This article covers things from a pedestrian's perspective, but it honestly looks like there may be benefits for drivers in this system too.
For one, this plan immediately halves the number of busy intersections along a given stretch of road (and reduces them to a third if multiple superblocks are built adjacent to one another). Yes, no intersections have been physically removed, but the number of vehicles using those intersections is drastically reduced. Traffic signals at those intersections can be optimized to reduce stop frequency/duration for traffic staying on the road meant for cars.
If you live in one of these superblocks, the last kilometer to your house may be slower but, if there are enough other superblocks along your path, your overall trip time may actually be reduced. Fewer stops also mean reduced fuel consumption and lower emissions.
Of course, a big issue is that some streets will now be carrying twice the traffic they were previously built for. Even if that traffic flows better, there may be problems. Making street-side parking on these streets illegal could increase the effective number of lanes available to traffic. After all, street-side parking should be plentiful inside the blocks, and the eventual plan is to build off-street garages.
I'm not convinced superblocks will be bad for drivers.
I don't bring my Mum to Barcelona by a few reasons, and one of them is that she could be unable to cross most roads, as a pedestrian, on time for the traffic light.
Of course that's one of the smallest problems, delinquency being the main one (attracted more in this months by the tourism).
Also people is uncivil with old persons here, the locals and the tourists.
Walking on bike in the sidewalk thinking you have preference over pedestrians also is common here. I've see many fights start by this.
The traffic? for me it's all day car horns. Without any good reason. Always just for the sake of the mass hysteria.
Stressed drivers pushing pedestrians to finish the cross. The same when walking, people push you for the space, even if they are just slow walking and doing shopping and you go clearly to work.
All those theories about traffic are nice. The article tries to make it even more nice asserting stuff.
I don't want my childs to grow up in barcelona, and I don't want my mum to live alone in this city like she can do in others.
I have attended and helped enough persons who had been stolen, kicked, violated, run overs, and what not in just two years.
I cannot take a single beer, without watch traffic problems in Barcelona. And I'm talking of a two channels street, where the main traffic mass, can vary from 5 to 9 cars in the same direction.
Oh you are the owner of this car? a bus just did break all the side of your car, he did go away without stopping. Take man, I did a photo, you can see the car number. This was yesterday.
Traffic is better than Madrid. But still is a "bad thing" for the quality of life of the city. Also in barcelona you need air conditioner, or sleep with the windows open... this is... all night long and in the main hours, old, big, vibrating and poorly driven trucks and buses all around. stopping with squeaky brakes, in each of those corners, and starting again with the engine noise that could not pass a decibel measurement by police.
It mixes with the drunken people and nightly prostitution noise... so at the end, the harley/truck/whatever is just one more noise in the Barcelona's non-stopping symphony.
Squared streets and all that, bike accidents are common here, bike Vs pedestrian problems too. Old people and children cannot walk alone even in relaxed areas. And the traffic (for me that don't own vehicles) and the air pollution is one of the worse things when I try to "live" here.
In the middle of off-topic complaints about Barcelona, there are some objectionable observations.
- Air pollution is a problem in many parts of the city, but it needs to be addressed with the promotion and imposition of cleaner engines. Reducing car use is only a secondary objective of a plan to reclaim streets.
- Bike vs. obstacle and bike vs. pedestrian accidents are much less dangerous than car accidents.
- Like in other cities, there's plenty of quiet corners with few tourists and few cars. Noisy people concentrate in the city center and traffic in the appropriate wide streets like everywhere else, despite the great number of tourists it isn't hell on Earth.
This was mentioned by another poster, but I don't see many people addressing it.
What about elderly or disabled people who require car/bus transport to live their daily lives? Are there transportation alternatives for those that can't walk as easily?
I'm not saying this can't work with them, but I'm curious what those options would be. Especially if their neighborhood just becomes one of these superblocks (rather than them deciding to live there).
I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives.
Growing up in the suburbs without a car, I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago).
I'm on the opposite corner of the neighborhood from the business districts, so a little errand like CVS or the grocery store is around half an hour by foot each way. The bus or shuttle is usually a wash, given the time spent waiting for it. A bigger errand like Target or Macy's is a special occasion, taking about 50 minutes each way (walk to bus, wait for bus, ride bus, wait for train, ride train, walk from train station, or sometimes take yet another bus). A downtown or North Side restaurant, once you get tired of the local ones, is a similar ordeal.
Feeling trapped in the neighborhood was mostly an annoyance. I adapted by buying most things from Amazon (Prime is well worth it) and carefully planning shopping lists for brick-and-mortar stores. After a while I got tired the local restaurants, so I pretty much stopped eating out. I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends, but generally spent as little money as possible when doing so. Still, it grew more annoying over a few years.
The turning point came when I realized that it took about as long to get from my apartment to the downtown train station (about 7 miles) as it did from that train station to Milwaukee (90 miles).
I bought a car recently, and my quality of life shot up dramatically. Distances that used to be a big deal are now nothing. Even if I'm going somewhere without cheap parking, I can drive directly to a train station instead of taking the bus. Life moves faster. I get to enjoy the city more often.
If the CTA would run more frequent, smaller vehicles on its routes I would easily go carless again. But instead it sounds like the approach is just to degrade the experience of owning a car until it's as bad as public transit, rather than the other way around. When that happens, it's off to the suburbs, I guess.
>I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago).
And you have the experience of using transit on what's generally considered a Top-5 system nationally! The transit experience elsewhere is often significantly worse than yours. We have "urbanists" here trying to block cars in our tiny little city, where a 10-minute car commute takes 90 minutes by bus (a bus which often does not run on nights, weekends, or holidays).
I totally support trying to be more environmentally friendly, and increasing density to do that, and making places more pedestrian friendly. But we really need to come up with some real, functional mobility solutions to do that. Telling folks to "walk everywhere" simply isn't a solution, for the same reason we haven't shut the internet off and told people to "mail CD's everywhere".
No amount of banning cars is going to magically make bad transit better -- we need to start building good transit first.
Nobody is going to care about transit unless it's for everybody and not just for the poor. Also, oftentimes the best way to make transit better is to divert resources away from individual automotive transport. A dedicated bus lane means fewer lanes for cars. Wide sidewalks mean fewer lanes for cars. For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars. Money that could be spent widening a freeway could instead be built constructing a subway.
Cars are also a classic example of socializing losses and privatizing gains. Taxpayers build and maintain the roads, air pollution and carbon emissions affect the global climate, and pedestrians and cyclists are driven out of public space in fear for their lives, but at least you can get point-to-point between your house and Wal-Mart. There are ways in which driving will always be "better" for the individual driver, but only in a fundamentally selfish and antisocial way.
>For streetcars and light rail to be effective alternatives to driving they have to be grade-separted, and that means fewer lanes for cars.
Yes, and setting dedicated right-of-way for public transit makes it faster, which should compensate for at least some of the reduced drivability in the overall navigability of the city. I think this counts as making transit better first (or at least at the same time).
Chicago's transit system is top five because the rest of North American is terrible - not because it's a wonderful system. It's designed to move people between one central work district (the loop) and their neighborhood or suburb. That's it. It can't be compared to systems like NYC, London, Paris, Barcelona etc. To be fair, Chicago, while populous, only has a few neighborhoods that match the density of those cities, making light urban rail in particular much less feasible.
When I lived carless in Chicago (2001 - 2006) it was only possible if you were childless and lived in a small number of densely populated north side neighborhoods (which does not include Hyde Park). Interestingly, the car sharing services are changing this — cabs generally avoided anything but same wealthy, dense neighborhoods. Uber and Lyft serve much more broadly. Anecdotally, in my neighborhood, the number of cars with a Lyft or Uber sign is astronomical - I once counted traffic for 30 minutes and 43% of vehicles that passed my residence had a car sharing sign in the window.
Between long-haul, low-friction car hiring services (Zipcar) and short-trip, low-friction car hiring services (Uber, Lyft) I think carless urban life in Chicago is vastly extended to everyone with a good paycheck and no children.
And it should be noted that Berlin is ridiculed in Germany for its horribly broken S-Bahn service. A few years ago, the Federal Railway Authority had to lay up about 3/4 of their trains because they were vastly underserviced. The operator then truncated many of the lines to have enough rolling stock available for servicing the remaining parts. These changes persist until today. (For example, I remember when the S3 used to run until Westkreuz.)
If you take cars off the roads, people will rebuild (well, reorganize) their cities to account for it. Public transit obviously needs to be better pretty much everywhere in the US, but people also don't want to pay to make it better.
I'm a proponent of simply wiping out parking in most areas. That will incentivize people not to drive, therefore to walk/transit, therefore to value the transit systems and the design of their cities.
It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.
