Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-ston...

Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.

Part of the problem with this is that it's so expensive that it cuts into the developers budget leading to less housing being built in medium density areas and larger/taller buildings so to keep the margins up.

Even if you imagine a magic shrinking situation where a car could be shrunk down and put in your pocket like a pokéball there's still the issue that roads in cities don't have the throughput to be able to move all those cars effectively.

It would be like a really big car that could fit lots of people. You could then put it on tracks so it had its own right-of-way or even underground.

Oh well, one day we'll figure it out. I'm sure instead what we should be doing is expanding our highways and building more parking lots. It'll fix the problem one day I'm sure of it!

Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.

Where it's a problem is those locations where people such as the Koch brothers [1] invested 50 years (1970 - present) and tens of millions of dollars to bend both public opinion and state and city representatives against public transport.

It didn't take much to have the land of the free muttering in lock step about freedumb's, liberty, and their right to roll coal.

From a distance it was like watching lemmings march over a cliff [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvQ-uEP_w7A

And yet, they have many many cars.

and this is what i dislike about discourse about public transport.

It is woefully inadequate in the majority of the US. Until the day it is fixed, car will always be a superior mode of transport, but then if car is so often used, there's no public incentive to build out more PT.

And by now, the suburban sprawl has made it such that building out the necessary PT with sufficient quantity and quality to replace cars is prohibitively expensive.

The best solution, imho, is a fleet of auto-driving cars that do not need to be parked, but is available at one's beck and call. Think uber, but is available 24/7 on demand.

Infrastructure is built upon intentional decisions with agendas, not following laws of nature or something.

Please, tell us one country in the world that doesn't need cars.

Many, may be less dependent on cars than the U.S. . But no country is independent of cars. Using such hyperbole doesn't help the conversions. It just deepens the trenches.

That's not the same kind of scheduling. You can miss a bus, and be forced to wait for the next one (which will at 15 minutes minimum), but your car departs exactly when you're ready to leave whenever that is. After that, then you add the 15-30 minutes drive time (or more for a bus, if it's not an express bus and makes intermediate stops or if it takes an indirect route for your itinerary). This is so obvious I'm surprised I have to point it out.

On the rare occasions you have more stuff than you can carry, you can just pay for delivery. It's far cheaper than the ongoing total-cost-of-ownership of a car.

aka, you've just qualified your use of public transport with the condition that you would not ever need to wait more than 3-5mins. What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?

In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.

>In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

Right, because the US is broken and doesn't know how to do this stuff properly. It's like complaining how Eritrea isn't able to provide efficient public transit.

So you don't want to live somewhere near forests or lakes. Somewhere, where is still some for of nature present. You only want to live downtown in a major city. Let me guess, you don't have children. Because many people change their opinion about that when they become parents.

Not just more expensive, but enormously more expensive.

The aesthetic priorities of a video game probably don't map well to real life.

Not sure if that falls within the purview of enormously more expensive.

https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-parking-garage

It's obviously not that simple, because the US isn't a place where no one wants a car but everyone is somehow forced into getting one. I wouldn't live in a residential building with no space a car, and I'm not alone. I'd imagine that most buildings like that just create an externality, where the residents use parking elsewhere.

Even in cheap city, urban monthly covered parking is around $150.

> There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities

There's a lot wrong with cars in cities. They choke up the streets with traffic congestion and the sheer geometry problem of them means that it's impossible for even a small fraction of people to get around via cars in a large dense city like NYC.

For parking this solution is public transit, and in many cities in USA and Europe it fairs rather badly. Bus systems are often underfunded and cities quite often settle for a minimal viable system, a system so dismal that it only marginally reduces parking proliferation.

A policy of underground parking—being infinitely more expensive—will realistically yield an even worse outcome than the public transit policies of most cities today.

This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands, but the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct. In many other places, it is in fact possible to achieve these outcomes through state power.

But now the trains have been privatized, the ticket prices jacked up, and gas taxes are absolutely bonkers right now. If we’re lucky, maybe the trains can be brought back into more direct government control in the next decade but I doubt it.

Good public transportation and city design is only enforceable through laws on the books. Dutch city planning in some ways is non-negotiable, but very fungible in others. We must stay vigilant if we want to see our small corner of the world continue to flourish and be a beacon of hope to North American and other western societies.

