Anybody who walks a lot has a story of almost or actually being hit by a car. I like how you play with the framing - a war on pedestrians is more accurate than a war on cars. An organization in my city challenges city councillors to take transit for a week every year. Maybe they should also be encouraged to walk as much as possible for a week to get a feel for what it's like to be a pedestrian.
I thought our "Right to Drive" was enshrined somewhere in the 2nd Amendment. Pretty sure it was Charlton Heston who said something about "You'll have to pry this Ford F-150 XLT 4X4 from my cold, dead, hands..."
This feels like an "attract more flies with honey" type of argument, and I think that's valid. When people berate drivers, especially in a country where most places driving is almost necessary to participate in society, you're basically trying to get everyone to open their mind with fear and hostility.
But if you're an average driver who's approached by someone who's not hostile about their car light lifestyle, the next question becomes "but how do I get there without a car?" In many places - even downtowns - it's impossible. And so we have downtowns ringed with parking lots and freeways. And considering that the rest of their world is built around a car whether they like it or not, to hear that some spaces will be more inconvenient via car sounds like it's a place that is just not for them. If we tell them we dream of a place where most of their needs can be gotten in a short walk, they will wonder "how can a Target really be workable if it's just a short walk away?"
There's just so much in the current state that ties us to our cars that having the imagination to understand how these problems were once solved without (exclusively) cars does feel like quite the stretch. I personally try to appeal to folks by talking about how latchkey kids no longer exist because cars were dangerous and now kids are more supervised and chauffeured around more. And I bring up how independent kids in Japan are. But even then, how many roads can you slow down to allow kids to more safely play near them, and cross them for their activities and schooling? Even with honey, that small accommodation for non-motoring kids feels insurmountable to most who hear it.
In this case honey is better than spice, but when you're likely not getting your way anyway I'm not sure it matters much either way.
Too many keyboard warriors like to talk about banning cars (and not getting that the term "War on Cars" isn't meant literally). When this comes up, I usually bring up the example of how they expect my 82 year old mother to get to a doctor's appointment if she can't take a cab - should she just bicycle herself there? And I also ask how they think their milk gets from the farm to the store - by bicycle?
I think the most practical thing we can do is start enforcing the laws more harshly. Parking in a bike lane should be aggressively ticketed and red light cameras should digitally ticket you anytime you drive through a red light
"“War on cars” is simply not an accurate way of describing the deprioritization of cars in downtowns, any more than those rules on the Interstate Highways represent a “war on walkers.”"
I'd say that the Interstate system is an excellent example of a war on walkers. Our society funnels huge amounts of resources towards cars, and that makes the experience of walking much worse. As a result, fewer people walk, more people drive. How is that not a war?
Europe has expressways too but didn't make the mistake of demolishing urban cores anywhere near to the extent that we did (and supposedly Eisenhower was upset that the Interstates ended up routed through cities). So the implementation of the Interstates combined with urban renewal was a travesty but the idea of having efficient travel corridors expressly for cars was probably inevitable, and I don't think that has to conflict with good land use or urbanism.
"And so the first exposure a lot of ordinary drivers ever have to anything like urbanism or bike advocacy is this shrill, hostile, progressive-sounding, seemingly left-wing political advocacy. And for a lot of people, that’s a signal that there’s no real point here. Oh, so this bike stuff is just another fake leftist social-justice issue."
This generalizes across most issue areas. People are comfortable with the status quo and wish those annoying leftists telling them about problems other people or even worse they themselves are experiencing without realizing it would just leave them alone.
But, there very much is a “War on walkers” as well as all the other non-automobile modes. It isn’t a war being waged between citizens, it’s a war that the US government has been carrying out for the better part of 90 years through capital programs that only build these limited-access autos-only roads or their evil cousins, the “stroads” that have 90 vehicle lanes and no sidewalks or bike lanes (and ungodly intersections that are safe for no one).
Auto-centric infrastructure doesn’t need to exist at the exclusion of everything else, and in some cases we have legacy infrastructure that hasn’t yet been ripped out that still carries on for pedestrians and transit-users. But, you don’t need to parse any speeches or standards guidebooks to see the priorities are fully lopsided. You only need to look at budgets and designs. Why should anyone be allowed to build a $4B bridge that has a narrow sidewalk, to be shared with racing bikes, that closes at dusk? New York attempted to do this! (And the MUP on this crossing did not open with the inaugural span of the bridge, but a good two years later... with the construction crews taking their sweet time to finish a project whose auto lanes were rushed) And of course this same crossing opened with 0 transit provisions on Day 1 - “maybe” sometime in the future if they ever cough up billions for a supposedly easy retrofit plan that I bet will be priced out as if it were rebuilding all of it. You would think that New York would have particularly learned from homegrown tyrant Robert Moses, but it seems many leaders in New York still think of Moses as a lodestar and not a barbarian.