I've become very skeptical of any plan to just get rid of something that people need and use, in the hope that that will magically force the issue and usher credible alternatives into existence years down the line. It's sort of like a government trying to reduce government spending by cutting taxes (i.e., the "don't feed the beast" approach). Such efforts never end up reducing spending, rather they just create an environment in which debt and chaos are constantly increasing.
I get the idea behind it- "let's just start doing everything according to our desired outcome, and the parts that don't fit will somehow come into line on their own". It's very seductive but I've learned to avoid the temptation to think that hard problems can be solved in this way.
I feel like this is a problem-solving antipattern that I see over and over again and it just never works- not just in government, but in software engineering, in management, even in interpersonal relationships. People get frustrated that they can't change other people, so they decide to simply move everyone to some new way of doing things without any sort of plan for how to deal with the fallout. They think it will create an environment where the people who are negatively affected will spontaneously start conforming to the desired behavior due to some invisible hand of incentivization, but I've never seen this strategy applied in any context where it worked out. It's always just a rat's nest of unintended consequences and misery.
It's not really the same at all to your tax analog. The difference is that Congress has the ability to reduce spending and to cut taxes.
With the car problem, no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution. Of course, with the exception of a fascist overthrow of the state that tears down cities and rebuilds with central planning. The government can't just come and take people's cars away – you have a right to own a car (more or less). You don't, however, have a right to a parking spot, and it takes just a small city committee meeting to affect change.
That's not to say people won't get hurt by this, but it needs to happen for the good of everyone. Suburbia is bad for the earth and everyone on it. We need to start making some tough decisions... 30 years ago.
And it controls infinite amounts of money? As I've said in other comments, I'm all for investing heavily in transit infrastructure. If you want a solution that totally ignores the fiscal reality of the world, then yes, I agree, dumping massive amounts of money into public transit would be part of it.
Cities can, have, and do function with fewer cars than most American cities. Reducing parking is the fairest way to reduce the usage and eventually necessity of cars.
And again, it's far more realistic than hoping that a transit authority is going to find a buried treasure chest to invest in infrastructure while the public is investing more and more into cars.
Let's eliminate cars. How does one transport a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on public transport? Transportation is more than moving a person from A to B.
If you want a real solution, provide tax incentives for companies to work remotely. If you eliminate commuters in those types of jobs that can work remotely, you solve almost all traffic problems.
Does an insurance salesman really need to travel to an office? 90% of that work is on the phone already and the other 10% could be replaced with video conferencing. I don't need to touch my salesman, I just need to hear what he's saying and read contracts. Unless your job involves handling physical objects, there is zero reason for a commute.
Why would you transport a week's worth of groceries in the first place? In cities designed not for cars, most people generally don't "transport" groceries at all, since everybody generally buys groceries very close to home (often on the same block), and the natural time to do it is on the way back from work/studies/whatever, so instead of having an explicit weekly trip, you just buy whatever you need now or for tomorrow, not a week's supply - and that is easily carried (not transported) for that short distance even for a family of 6+.
If you buy something that can't be carried, like a refrigerator, well, then you get it delivered.
How wacky that so many other countries have already figured this out. And that humans somehow fed themselves for literally thousands of years before cars but suddenly we won't figure out how to purchase food.
Start charging for privilege of driving / parking / owning a car and you can invest the money in better infrastructure. Not that it's a popular solution with the voters, but it is fiscally sound.
Well, I'm a hardcore anti-car person, and I'm coming by just fine. I need a car about once or twice per year, when I'm moving furniture or something. Everything else can be had by public transit.
I'm well aware that other people need cars, but I'm concerned that there is one group of people that get the benefits of cars (people enjoying the calmness of their suburb which then commute into the city for work) and another group of people which gets all the costs dumped on them (people living in cities who have to live with the noise and air pollution and missing space for pedestrians).
> You don't, however, have a right to a parking spot
This is debatable. In some countries there is an old tax for all car owners. They take the money specifically "for your right to have a parking spot for your car". But after you pay the tax, surprise, you realize that there is not a single remaining place with free parking in the entire city... by design. So of course, you are obliged to pay again. The car owner is taxed two times for the same service. Cling, mo' fresh money.
The planned scarcity of park spots is also a source of power and a weapon of mass destruction of high quality employments. If you restrict the access and monopolize the park spots, you can force easily the small bussiness in this areas to flee and make the whole neighborhood into recession. A handful of big bussiness that can build its own private parkings (or, even better, are strong enough to convince the local government to build a big parking for them) will quickly take all.
It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire generation to have shitty mobility for most of their working lives, so that they will vote to build trains for their children.
More likely they will just leave the cities.
Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.
You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0].
You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.
There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources.
Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom.
People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation.
My argument here is that policy should be at least net-neutral on quality of life.
If you "simply wip[e] out parking" and don't do anything else, I claim that's bad policy because it reduces quality of life.
If you wipe out parking AND deploy electric buses or whatever such that people's lives at least don't get worse, then I'm with you.
>There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is.
Except, of course, the transit agency, which has to actually have the funding and the competence to step up its game to not only stay neutral under increased demand, but also improve enough that drivers' quality-of-life is flat.
Local services are also funded by local economic activity, which generally requires that people have viable transportation.
> before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.
Which do you think is better for consumers: a whole bunch of hyper-local monopolies, or citywide competition and economies of scale? Economics provides very little support for the former.
Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile.
I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and we haven't moved fast enough. If we continue to build our cities for cars, then we will continue to need cars.
Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.
And yes, higher prices hurt consumers, as in they damage the one facet of an entire human being that's responsible for purchasing things. But there are many other facets of a human being that would be much better off with fewer cars around them, and I dare say that many of those facets are more important to preserve than ease of consumption. The human race survived for many thousands of years with nothing even resembling an automobile, and now after 100 years you're positing that we simply cannot go on without them?
>Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.
Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.
What are you talking about? Removing, say, 10% of parking spots per year for 8 years wouldn't require any of that. It would result in the same frustration that people already have and already cope with: "it sucks to park in the city."
It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!
People would vote out politicians that put in place such obvious frustration-increasing measures.
IMO the "solution" is necessarily holistic and incremental. Create a fast intra-city link, and you've effectively increased the density of the two areas joined by the link. If you think about space in terms of time required to go from point A to point B using a given subset of transport methods[1], fast point-to-point links warp space and cause it to overlap. Density is the lifeblood of cities, just as lack of density is what hollows out cities. Increased density means employees and consumers can live closer to businesses and entertainment. Increase the density enough, and private transport isn't required as much.
Anti-car policies aren't going to increase this time-to-destination-as-a-measure-of-space density much. In fact, without something to replace them, they will decrease effective density.
I appreciate your interesting stance on this, but you're missing my point. I am not saying "ban cars and everything is fixed." I am saying "we will not fix our cities as long as we continue to invest in cars."
The best way I can think of to get people to divest from cars in a fair, gradual, legal, cheap, and realistic way is to eliminate parking over time.
Did you even read what I said? I directly refuted your argument! Your suggestion is both politically difficult and would damage cities by decreasing the very thing that makes them cities: the time proximity between people!
You don't have to eliminate parking at all to achieve this. All you have to do is shift city taxation towards taxing parking more in relative terms. Encourage people to use existing public transportation more
>> All you have to do is shift city taxation towards taxing parking more
And that's exactly what's wrong with this idea: in a democratic society such taxation changes would be temoporary at best - people would just vote for politicians that would change it back during the next elections.
On the other hand, gradualy increasing quality of public transportation by investing more money in it would be something that noone would protest against, and once public transportation is equaly or more convenient than car travel people would switch on their own.
I suspect that the driver of a new car will never recover in gas savings the negative impact of harvesting resources and building an additional vehicle.
How are people going to leave cities if that's where the jobs are and you can't drive there from outside because there's nowhere to park?
We've already had shitty mobility for multiple generations. We can and should build transit much more quickly than we are today, and we could if we were actually willing to commit to redesigning our cities.
People want to live in walkable towns and cities. People have done so, happily, for much, much longer than cars have existed. Set aside the environmental and economic concerns: studies of show that walkable communities are much more conducive to human happiness. The world of freeways and suburbs that we live in isn't a natural human pattern of development; it's a futuristic dream from the 1950's that turned into a nightmarish reality. Half a century of irrational exuberance over the invention of the automobile is a mistake that can and should be rectified.
Indeed it can and should. Leaving people stranded in places where things are far apart with neither parking nor adequate transit is not a viable way to do it, though.
In Chicago it is actually faster to commute by public transit from the suburbs ~20 miles away then from the neighborhoods ~8 miles away because the commuter rail service (Metra) is so much better than the urban transit service (CTA).
