Travel is the driver of all human progress and development.
What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here.
> Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime.
We did. We made travel cheap and easy and it has benefited us massively.
This is a hell of a strawman. The proposition isn't to remove the ability to travel, which (as you said) is effectively the removal of geographic barriers to interaction. It's to replace car travel with something that has lower costs in terms of efficiency, health, economics, city planning, fatalities, the environment, etc etc etc etc.
> What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here.
Not all roads are made equal. There's a huge difference between "space reserved for a mode of travel" and the public spaces that roads[1] (in cities) were before cars became ubiquitous.[2] A good analogue is imagining a path in a park: it's generally used for transit (people walking and occasionally biking), but it's also fully open as a public space for the citizenry to use as they please.
[1] This whole conversation is about roads in cities, so that's what I'm referring to: roads across sparsely populated countryside don't have nearly as high a cost, nor do they have as many viable alternatives.
You have a VERY rosy eyed view of what cities were like before the car.
What they were actually like is rivers of mud mixed with horse manure. There were just as many roads before as now, except they were very dirty.
> and the public spaces that roads (in cities) were before cars became ubiquitous
Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were never public spaces like you imagine. They were roads, and carts and horses routinely road right over people who didn't get out of the way.
They were crowded and dirty, and those open spaces you imagine did not exist inside cities. (There plenty of open spaces outside cities, of course.)
Your dream world existed to some degree inside farm villages, but never in cities.
The amount of plays, novels, stories, poems, and songs that take place in and on and nearby, as well as revolving around and referencing to, ares of transit is pretty large. When looked at in the context of human existence on the planet, roads are the pathways human cells use to move and multiply and spread and settle. So much culture and development occurs on the paths of humanity. This is not limited to any single road concept; bridges, train tracks, shipping lanes, and airports all spawn society blocks around them.
The Pathways have always been public spaces. Are you opposed to those public spaces being safer and more productive? If so, would you say it is because vehicles [methods of human conveyance] have a priority over people [humans living] in the Public Square?
The point of travel is the people that can do it, not the profits to be gained or the methods to be employed IMO.
You do know there are people in those vehicles right? The way you write that, you make it sound like the vehicles are just driving around on their own.
The vehicles have no priority at all, the people in them do.
Does that bother you that someone wrapped in a vehicle has priority over someone not wrapped?
It's like that always - small boats have to give way to large ones for example.
It's like that always - small boats have to give way to large ones for example.
Boats traveling through fluid, controlled by a relatively tiny prop, are in no way comparable to road-going vehicles that enjoy the static friction of rubber on asphalt.
Additionally, all vehicles on the road are held to (virtually) the same legal standards, regardless of size. If anything, laws are more restrictive the larger the vehicle.
Also, this is false:
The vehicles have no priority at all, the people in them do.
There are many parts of the country where it would be illegal to cross a road on foot (jaywalking), but entirely legal to do so within a vehicle.
I get the feeling that you have little to no experience on the water outside of Jaws and pontoon party boats. Size only matters in context with the area one operates in. Malaca Straits? Bet your ass the big boys have priority... but that is because of traffic and pirates. Coastal Downeast Maine? If you have the elephantiasis feel free to cut off the lobstermen in their tiny boats; i will watch you get keel hauled from a safe distance.
It is always context as well as proportion. Neither air nor water work as reference points for driving, as the scale in both those worlds is analogous to the variance in insect size [ant to dragonfly] or water creature [diatom to jelly fish] while the road is much more like the difference in dog breeds. On top of that, the land is our natural habitat, as opposed to the hydro- or atmosphere, and the use of that space must take into account that society is based on people and not profits or production. Yes, like mobility, the are absolutely important, but only in how they advance culture and society. A heart is a meat pump if there is no brain to feed oxygen.
There are more people without vehicle access than with. De-personalizing vehicles would be a good thing.
And just because i'm on a rant: how many people die from terrorist attacks per annum v. car accidents? If the government[s] actually cared about people, vehicular death would be confronted with the same rigor and rhetoric that extremist islam is. Kind of sad that rich south africans and faceless cororations are the only ones who seem to be doing anything about it.