While your assertion about a lack of actual representative democracy may have truth to it, in my view, most Americans hate public transit and really like cars, despite all the clear negatives that come with them (and which those people deny). There are great cities in the world that are walkable and have excellent public transit: I live in one of them myself. But in my observation, most Americans simply don't want this kind of lifestyle, and in fact don't believe it exists. So as far as car-centric planning goes, I think that Americans really are getting what they vote for.

I suspect maybe part of it is a generational thing. In my circles at least a lot of my peers get actual anxiety while driving. It's certainly the most dangerous thing Americans regularly do.

No, it didn't. Hillary didn't get a majority, she got about 48%. Trump got about 46%. There was not a significant difference between the two, and roughly half the American public voted for Trump.

It's so weird how every single time I write about how roughly half the American public voted for that turd, people like you come out of the woodwork to try to insinuate that Trump was elected by some vanishingly small minority. Why is that?

are you sure you're on the right forum for you? This community generally values accuracy over flamebait.

Our local Tesco (Yeovil, Somerset, UK) had a fairly large car park, and a rather strange split level two storey thing at the periphery which seems to have been designed and built for dodgy purposes and is minimally used! Around 20 odd years ago they simply put a second storey on most of it.

You need to provide walkways anyway, so you minimally encroach on those with concrete encased steel pillars (mostly for fire retardant but handy extra section anyway). It's a pretty cheap way to nearly double your parking.

Suburbs have zoning standards that usually require more parking than required. The average big box lot has parking stalls that have never used for anything other than piling up snow.

In Boston it was the same policy until recently when they started enforcing motorcycle parking extremely strictly - basically requiring motorcycles to buy a car spot once the very few motorcycle parking spots are filled up.

I'm involved in pro-housing politics and it's just amazing how many people are like "well, ok, sure, people need a place to live and all, but let's think FIRST about where to store the automobiles. If that works out, then I guess we can build some housing".

They don't say it quite like that, but it's the general idea.

Cities should be about people first and foremost. Places for them to live and do business. Cars are pretty convenient for some things, and many people want one...fine. But base the decisions around people first and then work out spaces for the cars.

I feel like fixing zoning would at least make possible fixing the rest.

Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities. You need a really really really built out transit network to enable something close to point to point commuting in under an hour across a large city. (And traffic and parking becoming crippling things for a city are issues small cities often mostly duck by their nature of being small...)

It's a sort of "we all need to commit to changing our environment systematically for decades" problem.

These American cities are like the 600-lbs person who contemplates a lifestyle change but laments that it would be incredibly expensive to eat vegetables instead of fast food. “I need so many calories at my weight, it’s just a fact, they’re not cheaply available from that fresh stuff.”

I lived in Italy for a number of years. It is a poorer country than the United States in a lot of ways, and yet they manage this quite well.

It still comes back to zoning and parking: by allowing denser development, you can plan transit routes that serve a lot more people, some of whom don't even own an automobile.

Rome's metro area is about 4.3 million people. San Antonio's is about 2.6 million. San Antonio also has far more relaxed car-based commutes than the Bay Area or LA as a result.

If you dropped Rome's three subway lines in San Antonio you wouldn't get rid of that many car trips, especially since the city being smaller and less dense than the really big cities in the US makes the car trips that much easier in the first place.

And I'm not even talking about major cities. Where I lived in Padova, it has approximately 200K people in the same area that about 100K people occupy here in Bend, Oregon. Padova has way better transit than Bend does even if Bend is much more well to do in many ways.

The folks I know in smaller US towns simply don't have the same concerns about parking spaces as those in high-demand, high-population, central large cities. And comparing those cities to typically-small-to-medium-size Italian cities doesn't result in very actionable practical plans.

One of my best friends here got priced out and now drives in 40 minutes from a nearby town. That's bad for 1) him and his family 2) the environment 3) traffic.

If you ask people on Nextdoor, they'll probably tell you there's also a traffic crisis, but it's not true.

Population size isn't the problem, the problem is the way American cities were built. If you want public transit to work, you have to make cars extremely inconvenient, which means little or no parking (and the parking that exists is very expensive), high density, and zoning that allows all this.

This becomes really obvious when you look at where cities like Kansas City receive the most taxes vs where they spend the most: suburbs cost Kansas City huge amounts of money that the inner walkable city neighborhoods subsidize, despite the per-capita tax returns being lower in the more dense neighborhoods.

No. That is a radical change in needs and services. Cars don't need sewage treatment and fresh water delivery. Parking lots don't need school systems and health care. Just saying that a parking lot can be converted to houses ignores the radically different local and external needs of human residents as opposed to parked cars. It is akin to those who say that office buildings should "just be converted to apartments" with zero insight re the difficulties of doing so in practice.

https://bendyimby.com/2021/03/24/snow-and-financial-producti...