I live in a small town in France and in the villages, there is often zero parking. The effect on the village? Less economic activity than the ones that have parking. Just eliminating parking does solve a problem, but it creates another problem as people seek convenient alternatives. Taking 3 toddlers with strollers on public transport to go grocery shopping isn't as easy as some single guy jumping on the train to go get a beer. How does one transport things back to their house? Using only public transport means that you can only buy what you can easily carry.
Public transport makes it really difficult to carry any amount of cargo. Ever tried to bring grocery bags into the subway in NYC during rush hour? It's impossible. Now do that with a kid. Now do all that and end up at one of the majority of stations without elevators. No matter how 'good' NYC's public transport it, it still sucks if you are in a wheelchair, with small children, carrying any amount of cargo and traveling at anytime other than 12am.
Public transport has its place, but to suggest a car-free world is madness -- unless we have cargo carrying robots bringing stuff to our doors.
I will say Zurich does a good job -- their trains are super easy to board, they are spacious and uncrowded. The platforms are wide and easy to navigate and have no stairs. Still, even that doesn't solve the problem of cargo. One could use Amazon, but that requires a truck to deliver things, which requires roads and unloading zones.
Too many people fail to realize that the parking we have now is largely due to developers being forced to add it by law, and not because the market demanded it. Your parking spot can add 30-50k to the cost of a unit. That really stings if you're told you have to have "free" parking in your apartment, when it really just means higher rents.
There is a reasonable other side to this: when developers don't build parking but people still feel a need to have cars, tenants end up parking on the street. At any reasonable level of density there are more cars associated with a building than the curb space it occupies, so parking spills over all around the neighborhood.
Removing minimum parking requirements is reasonable, but it should be done in such a way that developers can't offload their tenant parking to public property, i.e. by also making the surrounding streets no-parking.
In this event, there's clearly a demand, so developers can build parking garages. What we do now is make the costs of parking invisible by putting it in everyone's rent (even those who don't own cars), instead of letting people show how much they want parking via their willingness to pay for it.
I live in an apartment with no parking. However, some people in my neighborhood like having cars. Fortunately, the solution is simple - they pay for monthly parking at the garage around the corner, and I don't subsidize people's parking in my rent.
In addition to making surrounding streets no-parking perhaps there should be some assurance of public transit nearby? If not, no one is going to rent or buy in that location -- if they can't have cars and they can't use transit easily, then the location becomes unattractive. Question is -- can the local government ensure that?
I think one thing everyone is missing is that having the freedom to have cars has an economic benefit that is not easily factored in otherwise. Like in this example, if the location makes in more difficult to have cars, then it's likely that the rents here will have to be lower to attract people. Or in the other example where someone was car-less in Chicago's Hyde Park area -- over a period of time he seems to have optimized to reduce going out because it was a chore. Maybe that is a good thing in the long run :-), but it sort of indicates depressed economic benefits for everyone.
Street parking is not a necessity, parking garages exist. When people are willing to pay the market rate for land to house their car then there will be a motive for people to build garages. Otherwise it's just parking welfare paid by those unable to afford cars to those who are.
There are cities where the main differences in housing price (the three main factors usually being location, location and location) is not as "expensive districts" vs "cheap districts" but according to "minutes to subway" metric, with a 10-minute-walk home in an otherwise more expensive district is cheaper than a 3-minute-walk home somewhere else.
> It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.
This might have been true sometime in the seventies - but its entirely a moot point now. Public transportation has nearly no future in the US since self-driving cars will pretty much solve this with 10-15 years and so much better than public transport has or would have.
This is very manipulative picture, although not as bad as the famous Munster photo (this: https://headwatersolver.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/64408578... notice how each photo has different perspective and zoom to make cars appear the biggest and bicycles the smallest).
When I need to get to the work, pick up groceries, transport two 30-inch displays across the town, etc., I simply do not walk out to the street, pose for a photo, smile, camera flash and go back to the building.
Transporting somewhere in terms of congestion is 'space integrated over time'.
First and obvious nitpick - there is single person in each car and absolutely no cargo.
Then, if it really worked like the picture suggest, the tram would need to:
a) transport each person directly between their endpoints,
b) do it in the same time as a car would do,
c) be full to its capacity all the time.
Given all these conditions, the cars in the picture (disregarding the single person occupancy and cargo) would really equal to the single tram.
But that is not the case:
a),b) In a car one can drive the shortest/fastest route between his desired endpoints, in the tram/bus one needs to follow the lines. There simply cannot be a complete graph of public transport lines going from every possible start to every possible destination, so you need to run up some extra distance to a 'hub' and switch lines, adding time. And even if there is a direct line, it typically goes as it can serve more people. One example, suppose you have a city with predominantly commercial and industrial parts in the centre with majority of the jobs and predominantly living parts in a star shaped pattern on the outskirts. If you happen to travel from one living neighbourhood to another (e.g. you work there, you are visiting a girlfriend, sport venue), the public transport will take you through many many stops around the centre, while in individual transport you can go between the quarters directly skipping the center completely and getting there a lot faster. There simply isn't enough people to fill a tram/bus between non-major stops in a reasonable intervals.
c) Unless you have 100 % mixed jobs, industry, commerce, leisure, education, everything on each stop and unless you have this with perfectly balanced population density end-to-end, you won't have fully occupied vehicle.
In order for that picture to be true, the tram would need to fill itself on its very first stop and on each stop, equal pax would need to enter/leave. Fiction.
I live at the end of the tram line and in order to get my seat in the happy photo of a full tram in the picture, then the tram must first arrive almost completely empty (in the morning, everyone goes from this living neighbourhood to the jobs in the centre and back in the afternoon, reverse flows are minimal) to pick me up. Then, the tram continues quarter- to half-full for several stops until it really have at least [# of seats] pax onboard.
To sum up:
I) tram takes twice the time because I have to route around with the majority of the flow instead of going direct route,
II) it has to arrive almost empty to pick me up,
III) it isn't full to [# of seats] for significant part of the journey.
So for me as a single person, count not one, but 4 to 6 seats to achieve the same 'space over time' density.
If I pick up my colleague on the go or drop him of, count approx. 8 seats. Two colleagues, 10 seats.
Suddenly if all the cars in the picture doesn't conveniently fit into a single tram, but in several of them spaced apart, it isn't so nice propaganda...
PS: I lived in a socialistic east-bloc non-SSSR country. In order to have a car, you had to be privileged/bribe/camp on the waiting list (literally camp in front of the state-owned car dealership). The public transport was wonderful, there were railway tracks going to every forgotten small village, bus lines everywhere, intracity transport roared through empty streets. The catch? Be any small fraction different that the 'major' flow - morning shift, evening shift, night shift interchanges between industrial jobs/housing areas/villages and you are out of luck, you either got blackmarketed a car in any possible way (e.g. train drivers), drive bike through the harshest freezing conditions or go with the flow and forgo anything else than 'buy groceries at corner store' (with regulated flat prices regardless whether it is 500-ish person village or capital city), 'go to job early morning', 'return from job in the evening' (nevermind that job was compulsory). Think Venezuela in recent HN.
Making using a car more and more miserable without improving public transport is, in reality, beating everybody into the averageness of 'you need to go from this stop to this stop at this time', otherwise sit at home or in walking distance. I been there, seen the carless variant and the free carsupported variant and it is a lot better even if you have to sit out through a traffic jam.
TL;DR: The public transport excels at only one thing - very major traffic flows in peak hours. Sucks very much at everything else. Self-driving car can be a nice hybrid - offering full occupancy of vehicles traveling at minimal distances between them (coordinated braking) in peak times, while still functioning nicely outside of major flows and allowing complete freedom outside of the peak hours.
I don't think anyone denies that taxi services (which is what self-driving cars will eventually replace) are an important part of a city's transportation network. But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale. And neither do taxis, and for the same reason.
> But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale
This needs a citation. There are lots of cities in the US where public transport accounts for a minority of transit.
You have so far failed to make any argument and only made a provocative comment linking a totally non-informative picture. Have you ever ran errands by bus in a city like GP was mentioning? It's a huge and ineffective waste of time. Suppose GP makes $100 an hour and produces $400 an hour of economic output but you are arguing rather than pay $15 and save a 50 minute trip, he should 'bite the bullet' and be forced to take public transport (by regulating cars off the roads); for what purpose is that again?
Great if you live in a large city. How about a small town of 10,000 people? How about rural? How about people who commute? Vacationers? Those wanting to leave on vacation? It's easy to think in a bubble when you have relatively infinite resources at your disposal. However, the majority of people in the U.S do not.
Actually, the most populous 48 urbanized areas in the country constitute over 50% of people. Let's continue to design our cities such that you can't live in them without a $8000/year recurring cost (average cost of car ownership). That will certainly help the people who don't have relatively infinite resources at their disposal.
