There are some very nice older suburbs, with much higher densities than would be thought of as suburban today, that provision parking for every home. The venerable alley is basically an accommodation for cars, but a much more humane one.
The Lake Vista neighborhood [0] in New Orleans nailed this as well, but sort of flipped the alley concept. Still has street access and parking for every home, but the "front" of most houses faces an alley-width, pedestrian walkway. It was always one of my favorite areas to hang out as a kid, never really understood why until now.
Nope, the article specifically addresses your point:
> consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre
Neither source just simplistically says "it's the fault of cars", both are deeply thought-out perspectives on what is really going on. It's not just cars, it's certain engineering and bureaucratic decisions that were made around cars. It's also the scale of development, i.e. governments that are set up to work with large-scale developers and are too hard for small-scale developers to deal with, and the general trend toward all-at-once top-down development, and I could go on and on. StrongTowns has successfully diagnosed the entire systemic pattern. It's not just blame-the-cars.
Check out the actual resources, don't just assume they are only the simple thing the poster had to say to make any point at all.
If anyone is interested in what's being discussed here and in Strong Towns, I'd highly recommend reading it[0]. I had been a fan of Strong Towns for a long time, but just finally read the book recently.
These are most likely two separate problems. Car based urban planning which requires large wide roads, giant carparks and 'boxey houses' due to garages can overwhelm any other aesthetically pleasing design (notably green space).
Admiring the old brick styles of the ivy leagues is simple confirmation bias due to their academic prestige.
There are plenty of beautiful Modernist buildings, it comes down to if the college is willingly to pay for it.
Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.
> Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.
I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones.
Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design.
This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing is changing, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.
But by your very logic, we also look to the past for cues to bad design. There are plenty of ugly old towns and cities in the US. Regardless, the most beautiful cities in the US: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Seattle are also some of the oldest.
> there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today
With how restrictive the building and city planning codes are, the amount of creativity is extremely limited.
Might be related to the way modern art is ugly by design. Since it became easy to create beautiful things at scale, the "art" appreciation scene moved into ugly stuff, because only sophisticated art experts can appreciate the stuff, thus separating themselves from the common rubble.
I definitely think the ugliness of modern art is related to the economics. Why invest a lot of time or thought into something, when you can convince someone to believe that those don't matter?
I like some suburbs. However, not far from downtown San Jose, within the city limits, there is some interesting tract housing developments: they have soundwall like structures surrounding these neighborhoods that are built like a maze. Once in it can be hard to find your way out without GPS to one of the few entrances/exits.
So that’s in a city, not even the maligned suburbs!
This is correct. Where this often goes wrong is that the planners don’t allow pedestrians and cyclists to take shortcuts, making driving the faster option for even short trips.
To me a place like hidden glen north is odd. It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets. This kind of development follows the thoroughfare model where smaller streets feed larger streets which feed boulevards/expressways which feed freeways. They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area. Suburbs are better designed than that.
> It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets.
I'm not sure any development built after about 1975 in my midwestern metro area isn't like this, including the sound walls if they're next to an interstate or major highway.
My neighborhood, with... oh, I dunno 150houses? At least a dozen named-and-numbered streets present in it? It has two exits. Get this: one of those can only be entered if you're going a particular direction on the road it intersects, because there's an unbroken median curb there. So it's more like 1.5 entrances.
Our neighborhood before this one? Two exits (it's bigger than this neighborhood and still developing, so I expect it'll get a third pretty soon).
Our neighborhood before that? One exit. One. technically two, but the second was marked "dead end" (it wasn't, really, but that was probably still the right thing to label it) and took you on a weird barely-developed road with no other intersecting roads, which looped you back up to the same highway the the neighborhood's other route would have put you on, so even for people who lived right by the connection to that road, leaving the normal way was faster.
The general rule seems to be: no more than one exit on any major road bounding the neighborhood. This means neighborhoods that are right next to each other can be slow to travel between on foot or by bike, without cutting through yards.
> They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area.
Some folks for whom keeping a working car around isn't a big deal, consider it a feature that their neighborhoods are hard to reach by a combination of public transit and foot. Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood. Time to sell before the market drops if you see them working on a new bus stop in walking distance of your house, they say. (seriously, this is straight from several people I know, not something I'm inventing or guessing at)
I don’t think that’s what article says. Article just keeps blathering that new neighborhoods are not “beautiful” or “nice” without describing any objective measures for what author really meant.