Something like sewers are more complicated, but the basic equation is that you're adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure and often pretty good infrastructure at that, rather than adding in kilometers of brand new infrastructure for relatively low-revenue uses.

Unlike in video games, "adding" load to infrastructure can cost more than running new lines. Everything from pipes to power lines have finite capacities. If a city sewer system is at capacity, as many are, dropping some more people into the middle (replacing a parking lot with houses) will require possibly ripping up the old sewer/water/power lines to expand them. And expanding their up/downstream connections. That can impact far far more than the local connection, often costing much more than green-field development. Imaging how much cost to open up and expand a sewer under any Manhattan street. Compare that to digging a trench through a green field out on the outskirts of town.

Yes it costs a lot in absolute terms to rip up and expand a sewer lines in Manhattan, but that doesn't mean it costs more per person being served by that infrastructure.

Density isn't the cause of high cost, it's the response to it. It's the market increasing supply in the presence of high demand. When prices are high you want more of it, not less.

Higher density enables mass transit.

Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

> build more transit

This is putting the cart before the horse. The suburbs aren't dense enough to justify a transit route and if you install one there it will just go unused.

First you have to rezone all the low density areas to allow higher density. Then you look where people are starting to build once they're allowed to and install transit routes to the places that now justify them.

This works great as long as neither has to ever change jobs to either a different location or one with a different WFH policy.

They WANTED to be in the middle of nowhere. They could have had a house 11 minutes away with good schools and access to nature, but they choose 45 to be isolated. They live in their cars.

I think if actual self-driving cars arrive, they will fuel sprawl like nothing else before. I wouldn't mind a long commute if I could sleep or work or chill out as my car drove me to work.

Everyone has different preferences and we should be free to fulfill them.

Land is important. I want a big garden and lots of space between me and my neighbors. I want quiet nights and a dark sky.

I could never afford this near a city, but once you drive thirty to sixty minutes, there are a lot of options.

To each their own.

I've been ready to buy a house for few years, but I've realized I'm no longer happy with the whole package. I want to realistically be able to walk or bike to get a dinner, coffee, or groceries. Yet, city centers (in the south for sure) tend to offer the most dangerous roads for doing this, and unhealthy environment, and poor social atmosphere.

I'm sensing that there are more people on the sidelines (who have remove jobs, after all) who are ready to buy into better neighborhoods. These people may not be willing to give up their cars, but there is negotiating space, and it is relevant that these are people who have economic clout to force the issue.

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/9/5883823/its-not-just-hipsters-o...

Worse, this is really just for the 20-30s crowd or childless crowd. As soon as you have kid(s), you’ll probably find this unsuitable (school quality/location, 3 floor townhouse design, etc). If you went to college and grad school and then moved out there, you might only have 5 years of this…

For the better schools in a more solidly middle class area, one easily ends up in a suburb. And if one desires a house less than 20yrs old, one learns about unknown communities formerly believed to be in remote reaches beyond the boundaries of known civilization… (I jest but they are way out from the city center!)

And remote jobs aren’t a panacea. If one has kids in school, they can’t just uproot their family and move to a rural mountain town across the country on a whim.

I’ve also always been vexed that I can’t live near where I work. Aside from years of long commutes, the distance caused me to largely miss out on after-hours social events. Almost felt like a foreigner next to the people who lived closer.

In reality in the UK every patch of open space, including pavements (sidewalks) become car storage facilities. housing estates with 4 bed houses with just 1 car parking space (plus a garage which nobody users to store a car) end up with 1 or 2 cars parked on the pavement in addition to the drive, houses in towns converted to HMOs (house of multiple occupancy, because professionals can't really afford a 1 bed flat in the UK) with 4 adults in mean 4 cars parked on the roads.

I've heard that UK zoning and land use is perhaps even worse than the US.

Having 3 or 4 adults in a 4 bed house is even more common once you include 20-something kids who live with their parents due to the cost of housing.

The cost of housing is nothing to do with the number of car parking spaces provided. If you assume the typical 2 adult 2 children household (the ones most likely to be in those 3/4 bed new build houses), where 55% have at least 2 cars -- at that includes London where car ownership is lower, having a single driveway is a major problem.

As it would be in Australia. But not 4 families!