My comment was also specifically referring to cities. I guess people in less car friendly countries are just totally incapable of vacation or employment eh? Who'd've thunk.
I don't disagree that successful dense, walkable neighorhoods exist. I could have phrased my post better.
What I take issue with is the position advanced in this thread that raising the hassle of owning/operating a car in places like Hyde Park is a good idea, that it will somehow transform those neighborhoods to be more like New York.
I think your problem is that you live in Hyde Park. It is quite isolated from the rest of the city. I agree with you that CTA should step up service to the south side, but living on the north side or west side you would much more easily live without a car. Source: lived on north and west sides for past 5 years and don't have/don't want a car.
It's both isolated and largely residential. Not a lot of large stores, just a lot of University of Chicago buildings. It's the most isolated place in Chicago where white people are willing to live. Source: 40 years old, born in Chicago, live in Chicago, attended Ray School and Kenwood, sister taught at UofC, never had a driver's license.
Also, Chicago is a designed garden city, enforced by zoning. It's largely and intentionally built up of huge residential arrays of city blocks, a half mile to a side, separated by boulevards where all businesses are packed. So, if you live in the middle of one of these blocks, it's 10-15 minutes of walking to see any business. If taking away drivable areas were accompanied by changes that allowed businesses to be built within those areas, like corner stores, I guarantee that groceries wouldn't be a half-hour away.
edit: that's what I get for reading comments before the article. Chicago is perfect for superblocks. It pretty much has them already.
I can't speak to Chicago specifically, but the problem in tons of places is that there's enough of the transportation budget spent on roads that you can never achieve a decent level of service.
Leaving aside the general point that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to compare "not having a car in a (somewhat) car-oriented city" to "changing car policy in general, with the attendant changes to the city structure down the line":
> I assuaged my claustrophobia by burning either money (Uber) or time to go downtown every few weekends
I don't actually take a lot of Ubers because my area is so well-connected by transit (and dense with commerce), but at least in my case, the idea that Uber is "expensive" as a transport option pales in comparison to the massive cost of owning a car (and paying for parking, maintenance, insurance, etc). Is this not the case for you?
Even with how walkable and transit-friendly my situation is, Uber and car rentals are still a necessary (though occasional) component of my overall transportation budget. Relative to living in a car-oriented area and owning a car, I still end up paying volumes less (as well as having a far, far better transport experience overall in terms of time, convenience, and health).
Indeed. I simply claim that directly taking the cars away from car-oriented cities without taking steps to undo their car-oriented nature is not a good idea.
I'm sorry, but as a resident of Hyde Park for more than a decade, your experience could not be more alien to me. I have not once wished for the burden and expense of owning a car. Indeed, living here has convinced me that the personal automobile has no place in an urban environment.
Hyde Park is very far from perfect, but its problems are entirely the fault of people with attitudes like yours. You could have bought an apartment close to the shops you'd like to frequent, or bought a bicycle (and now, bike share is a legitimate option). It takes 10-15 minutes to get downtown on Metra, but you probably couldn't be bothered to read a train schedule. And indeed, the problems with Metra—namely, long headways outside of peak hours and lack of fare reciprocity with CTA—would be eminently solvable by a consituency who values freedom from cars. Instead, we have people like you, who will exacerbate our issues by demanding more parking (and hence, necessarily, less density, less walkability, less transit, and less vibrancy). The assumption that everyone will drive engenders opposition to new development, particularly the type of mixed-use development that makes things easy for people on foot.
I'm always dismayed to see this kind of thinking on a site called Hacker News. A true "hacker" would look at the problems of urban living and try to unearth the real causes instead of falling back on the same old kludge everybody uses, buying a car. If you did, you would see that the kludge itself has become the dominant problem.
You feel entitled to easy access to the city, the sort of easy access that is currently offered to drivers and prohibited to anybody else. You're coming from a place of enormous privilege. Living without a car in Hyde Park is, despite your protestations, easy. Living, with or without a car, in most of the rest of the South Side is incredibly difficult. Many people on the South Side are too poor to own a car, or are driven into poverty by needing to own one to access their jobs. By choosing to drive, you are actively making life harder for the majority of South Siders, who would benefit greatly from better transit access and jobs and shops they can safely walk or bike to. Buying a car bought you a bit of convenience, but make no mistake: the system you have bought into immiserates, maims, and kills. We need to think beyond our own immediate comforts and decide to build a city that is safe and accessible for everybody.
It sounds like you still live in suburbia. I can bike or walk to local stores in 5-10m and since my job is down town, getting to city target, cvs or whatever is another 5-10 minute work errand. I have a car but use it so infrequently that I might as well sell it. Uber covers the other gaps and is significantly cheaper if you think about the TOC of a car.
In your cities case, the problem starts by having separate residential/business districts. In traditional, less car centered cities, those would be mixed. Here in Europe it is quite common in the cities to have shops on the ground floor of most buildings and residential use above. This means you are never very far from the shops.
Don't know about Hyde park, but all these small distance problems can be solved by bike, which is way faster then car in this range. Don't see a problem here, really.
Odd, I walk a lot, I live near 4 drugstores, 4 supermarkets, about five 7-11, many restaurants, big stores like Macy's etc, all by walking 10 minutes at most.
European cities have small, walkable centers, the mid-density around that, then instead of suburbs, they have a lot of higher density hamlets around them.
Also - they don't have horrific winters in which walking/biking is a pain.
So - even for Frankfurt, which has a bunch of US style high-rises in the middle ... you can comfortably walk many places, and bike almost all of them, any time of year.
Combine that with widespread and completely integrated public transit (without goons, slubs and idiots ruining them) - it works extremely well.
Most North American cities are designed for cars: long blocks, no walkable 'high streets', very wide streets, less density, less public transport ... and often a harsh winter which makes it really uncomfortable for 5-ish months a year.
It will take more than bike lanes to change the nature of culture.
Comparing with Lisbon, it has a small walkable center, no high-rises (except for a few semi high rises in surrounding areas), pretty great weather year-round (over 300 days of sun, I believe), lots of medium-sized plazas/parks and lots of lookout points over the city (both usually with one or more kiosk cafes). All in all, lots of compact green spaces, in addition to a few larger ones (parks and gardens).
On the down side, the slippery cobblestone sidewalks are only big enough for one person, there's a lot of dog "doodoo" on them, and parking is hell (so they tell me). In fact most people in residential neighborhoods just park on the sidewalks (partially if not fully), as well as double-park. People pay parking meters and often even a homeless parking attendent as well.
Luckily, the public transport (metro, bus, train, ferry) is quite good and reliable. I believe the govt was considering adding a downtown tax for cars entering the city center but I forget if that's been enacted. There was also something similar regarding older cars due to being less environmentally friendly.
I love dense walkable cities, though I'd love to hear more about traffic capacity on the outer streets (for example, by getting rid of parking there), then of course the numbers on the briefly mentioned parking plan, and whether subway capacity will be increased (yay), etc.
I ask because I dearly hope that it works, pedestrian-dominated city areas are wonderful. I especially love the idea of getting parked cars off most streets. I've always hoped self driving cars will <edit> reduce the need for parking </edit>, but I'm just a dreamer and these guys have to make a real city work so I'd love to hear the math on it.
EDIT: it looks like bike sharing ("Bicing") and a new "Orthogonal Bus System" are key aspects of the transportation plan:
You could send the car back home after it drops you off, or release it to pick up someone else. That is, if it is fully autonomous. I suspect that long before then, the "self driving" term is going to get abused by marketing until it means nothing more than "autonomously maintains RPM relative to pedal angle".
It comes to you within a couple of minutes when you call it, instead of having to wait for the next bus. Which can be around a half hour or worse in the US outside of the cores of cities.
It goes directly where you want to go, instead of going vaguely near your destination and stopping every three blocks for passengers.
Cargo can go in the trunk, rather than get hauled onto the bus by hand and fight for space with passengers when the bus is full
I have to say, it kind of blows my mind that someone could not see the difference in user experience between a bus and an Uber/Lyft... Even in the absolute best case scenario for the bus, where there's a perfect bus route from where you are now to your destination and there's a bus leaving exactly when you get to the stop, Uber/Lyft is still clearly better, and that best case scenario for the bus almost never occurs.
I am lucky enough that the bus stopped at my home door and at my University door that passes every 5 minutes and costs €0.60 ($0.66).
It is also kind of a social experience in Spain, since many times I would meet people from the University and chat up with them (also I am in an large student group that I started so I know a lot of people). The buses are normally really lively and just fun to ride.
