It’s poll time!
[socialpoll id=”2412282″]
I’m not sure the thumbnail captures the full transphobic awfulness of the graphic for option number three, so here it is full-size:
In case you’re wondering, Saddam is not actually mentioned in the story.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I voted for option 3, though the car seat one is lovely as well.
Here’s an archived link of Return of Kings’ front page as of today, in case you want to read any of these posts. I didn’t bother.
@Christina Nordlander (apologies to earlier commenter; combo of bad mouse and wrist pain is stopping me scrolling or going back to earlier page to find you)
I assume their assumption is that you could find yourself sharing this hypothetical vehicle with (a) stranger(s), like you do on the bus or train.
but in my headcanon fantasy public transport system, there could be an option where you specify that you are or are not able to share your ride.
there could be different sizes of vehicle on the system, from tiny two-seaters up to minibus size! you specify the number in your party, and say whether or not sharing is accepted.
I have not fantasy-worked-out yet how to avoid penalising those who can’t readily share with strangers while still encouraging ride-sharing where possible. But having different vehicle sizes would help with that a bit.
I’m also assuming that great public transport infrastructure in every urban centre and inter-city is a public good that ultimately benefits the whole of the economy/the whole of society regardless of whether person A is using it to get to work or to the cinema. Like having a national fast broadband network is obviously a public good overall, regardless of whether person A uses it for work or not in any given minute.
Tough choice between 3 and 4, but I do have to make special mention to 1 for its unironic use of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps. Are right-wingers ever going to realize that idiom is something that’s meant to be impossible?
@Opposablethumbs
Would do wonders environmentally speaking as well. Unfortunately, as PoM notes, American cities didn’t get like this overnight, and it’s not gonna be fixed overnight either.
Terrible. To expand on what PoM said (“There won’t be any less road): cars, driverless or otherwise, take up a prodigious amount of space per person-mile moved compared to basically any other mode of transportation. There’s the amount of road space they take up, parking when they’re not in use, parking when they are in use. All of those roads and parking spaces occupy large areas, which means that things are further away from each other and separated by lots of asphalt that’s often full of cars, and this is an inherently inhospitable environment for pedestrians and cyclists. There’s no way to create a situation where cars, driverless or otherwise, coexist with walkable communities.
I want to also point out that all of the ooohing and aaahing over driverless cars does not take into account the fact that non-cars use the road, too, and not always in predictable ways. Read any article masturbating about driverless cars and remind yourself that pedestrians exist and how they behave, then take a drink every time the article forgets that.
You are probably right, Dalillama. If the cars aren’t individually owned, though, and are summoned-as-needed (coming in a range of sizes, so no big vehicles travelling with only one occupant) it should ideally mean much fewer cars per X amount of population. So (theoretically) at least less pressure to build more roads, and no need for them to be as wide because after you get to your destination the car you used doesn’t get parked until you head back, but goes off to the next person, and you summon the nearest available one when you’re ready to head home.
Of course culturally a lot of people would scream a lot when they weren’t allowed to use a privately owned one within city limits, say. And then it would become impractical for most city dwellers to bother owning one (that’s in case prohibiting their private ownership was too draconian). If there were incentives for ride sharing, mightn’t that reduce the numbers of cars on the road?
In practice a lot of the vehicles might end up being more like buses, with only some being more like small cars.
Mind you, the amount I know about town planning and transport could very easily be written on the back of a postage stamp*, so …
* or possibly one side of a grain of rice.
Banning cars in town centers only makes town centers decay. It leads to exurbs and edge cities, and let’s be straight: the corporations that are the engines of downtown economies won’t tolerate it. If Louisville were to ban Humana’s employees from driving to work, Humana would fucking move to one of the smaller, more accommodating cities.
So that’s not a thing that is going to happen.
Not banning cars per se, though; only privately owned ones (this is in the currently-only-a-fantasy-future-hypothetical where these “public-transport cars” are very readily available and cheap to use).