Hell back in 2003 I lived in a 4 bed house in London which had 7 adults in it (I didn't stay there for long). That type of housing is 3 times more expensive now in relation to earnings. If you were to put that in somewhere like Mansfield you're talking at least 4 cars even if half the people commute via bus.

My spouse and I share a car. My neighbor and I probably could but not without a lot more hassle.

I agree, however once you make it the norm then people expect to have parking for free, and anyone attempting to change that would be voted out of office

With increasing numbers of children staying with their parents past education, you end up with 3 or 4 commuters per house.

Most people are too negligent/inept to safely operate them and there is genuinely no need for private vehicles if adequate infrastructure is put in place.

More people die due to automobiles every year than from cigarette induced cancer, and that's without addressing the elephant in the room of misattribution to second hand smoke that which is actually/more reasonably explained by chronic car emission exposure (take a look at that stuff, it's insane).

We don't actually need cars, people just Want them too kuch to do the right things to protect our children.

There IS more space in the united states, believe it or not.

My friend (working in biology research) lived in England for a few years, and had 2+ hour commute by public transport. He was married, so both he and his wife had to find the jobs, and one of them had to end up with the large commute...

Also, not all space is equal: even in the US, well-connected space with lots of amenities like the downtowns of cities is not infinite.

The total cost of a housing unit with parking wouldn't be be more than it is now because the cost of constructing a housing unit with parking wouldn't be more than it is now. It would just cause units without parking to become available.

Which would tend to increase housing availability, which would tend to lower prices including for units with parking. Because the people who want the parking spaces wouldn't have to bid against people who just want housing and don't need parking.

So they're tearing down shopping centers, movie theaters, and grocery stores just so they can build apartments with parking. I have no idea where the people living nearby that don't have cars will buy food, but at least the new luxury apartments will have parking.

Out in the real world, as we have constructed it, this is (sadly) pretty reasonable.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If you limit the market for an apartment to people who are willing to waste an extra hour to make bus transfers and/or those who are willing to risk their lives cycling on deadly stroads, you're going to have a much smaller pool of potential renters.

Perhaps that's the main problem. If we were more content to share them they'd be far less of a need for so much parking space (and possibly even road space). I haven't owned a car in 15 years, at least partly because I've been happy to accept there's generally one available within the household to use when I need it.

E.g., NIMBYism

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...

The solution is not as simple as "Just stop electing NIMBYs!" because NIMBYism is a Nash equilibrium.

Letting land owners build on land they already own with fewer restrictions solves this problem. If it's a matter of aesthetics or "neighborhood character" and not a matter of habitability as defined by the housing code, then why should the wants of whoever owns land that happens to be nearby factor in?

Absolute nonsense.

I think 'realistic parking' should probably be an option, like you said some people want the 'classic' sim-city experience and modeling. I'd hate to drive those people away from the 'cities' series, as it just seems to be sim-city without the EA enshittification.

I think it could be really interesting to allow users to try to build less car focused cities within the game. To simulate concepts like Barcelona's 'superblocks', to plan bikelanes or golfcart-focused communities like 'the villages'.

Generally the devs of 'cities' seem like they are interested in many concepts (there are sooooo many dlc for skylines) .. hopefully this one bubbles up.

Apparently in the sequel buildings actually have parking, and the cars sit in the parking lot. Some citizens such as older ones prefer to drive.

Traffic was modeled using the typical civil engineer math, rather than simulated one by one.

Moving to simulating actual trips made for very poor simulation performance

There is a also a DLC addon where you can have walkable cities. It is pretty tricky to get just right.

All the new HEBs (Texas grocery store) that I've seen are built above their parking garages with a smaller amount of parking at store level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-E-B

The REAL solution is going to look way more like Azimov's Caves of Steel style city.

  * High speed people mover beltway / sidewalks
  * No cost access to this transit
  * A Theme Park like utility corridor system

SimCity: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/simcity/e/...

Real Stadium: https://i.imgur.com/KwT1T53.png

There is a tacit assumption in your statement. Of course you don't need vast parking lots around stadiums, and there are plenty of real-world sports arenas that don't have those (some examples [1][2][3]). The parking that there is is structural, and most people simply use public transit to reach these places, which are often located in moderately densely built areas. So, allow me to restate your claim, with a different assumption:

Of course you need great mass transit connections to a stadium, how else would people reach it?

Edit: But yes, people also don't have a good intuition on how much space cars actually waste in bulk. For example, many people don't seem to realize how much space it saves on roadways if 50 people sit in a bus or or tram or train rather than in 30 or 40 cars. Indeed, any rational motorist should be enthusiastically in favor of any project that makes public transit more attractive or accessible, purely for selfish reasons!