Lastly I am happier knowing that I am using a not-so-contaminating bus instead of my large old car, and that in doing so I am helping even if a bit to make public transportation use more common. While this is not so convenient, making me happier about this is for sure part of the user experience. Also I realize that it's a drop in the bucket, but every bit matters.
But the truth is that it comes down to price vs technology. Right now the price of taxi (or Uber) doesn't make economic sense for students or Spain, and the technology is not there yet in terms of automation and parking is a major issue here. So bus is more convenient for many people. Also it frees up a lot of time if you would drive instead (which is also a major point for me taking up the bus) as I would read in the train or review some notes.
Edit: I also have to point out that once I took a bus in USA and it was probably one of the worst experiences in my life in transportation; it smelled like s*, people were staring rudely at us all the time while filling many more seats for no reason at all, it was super slow in a really bad street, the bus came really late and the driver was totally unhelpful and just plain rude.
I can easily see the difference, but I am no lord or duke, and thus not be bothered if sometimes my voyage is a bit uncomfortable. It's (edit: I meant public transport in general) cheaper, better for the environment, more social, certainly more secure than a random multinational company, quicker than any other option besides the motorbike, and helps free the roads for emergencies like ambulances carrying ill or wounded people. Now if infrastructure where you are is sub par, that's an infrastructure problem, not a defect of the medium.
Edit: I really want to add that I detest uber and the like for attempting to kill local businesses replacing them with lower quality cheaper services.
> I really want to add that I detest uber and the like for attempting to kill local businesses replacing them with lower quality cheaper services.
Uber in no way replaces local businesses with lower quality cheaper services. In most markets it is replacing corrupt monopolies with a higher quality product. In the other markets it is just a higher quality product.
Uber actually shows up, most cab companies I have used don't.
Uber cars are cleaner and have working air conditioning / heat
If you have a problem you just give the trip a bad review and someone follows up and actually does something about it (typically a refund)
You get emailed a receipt with everything you need to get reimbursed by your company instead of handed a blank card that you have to fill out yourself and hope your company believes.
In many markets there are a lot more Uber cars than taxis so it is much quicker to find one.
You don't have to hassle over paying with a credit card, no "the machine is broken" excuses.
Etc etc. I would never ride in a taxi again if there was Uber everywhere I went. Without question.
That's not the requested example of breaking 'corrupt local monopolies'...
And also to point out that the main effect of uber is to shift responsibility to drivers and government. Replace licenced, trained and properly contracted drivers (paying retirement and health insurance payments) and fully maintained and insured cars with untrained, uninsured and precariously 'employed' drivers, which gain no long term safety for sickness and retirement and use their own cars which may or may not be well maintained, and where they bear the complete business costs and responsibilities.
It's fully and completely exploitative, that's why it's cheaper.
For the user experience much works better, that doesn't make it a good company and certainly not healthy. The cost you save you'll pay back in taxes that have to cover drivers that fall into poverty, or when you have an accident and find your driver was not properly insured. YMMV depending on city and country, but the exploitation of the 'sharing economy' is just painfully obvious and it's your personal choice to support this.
Oh no but he can pay with the credit card. Sad how we trade in others' lives and economical morals so easily for such little conveniences. Thanks for your response that are thoughts that I share.
Have you tried using taxis in California before Uber? They just absolutely refuse to come and leave you stranded miles from anywhere. If you try to pay with a card, they kidnap you and drive you to an ATM to get cash instead. I once called the Burlingame dispatch instead of the San Mateo dispatch and got screamed at. It's life-threateningly bad.
The world is bigger than the US. And because the system is badly implemented where you are the system itself can't be considered inherently bad and obsolete. I have never been to the US but from what I read your experience is common there. Compare that to TfL black cabs. Or elaborate urban rail and bus transport in European cities. If it broke one should try to fix it first.
Uber has never told me to wait an hour for a car that doesn't show up. If an Uber driver were to pad my bill by taking a bad route, I could complain and get a price adjustment. Uber always accepts credit card payments.
Buses are also great if you have a stroller. Or are in a group.
Most buses (at least where I live) are wheelchair accessible.
From a utility standpoint, if I have to stand then there are 30 or more others in the same bus. That corresponds to 20+ individual cars. The high density lines go every 10 minutes, with an accordion bus. Assuming worst-case standing is frequent then there's something like 60+ people, meaning that one bus is equivalent to at least 40 cars.
Bearing in mind there's already other street traffic.
In other words, the worst case scenario for a bus means that the worst case scenario for the alternative leads is more street congestion.
Well, yes. But that's not really tied to the thread is it? I mean, the self-driving bus is going to follow a given route, and not have most of the advantages that throwaway287391 sees in Uber/Lyft.
BTW, I don't know how much you use the bus, but the driver does more than just drive. People ask "is this the bus to X?", or "could you let me know when I've reached Y?" If someone is running for the bus, the driver will sometimes wait a bit. (I've done all of the above.)
I've been on a bus where the side door didn't close. The driver didn't notice it, and started driving away. The passengers told the driver of the problem, who stopped the bus and closed the door manually.
The driver also kicks off people who are too disruptive.
Or wait until the cyclist mounts a bike on the front bike rack before getting into the bus. You wouldn't want an automated bus driving away with someone's bike on it, but without the person inside, would you?
I've never had an Uber ride longer than 25 minutes. I've never had a public transportation trip shorter than 50 minutes (walk to bus, wait, bus to train, wait, train to other bus, wait, bus to destination).
> I've never had an Uber ride longer than 25 minutes.
Off-topic but am wondering if this meant that you've waited for an Uber for 20+ minutes? I live in SV so there's always an Uber within 10 minutes, was just curious if drivers would really go 15+ min for a ride.
Collectivos are awesome (used them every day in Mexico). It blows my mind that countries we consider 'third-world' have such superior public transportation options.
Often, it’s because “advanced” countries have “advanced” consumer protection laws. A collectivo would be illegal here because it doesn’t have a hydraulic lift to pick up wheelchair-bound passengers.
Autonomous cars could be part of a service where you book a fare on an app and prices are stratified by how long you're willing to wait and how many people you're willing to split fares with. Then you have a spectrum from taxis to buses.
To me the answer is making dedicated travel roads for bicycles and pedestrians. This idea is ok, in that it slows cars down, and maybe that's enough, but what I'd love in a city like San Francisco are dedicated roads that allow bicycles to safely travel across the entire city without having to worry about getting run down at every intersection.
There are some streets that are safer than others, but what would be great is if say Valencia, Cortland, Market, Haight, Cole, Columbus and some other roads through downtown (like minna St. and Stevenson) were dedicated to bikes. Some have main bus lines, so maybe allow those to continue to operate as mixed use with bikes and buses. The intention is to make bike thorough fares which are safe from collisions with cars and especially delivery trucks.
This in my mind is the fastest way to transition from a car gridlocked city to one where alternative things like bikes, and battery assisted bikes, can operate safely. Most travel in cities is under 2 miles, perfect for biking (I have a bike that has seats for both my kids, which makes it great for families too).
Safety is probably the largest reason why more people don't bicycle, and targeting main shopping districts would encourage their use to get to those places, while also increasing the general enjoyment of those areas, with the added benefit of increasing traffic to businesses in those areas.
Slowing cars down is huge. First of all, probability of someone dying when a driver hits a person dips below 5% right around 20mph. At that point you already invite life back onto the street. Then once you have it there, drivers learn that they can't be distracted. Drivers should not feel comfortable when driving in urban environments.
That's not say you shouldn't have good old-fashioned car sewers, but the dearth of accesses should make it abundantly clear that those places are just car-movers, not places where economic activity happens.
Chicago has a few streets like these and they're great. The bike line is protected from traffic by the parking lane. Parallel parking a car is easier, and the bikes are protected from the driver-side doors as well as traffic. The pedestrian lane is, of course, the sidewalk.
You just have to really commit - a few protected blocks is nice, but people may not feel safe until it's the majority of their journey. Left turns are still intimidating.
>delivery trucks.
I'm extremely perturbed when there are large trucks stopped in the street. Loading docks are a thing - that building's decision to not have one is a classic case of dumping what should be its costs on everyone else.
I'm more sympathetic to taxi/uber pickups and dropoffs, since although they also tend to block traffic (and frequently encroach on the bike lane) it's still better than more cars driving and parking.
Not me. In SF at least they tend to block the bike lane and force bikes into vehicle traffic. For confident cyclists this is ok, but for many I can see that they do dumb things like try to pass on the right or not signal their intention to enter traffic.
This is why I suggest that the best thing would be to fully dedicate the entire road. As to fully protected lanes, this is good, but like you said, still leaves issues like left turns.
Very interesting idea. However, losing two through-streets out of every three will triple the traffic on the remaining through-street.