So anyone can still go anywhere, hypothetically more quickly than before (because fewer traffic-jams), and nobody has to find a parking space because you just dismiss your vehicle on arrival.
I’m not a huge devotee of driverless cars or anything, I mean I don’t carry a torch for them particularly. I just wonder about whether they might have potential advantages for reducing traffic and helping those who don’t or can’t drive. If there was really good transport in city centres, 24/7 and with no need to find parking, available for any size of party (including 1 person wanting to travel alone), and able to take any route you need – that wouldn’t make city centres decay would it?
(again, in theory) they should be more reliable at avoiding drunk pedestrians etc. than human drivers are (because they can look in all directions at once and don’t blink or get distracted. theoretically. I don’t know how good they are or could be in practice)
ETA PS late night here – off to sleep, see you later 🙂
In Minneapolis, they closed one of the main downtown streets, Nicollet Mall, to traffic other than buses and some government vehicles. But all the surrounding main streets remain open. It’s worked fairly well. Nicollet, where a lot of the retail and restaurants are is more pedestrian friendly but it hasn’t impacted traffic too terribly much.
It’s fairly common in major Australian cities to close off parts of the city centre to traffic – Rundle Mall in Adelaide, Queen St in Brisbane. Even a couple of suburbs here have done it with very crowded shopping strips. Like wwth said re Minneapolis, the surrounding streets are still open to traffic. If anything, having (limited) pedestrian-only zones has increased the numbers of people coming in.
eta: I initially said Rundle Mall was in Melbourne, oops. Can’t recall Melb’s one, but part of it is also pedestrian-only, iirc.
I have lived in the London area for most of my life, and while there’s a lot of problems public transport is one thing Greater London (or at least, central London and the town I grew up in) does pretty well. Most people take public transport and think it’s a fools errand to try and drive unless it’s night-time, and I expect even that will change with increased night tubes. The centre of the very busy shopping town where I grew up is all pedestrianised, and is all the better for it. You can drive around (if you’re good at figuring out the one way system) but for most people the transport links are so good it just isn’t worth it. For me, my parents house has a bus that goes from 2 metres outside our front door to both the nearby town and the big shopping town (as well as the train station and hospital.)
Then again, I don’t know if that would work in the US. The descriptions here sound frankly terrifying to someone who still refuses to learn to drive (I really hate it.) I was getting the bus to school on my own by age 12, and that was considered late to be using public transport; I can’t imagine having to drive everywhere. And if the comment suggesting grocery shops more than 2 blocks away is the norm, I don’t know what I’d do! I’ve never had to walk more than 15minutes for the nearest supermarket, and I don’t think I’ve ever lived more than 5 minutes from a corner shop (where I could buy bread, cheese, milk, eggs, booze, snacks, etc.) Granted that comes from living in and around big cities, but even in the sticks I think there tend to be easily accessible corner shops about.
Downtown pedestrian malls can work, but they can also go terribly wrong. Closing streets has destroyed dozens of previously-thriving retail districts. It can work if you have sufficient downtown tourism and/or a really really thriving downtown residential scene. Basically you are telling suburbanites that they are not welcome, so you really need a solid source of foot traffic that doesn’t depend on the suburbanite market.
In other words, the bigger your city, the more centralized your city, and the better your public transit, the better a pedestrian mall is going to work. Mid-sized cities are taking a risk, and small cities should give up. The returns are not necessarily worth it either.
It’s better in almost all cases to use traffic calming to slow the vehicular traffic down and leave the streets open to cars. Any city that has experienced significant sprawl is better off not experimenting with pedestrian malls.
In this theoretical world, it’s unclear what you’re accomplishing by banning privately-owned cars, because you still have cars going through the area. You’re still going to need roads, and the pedestrians are still going to have to negotiate sharing the road with vehicles. You’ll still need parking, because demand is not going to be steady and the driverless car is not going to magically have a new fare always waiting 100% of the time. There will be peak hours and off hours, with supply geared mainly toward provision in the peak hours with the cars parked somewhere the rest of the day.
