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I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
The author makes a good point but there's something they're missing. The way I would put it is that walking or biking are low-status activities in many places by design. This comment from HN puts it well:
The contempt in the design is, I think, on purpose. Perhaps not explicitly, in a saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud way, but it's a very important implicit goal that I'm sure planners understand. Constituents know that accessible public transport and cheap housing within pleasant walking distance to amenities will lead to people taking advantage of those things. People the constituents don't want around.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly.
The trouble is, of course, that poor feckless criminals are in fact bad for a neighborhood. If you'd like an extreme example, here's a video of Philadelphia. Would you want to take a walk or ride a bike there? There are wide accessible sidewalks, lots of bike lanes, tons of public transit, and high density. What's not to love?
It's clear that higher density and less car-dependence would be more efficient in some senses: less fossil fuel consumption, less time wasted commuting, and less land consumed by development, for example. It's also clear that there is value in excluding certain people from public spaces. In the extreme, if violent felons are allowed free reign, society as we know it couldn't function. In the less extreme, being less exclusive means more low-level harassment and petty crime and fewer positive-sum interactions among people. Exclusivity eventually reaches diminishing returns, but there's clearly some level at which excluding people is worth it.
Figuring out the right policies that maximize utility between these competing concerns requires taking a hard look at why basically anything is valuable. Why do fossil fuels and carbon emissions matter? Why does it matter whether vulnerable people can walk safely outside at night? As EAs have discovered over and over, people do not in general try to maximize utility. Most day-to-day decisions related to topics like this are for status signaling. Everyone wants their own lifestyle to be the one treated with dignity and privilege.
The problem with the built environment treating pedestrians with dignity is making sure it doesn't assign inappropriate dignity or status to the wrong people. Any system that assigns inappropriate status is going to be instinctively rejected by voters. If everyone is expected to walk and take public transit, there still must be practical ways for average-status people to exclude low-status people and to differentiate themselves from them. One way would be to use exclusive transit (think corporate shuttles). Make the public transit slow and impractical. Or make transit expensive, especially as a high fixed cost imposing a barrier to entry to non-conscientious people (a $500/year membership, but ride free). It's much harder to make pedestrian facilities exclusive without authoritarian policing such as curfews and id checks. To be practical it has to be combined with measures that make it hard to get to the walkable area in the first place.
Assigning inappropriate dignity and status is the core of the problem with many urbanist ideas, this included.
That sounds like it would be a pretty valuable thing...$500/year sounds like it might honestly be fairly generous for the average transit user. They're going to work 200 days/year, taking 400 trips...so it'd be $1.25/trip. Maybe have some kind of sweat equity program for the "deserving poor"/students/basically the kinds of people that can't afford $500 cash but also aren't aggressive fucked up mentally ill hobos. Accumulate 50 or 100 or whatever volunteer hours with (agency) picking up trash or building houses with Habitat for Humanity or whatever and you've got your pass for the year. The goal is basically to keep the hobos out, at least the ones that aren't able to be decently well-behaved and wear clean clothes. In some cities - Seattle, c. 2015 comes to mind - there are people that are homeless by choice, living in tents on the street and sometimes selling handicrafts. These people were wearing clean clothes and could hold civil conversations with you. They're just eccentrics; I wouldn't mind riding the bus with them...although I'd appreciate it if they didn't bring their samurai swords and whatnot with them on the bus, or at least concealed them.
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Look at Moscow or hell, any other large European capital. There is large population of "undesirables" generally immigrants working low-paying jobs and it doesn't make public transport impossible or limited to poor people. If incompetent corrupt autocracy i. e. Russia can do this than Americans sure can.
These are not the undesirables most Americans are worried about. They are talking about drug users, mentally sick homeless and chronically unemployed petty and not-so-petty criminals. Yes, they might mind immigrants working low-paying jobs that rent a single apartment for the whole squad next to theirs, but now when they have to share a public space with them.