All of this is amplified by the fact that driving in most suburbs is an inherently patience-trying experience, AND particularly no one in the field of civics is willing to point out that it has always been like this & there will never be a solution to that & it just hurts our future to take all our other options away in favor of saving a buck or letting these “stroads” and expressways swallow the entire rights-of-way between points that need to be connected for travel. Maybe streetcars aren’t coming back, maybe you can’t ask people to travel 5+ miles by bicycle in the winter... but you can certainly run buses anywhere there are roads, and the choices to make transit centers miserable unsheltered unkempt inaccessible places, to make service infrequent, and to make buses themselves unclean and rattly and loud... they are, in fact, unnecessary choices that are supposed to be kind to budgets and nasty to the poor. If one suggests improving upon these choices then suddenly it’s a War On Cars. And I don’t have an answer as to why suburban residents need to take the side that they shouldn’t be just allowed to keep their cars but also need to stomp out all other options. Once things get into grievance politics, it’s very very hard to bring the focus back to responsible policy and design.
Would we think the interior streets of malls would work with motor vehicles in them constantly...?
Of course not, it makes far more sense to stop cars at the periphery and start walking, keep the delivery vehicles at consolidated points on the periphery and push carts through service corridors.
***Nobody has to *demand* that we ban pedestrians or cyclists (or horses) on an Interstate Highway because it isn’t something anybody would really question. The rule pretty much follows from the form. The same logically should be true of urban cores. Why doesn't it feel that way?***
Cars have dominated the dialogue and policy about urban space for over a century. Let's not forget that it was the auto industry that pushed to make walking in the street wherever a pedestrian might like an illegal thing — jaywalking.
"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them. But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."
"The turning point came in 1923, says Norton, when 42,000 Cincinnati residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour. Local auto dealers were terrified, and sprang into action, sending letters to every car owner in the city and taking out advertisements against the measure.
The measure failed. It also galvanized auto groups nationwide, showing them that if they weren't proactive, the potential for automobile sales could be minimized.
In response, automakers, dealers, and enthusiast groups worked to legally redefine the street — so that pedestrians, rather than cars, would be restricted."
***
Once this was set, roadway design followed, entrenching the idea that pedestrians should stick to sidewalks, that cities are for vehicles. (Relevant illo by Karl Jilg: https://i.insider.com/59036a187dea725c008b50b2.) A 2021 study found that roads "occupied an average of 18% of the total land area of the cities' studied. Indeed, in some districts this figure was almost double, with roads monopolising an astounding 30% of space." (https://www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/identifying-amount-urban-space-occupied-roads)
The reason banning cars from.city cores is unthinkable is because it also means banning fire trucks, ambulances, and.police cars.
A safety-obsessed, lawsuit-addicted soxiety that mandates putting your kids in child safety seats until they're practically voting age because "if it saves just one life..." is not going to tolerate a city inaccessible to emergency vehicles and the liability risk occasioned by people dropping dead while waiting for the bicycle EMTs to arrive.
Building streets that aren't accessible to and within view of passing police cars at all times is also unthinkable until we solve our urban crime problems.
State Street in Madison, WI has been off-limits to private and commercial vehicles since at least the late 1970s. It's still a street with proper traffic-control devices, crossed by full-access streets; but only emergency vehicles and city buses are allowed to drive on it. It's eight blocks in the heart of the state capitol and a major university, thronged with bicycles and pedestrians.
One of the big adjacent issues here is the size of the vehicles - in Europe and on Twitter I've seen tiny garbage trucks/fire engines/delivery vehicles/etc. Part of this whole "scale" issue that I probe a lot here, how the size and scale of things in America starts at a very high floor and makes smaller enterprises of all kinds difficult.
I live in Madison, WI ... and State Street is nice! But every Spanish city of a decent size seems to do this better than Madison. (I'm sure one could find examples in other European countries but I happen to be obsessed with Spain right now.) So I agree 100% with the point of this article. I still think the point may be made more clearly with videos (and images) rather than words.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger
And you don’t propose reasonable, humane restrictions on automobile traffic in urban settings
Your practical rationalization is excellent- still ignorance is bliss for many drivers and the driver hostility is beyond any excuses now:
Drivers are terrorists nowadays - overt lawbreakers who do whatever they want; speeding, crashing, lying about “what happened”, endangering others:
Cars over 70mph in 40mph Residential Area Near Metra Station, Park, & Two Major Regional Trail Systems
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMfNAGP-iqfjctZ2JAq2MQ4X3Gqch2tG3
Anybody who walks a lot has a story of almost or actually being hit by a car. I like how you play with the framing - a war on pedestrians is more accurate than a war on cars. An organization in my city challenges city councillors to take transit for a week every year. Maybe they should also be encouraged to walk as much as possible for a week to get a feel for what it's like to be a pedestrian.