I do understand however what it is trying to say. My opinion is that housing development is vastly commoditized and builders wants tried and trusted designs at lowest prices and fastest speed. There is not much room for creativity and experimentation. I went to see houses build by Toll Brothers which are premium expensive builders and even their designs were regular with few bells and whistles only to show off. Lower end market basically just follows the template. This is extremely disappointing because house construction is something that lasts for so long.
It's interesting to note that Hacker News really loves Strong Towns.
I chatted with Chuck Marohn (founder and face of Strong Towns) once at an event a couple years ago, and they're quite aware that they get a lot of traffic from HN.
The strong town movement and its affiliated planning companies ruined my community. A lot of the mixed use re zoning is a pretext for opening up rural areas for heavy industry.
There is not faster to way to discredit oneself than to offer a pat, single variable explanation.
As others point out, Americans like and want to transport themselves by car. Let's accept this, work with it, and build around it instead of lusting after a minority defined Utopia.
I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".
In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport, driving as a percentage has gone down. "build it and they will come" is better suited to transport than it ever was to SaaS.
It is easy to conclude that people don't "want" to drive.
"81% of Americans agree with the sentiment that their car reflects who they are...59% consider themselves as someone who is passionate about cars, trucks, motorcycles, or other vehicles" [1]
78% of Americans personally enjoy driving moderately to greatly [2]
> Wrong.
> In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport
These are strong claims without citation. Your subsequent comments in this thread reveal a fairly extreme and inflexible viewpoint on cars which you advance through many logical fallacies (straw men, false dilemma, and hasty generalizations). In other words, I don't think you're evaluating this issue in good faith or rationally. So, I'm not going to engage beyond this comment.
The main point of my initial comment was to point out that this "walk-able utopia" goal is not shared by a great number of people and contravening both the will of the majority and the current state is an exercise in futility and thus a waste of a society's time and resources.
I gotta hand it to you, in response I searched DuckDuckGo for:
"people in los angeles love their cars"
and the top result was
"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars"
Hypothetically, if one person had to die every time you used your car (for your dogs to travel or whatever) would you stop using your car? How about if it were one person for every 1000 journeys. What if every single journey you made in your car had a very small and undeniable contribution to the deaths of people you live around, would you stop then?
"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars" is a headline meant to generate clicks, posted with no context, statistics, or discussion.
Are you a vegan? Hypothetically, how many people have to die due to the greenhouse gasses emitted due to your meat consumption? Have you ever served somebody an egg that didn't have a fully cooked yolk? Do you consume any single-use plastics? Do you use a compost toilet?
I lived in the PNW and loved that I could take a bus just about anywhere. It was a big draw for me.
If it was a hellscape dominated by 26 lane highways and hours of traffic to get anywhere like many parts of the US, I never would've bothered moving there.
This may or may not be true, and it doesn't matter because single use zoning in most American cities makes it illegal to build walkable cities. It's pretty hard to establish what Americans prefer when the alternative what they have isn't allowed.
Why should a neighbourhood consisting of single family homes not be walkable?
This is such a neighbourhood from the early 1920s not too far from where I grew up. Take a stroll through it with Street View. It is perfectly walkable.
It's not a single use zone if stores are allowed in it. The OP means that you need a car to get anything you need because the nearest store is 2 hours of walking away.
Oh, I'm also in Eastern Europe and it's similarly foreign to me. Even the new suburbs they're building here now with all identical houses, Edward Scissorhands style, have corner stores(tm) within walking distance everywhere.
Single family zoning isn't simply a car thing. I live in a small, walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood full of crunch eco-liberals, and it is entirely hostile to upzoning for reasons having nothing at all to do with cars; it's a central tool of NIMBYism.
Oh my yes: whatever height is currently built is perfect, every currently vacant lot is a prize, etc. etc.
But the GP spoke of single-use zoning, a slightly different cudgel. I understand the abstract appeal of dividing up a map into neatly-separated areas, a la SimCity, but that just doesn't accomodate real life.
San Francisco and New York, the most walkable and densely built urban areas in America, are famous for their extremely high rents. This is a function of extremely high demand for housing there.
Apparently a whole lot of Americans _don't_ want to transport themselves by car.