The people living on the interior of the superblocks will enjoy a more peaceful car-free environment, but the people overlooking the through-streets will experience more noise, pollution and congestion.
I wonder how Barcelona plans to compensate the residents of through-streets for the newly introduced inconvenience (and predictably lowered real-estate value with respect to their neighbours).
I'd expect the total automobile traffic to be reduced, rather than all of it concentrating on the through streets. Making driving less convenient will push people who don't have to drive to leave their cars at home and go with public transport, bike or foot instead.
* cause people not to travel at all, thus keeping money in their pockets rather than spending it to benefit the economy
* cause people who do not live in the city to drive to other places--places where their preferred mode of transportation is accommodated--to work or transact business
* cause people who live in the city to leave due to increasing frustration with their inability to go where they wish.
I'd hypothesize that your car fetishists are egotistical and hazardous drivers when they're sharing streets with pedestrians and cyclists. City centers wouldn't miss them.
It's an equilibrium thing. People only have a certain tolerance for bad traffic, so to some extent as congestion increases fewer people drive. And vice versa.
After reading the article I was ready to book a one way ticket to Barcelona! City looks amazing, the traffic diagrams are on point, and I just love the sound of the word "superblock" (so nintendo). But after reading all the HN comments, I think I'm good where I am...
Tokyo is amazing without a car. Most people live on the outskirts, which is still only 20 or 30 minutes away by train, and without a car, there is no search for parking. Trains come every 5 minutes. Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ginza, Akiharabara, Harajuku... Of course, the money and sacrifices made for infrastructure are insane.
LA is amazing with a car as long as you know the freeway exits and know where to park. Santa Monica, DTLA, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Koreatown, San Gabriel.. Good food, good people, good weather, and wide straight streets (compared to Japan). It's a little spread out, and DTLA is still a bit too tiny and too dirty to brag about, but culturally, it has to be the melting pot capital of the universe. You can't tell if someone is rich or poor, black or white, high or drunk, a man or a woman... and no one could care less. Good freedom.
But my favorite city so far has to be Fukuoka. A miniature Tokyo, but with better food, lower cost of living, and is small enough to get around with a bicycle. Very attractive dialect, and very attractive people. It's also an hour to Tokyo by plane, and business men ride 747s like getting on a train.
Great idea! The only puzzling point is the 10 km/h limit. In my experience it's almost impossible to go that slow. Better to set the limit at 20 km/h and cope with the conditions of the road. It will be slow for bicycles too. It forces bikers to go on the roads for cars or be very patient. Maybe it's the intended effect but I don't approve it.
One of the biggest problems with cars in the city is that they are ridiculously overengineered for that environment.
It feels too slow because all that power and speed gives the illusion of control. If it were possible to electronically put cars into "city mode" (low power, acceleration and speed), say, based on GPS coordinates and municipal laws, they could share the public travel ways with more equanimity with other forms of transportation.
I think they're referring to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street. In Germany that's 6 km/h, walking speed. You don't hit the accelerator at all, if you drive stick shift and use the 2nd gear (e.g. when police stops you) you were already too fast. They teach that in driving school because it's so weird to drive that slow.
> Great idea! The only puzzling point is the 10 km/h limit. In my experience it's almost impossible to go that slow.
Are you in europe? Keep in mind most EU drivers drive stick, and most cars in barcelona would be "city" cars, C-segment or below (compact and smaller in US segmentation). Depends on the exact car of course, but in my experience 1st and slow 2nd should be well into that range, and trivial to achieve on flat road (either gas up in 1st, or if the car has enough torque shift to second and idle along).
This is actually a big problem in the USA. Everyone has a powerful car with automatic transmission. On level ground these will eventually accelerate to 15MPH unless the driver uses the brake. A manual transmission, or electric drive, is ever so much more civilized.
I'd guess that people in the US spend a lot more time on freeways than Europeans do. A powerful engine is good for that (quietness, ability to overtake / maintain speed on hills). Automatic transmissions are great for freeways because they allow for cruise control. I have a pet theory that if everyone on the freeway used cruise control all the time the freeway would be safer and less stressful. That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to self-driving cars :)
Edit: I would imagine it would be straightforward to restrict the max speed that a vehicle can reach without the drivers foot on the pedal (there may even already be such a rule). The ability to regulate the speed already exists within the cruise control system.
You can have cruise control on a stick. I rarely use it but my manual car has it. On most (barring long climbs and descents) freeways with free moving traffic, you pretty much put the stick in top gear and leave it. The big win with an automatic is stop and go traffic.
Are there limitations to cruise control on manual? Presumably if it's a true manual gearbox the car can't shift automatically, so if you were to encounter an upward slope that required a down-shift what happens?
My old car had one. It disengaged when I touched brakes or the clutch. I could accelerate and it felt back to the programmed speed when I left the pedal. It never shifted, obviously.
Yes, I'm in Europe. Try driving at 10 km/h for 100 m. It's 2.7 m/s, an exercise of patience. I'd prefer a higher limit and be reasonable. I go even slower and stop if the road is full of pedestrians, all of us had to do that sometimes. But 10 km/h with an empty street? 20 km/h would do.
The point is that you should only drive on these streets at the beginning and end of your trip, so it would be like slow 100m at the start, then a longer trip, then slow 100m. I don't think that's a problem.
For the record, buses in Glasgow have to travel at 10mph to enter the bus station, and do so with ease. I've been in a car driving at 5mph into a campsite.
If you're driving a car beefy enough that it's impossible to do that, in the middle of a city where people respect pedestrian life... maybe it's a better idea to park-and-ride instead?
> For the record, buses in Glasgow have to travel at 10mph to enter the bus station, and do so with ease.
Buses and trucks tend to have gearboxes with lots of gears (e.g. 12 forward and 6 back), so they can afford low gears with very high ratios (engine to wheel rpm) for fine manoeuvres.
> If you're driving a car beefy enough that it's impossible to do that
Less an issue of power and more an issue of gears count and gears ratio. Also according to other commenters automatic apparently don't truly idle and settle at relatively high speed: someone quoted 15mph unless the driver is actively braking. Even with high power, you can run a stick idle in1st gear and likely not reach 10km/h.
The article does note that the plan also includes a lot of new bike lanes.
The idea here is for the superblocks to be pedestrian friendly, i.e. they're effectively big sidewalks with a limited amount of slow moving local vehicular traffic. Unless you have segregated lanes, bike traffic under those circumstances can't just zip along as if it's on a road.
(Habits in this respect do seem to vary by country. I was just in Japan and found I needed to be very aware on sidewalks because there were a lot of bikes. I needed to be very conscious not to make changes of direction without first checking that there wasn't an approaching bike behind me.)
The point is for the cars to be going the same speed as pedestrians so that pedestrians can safely use the roads. Cars would use it only to access the interior of the super-block; never to go through the super-block. Think of it as more like driving in a parking lot than like driving on a road.
IMO, they are better off with raised or lowered pedestrian walkways vs removing streets, but this is more about aesthetics than practicality. As to bikes, they should be on the road anyway.
It's a network effect, if you abandon street level for a wide area it can work really well. Considering the cost and impact of this change it's worth considering for other city's less focused on tourists.
Hong Kong has something like this in the city center and it works well. The entrance to many malls and buildings is on the pedestrian level, above street level.
On the other hand in residential areas they just share the streets - the streets are small with lots of bends so it artificially limits the speed at which you can drive.
Anything that reduces the number of trips by cars in the city reduces pollution. The downside of their approach is you increase the amount of travel time in car for anyone that makes a trip thus increasing pollution citywide for each trip on average.
I just got back from Barcelona, and was surprised by the level of air pollution. The smog never disappears, even after a heavy rain. I learned that Barcelona has never met EU minimum air quality standards since they were established 22 years ago. And all cars and trucks run on diesel. If I were planning their transportation future, I'd be looking to be the earliest adopter of electric transport in Europe. Super blocks appeal to me, but they don't address the air quality issue directly enough to really excite me.
Even before the superblock idea, that first picture of existing Barcelona blocks looks so massively better than anything I've seen in USA. I looked hard, twice, before reading article cause I was sure it was is was artist rendering rather than reality.
So, uniform, dense, but no sky scrapers, corners cut off, wide wide streets, wide sidewalks, interior (to block) "courtyards".
Many will disagree, but: having visited a large number of European capital cities over the past few years, I found this Barcelona neighborhood to be among the most boring. Every walk felt pretty much the same and it was easy to get lost if you weren't constantly reading the signs. Give me an insane, chaotic city center any day!
It's one of the nicest cities in Europe but the Spanish economy is still so far down that many Spanish people with marketable skills are to be found all over Europe.
Last I checked Barcelona was still in Spain. If they object I'm fine with it but I'm not going to 'tune' my comments to whether or not someone may or may not be offended when for the rest of the world 'Catalonia' is solidly part of Spain.
