. A big number of families here have 2 cars. For some reason I imagine most bigger US cites would only be worse in that regard.
Many families here in Copenhagen have one car, though certainly not all of them — and it's much more related to where people live than how much they earn.
It's very common to see bicycles with a child seat, or box bicycles, used to take children to/from nursery on the way to work.
There are slightly fewer days with rain here than in Vilnius, but it only matters if it's raining during the journey, which is far less often than ⅓-½ of the year. I usually wear a raincoat, though sometimes I just take the bus.
I don't think the goal is to remove 100% of driving, or private cars, but it is great when a city (including its suburbs) is practical and accessible without one. It also makes it accessible to people without cars, like old-enough children, some pensioners, poor people, etc.
Vilnius could build at least one metro / U-bahn line, or perhaps two. It is already big enough that the transport backbone should be grade separated from the streets, and metro is the easiest way to go.
My understanding of the US is most kids get a yellow bus to school. The U.K. on the other hand is either weak or drive - at least at primary school. At sexiest school theres more chance to be generic public transport.
at least here the situation was that rich kids get chauffeured, upper middle class take the yellow bus and poor kids (who usually live out of district) take public transit.
> Isn't this focused on the young, single, and healthy?
E-bikes are a wonderful thing. In countries with good cycling cultures, the older population cycles more than the younger.
People bike as children and teenagers, then get driving licenses and drive for a few years. Once the novelty of car wears off they start cycling again. It’s cheaper, quicker, easier, and healthier.
> You cannot bike your 3 kids to schools and hospitals during rainy autumn days.
Yes you can. The Dutch do it everyday. Also you don’t need to bike your kids to school, with proper cycle infrastructure, they can bike themselves, sans helicopter parent.
> Some form of "school" starts at around 2-3 y/o. 2-3 year olds cannot take a bus.
There are many types of bikes, include cargo bikes designed to transport multiple young children, driven by one adult. You can even get motor to help you out!
> There is winter, heavy rains, and wind. In most places you cannot rely on a bike all the time.
Dress appropriately! Wear coats! We solved this problem a long time ago. There are plenty of countries where people of all ages and experience cycle year round. In the sun, in the rain, in the wind, in the snow! Don’t limit your cycling to just pleasant weather, by proper clothing so all weather is pleasant.
> In most cities people work far from home, and the early schools the kids go to are also far away. A young family with two 2-5 y/o children will not be able to rely on a bus and a bike, unless they live in some expensive area where everything is nearby and are lucky to have jobs at the same place.
This is very US centric world view. The US has a strange obsession with spreading everything out as much as possible, ensuring that you have to spend your life in car going from A to B. I would argue that more enlighten approach is to put stuff close together, so you can spend your time doing stuff, not travelling to stuff.
> Dress appropriately! Wear coats! We solved this problem a long time ago. There are plenty of countries where people of all ages and experience cycle year round. In the sun, in the rain, in the wind, in the snow! Don’t limit your cycling to just pleasant weather, by proper clothing so all weather is pleasant.
That honestly sounds masochistic. I'm not from US btw.
I don’t know about you, but I put a coat on when it’s cold or rainy and I’m going outside. The alternative is being wet and cold.
I’m not sure what wonderful part of world you live in, but for me, dressing correctly for the weather is a basic requirement for comfortable living. Assuming of course you ever want to leave your home.
I have two kids and no car. Only three bicycle. We live in Oslo, Norway, so the winters can be cold. It helps living in a city with trams, bicycle lanes and electric cars spread around that can be rented by the minute. I just got totally fed up being stuck in traffic jams every day, so I eventually sold the car.
I live in Vietnam where effectively nobody has a car. We also have a monsoon rainy season for six months a year that dwarfs any rain anywhere in America gets.
Somehow people are still able to have families and get kids to school.
Ha! People in Vietnam are notorious for walking nowhere. Need to go to the store down the street? Get the motorbike. Sidewalks are crammed with bikes so being a pedestrian sucks hard in Vietnam.
Add on top you’ll often be riding a motorbike in between container trucks i think your example makes the opposite point you think it does.
I’ve come to the conclusion 90% of HN has no experience raising children and what it entails. This is evident in the replies of people saying “just do x”. Never contains any context as to the country you live in, it’s infrastructure or the requirements of your family.
Absolutely, but I remember seeing a HN survey that showed most HN users were in their 20’s so no surprise there.
