Fascinating! I've definitely shared those assumptions about cars. I've enjoyed learning about how we can challenge our assumptions about urban design. The big problem does seem to be that many people want cities to look differently, but they don't want to personally change.
My own city, Indianapolis, has horrible public transportation, and the city's ambitious plan to create rapid bus transit has been met with fierce opposition from our state legislators, business owners who are frustrated at the requisite construction, and the seeming low-adoption of the program among passengers, because, frankly it's just not as convenient as driving.
Interested to keep learning about solutions to these problems! Thanks for your work.
You can also see that this is a choice from European countries that chose differently. Belgium has commute distances and mode shares that aren't that far off the US and anecdotally there is the same assumption that driving everywhere is just what normal people do.
I’m pretty sure that the street pictured here is still a fairly car dominant street. One change that was made was the addition of an at grade tram line which makes traversing Amsterdam so easy that one can forgo a car and rely on a bicycle or walking beyond these main thoroughfares. But there were still plenty of cars on those thoroughfares.
I’m also going to say that the one place I’ve nearly been plowed down by a car as a pedestrian was Amsterdam, that includes Boston, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver and DC. We were in Amsterdam for a week and I narrowly missed getting hit by cars twice. Now, it’s possible this may have been a factor of me letting my guard down because the vast majority of the city is so pedestrian friendly.
I am incredulous about Toderian's claim here, which is too often repeated. While there are undoubtedly PARTS of Amsterdam that were rebuilt or degraded for the car, the photo invoked here is not an example of this! The structure of this street and the geometry of the buildings that define it are VIRTUALLY UNCHANGED by removing the cars. We do not advance urbanism by making claims that are this ridiculous, even when it is effective at building a cult following.
I mean, it's not something as drastic as freeway removal, but couldn't most American cities do the same thing in most of their land just by restricting cars? Large areas of American cities also still have streets and buildings that basically are still pre-car urbanism, don't they?
Yes and no. And sometimes a small change can make a big difference! First, I think Toderian should know better because this is his field. This photo is often juxtaposed as a Here and Now format, but with the lesson about the photos wrong. What these show is how too many cars degrade a great street, and by removing them you can have a great street. An example of that in Houston is Main Street in downtown, where vehicular traffic is discouraged without banning them completely.
Since I frequently see people write, "all we need to do is get rid of the cars," clearly people are missing the point. Getting rid of the cars would likely improve NA streets, but in most cases, they will still be bad streets, but better versions of those if traffic is prohibited or well controlled. Therefore, if your point is that removing cars would improve streets (while being careful not to increase LOS!), then make that your point. But that's not what I read above.
I'm not sure how "removing cars would improve streets" isn't what my point is? I guess I'm implicitly talking about the old urban fabric that's been degraded by cars, not the places we already transformed for cars in terms of land use. We definitely did more of the latter than Europe, but we still have plenty of great urban places that could be made to feel pretty "European."
This seems to be the thesis of the post and you subsume "removing cars would improve street under that thesis:
"'That’s fine, but those cities weren’t built for cars, while American cities—at least to a greater extent—were." This is what I used to basically think. It’s the default, inherited American viewpoint."
But the common idea is true: to a greater extent, European cities were not BUILT for cars. In the featured photo, there are drivers cramming cars into places that they were not built for cars, though there are certainly places in Amsterdam that were built for cars. This photo is not an example of one of them!
I kinda think you both have a point here. I remember visiting family in England in the 1990s and feeling superior because traffic in America was better than in England and France - in large part because America had these big roads that were easy to drive down, whereas everything in England and France felt so cramped. Clearly, all 3 had changed the meaning of streets to accomodate cars, but the manner in which the streets were built were newer/wider in America.
Either way, when I visited Germany before the pandemic - hardly an auto-phobic nation - you can see that it's easier to walk around even outside of downtowns, in a way that's only possible in very fancy and generally historic areas of America. And today, you don't even think about traffic in places where you're taking the train - so paradoxically, because American roads could better handle the car we didn't have the same inconvenience of cars everywhere until another 80M people moved in (and mostly congregated in "superstar cities") and therefore Europe spent that time changing. But also, the fact that they weren't built as well for cars also makes the change back a bit easier in Europe.
Similarly, in the 1990s when I visited family in India - everyone agrees that India is a better country to live in today than then. But everyone would also agree that it was easier to walk down the street in India then than now. If they so decide, it's probably easier to reverse the way streets have been fully dedicated to cars.
But nevertheless, I don't think the change is really so impossible - take an average suburban town, it probably has one large shopping center somewhere with big box stores and a large parking lot, and a bunch of neighborhoods around that shopping center, with some smaller shopping centers adjacent to some of the neighborhoods, and large, fast arterial roads breaking up the neighborhood. Before anything else, you can make the arterials have better walking and biking paths, and less lanes for cars. Improving access from neighborhoods directly to the smaller shopping centers isn't a crazy expensive task. The only area that really may be more intractably auto-dependent is the big box stores, but the rest of it won't look like europe, but - especially if you let folks sell things out of their garage until they meet a certain revenue threshold - it would be a pleasant way to live without really a ton of construction.
Your last bit is something else I've thought about - outside of the old legacy cities, urbanism in America probably won't *look* like "urbanism" - there will have to be some way of thickening up suburbia which will create a form distinct from current/typical suburbia and actual old cities. I guess we see that already in some places but I don't really think we've perfected or discovered it yet.