The U.S already did this, starting in the 40s-50s up till now, and it's horrific. The idea of building infrastructure around everyone having a massively expensive and wasteful machine to get anywhere they want as fast as possible all the time (and without any energy expenditure) makes for a hellscape. It's fine to like and own cars, but cars should be de-prioritized in planning and infrastructure considerations because it makes everything worse for everyone, including car owners. Might as well design cities around providing everyone with personal planes at this point.
Right. It's not just car dependency, and ... it's Not Just Bikes either.
It's almost a tautology to say that if you want to have a particular kind of nice neighborhood you'll have to include those uses in your planning.
I think that most people want to be able to get from A to B in comfort, and are not necessarily married to one particular mode of transport.
If the only way to get anywhere is by car, then of course people want to transport themselves by car. If you offer other competitive options, people will sometimes take those options instead.
It’s worth remembering that for a lot of “A to B” trips the change in location is kind of incidental to the actual goal of shopping, socializing, dining out, etc.
In other words you if locate a lot of “B”s close to your “A” (or vice versa) people will tend to be satisfied with slower modes like walking and biking (that also reduce the energy needed by a couple of orders of magnitude).
Well said. Another angle is the race angle. Most people advocating for lesser cars are young, healthy, rich and white. Healthy enough to not use cars and rich enough to live near work.
That is an incredibly poor take on top of a serious allegation, and sorry-not-sorry, it's clear you don't really care about poverty, racial disparities or ill health.
It takes very little empathy to realise that driving a car is a huge technical barrier compared to a wheelchair/scooter/just walking slower. There is no reason you need to be healthy to avoid car use... except one. That motorists will kill you if you don't quickly get of out their way. I've seen large parts of my local area become completely inaccessible to the less-abled because of fast roads, so can it with the "I'm thinking or the sick!". You're not.
Or to just go look at which cities are not color-coded into mansions and slums, and notice those cities are ones where the poor do not need to maintain their own expensive machinery for basic tasks. Because ... again, I don't believe I need to explain that. It's a deliberate choice you're making to not understand it.
"Healthy enough not to use cars" - man, that's a good one. I'll remember it next time my half-senile father in law has no other choice but to drive somewhere because there's no way around his car dependent neighbourhood - oh wait, that's every day.
The city around him is only built for driving, doubly so his completely car-dependent neighbourhood. He'll be doing this until he either cannot possibly pull it off, or gets in a serious accident. This is a fact of life for millions of seniors in North America, and saying "oh no they shouldn't" won't change squat.
That article is about cycling as a sport. I'd bet if you look at cycling as a method of regular transportation, it would skew heavily non-white and lower income. Owning a car is expensive.
Take a hypothetical scenario (not dissimilar to war breaking out in WW2, and not dissimilar to the 2020 global pandemic upending our lives) – where the private motor vehicle is gone.
Society (cities) would quickly re-orientate themselves so work wasn't so far away from home. So shops weren't on the outskirts of town.
Your argument is predicated on cars existing. On cars causing the problem you suggest they solve.
Cars are expensive. The old, the unhealthy, the poor -- all of these people can benefit from infrastructure that allows people to get around without using a car. Because cars are expensive.
I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities. Having lived that life for years I can’t imagine why. A lot of cities that are beautiful and attractive also have room for cars. I would even argue it is a big part of what makes those cities attractive. There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer. In cities that aren’t overbuilt, it makes it so much easier to get things done, see people, and access the outdoors. All that time saved is time to live a richer life.
A good example of a car centric city that is very attractive is Seattle from ten years ago. The city had a strong sense of community because it was composed of intimate neighborhoods mostly with single family zoning rather than mid rise boxy apartment blocks everywhere, ample green space for its population, and roads with little traffic. It is because Seattle was so attractive that people and businesses flocked to it. Now those aspects are going away as density, anti car policies, and other issues are making the overall quality of life worse.
> There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer.
If you design cities to not have alternatives to cars then of course there's no substitute. All my day-to-day trips are currently faster using a bike+train, significantly less stressful, cheaper and also much healthier. People don't generally prefer specific modes of transportation, they just want to travel quickly and conveniently. That can be achieved with any mode of transportation, yet cars are the most expensive, most polluting, loudest, lowest density and most stressful.
I just took a look at a picture of Seattle from 2011 and it looks like half the area is dedicated to car parking with huge stroads everywhere. Having to take a car to go to the shops 300m away sounds like a total nightmare. And it's not even the suburbs! If those roads had little traffic on them then that was clearly just due to the population not having caught up. Once it did of course those roads weren't going to be enough. At that point you can either bulldoze more of the city for the car and still get awful traffic or provide better alternatives...