When I lived in Singapore, it was very common for families to have cars despite the world class transit system. And despite the $50-70k for a permit to own a car and the 100% tariffs. That just demonstrates how much utility people get from cars. People are willing to pay a lot to have access to a car.
I remember discussing commutes with a developer in Singapore, she "had to" drive for an hour every day. We were looking at Google Maps to help me follow what she described, and I noticed a rail line. Was that an option? No! She couldn't be seen using the train.
Maybe among the very rich, but I worked with plenty of middle-upper class Singaporeans (~$100 to 150k SGD incomes) who spent money on cars.
Keep in mind despite the rail lines, it's much cheaper to own a place that isn't within easy walking distance. For the same amount of money you'd get a much bigger place.
But regardless, it was mostly just due to the demands of family. The train makes sense when it's you alone. When you're paying $20-30 per day for a family's transit costs (4 rides at $1.50 each times for 2 adults and 2 teens), then suddenly the $700-$1000/month to own a car doesn't seem so silly.
Yeah that’s also important math folks miss taking a family downtown it’s often cheaper to pay parking than bus fare both ways for a family of 4. Even at 2 it’s basically break even with 3$ fares
Yes and no. The cost savings from not using a car mostly is an all or nothing deal. You save a lot by not owning one all together but you don’t save much by not using one you already have
I agree that before I had kids it was easy to be blind to how different life is even when having those close to me with them. But people have kids in cities without cars and inclimate weather all over the world. I moved from a car-centric city when I had kids because the thought of driving from work, to childcare or school, to soccer practice, then home made me incredibly miserable. Suburbs accommodate this better, but that seems to almost necessitate two cars.
A decent city accommodates this, requires a lot less upfront cost, and just fewer resources all around. The comment you're replying to seems to think its not feasible.
Just do x never accounts for time spent doing x. Many times x is possible but does not meet time constraints. If you add another hour plus to your kids school commute then another hour to your own you might never actually see your kids
I remember my thoughts of being forever enriched in regards of what’s possible for bikes when I was in Norway 10 years ago and saw a man drag a bike child cart uphill an icy ~12% hill in February at -14C
> I can't imagine having multiple children and living with no car.
That is because everything in U.S. American life is centered around having a car and not having a car is fighting against that setup. There are perfectly viable alternatives for living without a car but there's been a strong social trend away from these for a very long time.
It will require new modes of living and some re-organization of our cities to get back to a point where not-having a car becomes an attractive default mode again.
The local elementary school has a large number of walkers and a large number of children who are driven in. Those who walk in are frequently accompanied by their parents, the parents appear to enjoy the time with their children, and the parents typically hang around to socialize with other parents. Parents who drive their children in usually drop their children off in dangerous spots and spend an awful lot of time socializing with police officers. A number of those parents also try to drive through crossing guards (sometimes literally) who are there to keep the children safe, including the children who were dropped off on the wrong side of the street. Driving may be convenient, but there are many times when convenience is taken too far and the walkers seem to be happier.
Schools in my city tend to be cancelled when the weather is too dangerous for driving yet safe for walking (e.g. large snowfalls) and are virtually never cancelled when it is too dangerous for walking yet fine for driving (e.g. high wind chill). In a way, it makes sense. Walkers can still be driven in when it is unsafe to walk, while most of the children who are driven in cannot walk to school. It is one of the many costs of designing car centric cities instead of walkable ones.
I wish this weren't the case in more places in Canada and the U.S. Where I grew up in central Canada this would almost certainly be a similar experience, but I did happen to live within walking distance, even in the awful suburbs, to every school I attended. Now on the west coast, without a family, I have no doubt that everyone walks their kids to wherever they need to be. There are about 15 schools within some reasonable walking distance, and I think that's incredible and I hope that propogates. Weather is a non-position to me, I don't see how it could be sufficiently arduous as to require a car all the time if the other conditions are met (maybe some of the time), but I'd be curious what I'm missing there. I grew up in hilariously cold winters and now live in extremely wet winters. This of course changes if you've chosen or have had to live really far out from where you need to be every day, but my impression is that this is more often a choice in NA than it is in EU where the centre is the premium for all these reasons (afaik)
> You cannot bike your 3 kids to schools and hospitals during rainy autumn days.
Where I live, people walk their small children to school. There's also a "footbus" which is basically parents taking turns walking the kids from their block to the school.