You’re telling anyone who already owns a vehicle that they will need to pay out extra money for a cab unnecessarily, which will make a huge number of them stay home or send them to the suburban mall. What is the advantage you’re gaining, and how does it reimburse the store owners for the loss of clientele?
Not to harp on about this (even though I am), Brisbane is geographically speaking the third largest city in the world (1140 km square). I stress geographically, obv, as the population doesn’t come anywhere near other major urban centres, at around 2 million.
My point is that few cities have as much sprawl as this one, yet as I said, we have quite a few pedestrian only malls (three of them in the heart of the city: Queen St, Brunswick St, and Chinatown), all of which have a steady flow of people, including people from the suburbs. And our public transport system is middling quality at best.
Re driverless cars: my personal jury is still out, although I like the idea solely because like Headologist, I don’t drive 🙂
I suppose that I’m also seeing this from the point of view of the non-driver (I dislike driving, and I especially loathe driving around and around looking for a legal place to park – and keeping an individual car is expensive). I also happen to be accustomed to what I suppose is a pretty good public transport network, with bus routes running about 100m away and urban rail stations about 400m and 700m away so all well within even a slow 10-minute walk (same distance as the local shops). I’ve never experienced the kind of scale and distances that are probably typical for many people in a different style of urban environment in the US.
I still think that even though there would need to be enough vehicles available to meet peak-hour demand (bearing in mind that many of them could be bus-sized, with computer-optimised routes for greater passenger density) there would surely be fewer than there are currently private cars a majority of which are carrying only one person at any given time.
If they were fewer in number (and so roadways could be narrower and pavements wider) and they were of course programmed to observe speed restrictions and pedestrian crossings, there has to be at least some potential for improvement of urban living conditions … :-\
Coming from an environment where people are generally pretty pro-public transport already, if our public transport had an even more ubiquitous network and was even more frequent, and ran even more often and extensively at night too, I reckon even more people wouldn’t bother having their own car.
I can see how this could be a different kettle of fish under different circumstances, though, and possibly harder to change.
I’m viewing this as an urban planner. Pedestrian malls can work, but they need to be sized appropriately, located appropriately, and supplied with steady foot traffic that doesn’t draw much or at all from the suburbs. Louisville has experimented with pedestrian malls. One worked, and one destroyed 4th Street. The observation that some pedestrian malls exist is self-selection bias: you’re only seeing the survivors of a process that took place mainly in the 1970s, of which only a few did survive. The many that didn’t make it are not in your sample.
It’s impossible to measure sprawl by just the square mileage of a city, because “city” means “area within the city limits” and nothing else. If a city has not annexed its suburbs, it can have vast sprawl but the square mileage is not going to reflect that. Louisville, for instance, is 400 square miles, which is much bigger than Cincinnati which has not annexed its suburbs. Louisville hasn’t even manged to get every suburb either, just the ones that are in the same county. There are a couple of suburbs (don’t call them that to their faces though) in Indiana and other surrounding counties that make the square mileage of the urban area even larger.
Most public transport systems lose money hand over fist, and require deep subsidies. Some municipalities are more willing to make up the shortfall than others. America in aggregate is not very willing, although we are very willing to deeply subsidize car ownership. That culture needs to change, and isn’t really changing.
As a case study, here is how Louisville’s experiment with pedestrian malls worked.
4th Street was a popular shopping district, but it was experiencing a decline as the suburban malls took over. Louisville closed several blocks to car traffic. The district instantly crashed. Downtown doesn’t have the residential reserve to support a shopping district by itself, and suburbanites preferred to just drive to a suburban mall to shop rather than park 2 blocks away and walk in and still have to deal with rain and snow.