---

[1] Nokia Arena in Tampere https://goo.gl/maps/3WmAxfA2pCXDre8p7

[2] Helsinki Olympic Stadium https://goo.gl/maps/BQhopp5kRtTrEDR79 [under renovation in the aerial imagery]

[3] Tele2 Arena in Stockholm https://goo.gl/maps/za3y6HfRvocjfZR37

The light rail line is not so good for connecting people from their home to their place of work. It was built a long an old industrial rail corridor 40 years ago and the area around all the rail stations is still zoned as industrial.

They've since built massive expansions, which is good, although they are now nearly 4 years behind schedule on the first major leg expected to open. I'm looking forward to an lrt system that's good for more than getting quickly from one sports complex to another.

I'm also a little curious on how to compare capacities. Per wikipedia, it is only 25k for sports. 70+k for teams is common in many of the other stadiums I looked at. That said, I don't exactly know that many stadiums. Very intimidating to see how large many of these places are.

There are a few thousand parking spots in garages a few stops away on the light rail, but the whole district the stadium is in has only about 5k public parking spots overall for ALL purposes. The sensible strategy is to arrive by public transit — many of the events (both concerts and sports events) have a train ticket included in the price of admission, run extra trains for the events, (including extra security in the case of soccer games), and light rail drops you less than 100m from the entrance of the stadium.

If you absolutely need to arrive by car, either come early or pick a garage elsewhere in the city, and take public transit to the stadium.

If you're absolutely allergic to public transit, you could probably get a Taxi, Uber, or friend to drop you off.

For sports events, some of the away fans travel in hired buses which will drop them off at the stadium, wait at some special lot (considerably more space efficient than the equivalent in cars, and can be further away), and pick them up again after the game.

Not assuming that, it's not that obvious how big parking needs to be.

If you are about to sit for few hours and shove hotdogs + sugary drinks down your throat the 10 minute walk will do you good.

I like the author's politics and agree with her sentiments. But if the author of this thing thinks she can run a business on Main Street without parking, by all means, she should go and do that. It gives me "I'm going to release my app for low end Android devices" energy. People who spend money, especially on the alcohol and jewelry on which Main St thrives, really fucking love to drive.

The most authentic system to me in Sim City was starting in debt, which I understand few players do. Then, it makes most sense to pause time and spend 100% of your money on day one, because services can be paid in deficit but improvements cannot. So why waste positive balance on services you can keep on with deficit spending? This strategy brings you the greatest ROI and the greatest tax base growth.

The micro of like, how many square feet of X does it take to simulate system Y... I don't know, who cares. The minmaxing people on YouTube make fascinating content re: urban design ideas, but it's not like it's grounded in reality.

In fact, many studies have shown that in reasonably structured cities, pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists. Their individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them. But it's also vital that the city center and its neighboring areas are actually places where people live, not just visit for work and shopping. There's a quote that goes something like "Americans really like to be tourists in the city they live in".

But yes, many business owners (and the sorts of politicians they tend to vote) are irrationally attached to the idea that motorists are the ones who bring in the money, and that proposals to make cities more livable and less car-dependent would be really bad for business. I'd wager that to an extent they're just trying to come up with rational sounding post-hoc reasons for their emotional attachment to cars and driving.

If they're so irrational, go and start a business with no parking! I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying that you're not appreciating the forces that make people put up with commutes and parking in the first place.

> pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists

My family and I bike everywhere. Obviously my dog in this race is more accessible cities.

I'm just being intellectually honest.

Like dude, the company that makes my e-bikes is going into receivership.

I live next to Valencia Street in San Francisco, and there was so much opposition to building new bike lanes, thoroughly vetted by experts, from cyclists themselves. I would almost call it "irrational."

They didn't even build the center lanes very far, because the center lanes from 23rd to Cesar Chavez would have reduced the way the megachurches use the center lane as free parking on Sundays.

The businesses on Valencia Street need those underage CSU revelers trucked in by Ubers. They cannot walk from a side street to Blondie's, the thing they pay for is to be dropped off in front of the door.

Someone has to deliver all that alcohol that sells! Someone has to truck the produce in gas-guzzling trucks to Rainbow. Someone's gotta gas-powered-bus the pickers to pick the produce at Rainbow.

This is my one neighborhood. You are welcome to try to start a new local business on the idea that "[poor people's] individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them." I can guarantee you will fail.