17 acres may be a bit small to have a school, but a moderately dense neighbourhood should be able to afford a school within 5-10m walking distance.
One of the ironies of cities designed and operated around cars:
Most of my life is close to my home, so I can bike to work and bike for shopping. When the snow hits, people start asking why I don't walk instead. According to them, biking in the snow is dangerous. The answer is simple enough: sidewalks are impassible for a few days after a snowfall, and can be icy for weeks after. Aside for side streets, roads tend to be dry and ice free within hours of the snow stopping. Even the side streets aren't too bad except for the intersections. The worse part is climbing over a three foot tall snowbank to get onto and off of the road.
Article could also read "free parking is a thing that no one is making money off of so let's ban it". You have to realize a business oriented magazine and staff have a silo of things they can write about and think about. If it doesn't concern profits then bloomberg is not interested.
Yeah this sounds to me like a tax that will fall on some of the poorest workers in the city core. If we had the public transportation infrastructure first this would be fine. Just extracting money from people doesn't seem to work as a forcing function though in this country for improvement, it just seems to be a regressive flat tax.
What's killing American cities is a lack of an ability to construct any beneficial infrastructure at all without litigious NIMBYs turning out in enough droves to outright kill or dilute all utility out of a given project. The free parking is just a side effect.
Only true if you ignore the history of American zoning laws, and Americas obsession with the car.
Current zoning laws in most of the US make it pretty much impossible to build anything except suburbs, attached to ginormous parking lots you call cities, by massive highways. It’s not hard to see why building better public infrastructure is so difficult when the current layout of most American cities means it’s difficult to even walk between shops on the same road, so public transport can’t move people between pedestrian hubs.
Changing that fundamental issue with American cities would require people to realise that current approach (which they grew up with, and was touted as the future for most of their lives) is broken and needs to change. As much as it needs to change, I can understand why people have a lot of difficulty accepting that.
And I think this is one of the reasons we are seeing so many companies racing to create a commercially viable eVTOL (electric - vertical take-off & landing) product. To me, this transport system only seems to be a solution to the problem mentioned above. I can't see them ever being commercially viable (FAA regulation, power density, etc.) And yet there are a lot of companies trying to make them a reality when really the cities they have renders of with their flashy electric vehicle flying over just need better public transport systems.
You could just start redesigning your cities and improving your public transport. America is not unique in it obsession with cars, the Neatherlands used to be the same. Their city centres were mostly parking, and driving a ginormous highway through the centre of a city was once considered good public policy.
For the past 30-40 years, the Dutch have managed to completely transform their urban landscapes into something far more people friendly. Additionally American cities used to be dominated by pedestrians and bike, the car centric city is a relatively new phenomenon. So it quite possible for the US to reverse the damage done by cars, and plenty of case studies to base the work on.
There's a logical place for an autonomous delivery vehicle, but wasting 95% of its energy fighting against gravity to carry a six pack of beer is absurd.
Make a ground vehicle the size of a Saint Bernard that travels in bike lanes. Big enough to handle a large array of direct deliveries, and probably had a much longer runtime on a charge.
If you want to be really seamless, build dedicated routes for them in underground tunnels.
Great point and I would actually further emphasize the car aspect of this. Houston for example doesn’t have zoning restrictions like other suburban cities and yet still chose sprawl.
It sucks because we are just sleepwalking through this. Everyone takes it for granted that energy will be cheap and plentiful and that we can always just spread further out or build a bigger highway.
It's much less than the full picture to say Houston doesn't have zoning restrictions. Technically there are no rules called "zoning restrictions" there, but they have complex ordinances that produce very similar effects. [0]
Sure but even in the absence of such ordinances they would still choose sprawl. The law is certainly not helping across the country (zoning, etc.) but the culprit is cars and infrastructure dollars going to roads and highways. If I were dictator I would stop all new road construction for 50 years and then review after that.
The issue is that we have extraordinarily cheap energy so of course people are going to buy cars. Oh and gotta keep the domestic car manufacturing industry alive in case we need to build tanks. Nobody has been paying the price for global warming either - so cars are subsidized big time in that way too.
I think this approach kind of has cause and effect backwards. Certainly an element of zoning laws will be driven by NIMBYism, but equally an element of zoning is needed to build functional cities.
You don’t want heavy industry to be co-located with residential areas, for no other reason than heavy industry occasionally have catastrophic accidents that destroy many square miles of buildings. You don’t want residential buildings in that blast radius.