Louisville spent literally decades trying to revive 4th Street. The southern block was opened to traffic and has slowly recovered with intensive attention. The northern block was converted to first a downtown indoor mall, then to 4th Street Live, which is a pedestrian mall that succeeded. It is only 1 block long, is half covered to protect people from rain, is closest to the convention center, and it’s privately managed by a company that monetizes the space aggressively. The central block was only re-opened to traffic recently, and it is still kind of a blight. It has a bizarre number of wig shops and several empty storefronts. There is a big apartment complex with first-floor retail going in on the corner, though, which we hope will be a huge step toward revitalizing this block.
@PoM, I’m assuming – hopefully correctly – that the following comment was addressed to me, unless you’re talking to wwth? In which case I apologise.
For myself, I wasn’t simply stating that pedestrian malls exist. That would be a smart-ass and basically stupid response. I was responding to two of your points:
My point was that some pedestrian malls in CBD areas do in fact get significant suburbanite traffic, and that this can happen in cities with significant urban sprawl, which Brisbane has. Urban sprawl has been a significant issue here for at least a decade, according to geographers and town planners.
The intent was not to dismiss what you said, and I respect that you obviously have expertise in this area that I don’t. It was to perhaps qualify. Again, if you weren’t talking to me, sincere apologies.
ETA: just saw your comment on 4th St in Louisville. Interesting details
:-s adding pedestrian malls to the (long) list of things I’ve never experienced (unless you count some tiny city-centre pedestrian precincts consisting of a handful of streets that are mostly too narrow to get anything bigger than a Mini along anyway, or a couple of covered shopping centres that have massive car-parks attached to them and are located far from city centres). I’m probably not even visualising the US version accurately, now that they’ve been mentioned, so I can only think that the differences between what can work in different contexts are probably even greater than I imagined!
I don’t mean to get ‘splainy, although I see that I have, and I apologize for that. I wouldn’t call myself an expert; this is my field now, but I’ve been working in it less than two years. City planning sounds more glamorous than it is, but I enjoy it.
Louisville recently won Streetsblog’s Golden Crater award for our postindustrial surface parking nightmare in Sobro:
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/08/your-2016-parking-madness-champion-is-louisville/
Not exactly a coveted title. There is a lot of pressure here to reduce surface parking, which would require reducing reliance on cars. The dirty reality is that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and everyone knows it. When it does, it will be for reasons unrelated to anything the city does. The city has tried everything, and the cars still come. When they are forcibly excluded, business suffers.
There is what I think could be described as a ‘pedestrian mall’ near me, in Stratford upon Avon. It is a really lovely one with great shops and great Tudor buildings along it. It always just seems a relatively busy yet comfortable place in the centre of the town.
Heck, the most important structure there of course is Shakespeare’s Birthplace!
What about “pedestrian malls” in cities where suburbans can get to the city by public transportation?
Very large parts of our inner city consists of pedestrian malls, if I understand the term correctly. Granted, this is Sweden and not the US.
I live in the greater Los Angeles county/Orange county region of California. Right on the border of those counties to be specific, and in the last few years even our public buses have cut down routes in order to continue operating at all (even the modest increases in fares have not been able to fully counter the decrease in ridership); we have some light rail but the nearest station is 15 minutes by car from my house, and is limited to 7 (I think) lines which go to various sections of Los Angeles county that are still relatively close to the city center. Suburban and even to some degree urban Southern California was planned and designed with automobile drivers in mind – almost exclusively with car drivers in mind. Our corner stores are largely liquor stores with maybe an aisle devoted to bread/snacks/pet food which is minuscule when you consider the next aisle over is devoted entirely to candy. Housing here is not designed for maximum population density compared to other population centers, is expensive as all get out (I’m lucky to own, and grateful – as much as one can be for familial deaths – the chance circumstances that have allowed me to do so.) while affordable/low income housing was recently declared too expensive to build more of by our governor, something that undoubtedly pleased the many NIMBYs (not in my backyard) who also loathe the idea of creating additional homeless shelters even though the civic center where the OC county government is based is overwhelmed with full-time 24 hour homeless encampments – tents and everything – because of the massive homeless population we have in the region. Many people live in their cars, the last big thing they own, parking in Walmart parking lots where local police usually do not hassle them provided they aren’t doing drugs or committing crimes in the shopping center businesses. Simply sleeping or hanging out in a car minding your own business isn’t something the police consider a jail-worthy offense, plus many of them have compassion for those in such circumstances – unlike others who are more concerned about their ocean or panoramic city skyline views being protected, their property values all-important.
