McBTC

Sure, the 8.5 million people who live in NYC obviously do not really have much choice to do otherwise-- there's far too many of'm to all drive to and park their own automobiles at most any place of possible employment so they either live close enough to walk or ride a bike to a job or take a cab or a train or some form of underground public conveyance. Nothing great about that lifestyle to many-- especially those who grew up in California when Disneyland was first built in Anaheim and probably thought if anything there'd be space-age monorails traversing such cities by now instead of herding people into crowded underground subways.

cooker

I guess the New Yorkers must be okay with it, however, if so many millions want to live there. How about you, though? Have you given some thought to how you might lessen your car dependence? Or any ways your community could facilitate it? I think I asked you a few posts back.

Roody

I enjoyed those threads. Of course, a couple people had to post constantly that cholera and horse manure were big problems, evidently related in their own minds to the lack of cars. Well, at least these folks seem well-versed on the topic of manure!

It does seem wise to look back to these pre-auto days for inspiration and guidance now that it's time to design cities for the post-auto age. I imagine that city planners in Oslo have looked at some of those same videos and photos as they plan for a post-auto city center. And this time they will leave out the cholera and manure!

Old photos from carfree.com:
Carfree.com: City Design
(Videos are also available on other parts of this fantastic website.)

tandempower

Idk, it could be good to re-introduce more living ecology into (post)modern cities. Manure minus cholera is good fertilizer, and naturally-fertilized trees and plants are good for filtering urban dust and pollution. It's strange to me that biotechnology is probably the most rapidly advancing field of science and technology, and yet we don't see an explosion of urban applications that could convert sunlight/warmth/CO2 and wastewater into all sorts of interesting and useful biological products.

Stadjer

That's the point of a city in the first place: as many people as possible in the same area at the same time by having short travels. The car has just been standing (and driving) in the way of the development of city life. Tourists in Amsterdam for example often ask why so many people cycle. But that's not the right question, the question should be how did all those people manage to get here at the same time. Cycling cities or walkable cities are just busier and more lively. People get from A to B easier, but that means that they will go to C and D too, so they'll do more and spend more.

Yes, but that's linear thinking that everything newer must be better. Images of a future where everybody moves around on electric bicycles through a clean siltent city with a mobile phone/tv/library/music player in their hand would have been utopian too. In a lot of futuristic ideas in the past there was this idea that people should be as isolated from strangers as possible, but that's never been what city life is about. Of course cycling is much nicer than taking the subway, but if you don't like to be among lots of strangers city life just isn't for you.

Yes, but there where also cities like Paris and Barcelona who broke down large parts of the historic parts to create wide avenues between compact blocks. In the end you need to get a lot goods in and a lot of garbage out. The car was often seen as a blessing for the urban environment because of all the horse and ox manure in the streets. A lot of European cities stayed compact despite the car because there was just no room to expand much. Not just the city is historic, but also the location and the surroundings.

That picture is taken after 1920, probably closer to 1930.

McBTC

An obstacle has been those raised in the beehives of Old World thinking who came to a place like California to get away from the high-rise, elevator, rat race, fast-talking lifestyle and then corrupted the politics by stealing highway improvement monies and allowing dense building right up to the 'shores' of our highways, turning open spaces into the beehives that caused them to flee the big cities in the first place. The Jetsons is a good example of looking to a future that still allows for the independence of personal transportation. It's a fanciful notion given the technology, which is why we have and use automobiles but for many, personal transportation it's still a better lifestyle than looking down on the streets of a city from the 40th floor and see nothing but ribbons of yellow...

tandempower

It is a cultural slight-of-hand to say that motor-cars are newer and more modern than bicycles. Really, the motor-car was invented in the 19th century around the same time as the bicycle, and technological advances in both types of vehicles has been progressing ever since.

Sociologists like C Wright Mills and David Riesman noted how people are never so alone as in a crowd, but I think generally there is this philosophical problem of social isolation that's put forth by people who have a political bias against individualism and independence. Really, whether you're interactive or non-interactive, denser urban environments can bother you. E.g. if you're looking for interaction, you'll find that people in cities avoid eye contact, scoff at smiles, etc. while if you're trying to avoid interaction, you'll feel like you can't get away from it even in the most remote situations, like nature preserves etc. where you'll always seem to run into other people or at least feel like you're going to if you do something that might upset someone, like go off the trail.

It's funny that this post is in response to Stadjer, who lives in a Dutch city. My impression of Dutch cities is that they have been actively prevented from growing into modern metropolises with tall skyscrapers, etc. with maybe a few exceptions in the biggest cities. Generally, my impression of Dutch density is that its dense enough to facilitate commuting convenience by bicycle and transit, but it's still pretty green and suburban in most places. I think the bicycle made this possible, because biking as transportation allows pretty fast traversing of medium distances, but not to the same degree as motor-sprawl in the US, where driving has allowed much lower densities to emerge.