Equally zoning laws that specify the exact type of housing in a residential area strikes me as counterproductive, and clear case of NIMBYism encoded in policy.
I am fan of planning policy that restricts building types in order to mitigate obvious health risks. And provides guidance on where commercial and residential areas are (but doesn’t introduce strict restrictions). After that I think people should be allowed to build where they want. If they want a house in the middle of a commercial district, that’s their choice. Just don’t complain about the noise.
> I think this approach kind of has cause and effect backwards. Certainly an element of zoning laws will be driven by NIMBYism, but equally an element of zoning is needed to build functional cities.
>
> You don’t want heavy industry to be co-located with residential areas, for no other reason than heavy industry occasionally have catastrophic accidents that destroy many square miles of buildings. You don’t want residential buildings in that blast radius.
It is very much true that you need zoning, but the most egregious elements of american zoning are the outcome of NIMBYism and racism, and yet american zoning will allow schools within the blast radius of chemical plants. Horrifyingly, I was thinking of the 2013 West Fertiliser plant and checking whether my recollection that there had been a school nearby was correct (it was) when I discovered that in 2019 a TPC plant blowing up also damaged a nearby school.
> After that I think people should be allowed to build where they want. If they want a house in the middle of a commercial district, that’s their choice. Just don’t complain about the noise.
IIRC, japanese zoning works in terms of "nuisance levels" (noise, pollution, traffic, …). You could have a house in the middle of a mid-level nuisance commercial district, but not a noisy business in the middle of a (low nuisance) residential district; however low-nuisance businesses would be allowed just fine.
Would you be ok with a strip club and liquor store next to a elementary school? I wouldn't, and appreciate zoning laws for that reason.
Simply blaming NIMYism feels like lazy analysis. Every community is different.. how, why, and where things are built is far too complex to explain w/one word.
What actual harm would come from a school being next to a liquor store or strip club? It's not like an elementary school kid is going to sneak in to the latter or buy anything from the former on a fake ID. The buses I had in school took me past plenty of places I could have walked to that sold--and advertised in plain view--alcohol and things much more racy than you'd see in a strip club, and that was 1990s Georgia.
In U.K. there’s been some studies on stuff like this.
There is a link between the availability of liquor stores and fast food restaurants near school, and students consuming unhealthy levels of both. (For liquor you just pay some random in the street to buy for you, or you find a store that doesn’t ID). As with many things in life, if you make something convenient, people will use it more.
As a result fast food restaurants and off licences are generally restricted from be built near schools, and for fast food restaurants, also delivering to schools.
Obviously elementary school children are probably to young to be influenced by either, the but the above applies for older age groups.
I don’t think strict zoning is the right approach to solve issues like this, it’s an extremely crude tool for urban planning. But specific, evidence backed (I.e. there’s strong evidence that co-locating these buildings have significant negative impacts on local populations), restrictions on what types of buildings can co-exist seems reasonable.
However 99.9% of communities seem to refuse things necessary things from bus stops to trams to homeless shelters. And frankly, from a homeowner's perspective I fully understand why.
‘NIMBY’ is usually in reference to low-income housing projects. I think you would get a lot of ‘YIMBY’ in response to a reasonably well-isolated parking development if it came with removing parked cars from the road.
There's a cycle that a lot of people go through when they graduate. They've been told or are predisposed to the idea that cities are the place to be. And they can be like a campus - lots of places to meet others, etc. So they happily move to the city.
But then something happens. They get married and realize the schools there suck and are completely unaccountable to meddling from parents. So they have to move to find a decent school.
Or, they or their spouse or friend gets mugged, or their house gets burgled, or any number of other crimes that are prevalent in cities run by a single political party. So, they move to escape the crime.
If people have the means to move, they will do so to get out from under high crime, high tax, low service regimes.
Cities are like companies the big ones are ineffective at management or providing services. So when you need city services you go to a smaller city to actually get them.
> This anti-car shit is already way beyond tiresome, especially from some L.A douche. L.A. is a COUNTY, not a city. It's not fucking Amsterdam; it's a sprawling geographic region with no public transportation to speak of.
Build some, then. How do you think Amsterdam got where they did?
>Therefore it's time to stop whining that people in such places have cars, and stop pretending that everyone else is somehow "paying" for them. Car owners pay and pay and pay.
