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"we designed a huge majority of the land use of the built environment for only one modality of transportation, and now that modality is the dominant form. Checkmate atheists"
You're not exactly working with a control group here...
Horse and carriage, here in the East. The pavement's gotten better, the rights-of-way often haven't. Driving's just a lot better than cycling for most things. You can carry more stuff (and passengers), you're protected from the weather, it's harder to steal a car, you don't get tired doing it, etc. Downsides are it's bigger, takes a lot of space to park, and creates more traffic.
Fully agree, that's why I own a car. I am typing this from the waiting room at the dealership as they replace my underside cover.
There is one thing that driving profoundly fails at though, both on its own and really really badly once you compare to cycling.
Scale.
The road capacity of downtown cores is fixed. The population, as more and more towers get built, is not.
Each human wants to go places, if they all pick "car", eventually it all stops working. Nothing can fix this aside from having people go places not in a car.
Coincidentally, bikes are ridiculously better than cars downtown as they are much faster.
From my apartment to the dealership is 19 minutes right now by car or bike. This afternoon rush hour, it'll be over 30 minutes by car, and still 19 minutes by bike.
The problem there is too many people in too little space. I spent some time recently in a couple of cities MUCH less dense than NYC (one was less dense than my suburb, in fact), and things were far more civilized. You could bike, you could drive, you could walk, all without being jammed.
Switching cars to bikes doesn't solve the problem of scale, it just delays it. Back in the 1980s, when China was much poorer, they still had traffic jams -- they were bicycle traffic jams. And in places with winter (which includes NYC), it doesn't help much at all, because bicycles are terrible in winter, and you need things to work in bad conditions as well as good.
At this point it's all just preferences though. I believe what you say, it is a calmer existence in a less dense north american city. I also find it a soulless hellscape of awful design that I want to get away from immediately, whereas one of my favorite activities is wandering around Toronto with my dog (no destination, just vibes).
Edit: I should add, I have no problems with less dense cities, and think they should be free to shape their built form however they please, which they do. I dislike this form, so I don't go (which is fine). But then dense cities don't get this benefit, and have to cater to everyone's tastes, which results in really mediocre outcomes. If one doesn't like bike lanes, one should move somewhere that doesn't have or need them, instead of fighting to make everything worse for everyone, including themselves.
The issue is that people who have (valid) preferences for living in less dense cities then try to take their preferences and impose them on dense cities (also funny how the suburban preference people still love coming downtown, but the downtown people don't want to go hang out in the suburbs, I wonder why), and everyone loses because it fundamentally doesn't work because of spacial limitations and a refusal to change anything, ever.
Build bike lanes for more efficient transportation? No! Can't take space from cars?
Build LRTs or dedicated bus lanes? NO! can't take space from cars.
Build subways? Okay but only one as they are expensive.
WHY IS TRAFFIC SO BAD? WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS WOULD HAPPEN?!?!?!?
I'll also offer some hope re: cycling. I bike most months of the year, basically only Dec/Jan are when my ability to bike is seriously constrained. Snow plowing infrastructure has improved a lot, and we have sidewalk plows now that do bike lanes, so they're quite clear. Also climate change means even Toronto winters are very mild. Feels like we get more rain than snow in winter now, and days under -10 are so rare vs my childhood.
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Yeah great plan, let's see how that's working in cities which have leaned that way like LA.... Oh wow no way, it's one of the most congested places on the continent? That's crazy! Who could ever have predicted that...
Maybe Dallas and Houston? They're doing better than LA, but no suprise their traffic congestion stats get worse every year. It's almost like this doesn't work at scale.
Putting aside the fact that cities that are 50% parking area absolutely suck.
Los Angeles has fewer miles of roadway per capita than any urbanized area in the US with 1,000,000 people or more.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/hm72.cfm
That's kind of my point though.
Even major cities which have tried to prioritize driving as the primary transport modality fail, because it doesn't scale.
I'm sure 50 years ago the LA road per capita stat was way better. And then LA's population continued to rise, and amount of roads stayed fixed.
The sunbelt cities are earlier in this life cycle. Their populations are lower and they're not so sprawled you can't drive across them. But they'll keep growing, eventually more up then out, and traffic will continue to get worse and worse, which we already see.
LA did not try to prioritize driving. It neglected it. This has been true for decades -- LA has long been held out as an example of a place which built out its road infrastructure and had terrible traffic, but that whole time it has in fact been near the bottom in terms of road infrastructure per capita.
I guess if none of my negative examples are good enough, do you have any positive ones? Because you're right, LA is an example of a car-centric city, which did it's best to orient cars and yet driving there sucks.
I guess you're saying they specifically did a bad job and that's why their traffic sucks. I'm saying at a certain population size (depending on geography, alternatives, etc) it's not possible to do it well period. Because at a certain point the people of the city/society stop letting you flatten neighborhoods for more highways, and then your road capacity gets fixed and fills up and bam here we are.
Are there any large cities that were able to scale car use into the mid-millions well?
Because like I said, even the sunbelt cities who are in their growth golden area are seeing 5-8% YoY growth in travel times/delays/etc. So they're well on their way to being just like LA!
Also thanks for the point about low road per capita in LA, I didn't know that and this is an interesting sub topic to research.
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That would be far too few roads for a dense city. NYC roads (including on-street parking) are 24% of the land area -- 36% in Manhattan -- and doesn't have enough.
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Speak for yourself! I often have trouble keeping myself awake at the wheel.
That said, I'd like to add to your list of advantages: You can drive long past the point where injuries or sickness prevent you from walking notable distances.
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