Frisians are Dutch too, and Welsh are British and so on.
Most people in Barcelona are not "pro-independence". Most "pro-independence" people come from rural areas, or small cities. Industrial and touristic areas of Catalan region of Spain are not nationalists/separatists. That sentiment comes much like in other regions, because of the crisis. P.S. I live in Barcelona.
Slightly different personal data point from my guiri perspective living in Barcelona I'd say that of the 12-15 Catalans that I know well the clear majority are pro independence.
You "forget" that the "80%" was on an unofficial and illegal (currently on Court) poll/"referendum" with massive abstention, because supported mostly by Catalan nationalist parties, and not by constitutionalists (the ones supporting the Rule of Law). Real pro-independency support in Catalan regions is about 35-45%, being much less in industrial and touristic areas (you can find official statistics about the subject -INE and CEO-).
In my opinion, nationalist agitprop in Catalonia, more than reaching the independence from Spain, it will "break" Catalan region psychologically in two, because of the polarization, much like it happens in North Ireland or Belgium. I hope it doesn't happen in Barcelona, as it is a nice place to live and invest, with really nice and open minded people.
That's pretty much my experience. I spent a few weeks every year in Barcelona for the last 3 years or so, super nice people and a very nice city (especially the architecture and the amazing blend of city and sea).
I just came back from an extended trip in Barcelona, and I saw first hand how there is plenty of wasted space in neighborhoods.
Many intersections between dense housing areas are overly large hexagons where you must annoyingly walk around dedicated parking spaces to cross streets.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/16nine/22802717995
Hopefully the city will have buy-in from the residents, as this plan seems to also modify the bus routes. And from what I saw, the locals have ingrained those stops in their daily routines, which might cause some backlash when those drastically change.
In my opinion, those blocks (known as Cerdá's manzanas) create a much nicer space than normal ones. It also seems safer traffic-wise. True, it takes a bit longer to cross as a pedestrian but I think that's worth the price.
As a Barcelona citizen I can not agree more on your comment. Cerdà blocks are much better than regular square corners, as a pederestian those "dead spaces" are a pleasure to walk, and as a driver makes crossroads much safer.
I'm from Barcelona (but abroad now). The whole bus system is being revamped (for the last 4 years) and is being done gradually.
It's been a painless transition for most. In general, the amount of transfers to reach a destination has dropped, the average speed of bus routes has increased and the frequency of the revamped lines is better than the old ones.
Basically, the buses "adapt" to the grid following "horizontal", "vertical" and "west-east diagonal" routes (as much as possible).
The streets the buses run on are either main streets (those that will be the veins of the supergrids) or pacified streets with dedicated lanes (in some cases reverse direction lanes [such as Carrer Pi i Molist]).
The transition, as I said, is being implemented gradually, with very intensive campaigns informing impacted neighborhoods. IIRC, 50% of the new routes are in place. New ones are introduced twice a year approx.
Regarding your comment about the intersections in Eixample... I bet you will not find anyone in Barcelona who does not love them. They make the city open. And even if it seems impossible, there are occasions when they can be used to make the neighborhoods come together: http://eldigital.barcelona.cat/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/en...
Hm, i find this kinda hard to port over to a typical chaotic/radial european city.
In Moscow, for example, there are wide radial and circular roads, from which branches of small roads diffuse into the meat of the city under pretty much every angle.
Any attempts to rope "superblocks" off would likely collapse the traffic completely - there aren't any alternative roads like a grid would have.
Having spent time in both cities, I don't think the residential urban areas of Moscow have the same problem as Barcelona does. If you look closely between all of those Brezhnev era apartment blocks, you'll find that the soviets packed them with green space, playgrounds, etc. If anything, Moscow is short on parking lots. (edit: Not advocating tearing up the playgrounds for parking lots.)
I think the idea is to apply this to grid based cities, like the kind predominant in the US, rather than to "chaotic" city plans, like in most old European cities. Barcelona is in many ways atypical of large European historic cities, in that regard.
In Moscow, and other Soviet cities there are "superblocks" already. It's called "microraion" [1]. A huge block of apartment buildings with a ring of driveways around every building, and a lot of shared spaces like playgrounds and such.
The Netherlands has municipal areas designed mostly like the same principle. Low-speed areas with high houding densities are connected using main roads. A very nice example of this concept is shown in Houten, near Utrecht. A roundabout road over the whole area connects to living areas inwards.
As a local that likes to follow urbanism topics, I can tell you that this idea has been floating around for a number of years, but it's far from clear it's ever going to be implemented. A few political parties have expressed lip support, but applying such a radical change would require a lot of political courage and a solid majority.
One of the problems is that the grid in Barcelona is quite imperfect. A similar plan to prioritize bus transit across orthogonal lines has been far from successful, and my take is that one of the reasons is that orthogonal lines have ended up not being quite orthogonal at all.
Anyway it's been the policy of the city government at least from the 90s to reduce the surface area dedicated to the cars. Interestingly most of the recent interventions have been on what would be on the superblocks concept considered 'fast' streets (mostly by increasing the side of the sidewalks [Arago, Balmes St, Diagonal, General Mitre] and by reorganization massive intersections [Glories, Lesseps].
And there are a few committed plans also in this direction [Via Laietana, Urquinaona].
So there are really two competing visions here:
* Make "fast" streets more pedestrian-friendly, kill urban highways, make the grid work in a homogenous way, increase surface for pedestrians across all the city.
* Create a hierarchy of streets (with fast/slow streets)
And to me it's far from clear which vision is going to win.
"The new bollards that will be planted to stop cars cutting through the middle of the superblocks won’t stop that menace of the Mediterranean, the motor scooter rider"
"In Barcelona two out of three streets will be easy to cross, but make a mistake when crossing the third"
I think this is a worthy experiment, but I wouldn't roll it out across the city without knowing whether it will work.
Because to me, the existing blocks simply look too massive to become a truly pedestrian neighborhood, I also would look for ways to cut paths through some of the blocks.
There are plenty of scooters in Barcelona but honestly I've never noticed generally worse behaviour from them than anyone else, except maybe starting off from lights early, but it seems everyone is guilty of that here.
Aside from that however, as a cyclist from the UK, I've been very pleasantly surprised by the lack of aggressive driving since I've been living here. I very very rarely feel threatened by other road users on my bike, except by Bicing (city-wide bike rental/'sharing' scheme) users, and I think that's just because Bicing is used by people that don't cycle regularly so aren't very experienced.
Also there are already an increasing number of semi-pedestrianised streets in the centre of town and they work fine, cars, scooters and bikes go down them too but very slowly and usually only if they really need to because there are faster routes if you're through traffic.
To be honest I doubt it will make that much difference. Driving here is a pain in the arse. You don't get much speed up between traffic lights unless you are on one of the big streets like Diagonal or Arago.
Another Ada Colau BS. Barcelona might be very popular, but it is a village, nearly dead out of summer. Cars are already 2nd class citizens, there is no traffic except taxis and motorcycles. Now they are just closing the traffic to some streets, it is not a futuristic super intelligent plan, nothing special. Nobody was using car and everybody was walking everywhere and the same situation will continue, our lives won't change at all. Don't threat this plan like the biggest urbanistic invention of the century. It is nothing more than internal municipal legislation change. It is not making the half of the NYC pedesterian area.
I live in Barcelona and most of the people are not happy. A simple math problem for you in order to understand why.
Currently with a top speed of 50kmh the average speed is 36kmh. Now reducing the top speed partially to 10kmh how fast will be the average?
Well, it can be argued that the traffic will shift to the faster streets on the periphery of the super blocks, so this streets will have to grow in order to be able to handle the traffic, this can be challenging in terms of space.
But what really pisses my catalan friends and colleagues is that the superblock will come first and accordingly the tweaks on the periphery. This will cause homongous traffic jams because of the construction works on the periphery of the superblocks.
So this is aimless activism, those who know traffic and transportation in Barcelona will agree that smart traffic lights will make a huge impact on car pollution. Together with Park and ride; offering a fast transportation to enter and leave the city would be amazing.
Good point, additionally there are more parameters that influence the average speed. But the reality is that I now need at least 30% longer to reach certain areas. Ironically this areas with now huge pedestrian sidewalks are full of shops and other business which I now try to avoid.
It's a verbatim application of one of the original Christopher Alexander's architectural and urban design patterns. "49. Looped local roads" is the pattern being applied here. Alexander even mentions that a grid can be modified to create the loops although without explicitly mentioning the superblock idea.
On some superblocks it seems to me they could connect the corner blocks instead of the center block as the one way lanes. This would leave the old middle roads free of cars altogether giving pedestrians more space and maybe let the cars go a little faster (10 km/h is rather unbearably slow slow).