Meanwhile the state has been working to set the highest standards for air quality and reducing emissions, encouraging residents in various ways to buy cars that get more miles using less gas, hybrid vehicles, fully electric ones…all of which have a limited number of ‘early adopters’ so the costs are extremely high, out of reach for most. It doesn’t seem like our state government is all that interested in expanding public transportation on a more affordable basis, given the driverless cars and hybrid/electric vehicles that are being pushed while light rail and other mass transport options are not.
I loved living in the smallish European Capital where I lived for a year. You could get anywhere easily, cheaply, although not late at night and not when the workers were on strike.
I’m not complaining about the strikes, just showing that a) all wasn’t necessarily good and b) this city was still walkable without the transit, at least where I needed to go (I have some new mobility issues nowadays, making me reconsider a lot of things)
The place where I returned to in the US was walkable. The place where I live now is not. Today, I could easily get to a couple of restaurants, one chinese, one italian, and a liquor store. And I live in a really privileged, high income, ‘our taxes’ kind of place. The fact that I can reach these places on foot, c. 15 min. is not designed, just accidental.
This whole American Life is unsustainable.
I live in one of the most racist cities in the country. Sometimes it seems everyone is trying to claim that prize, but I’m pretty sure I’m close, both historically and present day.
Racism is the foundation of every part of our public transportation landscape. It forms the basis of resistance to expansion of our public transportation.
(White) people here are aghast when I rode the bus 10 or so stops down a major thoroughfare when I had my car serviced! They think I should have rented a car!
It also affects any idea of any kind of “pedestrian mall” and probably does other places. Lots of white people here think downtown is a dystopian hell where they will die if they enter. I’m not joking. I heard a policeman who works public transport on weekends refer to paid passengers as “the soul train.” It’s ugly, the people who espouse these sentiments feel they are ‘good americans.’
I should stop, because I know I’ve gone on too long, but realize, those of you in other countries, those of you in other cities in the nation, this is where a lot of us live, those of us stuck in “Trump’s America.”
@IP
A pedestrian mall is an open-air, outdoor shopping district with rights-of-way that were once open to vehicular traffic but are now closed so that only pedestrians and sometimes cyclists are allowed to use the road. It is therefore distinct from a shopping district that was never open to cars. It’s also distinct from a bazaar with temporary structures; a pedestrian mall is lined with brick-and-mortar stores rather than tents or stalls.
@PoM
Oh, okay. I didn’t know about that distinction. What practical difference does it make, though? I get that the original intent/planning matters to some extent, but in the end what does it matter whether cars were once allowed there or not?
@nparker,
*not envious of yooouuuu, no I’m nooooot…* 😀
@PoM,
Thanks for the details re Louisville. Wow. I see what you mean.
I didn’t think you were being ‘splainy, actually. What bothered me was (what I saw as) the assumption that I hadn’t done my homework and/or was just being argumentative. Both those things are intellectual crimes to me, to be overly melodramatic.
And my knowledge of city planning etc. is only what I’ve gleaned from a couple of colleagues at Uni, plus informal stuff from my partner who’s been driving cabs here for 18 years.
An Indian cab driver in Brisbane – how unique! (/s)