How the automobile shapes cities for the worse

[dubu]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

With the move towards EV’s that has been lauded by environmentalists, the irony is that the car isn’t going anywhere.

In fact, while before you could drive a car and feel bad that you are belching emissions into the atmosphere, that changes with EV’s. People can now drive guilt free.

So in a sense, it’s great for the environment but a major setback for the effort to reduce car usage.

it depends on the location. everyone in mexico isnt going to be driving EV's. even over here in oregon, idaho ect

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

The car didn't force it, but it would never have happened hadn't private cars become ubiquitous. We need to recognize the extreme damage done to our urban environments just because everyone wants to drive a mechanical device weighing a ton or more just to pick up a shitty drive thru coffee. Would the Middle East be the shitshow that it is if our economy wasn't so dependent on fossil fuels?

Imagine, for a moment, what the world would be like with private automobile ownership severely curtailed (or at least, the driving thereof).

I don't really follow this. The problem is politicians making bad decisions and the solution is to elect politicians to make better decisions. Nobody begged U.S. mayors in the 1950s to demolish neighborhoods and build massive highways through the heart of the cities. Many/most people at the time thought the idea was batshit crazy. And they were right.

[SkahHigh]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I don't really follow this. The problem is politicians making bad decisions and the solution is to elect politicians to make better decisions. Nobody begged U.S. mayors in the 1950s to demolish neighborhoods and build massive highways through the heart of the cities. Many/most people at the time thought the idea was batshit crazy. And they were right.

These politicians did it because there was demand for it. That demand being easier access to suburbia.

Rarely do politicians do such drastic things without having significant public support behind it.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

The car didn't force it, but it would never have happened hadn't private cars become ubiquitous. We need to recognize the extreme damage done to our urban environments just because everyone wants to drive a mechanical device weighing a ton or more just to pick up a shitty drive thru coffee. Would the Middle East be the shitshow that it is if our economy wasn't so dependent on fossil fuels?

Imagine, for a moment, what the world would be like with private automobile ownership severely curtailed (or at least, the driving thereof).

For the vast majority of the global population, there's no realistic alternative to a car. I would be trapped without one where i live. It's not a matter of want but necessity. Again, it was short sightedness on local planners' part to allow seas of surface lots and wasteful drive-thrus. People have cars in Manhattan but you don't see that crap there.

Also with research and develop into alternative fuels and technologies such as EV's.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by SkahHigh

These politicians did it because there was demand for it. That demand being easier access to suburbia.

Rarely do politicians do such drastic things without having significant public support behind it.

The mayors did it because they wanted free money from the federal government. There could not have been demand for something that didn't exist.

Also, suburbanites aren't constituencies of inner-city mayors. Why would mayors acquiesce to the demands of people that don't/can't vote for them?

[SkahHigh]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The mayors did it because they wanted free money from the federal government. There could not have been demand for something that didn't exist.

Also, suburbanites aren't constituencies of inner-city mayors. Why would mayors acquiesce to the demands of people that don't/can't vote for them?

I'm not talking only about mayors. There were senators, lawmakers, county officials pushing for all these expansions. Not just at the municipal level.

Racial motives were also behind these policies as you probably know.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by badrunner

Don't blame cars for your ugly suburbs and uglier houses. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Canadian auto oriented suburbs gets it all wrong on every level.

They're generally much more environmentally sound and sustainable than U.S. suburbs. But yeah, many look like they got hit with the ugly stick. The GTA has some amazingly bleak suburban landscapes.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The problem is politicians making bad decisions and the solution is to elect politicians to make better decisions. Nobody begged U.S. mayors in the 1950s to demolish neighborhoods and build massive highways through the heart of the cities. Many/most people at the time thought the idea was batshit crazy. And they were right.

I think most politicians and planners believed that urban renewal was the right thing to do. Read planning-policy books from that era, and there's a pretty solid consensus that "blight removal" was akin to removing cancerous growth in a human.