I appreciate that there are experts studying this. They are welcome to apply for civil jobs in San Francisco! They can go and win elections! I am aligned with those politics and want those outcomes, and I am not saying they are inaccurate at all. I am saying your "studies" an incomplete view on cities.

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¹ Even SF is much less dense than almost any European city of comparable size!

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...

[2]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/trackin...

The whole point is that this is illegal. Let’s make it legal again and see what happens. :)

But that's not even true, much like your assertion that businesses are kept afloat by customers who drive to them.

I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers.

I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making it mostly pedestrian space. It's incredibly nice to explore the area on foot. Our city has considered the same idea but pedestrianizing our downtown has been so controversial when it has been discussed, it hasn't come up for over a decade- mayors are scared to death to touch it.

Part of the reason is poor past civic planning would make it very expensive to correct. The main conduit through the downtown business district is also the major East-West artery of town, making the street one of those dreaded "stroads-" a street in the sense that there is heavy commercial and residential presence, resulting in a LOT of local foot traffic and stops all day long; mixed with traffic that just wants to get through downtown to somewhere else. So half of the traffic is looking for parking and the other half is running red lights to get somewhere else as fast as possible.

There have been, predictably, many incidents involving cars, pedestrians and bicycles. But not one inch moved on what's become the 800lb gorilla. I don't think a solution is even possible.

The pedestrianized portion of State Street was part of a New York state highway -- highway traffic was re-routed to be on parallel one-way streets, separated by 2 blocks, that bracket the district.

The somewhat scattered wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Commons) has some of the backstory. (I lived there in the 90s and I think it's exaggerating the downturn in those years, but whatever.)

Which is what it took to turn American cities into car based to begin with.

On the flip side, Amsterdam is great, but I felt like I was constantly dodging bicycles.

In many countries (including USA and EU) working class people are pushed out of the cities and into suburbs or satellite cities as the inner city prices are simply to high and they cannot afford rent. This is doubly true for people with kids or otherwise large families. If they still work in the city, they are simply forced to commute. Thankfully many cities have adequate public transit systems so they are not always forced to buy a second or a third car for the household (notable exception here is the Sunbelt in the USA) and move even further away to an even cheaper house to be able to afford that.

It would be a simple narrative if in place of the poor folks moving out of the city, rich folks would be moving in. But that is not the case. In many cases these houses are filled by AirBnB, short term rentals, or simply left vacant by a landlord hoping to rent at a higher price.

Most working class people that I know and commute to work by driving would love to be able to leave their car at home and commute with a bus or rail. For them driving to work saves might save them over an hour a day in commute time, time they would rather spend with their family then waiting at a bus transfer. If they could park their car at a nearby park and ride and save even more time, they would. For them, they are not commuting just fine, they are indeed very annoyed at not having a better option.

The only rich folks in the gentrification scenario are still the landlords, and honestly I don’t think they are moving to the city and complaining about too much parking. (though I admit I agree with GP that they are probably the ones that are complaining about congestion and lack of parking)

I don’t see how that’s true for most cities in the USA.

For walking, in many cases, there isn’t even a sidewalk for pedestrians to use. If there is, crossing stroads is way more difficult (large distances between crossing opportunities) and dangerous (e.g. no pedestrian islands halfway) than needed.

There's no way to escape this as my house is flanked by two stroads. I hear constant traffic sounds well into the night. I live in a beautiful old neighborhood that predates the Ford Model T. I've seen pictures of ox-driven carriages rolling by historical downtown buildings. We had a cable car that ran down one of the current stroads. My city could drastically drop car dependency if we had the will.

Whereas if I was in a car I could turn left from the 3-hotels’ lot into the lot where the shuttle is stopping in under 1/4 mile. It’s absurd when you can drive for 1/4 mile or walk for 2.

I read that no councillor had suffered at the ballot box for their pro-LTN news. Which suggests it's a noisy minority.

the street parking in front of a business is never enough for all the patrons of that business anyways, people are usually parking and then walking 1-2 blocks to get where they're going. removing the street parking in front of a business only removes the hope of finding that perfect parking space.

[0] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/91127592440641982/

[1] https://www.stlmag.com/history/pedestrian-deaths-streets-dow...