Fascinating! I've definitely shared those assumptions about cars. I've enjoyed learning about how we can challenge our assumptions about urban design. The big problem does seem to be that many people want cities to look differently, but they don't want to personally change.
My own city, Indianapolis, has horrible public transportation, and the city's ambitious plan to create rapid bus transit has been met with fierce opposition from our state legislators, business owners who are frustrated at the requisite construction, and the seeming low-adoption of the program among passengers, because, frankly it's just not as convenient as driving.
Interested to keep learning about solutions to these problems! Thanks for your work.
You can also see that this is a choice from European countries that chose differently. Belgium has commute distances and mode shares that aren't that far off the US and anecdotally there is the same assumption that driving everywhere is just what normal people do.
Interesting!
I’m pretty sure that the street pictured here is still a fairly car dominant street. One change that was made was the addition of an at grade tram line which makes traversing Amsterdam so easy that one can forgo a car and rely on a bicycle or walking beyond these main thoroughfares. But there were still plenty of cars on those thoroughfares.
I’m also going to say that the one place I’ve nearly been plowed down by a car as a pedestrian was Amsterdam, that includes Boston, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver and DC. We were in Amsterdam for a week and I narrowly missed getting hit by cars twice. Now, it’s possible this may have been a factor of me letting my guard down because the vast majority of the city is so pedestrian friendly.
The difference is that European cities were leveled by World War II. In America we *chose* to level our cities
I am incredulous about Toderian's claim here, which is too often repeated. While there are undoubtedly PARTS of Amsterdam that were rebuilt or degraded for the car, the photo invoked here is not an example of this! The structure of this street and the geometry of the buildings that define it are VIRTUALLY UNCHANGED by removing the cars. We do not advance urbanism by making claims that are this ridiculous, even when it is effective at building a cult following.
I mean, it's not something as drastic as freeway removal, but couldn't most American cities do the same thing in most of their land just by restricting cars? Large areas of American cities also still have streets and buildings that basically are still pre-car urbanism, don't they?
Yes and no. And sometimes a small change can make a big difference! First, I think Toderian should know better because this is his field. This photo is often juxtaposed as a Here and Now format, but with the lesson about the photos wrong. What these show is how too many cars degrade a great street, and by removing them you can have a great street. An example of that in Houston is Main Street in downtown, where vehicular traffic is discouraged without banning them completely.
Since I frequently see people write, "all we need to do is get rid of the cars," clearly people are missing the point. Getting rid of the cars would likely improve NA streets, but in most cases, they will still be bad streets, but better versions of those if traffic is prohibited or well controlled. Therefore, if your point is that removing cars would improve streets (while being careful not to increase LOS!), then make that your point. But that's not what I read above.
I'm not sure how "removing cars would improve streets" isn't what my point is? I guess I'm implicitly talking about the old urban fabric that's been degraded by cars, not the places we already transformed for cars in terms of land use. We definitely did more of the latter than Europe, but we still have plenty of great urban places that could be made to feel pretty "European."
This seems to be the thesis of the post and you subsume "removing cars would improve street under that thesis:
"'That’s fine, but those cities weren’t built for cars, while American cities—at least to a greater extent—were." This is what I used to basically think. It’s the default, inherited American viewpoint."
But the common idea is true: to a greater extent, European cities were not BUILT for cars. In the featured photo, there are drivers cramming cars into places that they were not built for cars, though there are certainly places in Amsterdam that were built for cars. This photo is not an example of one of them!
I kinda think you both have a point here. I remember visiting family in England in the 1990s and feeling superior because traffic in America was better than in England and France - in large part because America had these big roads that were easy to drive down, whereas everything in England and France felt so cramped. Clearly, all 3 had changed the meaning of streets to accomodate cars, but the manner in which the streets were built were newer/wider in America.
Either way, when I visited Germany before the pandemic - hardly an auto-phobic nation - you can see that it's easier to walk around even outside of downtowns, in a way that's only possible in very fancy and generally historic areas of America. And today, you don't even think about traffic in places where you're taking the train - so paradoxically, because American roads could better handle the car we didn't have the same inconvenience of cars everywhere until another 80M people moved in (and mostly congregated in "superstar cities") and therefore Europe spent that time changing. But also, the fact that they weren't built as well for cars also makes the change back a bit easier in Europe.
Similarly, in the 1990s when I visited family in India - everyone agrees that India is a better country to live in today than then. But everyone would also agree that it was easier to walk down the street in India then than now. If they so decide, it's probably easier to reverse the way streets have been fully dedicated to cars.
But nevertheless, I don't think the change is really so impossible - take an average suburban town, it probably has one large shopping center somewhere with big box stores and a large parking lot, and a bunch of neighborhoods around that shopping center, with some smaller shopping centers adjacent to some of the neighborhoods, and large, fast arterial roads breaking up the neighborhood. Before anything else, you can make the arterials have better walking and biking paths, and less lanes for cars. Improving access from neighborhoods directly to the smaller shopping centers isn't a crazy expensive task. The only area that really may be more intractably auto-dependent is the big box stores, but the rest of it won't look like europe, but - especially if you let folks sell things out of their garage until they meet a certain revenue threshold - it would be a pleasant way to live without really a ton of construction.
Your last bit is something else I've thought about - outside of the old legacy cities, urbanism in America probably won't *look* like "urbanism" - there will have to be some way of thickening up suburbia which will create a form distinct from current/typical suburbia and actual old cities. I guess we see that already in some places but I don't really think we've perfected or discovered it yet.