I read a 1970's-era book about the Lodge Freeway (for those unfamiliar with Detroit, a freeway connecting downtown to the affluent NW suburbs) and there was a bit of controversy as it headed through (at the time) upper middle class Jewish and WASP areas of NW Detroit (hence the deep trench alignment in NW Detroit, as opposed to "normal" freeway layout) but it seems that most interest groups supported freeway expansion and blight removal.

[Doady]

I think the main effect of car dependence can be seen in commercial areas: offices and retail, much more than in residential areas. The suburbs can build high-rises with all parking hidden underground or houses with garages along alleyways in the back, no problem. It's the surface parking surrounding malls and power centres and office buildings and that have ravaged historic downtowns across the US such as Little Rock that are harder to fix without a serious commitment to getting people out of their cars, including a serious investment in transit. The lower car dependence in Canada compared to the US may not be so obvious when looking at the design of houses in the suburbs, but it can definitely be seen in the amount of surface parking and parking garages in the inner cities. And unlike snout houses, the inner cities being taken over by parking lots and parking garages is much more than just an aesthetic problem.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

I think most politicians and planners believed that urban renewal was the right thing to do. Read planning-policy books from that era, and there's a pretty solid consensus that "blight removal" was akin to removing cancerous growth in a human.

I read a 1970's-era book about the Lodge Freeway (for those unfamiliar with Detroit, a freeway connecting downtown to the affluent NW suburbs) and there was a bit of controversy as it headed through (at the time) upper middle class Jewish and WASP areas of NW Detroit (hence the deep trench alignment in NW Detroit, as opposed to "normal" freeway layout) but it seems that most interest groups supported freeway expansion and blight removal.

Slum clearing became the political language used to sell the idea to skeptical urban dwellers, but that was later on. The idea was unpopular among city dwellers in the beginning, but mayors wanted in on the free money (and jobs) from the feds that were being poured into rural areas to build the interstate highway system. In fact, Eisenhower himself was against it:

[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way… [He] was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored.

https://seattletransitblog.com/2012/...hrough-cities/

[MonkeyRonin]

The problem isn't the automobile itself; the problem is auto-centric planning. There's also (as evidenced by the ugliness seen in the first post) the wider problem of late-20th century decline in aesthetic standards which isn't strictly related to cars.

Pre-automobile cities are probably the pinnacle of urbanity - and for that reason their preservation is essential - but the reality is that cars aren't going anywhere now, and they serve a pretty vital role for transportation of goods and people. Rather than wishing they were never invented, let's instead consider ways that they can be better incorporated into the urban fabric, while also giving residents the ability to get around the city by multiple other means of transportation.

I think Japanese cities can teach us some useful lessons on how the automobile can be incorporated into modern cities without having them overwhelm or detract from their urbanity. Most newer housing has off-street parking, parkades & underground parking are common, expressways weave through cities - yet they're still highly urban, and dense enough to be walkable and support high-quality transit service. They're car-friendly without being auto-centric.



https://www.trendir.com/futuristic-o...nspired-tok-1/


https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-da...-54150983.html

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by mhays

With an alley, sure. Otherwise you're simply turning half your yard into a driveway the length of your property.

Rear garages with a shared driveway between the houses are pretty common in streetcar suburban Toronto. Like this: https://goo.gl/maps/iprK9UF9NYnK23Yg7

Bringing it back to my post above, stuff like this is a good way to accommodate cars in a way that isn't ugly or detrimental to the neighbourhood's urbanity.

Heck, I'm even fine with the early post-war era's small street-fronting side garages: https://goo.gl/maps/xYEQqRPpbwsSWASD8
And of course, garages at the bottom don't have to be bad either: https://goo.gl/maps/MhvmQdL6XHYBLYww7

[dubu]

japan and the us.. the us is big and spread out, japan is small and every inch is used for living. its not the car, its more the land.