I thought our "Right to Drive" was enshrined somewhere in the 2nd Amendment. Pretty sure it was Charlton Heston who said something about "You'll have to pry this Ford F-150 XLT 4X4 from my cold, dead, hands..."
Or, am I just misremembering?
This feels like an "attract more flies with honey" type of argument, and I think that's valid. When people berate drivers, especially in a country where most places driving is almost necessary to participate in society, you're basically trying to get everyone to open their mind with fear and hostility.
But if you're an average driver who's approached by someone who's not hostile about their car light lifestyle, the next question becomes "but how do I get there without a car?" In many places - even downtowns - it's impossible. And so we have downtowns ringed with parking lots and freeways. And considering that the rest of their world is built around a car whether they like it or not, to hear that some spaces will be more inconvenient via car sounds like it's a place that is just not for them. If we tell them we dream of a place where most of their needs can be gotten in a short walk, they will wonder "how can a Target really be workable if it's just a short walk away?"
There's just so much in the current state that ties us to our cars that having the imagination to understand how these problems were once solved without (exclusively) cars does feel like quite the stretch. I personally try to appeal to folks by talking about how latchkey kids no longer exist because cars were dangerous and now kids are more supervised and chauffeured around more. And I bring up how independent kids in Japan are. But even then, how many roads can you slow down to allow kids to more safely play near them, and cross them for their activities and schooling? Even with honey, that small accommodation for non-motoring kids feels insurmountable to most who hear it.
In this case honey is better than spice, but when you're likely not getting your way anyway I'm not sure it matters much either way.
Too many keyboard warriors like to talk about banning cars (and not getting that the term "War on Cars" isn't meant literally). When this comes up, I usually bring up the example of how they expect my 82 year old mother to get to a doctor's appointment if she can't take a cab - should she just bicycle herself there? And I also ask how they think their milk gets from the farm to the store - by bicycle?
I think the most practical thing we can do is start enforcing the laws more harshly. Parking in a bike lane should be aggressively ticketed and red light cameras should digitally ticket you anytime you drive through a red light
"“War on cars” is simply not an accurate way of describing the deprioritization of cars in downtowns, any more than those rules on the Interstate Highways represent a “war on walkers.”"
I'd say that the Interstate system is an excellent example of a war on walkers. Our society funnels huge amounts of resources towards cars, and that makes the experience of walking much worse. As a result, fewer people walk, more people drive. How is that not a war?
Europe has expressways too but didn't make the mistake of demolishing urban cores anywhere near to the extent that we did (and supposedly Eisenhower was upset that the Interstates ended up routed through cities). So the implementation of the Interstates combined with urban renewal was a travesty but the idea of having efficient travel corridors expressly for cars was probably inevitable, and I don't think that has to conflict with good land use or urbanism.
"And so the first exposure a lot of ordinary drivers ever have to anything like urbanism or bike advocacy is this shrill, hostile, progressive-sounding, seemingly left-wing political advocacy. And for a lot of people, that’s a signal that there’s no real point here. Oh, so this bike stuff is just another fake leftist social-justice issue."
This generalizes across most issue areas. People are comfortable with the status quo and wish those annoying leftists telling them about problems other people or even worse they themselves are experiencing without realizing it would just leave them alone.
But, there very much is a “War on walkers” as well as all the other non-automobile modes. It isn’t a war being waged between citizens, it’s a war that the US government has been carrying out for the better part of 90 years through capital programs that only build these limited-access autos-only roads or their evil cousins, the “stroads” that have 90 vehicle lanes and no sidewalks or bike lanes (and ungodly intersections that are safe for no one).
Auto-centric infrastructure doesn’t need to exist at the exclusion of everything else, and in some cases we have legacy infrastructure that hasn’t yet been ripped out that still carries on for pedestrians and transit-users. But, you don’t need to parse any speeches or standards guidebooks to see the priorities are fully lopsided. You only need to look at budgets and designs. Why should anyone be allowed to build a $4B bridge that has a narrow sidewalk, to be shared with racing bikes, that closes at dusk? New York attempted to do this! (And the MUP on this crossing did not open with the inaugural span of the bridge, but a good two years later... with the construction crews taking their sweet time to finish a project whose auto lanes were rushed) And of course this same crossing opened with 0 transit provisions on Day 1 - “maybe” sometime in the future if they ever cough up billions for a supposedly easy retrofit plan that I bet will be priced out as if it were rebuilding all of it. You would think that New York would have particularly learned from homegrown tyrant Robert Moses, but it seems many leaders in New York still think of Moses as a lodestar and not a barbarian.