> You have a VERY rosy eyed view of what cities were like before the car. What they were actually like is rivers of mud mixed with horse manure. There were just as many roads before as now, except they were very dirty.
I was actually worried my point may come across like this and considered clarifying, but I figured it would be obvious with even a moment's thought that I'm not suggesting literally reverting to exactly how roads were before cars. The only point I was making with respect to the way roads were used was that they were closer to public spaces than the situation we have now. Roads today are reserved pretty much exclusively for vehicles: just try dawdling or having a conversation on a major street in any city to see what I mean. If you RTFA, Hamburg is planning to replace the massive amount of space wasted by roads with green spaces. Relying on things like underground subways or elevated monorails or (much much much smaller than roads) bike paths means we can have the best of both worlds: undo the disastrous damage that cars did to city planning and public spaces without giving up the incredible benefits of streamlined transportation that cars enabled.
> Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were never public spaces like you imagine. They were roads, and carts and horses routinely road right over people who didn't get out of the way.
Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were public spaces almost exactly as I described them, since what I said was that vehicle traffic existed alongside people strolling and standing and doing whatever the hell else. As I mentioned above, we'll even be getting rid of the vehicle-induced downsides of these previous spaces (the mess and the danger), since vehicle traffic will be completely excluded from the road-replacements being described in the article.
We're lucky enough to have video from the early 1900s[1], which shows exactly what I mean about roads essentially being extensions of the way sidewalks are today (+ vehicle traffic), as opposed to the "all vehicles except for crosswalks" style we have today.
By the way, I notice that the only thing you addressed in your entire response was nitpicking (an inaccurate interpretation of) my unimportant supporting comment about how roads previously were. As I said before, the only thing I was alluding to was the fact that they were space that you could actually use, spend time on, play on, etc, as opposed to the reserved-for-cars and much-more-dangerous-for-pedestrians streets we have in the modern era. I can only assume you fully agree with the _actual_ point of my comment, which is that talking about giving up the advantages that efficient transit has bought is either disingenuous or idiotic, since that's not what's being discussed.
> I was actually worried my point may come across like this and considered clarifying,
No, I understood, I was trying to tell you that roads are, and were, for travel and that's it. This public space you love never occurred on roads. People have ZERO interest in doing anything on a road except getting to their destination. We have lost nothing whatsoever.
> vehicle traffic existed alongside people strolling and standing and doing whatever the hell else
You can not bring back the halcyon days when people strolled slowly and were not in a rush. Those days are gone and are not coming back. People want to get where they are going without any time waste.
You propose replacing roads with underground subway or monorail, which are entirely unsuitable for 90% of cities. Plus they don't solve the last mile problem, I've actually never heard of any solution for it except self driving cars that don't exist, or expensive taxis. And even then you still need your hated roads!
> As I said before, the only thing I was alluding to was the fact that they were space that you could actually use, spend time on, play on, etc,
No ever actually did that. Your dream world simply never existed.
Go watch that video you posted and tell me how many people you see talking to other people. I spotted exactly ZERO. People were shopping, or going places, sometimes together. But none were using this "public space" you imagine for anything except travel.
Perhaps you are thinking of central markets like a souq? But that's only a tiny portion of the road network.
> which shows exactly what I mean about roads essentially being extensions of the way sidewalks are today (+ vehicle traffic), as opposed to the "all vehicles except for crosswalks" style we have today.
And you'll still have your hated roads even in your scenario! Only instead of carts you'll have slow autos? So in essence you want to drop the speed limit? And that's about it? So why all the text about how much space roads are taking?
Or do you want to get rid of roads to bring back an ideal that never existed and that no one even wants (periodic mini-parks would provide all the advantages and none of the drawbacks), and have no suggestions for what to replace it with?
> You can not bring back the halcyon days when people strolled slowly and were not in a rush. Those days are gone and are not coming back. People want to get where they are going without any time waste.
If you're in a rush then taking cars through a city is a terrible method to get somewhere fast. The root problem is not that people have gotten more efficient.