What puzzles me is that Sioux Falls, which someone posted upthread, is not full of undesirables that hostile architecture is supposed to keep separate from the upstanding folk. It's 87% White (historically cis-Hajnal White), only 11.8% of the population live below the poverty line. It has cold winters, so the craziest ones should freeze to death, but they aren't so cold you can't walk outside. In other words, it's not Atlanta. And yet it's a typical American sprawl.
Does Russia not have lots of mentally ill criminals and heavy drug users, or do they all die off in winter?
I just moved, but the district I formerly lived in, which is served by light rail, has a certain spot where the local winos/druggies (most likely not homeless due to local strong "house the homeless" -policies, but still, those policies can't help you fully if you fall into the substance hole) tend to congregate. They're loud and belligerent, but also usually easy to avoid if one wishes.
Yet, you almost never see them on light rail. The trams only sparsely have ticket inspectors or other staff, so it can't be due to them removing the winos. However, on the other hand, why would they need to travel? They have their buddies right there on the spot and can spend the whole day there if they wish. Why would they need to move around?
I suspect that if you have a strong policy of cities shooing around similar populations whenever they congregate, or otherwise making their life difficult, they'll eventually congregate on public transport, since they need it to move around to look for new locations and since it's harder to remove them from there than from other places (at the very least you'd often have to wait for the next station).
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The former usually do. Heavy drug users overdose, and the general public isn't known for having bleeding hearts. If you try to inject or huff or whatever in a public space that is not a complete ghetto, the cops will be happy to arrest you, they have a quota to fulfil.
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All these materialist/structural/systemic arguments have become just a bit too tiresome for me, and I have 2 words for them: rationalizing culture.
OTOH, if the mass transit enjoyers think that means they get to do a victory lap they need to take a seat. Culture is hard to transplant, and I'm afraid that means when it comes to dealing with homeless schizos and running public transport, you're the incompetent ones, not the Russians.
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All the US has to do is send the problem people to prison or otherwise relocate them. It really isn't that hard. There's no rule of the universe that demands open-air drug markets and massive colonies of rowdy homeless shitting up the richest cities in the world. In the Philadelphia video there are all these people saying 'it was never like this under Communism' or 'even in El Salvedor people had their dignity'... This is an American problem that America can choose to solve.
Is it really a huge strain on a $26 trillion economy to build some more prisons, especially considering the gain in rehabilitating urban centres? Combating two great powers on the other side of the world is easy - but laying down some cement and cubicles is hard? Or if prisons are too hard, they could try caning. Singapore knows a lot about running safe cities and combating drugs, the US should try copying their notes.
I've used public transport for over a decade in Australia, there are plenty of people wearing suits on the bus. We simply don't have a systemic problem with our public transport system being a playground for illicit drug users because we choose to suppress it.
America already has more prisons than the countries which don't have these problems - the problem is that you guys need more and better cops to make sure that the right people are in those prisons for the right reasons. (Right reasons is particularly important, because it generates an impact by deterrence as well as incapacitation).
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I honestly think that beating/flogging petty criminals and then releasing them would be better than the jail/prison revolving door that petty criminals wind up in. People that fuck up once or twice learn not to do that and can go back to work reasonably fast; even the hardened criminals at least don't spend a bunch of time in Criminal School.
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Those things are extremely hard, harder than going to the Moon, not because of resource constraints, but because of political opposition.
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It does not. This is America; even the poor drive.
The cops can safely pull them over and have their car towed for having expired tags and driving on a suspended license, if they dare to drive outside poortown. Can't do that to bus riders without getting accused of racial profiling.
This is technically possible, but do you actually know of an American city not overrun with beat-up altimas flapping paper tags and weaving across 4-lane interstates?
The poor are persistently able to drive here without being molested by the cops. Which, despite how much it sucks for everyone else, is admittedly a requirement for living in an American society.
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Then I recommend these hypothetical poors keep their registration and license active.
Tsk, tsk, that's voter suppression.
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