All of this is amplified by the fact that driving in most suburbs is an inherently patience-trying experience, AND particularly no one in the field of civics is willing to point out that it has always been like this & there will never be a solution to that & it just hurts our future to take all our other options away in favor of saving a buck or letting these “stroads” and expressways swallow the entire rights-of-way between points that need to be connected for travel. Maybe streetcars aren’t coming back, maybe you can’t ask people to travel 5+ miles by bicycle in the winter... but you can certainly run buses anywhere there are roads, and the choices to make transit centers miserable unsheltered unkempt inaccessible places, to make service infrequent, and to make buses themselves unclean and rattly and loud... they are, in fact, unnecessary choices that are supposed to be kind to budgets and nasty to the poor. If one suggests improving upon these choices then suddenly it’s a War On Cars. And I don’t have an answer as to why suburban residents need to take the side that they shouldn’t be just allowed to keep their cars but also need to stomp out all other options. Once things get into grievance politics, it’s very very hard to bring the focus back to responsible policy and design.
Would we think the interior streets of malls would work with motor vehicles in them constantly...?
Of course not, it makes far more sense to stop cars at the periphery and start walking, keep the delivery vehicles at consolidated points on the periphery and push carts through service corridors.
As you note in your Xeets about this post:
***Nobody has to *demand* that we ban pedestrians or cyclists (or horses) on an Interstate Highway because it isn’t something anybody would really question. The rule pretty much follows from the form. The same logically should be true of urban cores. Why doesn't it feel that way?***
Cars have dominated the dialogue and policy about urban space for over a century. Let's not forget that it was the auto industry that pushed to make walking in the street wherever a pedestrian might like an illegal thing — jaywalking.
From https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history:
"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them. But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."
"The turning point came in 1923, says Norton, when 42,000 Cincinnati residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour. Local auto dealers were terrified, and sprang into action, sending letters to every car owner in the city and taking out advertisements against the measure.
The measure failed. It also galvanized auto groups nationwide, showing them that if they weren't proactive, the potential for automobile sales could be minimized.
In response, automakers, dealers, and enthusiast groups worked to legally redefine the street — so that pedestrians, rather than cars, would be restricted."
***
Once this was set, roadway design followed, entrenching the idea that pedestrians should stick to sidewalks, that cities are for vehicles. (Relevant illo by Karl Jilg: https://i.insider.com/59036a187dea725c008b50b2.) A 2021 study found that roads "occupied an average of 18% of the total land area of the cities' studied. Indeed, in some districts this figure was almost double, with roads monopolising an astounding 30% of space." (https://www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/identifying-amount-urban-space-occupied-roads)
The reason banning cars from.city cores is unthinkable is because it also means banning fire trucks, ambulances, and.police cars.
A safety-obsessed, lawsuit-addicted soxiety that mandates putting your kids in child safety seats until they're practically voting age because "if it saves just one life..." is not going to tolerate a city inaccessible to emergency vehicles and the liability risk occasioned by people dropping dead while waiting for the bicycle EMTs to arrive.
Building streets that aren't accessible to and within view of passing police cars at all times is also unthinkable until we solve our urban crime problems.
State Street in Madison, WI has been off-limits to private and commercial vehicles since at least the late 1970s. It's still a street with proper traffic-control devices, crossed by full-access streets; but only emergency vehicles and city buses are allowed to drive on it. It's eight blocks in the heart of the state capitol and a major university, thronged with bicycles and pedestrians.
One of the big adjacent issues here is the size of the vehicles - in Europe and on Twitter I've seen tiny garbage trucks/fire engines/delivery vehicles/etc. Part of this whole "scale" issue that I probe a lot here, how the size and scale of things in America starts at a very high floor and makes smaller enterprises of all kinds difficult.
I live in Madison, WI ... and State Street is nice! But every Spanish city of a decent size seems to do this better than Madison. (I'm sure one could find examples in other European countries but I happen to be obsessed with Spain right now.) So I agree 100% with the point of this article. I still think the point may be made more clearly with videos (and images) rather than words.
For instance (and there's nothing at all special about this video in particular): https://youtu.be/jN5DTiyB9ow?si=3KazVs0SUgFWHf2t&t=699
(The link starts the video at a point where you can see cars off to your right, but then the walker enters a pedestrian only area.)
"Since the 1970s" is the key phrase there. A whole lot of what we allowed in the 1970s isn't allowed anymore.