- Taxes on cars do not cover the cost of roads
- Taxes on cars do not cover the increased development cost caused by parking minimums, single family zoning and other complete non-sense zoning rules
- Taxes on cars definitely do not pay for the negative externalities they have on the climate
- Taxes on cars do not pay for the large amount of deaths they cause
Of course, given what the U.S is today, actually making car ownership pay for what it costs would be unfeasible, since this would likely further drive low class people into ruination - which is why it's important to start developing actual alternatives that they can use - bicycle infrastructure, walkable urban environments and public transportation.
> You can spot the developer shills in any urban-living-related forum; they're the ones claiming that the elimination of parking requirements will allow people to ride their bikes to the grocery store in the rain and snow. Or to carry 30 bags of dirt on their bikes. Or lumber. Or a table saw. A dresser too.
Yes, clearly this is every single trip that anyone could ever consider making. Hence the only conclusion is that every person in the world must have a car.
Except that is not true, and there is evidence against it out in the world.
I move around the world using walking, bicycling and public transportation. I can do this because I do not live in the U.S, where such a lifestyle would be impossible. As for how I tackle the challenges you listed in your examples:
- Groceries: I used to buy my groceries using public transportation, but I have now transitioned to a conbination of getting my groceries delivered and walking 2 minutes to my local supermarket
- 30 bags of dirt, lumber, table saw: I rarely have the use-case to transport what I assume is building materials, but should I need to do so, I would likely have it delivered (which costs less than owning a car). This is what I did when I bought lumber for my patio, at least.
- Dresser: The last time I transported something like this, I used an uber-style service and had it delivered door-to-door very cheaply.
We can easily conclude that car ownership is not necessary, even when listing the most convoluted use-cases that you did.
LA is building quite a bit of public transit btw, just in the most ineffective way possible, building stations in the middle of loud and annoying highway medians 30+ minute walks from anything of interest.
Agreed, and even more drastically, taxes on cars are an incredibly poor ROI on the massive infrastructure given to roads. Obviously we all benefit from this public good - even non-drivers are getting the benefit from things being moved around on the road network, so it's not cut-and-dried.
But in Australia, we tend to raise money on road taxes that supposedly balances spending on roads - ignoring the humongous investment that giving so much of our space to roads represents (if you give me several billion dollars worth of real estate, I can probably break even too!).
It frustrates me, because spending on public transport is usually treated in a cost/benefit fashion in a very short-term way, but the massive capital investment into roads is just regarded as a given.
The Netherlands is the place I always point to when people say "no we can't get rid of car-dependent infra in the US". They completely undid the mess of cars and now it is like visiting another planet, where bike lanes often never even intersect car roads!
I have family in The Netherlands and I spent time there cycling. I also use the bicycle 4-5 day per week in Bucharest: using The Netherlands as a comparison is wrong. They have no extreme temperatures (we have 40 Celsius and -20 Celsius), almost no snow and a huge cultural difference. In Bucharest I am considered a bike maniac and I am still using a motorcycle or a car from time to time, there is no other way.
On the other hand, there's this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU showing some sweet bicycle action in Finland, where it is indeed very cold during the winter.
The Netherlands is tiny compared to the US, not sure how useful the comparison is tbh.
I mean it’s an hours cycle between The Hague and Rotterdam, two of its largest cities.
Amsterdam is a small city as well compared to most other EU capitals.
Edit: just to be clear I am a strong supporter of cycling and building up cycling infra I am just saying that comparing the infra between such massively different size countries with massively different geographies (Netherlands is completely flat) might not be the best approach.
Germany is probably a better comparison for how you can build up great public and cycling infra in a car centric country
It's a question of resource allocation. There is limited space for [trains,trams,cars,buses,pedestrians,taxis,motorcycles,scooters] and it must be allocated between those modes. A decision to build a bike lane leaves less space for cars, and a decision to make a space 100% free-for-all makes it worse for cyclists and pedestrians. The art is in appropriately weighting the different modes, but there will always be some group with an axe to grind.
In Portugal most parking is free as an extension of the businesses, that the owners have to consider. You can just leave home and not think about it while going about your business
In the UK most parking is paid, and there are hundreds of companies to manage parking lots, check the cars, to issue fines, to go after people that don't pay, a 60£ fine that is now 600£ because you have to pay the salary of the goons putting a wheel lock in your car, everyone in UK has paid a car park fine, it is a whole business in itself that is basically just a capitalist cancer