> On some superblocks it seems to me they could connect the corner blocks instead of the center block as the one way lanes.
> This would leave the old middle roads free of cars altogether giving pedestrians more space
You seem to be missing the point entirely. The in-block roads are for when you have something to do in the block, which is why you can't cross a block through them (they loop and send you back the way you came from). You arrive, you do your thing and you leave. The entire block is pedestrian space, which is why the speed limit is pedestrian range.
> maybe let the cars go a little faster (10 km/h is rather unbearably slow slow).
1. that would defeat the entire point of superblocks by still having fast vehicles within them
2. at 400m long, in-block loops can be traversed entirely in 2mn, since you've got something to do there (otherwise you'd go around the superblock) that seems perfectly fine.
I can't even make my car go that slow without tapping the break. We have kids that play in the streets in my community, most people go the speed limit 20mph and we have no problems. Just saying 6mph is really really slow.
This seems like the urban version of road hierarchy. With the local roads being more like a large shared driveway. Similar to how cul-de-sacs are used in suburban settings.
The place to spend the money on improvements would be the roads outside of the 9 block cube. Obviously they would now have a lot more traffic.
Personally I love the idea of a car free city. (No idea how that might work). I am pretty sure a lot of the negativity of city living comes from the constant noise of traffic and horns.
Horns are a cultural thing. In some places they honk all the time. In .fi you're not supposed to use the horn except to warn of immediate danger. I can take a walk in town and get a headache from the noise without ever hearing a horn.
> In America, we can’t even agree on the idea that cities are for people. We still decry bike lanes as a "war on cars," even in our allegedly progressive West Coast cities.
This seems disingenuous. I like bikes, but they are not more "people-y" than cars.
I think Bloomberg's filling-in of Times Square was more radical and effective [1]. By turning it into a pedestrian space, it's prioritized space for living and being over transiting. I'm hopeful about plans to turn the length of Broadway into a park.
This is a variant of the Verkeerscirculatieplan [0] introduced on September 19, 1977 in Groningen, The Netherlands. This map http://www.regiocanons.nl/beeld/Groningen/Groningen/_250/Y39... [1] shows how the old center was devided in 4 sectors (Noord, Oost, Zuid and West) and car traffic was not allowed to cross sectors borders, they had to travel out back to the canal-ring (diepenring in Groningen-language ‘diep’ ~ related to english ‘deep' = canal) first. Bicycles, buses and taxis where allowed to go from one sector to another. It was introduced by the local government consisting of young politicians who took power by a sort of a Coup in the local Social Democratic party. These young guys aged 25-30 years had the vision and courage to give back the city center to pedestrians & bicycles. They reintroduced the daily markets on the central squares (tuesday, wednesday, friday and saturday) which until then where used as parking-lots. To counter objections of local shopowners against the removal of many parking places near their shops, they negotioated with the Shell Oil pensionfund to invest in a parkingbuilding a the beginning of the Haddingestraat [2] 50m from the former parkinglot on the Vismarkt. In return Shell Oil was allowed to have gas-stations on the main exit roads of Groningen.
The Groningen Verkeerscirculatieplan has been an example to many cities in the past 40 years, now including for Barcelona.
The elephant in the room is that personal mobility is going to undergo a complete redesign in the coming decade as vehicles drive for themselves. This will bring about a complete change in usage patterns so doing anything in this space is pre-mature and we should hold off to see how society's requirements change. For example maybe on street parking will become a thing of the past as your self driving Uber goes on it's way to pick up new passengers after it drops you off. Perhaps we'll have more drop-off points like at an airport instead.
Self driving cars are still cars. The only thing self driving cars might change is parking. The ability to have cars circulating around with no one in them might actually make things worse.
> The elephant in the room is that personal mobility is going to undergo a complete redesign in the coming decade as vehicles drive for themselves.
The way the argument is going right now, personal mobility won't get redesigned -- it will get eliminated.
Faux-urbanists will continue to fight for (and win) at getting cars more-or-less banned in cities. Cars will continue to get better at zero-emissions and self-driving, but that won't stop people from hating them. Attempts at better public transit will be promoted, but nothing nearly as fast/efficient/convenient as cars currently are.
I suspect in the coming decades, people simply won't be allowed to move around as much, and folks will succeed in convincing people that this is "better" for them. Personal mobility will be a concept for history books, like privacy.
People will certainly not be able to move around in cars after they use up all the oil.
BTW, there are 14 million people in Tokyo (or maybe 40 million) and probably never more than one car per family. They don't seem to have a problem, maybe because they can actually afford to build train lines and don't have commercial zoning over there.
Worth noting regarding Barcelona is that this is, to a great extent, retrofitting a concept that already exists within the city to "new" parts. In Ciutat Vella, there are a few "outer" thoroughfares, with the inner streets shared between cars and pedestrians. They are, however, narrow to the point where they are not really navigable by anything larger than a Smart Car moving at rolling speed, and it's very clear that cars are second-class citizens. Thus, this isn't really introducing a new "social order" as if this were to be done anywhere in the US.
I see it more as an attempt to revise and scale up the already exceptional block-structured design of the Eixample, which is already trying to pack as much as possible (backyards, terraces, parking...) into the interior of the blocks.
"Some folks, however, still cling to the old idea that cities are for people,"
How strange. Every time I see a car, one or more people are in it. I also see other vehicles, such as trucks, that not only have a person in it, they also are carrying things (such as food or building materials) that other people need.
You seem deliberately obtuse but the point is that cities dedicate huge amounts of what is ultra-prime real estate to the movement of cars, often single passenger, while neglecting public transport or most basic of all pedestrian movements. It doesn't require a PhD to realize that individual motor transport is useless for the efficient transport of large number of people.
My point is it is ridiculous to make statements like "the city is ruled by the car." The car is not a living thing. It cannot rule anything.
All the cars are there because they serve people. People find them to be useful.
What people are really saying when they claim the city is "ruled" by cars is that they believe there are too many cars--which is a rather odd statement, seeing as cars are useful and people voluntarily buy and use them.
It's odd that these people are motivated not by their love for walking, not by their love of particular kinds of spaces, and not by their desire for a certain lifestyle. Rather, they are motivated by their dislike for cars. This is an immediately off-putting argument since most people do not hate their cars. If they would focus on getting more of what they want, rather than less of what they do not want, then maybe they would be able to craft winning solutions that do not rely on taking useful things away from people.
> "What people are really saying .. they believe there are too many cars"
No. While I'm certain there are some who believe that, it is not a universal belief.
Which routes are the most direct, the ones for drivers, the ones for walkers, or the ones for cyclists? If the car route is most direct, while the safe biking route requires 25% more distance, then the car has been placed ahead of other modalities.
If walkers and cyclists are limited in where they can cross the street, then the system favors the car driver.
If drivers aren't required to stop for foot traffic, then the system favors the car driver.
If there are 6 lane surface roads with a crosswalk, but no pedestrian island or other safe refuge for slow walkers, then the system favors the car driver.
Are there ways to run most errands without using a car?
Are the roads constructed to maximize vehicle throughput? Or minimize maintenance costs? Or minimize the number of traffic deaths?
How much of vehicle parking is subsidized? (Don't forget zoning requirements for the number of parking spaces.)
The more the system favors driving over other modalities, the more reasonable it is to say that "the city is ruled by the car", at least metaphorically.
> Rather, they are motivated by their dislike for cars.
This is not true. The "Vision Zero" plan, for example, is motivated by the desire for no traffic deaths, not from a dislike for cars.
In reality, most people enjoy spending time outside - and outside doesn't mean in their car, it actually means outside. The more you assume people have and want to use cars all the time when developing a city, the less time people are reasonably able to spend outside. There's very few people who actually enjoy being in cars in the middle of a city.
For one, this plan immediately halves the number of busy intersections along a given stretch of road (and reduces them to a third if multiple superblocks are built adjacent to one another). Yes, no intersections have been physically removed, but the number of vehicles using those intersections is drastically reduced. Traffic signals at those intersections can be optimized to reduce stop frequency/duration for traffic staying on the road meant for cars.
If you live in one of these superblocks, the last kilometer to your house may be slower but, if there are enough other superblocks along your path, your overall trip time may actually be reduced. Fewer stops also mean reduced fuel consumption and lower emissions.
Of course, a big issue is that some streets will now be carrying twice the traffic they were previously built for. Even if that traffic flows better, there may be problems. Making street-side parking on these streets illegal could increase the effective number of lanes available to traffic. After all, street-side parking should be plentiful inside the blocks, and the eventual plan is to build off-street garages.
I'm not convinced superblocks will be bad for drivers.