Now, I'd not recommend that we centered any serious investment making downtown less car-friendly, but mainly because downtown's fixes are way too expensive: In its current form, it's not doing well, and not trending up. Walkability could help, but walkability downtown isn't a matter of making Market street narrower, or slower: Many buildings themselves are set up to be anti-pedestrian, with huge setbacks to the street, and no retail space. Just huge office buildings nobody wants to rent. Interventions to help the city of St Louis just have to start in parts of the city that have better bones. Spend a little to make the somewhat successful parts of the city a bit more successful. Allow relatively walkable neighborhoods to become denser, bigger and more walkable, and see if people vote with their feet.

Downtown? We couldn't afford fixing it, for either cars or pedestrians.

What are the actual piece of reality that makes it impossible in US cities?

Heavy car traffic is a stable system that's actively unfriendly to pedestrian and bicycle uses. You need to slowly claw away space for bicycles and increase ridership; and then work to densify and intermix commercial and residential for things to work well.

It takes decades, and the initial steps make things worse even if the new equilibrium is better.

Your point about the stable equilibrium is correct, but there's no reason it has to take decades. If you look at pictures of cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna from not long ago, you can see how much more pedestrian-friendly they were made, and much of those changes actually happened more or less overnight.

The actual changes are pretty easy to implement. Red tape slows it down, but that's a feature of our own invention, not an inherent limitation.

As soon as you take away cars, people look for alternatives and the space is claimed by lots of uses. Bus and bicycle use goes up fast.

It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college town in Illinois and parking downtown is a nightmare, and can easily add 10 minutes to your trip time, AND it's paid. Visiting a city I'm not familiar with can add some stress too as you don't know the best parking, unlike cities you are familiar with.

NYC has problems of it's own (trains are generally reliable, but tend to have delays right when you need them), but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes, walking straight to my destination. Add in $40 for a couple cabs when I prioritize a quicker trip, and I have amazing access to my city for less than $100/week.

Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

She's considering ditching the car and moving north. Gas, maintenance, and car payments are silent killers. Most people equate them to rent and cannot imagine a life where they don't pay for their car.

Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car, but as someone who frequently drove far out of the city I was paying for the worst of both worlds.

I agree with your TCO assessment, thanks to pandemic/WFH myself and my partner were able to switch to sharing a car and we saw about 10k in annual savings.

Rents are very high in cities because there's not enough housing for everyone who wants to live there [1] not because of an assumption about car ownership.

[1] Ironically, in part because of an assumption that people will have cars, which is one limitation on how dense housing construction is allowed to be.

Look I get that I probably don’t do cars the way other people do cars, but like - ten thousand a year? I spend maybe $800 on gas in a year. What are these people doing? Buying a new set of tires every Christmas? Yearly visits to a detailing shop or something??

I mean like no offense but if you guys were spending twenty thousand dollars annually on cars… that’s on you. You don’t need to live that way. I bought my Subaru used ten years ago for $3k, and I’ve managed just fine without spend a small fortune on… whataver it is you were spending yours on.

I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.

My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)

I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.

Not really, the car doesn't evaporate on year 10. On a quick search I see 2013 Highlanders (you didn't mention a year but those are 10 years old now) selling from ~14K to ~20K. So looks like you'd get about a third of the purchase cost back when you sell it.

That's a 50K car though. If you like to spend on that, great. But it doesn't mean that owning a car has to cost that much. People who like to minimize car costs (like me) will buy a 5-8K used car and drive it forever, bringing the annualized cost down to just a few hundred dollars.

> I can easily get to $10K for one car

Certainly. Or 100K, or even more. I know someone who spends well over a million dollars a year in cars! The sky is the limit. But nobody needs to do that. If all one needs is a car for transportation, it can be had for under 1K a year.

I am simply showing that it's easy to get to that ballpark number with relatively generic car owners behavior.

Get a reasonable car for $25k-35k and your costs drop significantly. Hell, your $50k number means you chose to have a bunch of upgrades. The base MSRP is $36k, and I'm seeing dealer advertised prices of $37k near me. I have to go all the way up to the "Platinum" tier to find $50k prices.

My point to the GP was that it's trivially doable to get to 10k a year ballpark car cost without doing anything too crazy.

If you are curious, it's a hybrid XLE with AWD. I wanted the hybrid, AWD is standard here in the north east and XLE is the lowest model that comes with (fake) leather seats which we wanted due to having small kids.

Maybe if you buy a really expensive car, and you drive it all the time, and it’s really expensive to maintain / repair - I guess. But like - aren’t you choosing an expensive route, in that case? The person I was replying to made it sound like doing away with cars altogether was the reasonable option, rather than what seems like a no-brainer to me: just keep a less expensive car. I suppose that’s a luxury (ha) I can afford?