>the last mile problem
You could have public transport. It wouldn't have to be exotic. It would need one lane and wouldn't fill it.
> And you'll still have your hated roads even in your scenario! Only instead of carts you'll have slow autos? So in essence you want to drop the speed limit? And that's about it? So why all the text about how much space roads are taking?
A few slow cars would not take up nearly as much space, and they would not interfere with people walking.
>This public space you love never occurred on roads.
You are flat out wrong. Markets, bazaars, strip malls, housing; these are all based on road placement. What happens when a city has a huge celebration? Why, they shut down the roads so people can move freely in safety and merriment. What happens when the government pushes its citizenry too far? Why, take to the streets and make yourself heard!
TBH, i cannot think of a thing/facet of infrastructure that is more representative of public space and socializing than a road. True, steel death machines flying about at 70kph+ is not conducive to healthy neighborhoods. really, the personal car is a huge fracking waste of time, material, and currency.
I think you may, as my father does, believe that the car is some magical device that creates freedom and profits out of thin air. Just look at the commercials; each year we are expected to believe that the NEW one is SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER than last years model WHICH IS SHIT COMPARED TO THE NEW AVENTURAMO by NISSOTA NOW FOR JUST 200%+ THE AMOUNT IT COSTS TO MAKE!!! Truly, car culture is what props up the fallacious American Exceptionalism that capitalists purport.
How sad is it that the most patriotic thing i can do, more than military service or medical aid or child rearing, is to own 1+ cars and make all of the requisite repairs and pay for all of the titling, permits, and insurance?
With the automobile came the invention of 'jaywalking', and the idea that the street belongs primarily to cars rather than people. The nature of public space changed fundamentally.
Many European cities are heavily pedestrianised, with large areas of the centre accessible only for deliveries. There are big public health impacts - walking and cycling becomes more popular, children have safe spaces to play, accident rates fall and the air quality is drastically improved.
And not just an invention after the fact! "Jaywalking" was a word made up by the auto companies to sway public opinion in their direction (and paint pedestrians who use the street as stupid).
Obviously the indexed text of this book is not actually from 1891, given that the very next sentence talks about 1926 in the past tense.
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> Within ninety days after the signing of those pledges, the records of the Bureau of Public Safety showed a decrease of almost 50 per cent in accidents resulting from jaywalking. In 1926 all honorary and special commissionerships in the police ...
Many European cities have 30km/h zones where the term jaywalking makes no sense because people has always priority over cars.
I really thing life is better in cities where people has priority over cars. But it is also true that the lower population density in a city, the higher dependency on cars it has.
We didn't have roads 4 lanes wide (which is a huge amount of additional land lost), and we didn't have the insane amount of parking space.
Even a not particularly car friendly city like Amsterdam would look dramatically different if you removed the parking space, because it would free up such an insane amount of space.
Cars have multiplied the amount of space dedicated to transport, without actually adding much to human progress and development, what with most of it being used to carry individuals short distances from A to B and back again.
I don't see the massive benefit here. It's a pointless habit we shaped a life/work culture around with a mostly negative impact on the quality of life.
>without adding much to human progress and development
I am opposed to vehicles being the priority, but their prevalence is directly related to their usefulness within the economic regions they occur in. If you ever go to the developing world, you will see vehicles used to grow and maintain society. It is easy to forget, living in the suburbs as i do, that most of the world does not joy ride over-produced SUVs.
The ability to move freely is a magical thing. Living in a place with bad roads is a reality to itself that i think every westerner should experience. The problem is what we use to take advantage of the roads.
Roads are great. The argument is against personal cars. You can have most of those gains with a vastly smaller number of automobiles, and remove many of the negatives like parking lots.
I completely agree. I was only responding to the assertion that roads and vehicles are fairly useless.
I hope i live to see the day when city centers are car free, and all cars on the road are automated and distributed. Imagine leaving your domicile, hitting a widget on your device, and in a short time a vehicle approaches near silently, its bay door opening. you step in and you are off to work at a consistent 60kph. Each day, you see the same people on their commutes, so you naturally strike up conversations and friendships. With the steering column as well as ~90% of other standard car interaction gack gone, the interior is free to be redesigned to suit whatever purpose one may have. Vehicles could link up, breakfast could be enjoyed over whatever amount of data you choose to view on your way, and there would be no traffic that the passenger is accountable for. And in the afternoon you do it all again, only now beverage quads flit back and forth between mothership and car swarm, possibly making the commute the high point of the day.
Exactly. The Romans just parked their horses in a nearby field and got them fed at the same time! Renewable fuel and the perfect "green space" parking lot / local park
Mud and horse poop - before the car London as the biggest city had serious problems just getting rid of all the waste from the horses used on its streets.
Actually that would have been pretty typical for a 19th century American city, e.g. in San Francisco most of the older streets have always been that wide.
> We did. We made travel cheap and easy and it has benefited us massively.
If you're referring to ICE and automobiles, that "cheap" cost is bought by uncountable externalities that aren't on the balance sheet: many lives and wars to secure this cheap fuel, not to mention climate change.
That's being fixed already with new propulsion methods - namely, electric power, which could potentially be provided via cleaner energy sources (wind, solar, fission, geothermal, fusion (someday), etc.). This will soon make automobiles even cheaper on all fronts - even those that - as you say - "aren't on the balance sheet".
Arguments to ban cars outright because of climate change and oil might've been relevant in the 20th century, but now they're pretty much moot, so long as electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity.
No disagreement there. I was merely pointing out that objecting to cars because of their pollution is silly when more and more of us are driving around in electric vehicles.
Yes, but carts and horses don't habitually move at 25 MPH or more. It was possible to get run over and killed by a cart, but walking into a busy city street full of cars (without following the signals) is almost certain to get you killed. That's a pretty big difference in how the space can actually be used.
To be fair, millions of horses in the streets would cause a lot of pollution in the form of horse dung. Streets would be mired in horse crap... And what would you do with it, if you removed it? Some could be used as fertilizer, but not all. Woe are us after the rains...
> walking into a busy city street full of cars (without following the signals) is almost certain to get you killed
This is total nonsense, easily falsified by just looking at daily urban life in the modern world. The behavior you describe is completely routine in Shanghai; deaths are rare.
This is total nonsense, easily falsified by just looking at daily urban life in the modern world. The behavior you describe is completely routine in Shanghai; deaths are rare.
The Chinese appear to disagree:
Shanghai traffic police have punished 350,000 cases of pedestrian jaywalking this year.... There have been more than 200 crashes involving pedestrians that have killed 56 people as a result of ignoring traffic signals in Shanghai this year, traffic police said. (2012)[1]
and
According to Shanghai traffic police, 48 people have been killed and 206 injured in more than 200 accidents in the first 5 months of 2013, involving either jaywalking or scooters and mopeds running red lights[2]
Sir Tim, as a UK citizen in the late 20thC would have used many drugs in his lifetime, paracetamol, aspirin, penicillin, vaccines... I think you may have leapt to a conclusion about the drugs the parent post meant. Are you thinking about those recreational drugs a bit too much ... :-)
Yes the last sentence was meant as a joke and is admittedly rather condescending. However the first half of my comment is I think valid - access to medicinal as opposed to recreational drugs is part of the virtuous circle that has driven human development - better agriculture, better sanitation and better medication have all had outsize impacts.
To deliberately - or perhaps honestly - miss that point and suggest access to recreational drugs (the only kind we use the term "doing drugs") is necessary to point out.
I disagree, in the context of the post (human society and development over thousands of years), then I read that as "free time - better agriculture" and "access to drugs - medication to improve quality of life"
Increased productivity over time hasn't correlated very well with the amount of free time people have, and there's always been room for tinkering. There were especially large amounts of free time pre-agriculture.
And I wouldn't put advances in medical drugs particularly high on the list of advances either. It's not even the top of the list of medical advances. Though I don't classify vaccines as drugs.
What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here.
> Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime.
We did. We made travel cheap and easy and it has benefited us massively.