"Car free" is a straw man that's easy to argue against, and misses the point. Rather, most urbanists call for cities that are fair to all who inhabit it, regardless of whether they are currently inside of a car. A bus that carries 50 ought to have priority over several cars that carry 1 apiece. Neighbourhoods should not be artificially embalmed in time by excessive zoning rules to only allow car-dependent architecture. People who live in a city should have an actual choice in terms of what density and transportation mode is best for them. (That definitely includes single family homes and cars). That'll obviously be different from person to person, and even more obviously that'll change over one's lifetime. So make a city liveable and navigable and interesting for those who are 8, 80 and everything in between. Make that the goal, and you'll be heading in the right direction.
> "There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer."
Very few American cities actually offers FAST point to point transit via automobiles. 50 years ago, it was probably realistic, but now automobile traffic in most American cities makes quick transportation anywhere unrealistic.
But central London is a tiny portion of London, and the slow speeds are very common for busy downtown areas of large cities. Despite excellent public transportation, 54% of London households own at least one car - not too much different from the number for Newark, NJ (60%).
> I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities. Having lived that life for years I can’t imagine why.
I for one simply don't want to pay the to own and maintain a car, preferring instead to rent one or purchase a ride (via taxi or rideshare etc) as needed.
Same here. I would only put maybe 2000 miles on a car per year. Insurance + maintenance alone would be more than I'd pay for a rental/rideshare every now and then.
Most of the complaints against density are really against medium-density cities. Those combine the worst of both worlds. They don't have enough room for cars if most people drive, but far too many people have to drive because there are not enough people to support decent public transport on most routes. Once population density starts approaching something like 10k / square km (25k / square mile) over large enough areas, urban life becomes much more attractive.
I've never been to Seattle, but it looks like a medium-density city on the map.
I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities.
Yes.
Now go look at Peter Cooper Village in NYC.[1]
"The complex is designed as two large "superblocks", independent of the grid system that characterizes the majority of Manhattan below 155th Street.It consists of two large parks, one for each part of the complex, juxtaposed with modern red brick apartment towers."
For one data point: I lived in London without a car for several years, and enjoyed it. A lot of people do. One big thing you give up in car-dependent areas is interesting walks. Everything is super-sized to accommodate vehicles, and at a human scale, it's boring. In an older city designed for people, every 10 feet there's something new to catch your eye.
There are tradeoffs, but I much preferred being able to take the train or bus and relax and zone out rather than have spend the entire trip in the vigilant state you need while driving. And while cycling, yes, you have to be vigilant, but you're getting exercise too.
I'm at a point in my life where, I probably don't want to live in the big city as much. (Funnily enough, when I was much younger I never thought I would want to.) But anyway, I'd still much prefer to live in a denser, more walkable suburb, which tend to be unfortunately hard to find and expensive in the US for reasons that are probably already all discussed in comments in this thread.
Having taken commuter trains on gray November Euro-mornings, I still prefer them to cars for commuting. Sitting in a traffic jam on a gray November Euro-morning is more depressing to me. But you’re right, I live in the center of a city. I can get by without a car just fine. On the country side this is not really an option. Whether the suburbs are well connected depends on where you are. In the end, plenty of people still commute by car, it’s just that there’s a sizeable proportion that doesn’t and it changes the feel of public space (and your own sense of options).
> But I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.
I live in Dublin. I'd rank it as pretty middling in transport by European standards. We have a decent bus network, commuter rail to the suburbs, trams that are frequent but overcrowded at rush hour, and intercity trains to the other cities in the country.
I've been here nearly a decade and have no great rush to buy a car. And there's still obvious improvement to be made. The red line needs a relief line unless work from home makes the expanse of new offices at the end of the line mostly empty, cycling lane coverage is spotty and often conflicting with buses or parking, and bike parking is lacking.
> Even famously “mass transit unfriendly” cities can be fit for a car-free lifestyle if you work at it.
I think it's such a pervasive meme that the US is bad for transit that people don't even try. I don't ever use cars (like twice in 450 days) AND I live beside one of the major transport hubs in my city (65/Folsom in Sacramento), yet I don't know where or when buses could bring me.
There is a dearth in communication.
I was in Orlando last week and the buses were great, and empty.
The sweet spot seems to be about 1920-1940.