[MolsonExport]

The USA/Canada are big and every inch is used for the car.

yeehaaww

someredneck'scamera

[dubu]

we can only go forward, we arent rich enough to make a redneck country again. old fashion is better instead of redneck. i was just making a joke.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I don't really follow this. The problem is politicians making bad decisions and the solution is to elect politicians to make better decisions. Nobody begged U.S. mayors in the 1950s to demolish neighborhoods and build massive highways through the heart of the cities. Many/most people at the time thought the idea was batshit crazy. And they were right.

Well nobody with a real say gave a fuck, and the politicians reflected that. Most still dont give a fuck.

[memph]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

With the move towards EV’s that has been lauded by environmentalists, the irony is that the car isn’t going anywhere.

In fact, while before you could drive a car and feel bad that you are belching emissions into the atmosphere, that changes with EV’s. People can now drive guilt free.

So in a sense, it’s great for the environment but a major setback for the effort to reduce car usage.

Who knows. Maybe if there's a marginal cost to car usage people will try to use cars more efficiently and maybe even bike/walk if the distance is short?

But more significantly, it will greatly reduce the need for parking, so no more garages/snout houses, driveways, parking lots, narrower roads, reduced front setbacks, etc.

[MolsonExport]

What to do about America’s killer cars (Economist)

THE NEXT time you are stuck in traffic, look around you. Not at the cars, but the passengers. If you are in America, the chances are that one in 75 of them will be killed by a car—most of those by someone else’s car. Wherever you may be, the folk cocooned in a giant SUV or pickup truck are likelier to survive a collision with another vehicle. But the weight of their machines has a cost, because it makes the roads more dangerous for everyone else. The Economist has found that, for every life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen lives are lost in smaller vehicles. This makes traffic jams an ethics class on wheels.

Each year cars kill roughly 40,000 people in America—and not just because it is a big place where people love to drive. The country’s roads are nearly twice as dangerous per mile driven as those in the rest of the rich world. Deaths there involving cars have increased over the past decade, despite the introduction of technology meant to make driving safer.

Weight is to blame. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, we found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest vehicles kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The situation is getting worse. In 2023, 31% of new cars in America weighed over 5,000lb (2.27 tonnes), compared with 22% in 2018. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Although a typical car is 25% lighter in Europe and 40% lighter in Japan, electrification will add weight there too, exacerbating the gap between the heaviest vehicles and the lightest. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin, because of the battery that moves all those lithium ions from cathode to anode.

This poses a giant collective-action problem. Individually, it is rational for people to buy bigger cars. As Tony Soprano once said to his son A.J. when discussing SUVs, “So you want to be the sucker in a regular car who gets decapitated?” Yet the sum of those decisions is much more lethal roads, as well as more expensive car insurance.

[JManc]

Meanwhile, the market wants small basic practical trucks like my 1997 Ford Ranger but federal regulations (esp. fuel economy) won't allow for them so it disincentivizes production of smaller vehicles because of the weight per fuel economy ratio; it's easier to meet federal standards on heavier vehicles than lighter ones. And on the same token, governments are pushing hard and fast for EV's which are not really ready for prime time as the battery tech is still pretty early in its developments stages which means they add a lot of weight and offer negligible mileage differences compared to ICE vehicles.

[muppet]

There's something to be said too about the requirement by law of a minimum of parking lots per resident (that now outpaces housing per sq ft). This means even when the architects, residents, market and often councillors would prefer density, they can't and have to build islanded buildings even when denser:

https://commonedge.org/why-does-amer...ousing-people/

In many parts of the world it operates a maximum allowed per household, that's often below the US minimum. For example in my city it starts at one space allowed for a 3 bed property, and no need to allocate if not. Thus if it's a tower block of 2 beds, no need for any parking, or for a business or skyscraper.


And don't forget almost all European urban areas were equally blighted in the postwar years by thinking car is king. Major cities recovering from razed centres rebuilt with a hard on for Courbousier -however, the urban planners were later allowed to correct their mistakes, at profit.