I wish the other sides of the bridge were better for bikes, too, but I'm sure they're coming with the next re-paving/maintenance of those roads.

What if you don't live near a pool? Your kids just don't learn to swim? My local pool is a 15 minute drive, but a harrowing cycle route.

    In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town.

    What if you don't live near a pool? 

Also, commuter cycling should not be harrowing. It becomes harrowing when planners don't properly invest in the infrastructure and mix modes in dangerous ways. Imagine if we did the same thing with planes and used local highways as runways. Narrow the streets to reasonable, 3m lanes and even a 2-lane road can fit a dedicated cycle lane. The streets in my california neighborhood use a horrifying 12m for only 2 travel lanes, yet still can't find room for a cycle path.

Compared to that, now every time I drive to a remote hike it blows my mind how much stuff gets done -- the distance is the same, but it's just a long-ish morning trip. You can hike for a bit, then get back home, get groceries on the way, have lunch, and have the whole evening free. And you are not limited to destinations next to the train line either!

(One thing I miss however is the ability to enter into the forest on one train station, and exit on another one. It's pretty nice when you don't have to do a loop)

These days, most of my trips are on my bike. Anything I can round trip within 50 miles round trip is fair game. My roommate made it to Cape Cod a few weekends ago, but he's very athletic.

Do you need a personal vehicle to carry a few sandwiches, some water and a first aid kit? If you are going camping can’t you rent a vehicle, how often do you realistically go camping that it justifies the cost of ownership over renting when you _truly_ need it?

If you really do need a car, that’s totally acceptable! But how many people don’t actually need it for anything other than weekend grocery shopping and work commutes? Hint: a very large portion of the population.

$10k seems suspiciously high. Maybe that's because everyone is buying overpriced pickups/SUVs? If all you want is a vehicle, you can get this[1] which the site calculates the TCO at $33,858 over 5 years, or $6.8k. I suspect that if you buy used or keep the car for longer (eg. 10-15 years, the average car age is 12.5 years in the US), you can get that number even lower.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla-hybrid/2023/le/?vehicleid...

But most Americans have a car payment; the average amount totaling over $400/mo. So in that respect, I guess 10k isn’t too far off.

Every time I hear this insane number I have a good laugh. I own 3 cars myself and my total cost of ownership is nowhere near that high combined.

"Affording" a car in Boston is stressful as hell even beyond the cost, and I wouldn't recommend it. My friends who both live and work in the city don't own cars. I ditched my car when I moved into city limits, and ride an EUC, bike, or train to work.

The suburbs would have nothing for me if I didn't have family there. But even there, a weekend pass for the commuter rail costs $10 and can take me as far as Rhode Island if I want.

Though my anecdote is pretty heavily skewed the other direction towards skaters and the types of people who own PEVs.

So, yeah, city people I know have made a deliberate (and expensive) decision to live in the city but maintain the flexibility to drive elsewhere without a lot of friction.

People naturally gravitate to lower friction. If activities like getting outside of the city/transit coverage is expensive/a pain you mostly just don't do it.

NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents don't own cars. Manhattan has the lowest car ownership rates of all the boroughs, but car owners are still the minority city-wide. (Within NYC, car ownership also skews notably towards the wealthy).

I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.

Tell that to my local Facebook & Nextdoor groups.

Even in regions like the SF Bay Area outside of San Francisco proper there is abundant parking near most homes, retail, and workplaces. Now I agree that devoting so much valuable real estate to parking is rather wasteful and we ought to eliminate some of those asphalt wastelands, but as a practical matter today it means most people don't get stressed about parking. If you tell them to get rid of their cars so that they don't have to worry about parking they're going to think you're crazy.

Are you sure this gives you a representative sample of Americans?

I'm aware that this is a squeaky wheel situation, but I asked a question on a local group about a laundromat that's getting torn down - of the (last check) 38 comments on my post, approximately 5 have to do with my question, and the rest are people worrying about parking spaces if/when a small apartment building replaces it.

Driving to those places would be 30+ minutes anyways, some of it really is just distance + gridlock

I think if we also focused on walkability for residential development, we could cut down on car use. Even though I now live in suburbia, I made sure there were a few places I could walk to before I bought my house.

A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.

The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as often, but car ownership there is in the same ballpark as most of the rest of Europe.

If you need a car for a construction job, we have autobuses like VW Sprinter or Caddy for that

This is only true if you live in an inner city bubble. Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas.