Syt's Pictorial Collection of Stuff and Things (image heavy)

[Sheilbh]

If you want to effect real change, you need to be realistic about what you can actually achieve. Nothing you've suggested so far suggests anything remotely like a carless society except for perhaps residents of city centres (many of whom already don't have cars).

You asked about a city Though the core of massively improved public transport is ever-present.

If you want to effect real change you also need to have a goal. And as I say there's wider social issues at play. So I think we should be encouraging density, I think we should be moving to home working as much as possible and encourage people to change the places and the way they live (as it was before towns when people who worked in the country lived in the country, if you didn't you lived in the town). But there should also be inconveniences in using a car, you know a preferential option for public transport/non-car transport.

I always think of this when I see certain senior people at my firm, in London, living miles out of town in a lovely restored farmhouse. That should be inconvenient unless you're a literal farmer (ignoring the obvious risk of murder in the night  - "You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their special beauty. I look at them and the only thought which comes to me is the feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.")

[Sheilbh]

I'm also uncertain about this statement given it must then cover many areas where cars are needed.

I'm uncertain too. It's some dodgy UN stat that I have no idea who's calculated, but let's pretend it's true

There's estimated to be around 1.5 billion vehicles in the world (and there's what, 7.5 billion people in the world), which includes trucks and buses etc (again - let's pretend these are accurate rather than the first result I found on Google).

I get there are reasons why the US and Canada and Australia are complicated and difficult to move away from cars. But we can't afford, globally, to have society that car-centric. And for what it's worth the countries with the most cars per capita include the US, but they also include Finland, Luxembourg, Greece, Malta, Austria, Malaysia - we can do better.

[Malthus]

Cycling as a solution isn't going to work universally - it certainly would be a tough sell here in Toronto, because of climate. For several months every year, cycling is not very appealing to the average person, to put it mildly.

The fact that certain solutions work in the Netherlands may have a lot to do with its geographic features (relatively compact, flat, weather not too extreme). The Netherlands has a population of 17 million fitted into 33k square km, mostly very flat; my province of Ontario has a population of 14.5 million fitted into an area of over 1 million square km, and much less flat, with ferocious winter weather - though admittedly, the northern portion of that (the largest portion) is mostly uninhabited wilderness. Though these are just examples, any proposed transportation solution has got to take such differences into account.

The Dutchies I know who moved to Canada (Toronto and Ottawa) never got a car and are happily cycling everywhere year round 

Edit: although I suspect they'll use the excellent public transport as well.

It is possible, but hardly attractive for ordinary folks, to bicycle all year round in Toronto and Ottawa.

Bicycling isn't very attractive as an option for the average person when it is -30 Celsius, and the roads are covered with a slurry of salt and ice. Some hearty souls do it nonetheless.

[Josquius]

Dude your entire country + Ireland fits inside one of our states with room to spare. You live in "compact" areas because you literally have to. We have millions of square miles that allow us to have space to breathe. Yes, it requires transportation to make that happen, but in most of the major urban centers and suburbs, there is public transit. It's just if you want to go outside those areas, you need a vehicle. Once you have a vehicle, the convenience is hard to get rid of.

It's a very different mindset. I regularly "day trip" three hours one way to events on a Saturday. That's unconscionable to most Brits I've met. My parents lived six hours from me, and I drove there at least once a month when my kids were little. That's like you driving from London to Edinburough. Mind, I'm from the Midwest, and I'm now learning that our driving long distances isn't so common on the West Coast, but we also don't have mountains to deal with.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
That's the entire discussion here. We all know how things are in America. However for the sake of the world (and it will be better for American people too) steps need to be taken to change this.
In Europe too, that was the basis of the discussion. But America being big is no excuse for it not applying there also.

That's not a city you're talking about, it's a county.
Horses were a few steps behind cars. They were already on the way out with trams.
In actual cities not many people bar the very wealthy had a horse (and carriage and driver)  in the way people have a car today.

That's absolute bunk. First, it's a city in the US. Second, horses and cars shared the streets for at least two decades. And finally, horses were not a rich man's toy. They were a tool and most middle-class and up people had one, though maybe not specifically with a carriage. Merchants most definitely had a horse and wagon.

And how many people ran a business?
The vast majority of city dwellers did not have a horse, this is a fact.
They got around on foot and then as technology and development picked up train and tram.
There's some interesting maps out there which show the development in city sizes over the years neatly mapping to this.
It was not as presented that everyone had a horse then simply traded it in for a car.

Tyr, hon, I say this with all of the love in the world, but the UK is not the whole world. What is "truth" there doesn't necessarily follow to be "truth" everywhere.

Interesting you're all jumping to this assumption to defend the US.
Just because something is a huge problem in America it doesn't mean Britain is perfect. More than one country can be crap.
On this America is a fair bit worse, but there's also a hell of a lot to criticise Britain about.

[Razgovory]

Here is a few photos of New York city in the late 19th century.






That is an enormous amount of horse shit.

[Pedrito]

Just think about biking through all that horse shit. 

L.

[Josquius]

I think you're hinting towards the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 here.
This alas is a myth.
The only places it became remotely true were in huge cities like NYC and London where you had sizable numbers of wealthy people travelling in the centre by taxi carriage, and farms and industries that needed manure very remote. Usually horse manure effectively sorted itself out with there being people more than willing to clean it up to sell it on. In these metropolitan areas however it became an actual issue they had to pay attention to and pay someone to clean- quite a shock worthy of minor comment to people of the time but not a big deal by modern standards.

Thats the thing thats really hard to grasp when it comes to understanding history and even other cultures in the here and now.
They aren't just the same but different. They are fundamentally different at the core.
As mentioned when I moved to Japan the hardest things to grasp weren't the flashy surface elements of cultural difference- different language, bowing, take off your shoes or death, etc...
It was the less tangible fundamental differences in outlook. Such as the massive emphasis on conformity and following the rules even in school and crap jobs, and the car focussed approach to urban development and the 'driving everywhere is the only way' mindset that came from that.

Its such a change in mindset that is needed in the world. Not simply swapping petrol cars for electric ones. We need to rethink how we setup our civilization.
Its a problem I've encountered a lot, people who just can't grasp another way to live than a car focussed world (including in the UK). But that's what we're looking at. The current state of affairs is very much an aberration, not the way things always must be.


This is a decent article on the whole thing-
http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/did-cars-save-our-cities-from-horses

[Admiral Yi]

Which cities that you have lived in do you consider to be "American style?"

[garbon]

You asked about a city Though the core of massively improved public transport is ever-present.

Yes, but we know not every lives in the city centre, so unless steps are taking to easily integrate travel for everyone inside the city, it doesn't seem workable.  For example, I wouldn't count Shooter's Hill as in a city centre. Currently its only transport links are walking to a bus to DLR. And then going home walking back up said hill. From what I've seen the majority of residents seem to have a car. I'm not sure what system you can devise that would make people happy to give up their cars.  And this is in London which I just saw in the Guardian was named the 5th most walkable city in the world.

If you want to effect real change you also need to have a goal. And as I say there's wider social issues at play. So I think we should be encouraging density, I think we should be moving to home working as much as possible and encourage people to change the places and the way they live (as it was before towns when people who worked in the country lived in the country, if you didn't you lived in the town). But there should also be inconveniences in using a car, you know a preferential option for public transport/non-car transport.

I always think of this when I see certain senior people at my firm, in London, living miles out of town in a lovely restored farmhouse. That should be inconvenient unless you're a literal farmer (ignoring the obvious risk of murder in the night  - "You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their special beauty. I look at them and the only thought which comes to me is the feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.")

Should we be encouraging density? After all, aren't we right now in an era where the chance of repeated global pandemics has risen up...and won't your proposed density make us more vulnerable?

I understand the notion that we should be phasing out petroleum fueled vehicles but not sure why it is preferable for us all to be bunched on top of one another.

[Josquius]

Which cities that you have lived in do you consider to be "American style?"

Kofu, Hanyu.

Also, I've never lived in them but we have places which veer that way around here too. Washington (the original) is pretty horrific.

[Tamas]

I am now too old to consider moving there (my pension will be low enough even without trying to start assembling it from scratch aged 40) but the one thing still attracts me in the US is all that open space. Must be great. Here in Europe you have to choose between having current first world comforts or not living in an ant farm.


BTW recently I was looking at the map around in our general area and realised that next to a town of 14 000 people, there's a golf course that's literally takes at least as much space as the town itself. I have found that seriously fucked up.

[The Brain]

America has great space. Probably the greatest space ever.

[Maladict]

The thing with more space is you just fill it up with crap.

[garbon]

The thing with more space is you just fill it up with crap.

[Sheilbh]

Yes, but we know not every lives in the city centre, so unless steps are taking to easily integrate travel for everyone inside the city, it doesn't seem workable.  For example, I wouldn't count Shooter's Hill as in a city centre. Currently its only transport links are walking to a bus to DLR. And then going home walking back up said hill. From what I've seen the majority of residents seem to have a car. I'm not sure what system you can devise that would make people happy to give up their cars.  And this is in London which I just saw in the Guardian was named the 5th most walkable city in the world.

That's where the inconvenient point comes in. Restrict where cars can go in the cities make them more expensive.

Should we be encouraging density? After all, aren't we right now in an era where the chance of repeated global pandemics has risen up...and won't your proposed density make us more vulnerable?

Yeah - I think we can deal with global pandemics. We have handled this badly in the West (even "good" countries like Germany have failed in comparison with South Korea and Japan. The only difference I can see in how successful countries have been with managing the response to this is experience of pandemics. So some of the densest cities in the world in East Asia are functioning fine despite the pandemic. I could be wrong but I imagine at the next pandemic (if it's within the next, say, 30 years) we'll handle it better because we'll have the sort of cultural memory of how to respond (as with SARS) and automatically start distancing etc.

But I think you have to balance that risks of density with the impact we have on the environment and climate.

I understand the notion that we should be phasing out petroleum fueled vehicles but not sure why it is preferable for us all to be bunched on top of one another.

The fuel is part of it but the amount of carbon in producing cars is also very high. At the minute environmentally you are always better off buying a used, petrol using, really unhealthy car than buying a new one whether electronic or clean petrol or whatever.