But Dutch cities aren't dense and towering like NYC, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, etc. I think.

McBTC

It seems pretty much, jam-packed. Even The Hague which is Netherlands 3rd third-largest city (after Amsterdam and neighboring Rotterdam) with its >500K population has a suburban area where >1M people live.

Interesting comparisons:

California's 39M population may be more than 2x as large as Netherland's but Cali is also >11 times bigger. You also get a lot less square footage of living space per person in all of the old Euro cities. Many have a more car-intensive lifestyle than what the LCF movement approves but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them put a lot more miles a year on the bikes that they also own.

tandempower

Stadjer would know better than I would, but I think there are relatively few Dutch cities where much housing exceeds three stories high. There are downtown areas with taller buildings, but they're certainly not jam-packed with sky scrapers. I think you're right about bustle, but I think that is caused by a lot of human traffic, because people can walk out of buildings to go shopping, visit others, go to cafes and restaurants, etc. a lot.

I think there are a lot of suburbs that are biking distance, so they're not that close to the city center, but also not that far.

From what I've read/seen, CA has 10-lane highways with congested traffic, and there are people who have multi-hour driving commutes to suburbs many miles from their workplace.

Mobile 155

This is often a subject I get interested in. The espoused reasoning seems to be the more dense a city is the easier and faster are the commute times. But I wonder if that is true in the US or even in the developed world? Have there been studies, surveys? Let us take a look. The forth one with the charts by country might be most interesting. Just a FYI.

California Commute Times Rank 10th Longest In US | HuffPost

Britain's average daily commute is ONE HOUR AND 38 MINUTES | Daily Mail Online
New York, D.C. Areas Have Worst Commute Times in the U.S. | Fortune.com
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2...ommuters/?_r=0
Beijing workers have longest daily commute in China at 52 minutes each way | South China Morning Post

McBTC

A lot of it boils down to state of mind and circumstances. In Southern California, for example, many who live in Carlsbad drive south to a job in Downtown San Diego, a distance of 35 miles (56 km)-- still in the same county but it would be like driving to work from Amsterdam to Rotterdam in Netherlands.


The Carlsbad commuter would spend a lot of time on the freeway if work was from 8A to 5P... probably more time than driving north for am 8A-5P job in Newport Beach in Orange county, a distance of 57 miles or 92 kilometers. The Carlsbad commuter headed north probably would get to work in less than an hour which could be less time than driving just a few miles for an 8A-5P job if you live and work in Los Angeles.

tandempower

I think there is a lot of train commuting between cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, because the distances are too far to bike in a short time, and the traffic congestion on highways is bad, not that the human congestion in trains and stations isn't also. Still, the popular reliance on bikes/buses/trains means less cars taking up space on roads and in buildings/garages, so that is a huge benefit of the multi-modal option.

I haven't spent much time in CA, but if it's anything like FL, there are small cultural barriers that go along way toward prevent small infrastructure/economic changes that would facilitate a much greater share for LCF, and thus less congestion and parking. Most people are used to taking their cars everywhere, and toting groceries etc. that way instead of carrying them in their arms, a cart, bike-trailer, etc. Also, a professional culture of long pants for men and uncomfortable, synthetic fabrics for women make it more difficult to walk or bike significant distances to work without changing and freshening up, which would be a deal-breaker for most people if they were overweighing giving up driving to LCF instead.

I hope we will see a continuing shift toward liberation from restrictive social-aesthetic standards that deter people from biking and walking for transportation. If people just felt more free to LCF, there could be so much positive infrastructure reform and consumer-lifestyle evolution that would make people and the environment healthier and happier. I'm glad Oslo seems to be seeing and spreading the light, but I hope large driving populations like CA and FL cities also shift toward much more LCF, because that would signal a lot of hope for a sustainable future, which would alleviate a lot of global economic/social tension that's built up from the seemingly unmanageable stubborness of modernity against broad and deep sustainability reform.

cooker

A lot of that is apples and oranges. One of your sources shows the commute is 5 minutes longer in New York than Oakland, but the New Yorker is much more likely to be using some combination of foot and public transit, so that extra 5 minutes, plus some of the time in common, is likely to be spent in exercise, reading, snoozing etc., none of which are available to the typical California driver. I was a bit surprised at how long the English commute are (they added both ways, so an hour and 38 minutes is 49 minutes each way), but again, a lot of them take the train and say they spend the time reading. Public transit users in California commute 47 minutes each ways so not that different. I didn't look at the methodologies in depth yet, so I don't know if there are other differences.

I-Like-To-Bike

You have an idealized view of NYC subway commuting. It seems to be an apples and oranges version of the actual benefits many NYC commuters "enjoy" while commuting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/n...-to-limit.html

Subway delays increase as overcrowding spreads to weekend - NY Daily News

cooker

No, I am well aware that segment of the trip can be stressful, just like being in a car in gridlock.

tandempower

What about all the activities that drivers are doing during their commutes:

listening to fabulous surround-sound audio
talking hands-free on the phone
changing lanes
monitoring following distance
scanning as far ahead as possible for brake lights
watching pedestrian signals to anticipate traffic light changes before they happen
monitoring gauges to avoid speeding, running out of fuel, engine overheating, etc.

McBTC

So broad the individual is lost in your Utopic mélange. If working a 40 hour job and meeting up with an old friend for a game of racquetball before going home or squeezing in the time for a quick run before heading off to night classes at law school or hitting the surf at your favorite beach break before heading off to work in the morning requires a car and the job you hold pays enough to foot the bill, it's a sustainable lifestyle.

McBTC

True, true the pictures you posted look like steps we need to take to optimize the spread of winter cold and flu viruses... These pictures also remind me a time when Japan was riding high and we saw Japanese versions of American football linemen whose only job it was to shoulder passengers through the doors of crowded bullet trains, which is why at the same time -- before their economic meltdown -- a parking space in Tokyo sold for the equivalent of a million dollars. Sustainable perhaps but I imagine many who use public transportation do so because it is necessary and not because it is the most desirable option.

wolfchild

What about it ??.

tandempower

Cooker mentioned all the things transit commuters might be doing during their commute, so I mention some things driving commuters might be doing with their time during theirs, in order to compare 'apples to apples.'

tandempower

The economics of keeping population density low enough to avoid congestion is complex. As the cost of living goes up, less people can afford to live in an area unless their incomes go up as well. So if you can keep the population from increasing, it might be sustainable for people to all drive in the way you say, but the economy can't grow in a way that facilitates population growth, i.e. an influx of new people moving into the area.

So 'sustainable' is a weird term to use when sustainability requires limiting population growth. What's more, you need to secure resources for all the people living in the area, so the question is how long that area can sustain that lifestyle without depleting others elsewhere of resources they need to live 'sustainably.' So once you get into resource competition and population-limits, sustainability is not possible because how can you project an indefinite future for economic culture that requires resource-competition and population-control? Isn't such a culture ultimately doomed to consume its resource-base and population into extinction?

As I read back over this post, it's getting very P&R. Should we split this thread and move this portion to P&R?

wolfchild

If colds and flu wasn't bad enough... it was recently discovered that the air quality and pollution in the underground subway tunnels in Toronto is really bad. Then there are all kinds of low lifes and unruly passengers who have absolutely no etiquette.

McBTC

Agreed because you describe a "beggar-thy-neighbor" understanding of economic policy whereby one person's success worsens the problems of everyone else, as opposed to a philosophy of a "thousand points of light" that flows from an abundance of spirit (a concept that is so easily lampooned by the establishment of unelected deep-state bureaucrats and politically correct hypocrites) and, "a rising tide raises all boats" understanding of macroeconomics, based on recognition and respect for individual liberty, personal responsibility and a free market for goods, services and ideas, which are not topics for bike forums and yet it seem to underlie the LCF movement.

Mobile 155

As I posted it is a FYI feel free to ignore the links. Statements have been made that commuting times would be less in highly dense cities and people would be happier. I couldn't find surveys and studies supporting the Yet people in China still seem more willing to commute than not and their time is higher than LA. Their concerns are as some here have and the quote in the British link I found amusing. But I have made my choice and my views are known. So it is just a FYI over the "it should be statements" made so often earlier. The Quote from the British link:" The most annoying bugbear for commuters is when fellow passengers have their music on too loud, with 26 per cent of those surveyed saying that, closely followed by 21 per cent who can't stand people smelling badly."

I didn't say it the link did. And I have visited some of the cities mentioned. Seems about right to me.

tandempower

This post scrambles ideas together. If this thread gets split and moved to P&R, we can unpack all these ideas you mention and discuss them.

I think it was you, however, who started comparing driving-sprawl California with Dutch cities and then talking about how the freedom to drive 100s of miles per day is sustainable if you can afford it, etc. The only thing I had said about Dutch cities, originally, was that I didn't think they were that dense compared with skyscraper cities like NYC, Boston, etc. or even London, Berlin, and Paris. I think Dutch geography is basically a lot of suburban sprawl, only the suburbs are more bikeable and within bikeable distance of more other suburbs and one or more city centers. I.e. it's not like everyone lives in dense downtown areas, but yet people can still get around and commute by bike from their suburban neighborhoods where they live.