Eh, proposals to eliminate parking requirements come close. If you can’t park your car near your home then you can’t really have one in any practical sense.
That said, you could eliminate parking near businesses and force people to walk / bike / transit. But if you eliminate it near homes you’re basically forcing the people who will live there to give up their cars altogether. The bill you touted in the Slate article you posted does both and it’s misguided around housing IMO.
Thanks, this is all interesting. The 25 stories is my key number. The president mentioned Hong Kong with 30-40 stories, that may be more then necessary for “walkable” density, but when I look at 5 story buildings around here I just don’t see enough density to put most services within a “walkable” distance.
A square, 9,000 sqft building would be about 95 feet on a side. Add 25 feet of air space on all sides (includes half the street on the street side, and that’s 145 feet per side or 21,000 square feet of building plus cushion, or 84 feet of land per adult resident. A plot of land that’s a quarter mile on a side would have 21,000 people (assuming no parks or streets wider than 50 feet, or retail, schools, etc).
To me, that is “dense enough”. Even after I deduct for the wider thoroughfares, parks, retail, I think I’ve got enough people to support a mix of retail services within a quarter mile of most peoples’ doors.
Get rid of personal cars. Make all cars rentals and easily accessible on the streets like zip cars or uber. That’ll get rid of the majority of cars and parking spaces.
Taxis and uber reduce the number of parking spaces, but increase the amount of traffic. That’s because taxis and ubers “deadhead” – travel empty from one fare to the next.
You could still own a car if there’s good mass transit, that you park in a big parking garage away from the urban center that’s next to a train station (like they have in Chicago). If you can pack all your holiday gear into rollabags, then you can all take the train out to the parking garage. If you have too much gear, somebody goes out to pick up the car and brings it back to the expensively-metered short-term parking out the front of the residential building to load the car.
We need to dig up the post twig93 once made enumerating the myriad personal items that live in her car.
I can see how that would be practical for a once-a-year road trip; but that would be very inconvenient to have to do for every shopping trip at the specialty grocery store just outside of town.
Normally in these sort of neighborhoods (in Europe/Asia) you have plenty of specialty stores within walking distance. Otherwise, you can take your wheeled shopping bag on the train to a nearby station.
2 big issues in my city help constrain affordable housing IMO, and both need to change. Proposals for both were both recently advanced and so far have been rejected.
Zoning: the vast majority of the city is zoned single family residential, and there’s a bit of NIMBY regarding higher density development. Recently, one proposal was to change all zoning within a half mile of a rail station to allow for small apartment buildings of up to 4 units, and up to 12 units if it was affordable housing. Sounded like a step in the right direction to me, but we need even greater density near rail.
The second was to eliminate some of the minimum parking requirements in residential areas.
I also agree that my city needs a lot of work on improving bike infrastructure with more protected cycle tracks. The huge size of many vehicles now makes biking on major streets increasingly dangerous. The city is better than it was 20 years ago, but cycle infrastructure is still woefully inadequate here.
Ah, yeah, that would be nice. The population addressed by the specialty groceries I buy just isn’t well-represented enough where I live to have a store in every neighborhood.
Do you have an example of this wheeled shopping bag concept? I’m curious how much it would hold, and where it would go while I’m inside the store shopping, with no car to leave it in outside.
You can wheel it in the store and use it instead of a shopping cart
You can take the bag into the store (I used to stash it in the lower compartment of the shopping trolley). People in those neighborhoods tend to shop more frequently, picking up the food very fresh. If you go by bicycle you don’t need a wheeled bag, you just stash it in the basket of the bicycle - Why Grocery Shopping is Better in Amsterdam - YouTube
The idea is NOT to ban Cars in any legal way. The idea is to give people viable alternatives to a personal car. Mass transit, walking, bicycling for instance.
The purpose is to reduce congestion and the associated costs of car dependency. Urban planning is a thing. And they’ve learned a lot about how to make those alternatives work.
Place residential and commercial near the transit stations. In NA, the space around transit hubs is more than likely a giant parking lot, making it hard to walk to and throwing away some of the most productive tax revenue. Just stop that.
Reduce car traffic by altering the street. No more Stroads. stroads are the main arteries across the urban landscape. 6, 8, and sometimes 10 lanes that link together consecutive still malls, big box stores, and of course, drive thru fast food. We all know these spots. Tough, hazardous driving. Many accidents. Very bad for walking or cycling, as the cars have posted limits like 40mph that no one observes. These are places you forbid your 12 year old child from going anywhere near. And with good reason.
Revise your tax policies so that the whole city isn’t subsidizing the suburban housing experience. SR1 is not evil, but it should not be coddled,either. Just pay what you owe.
Cities around the world are moving this direction (even Paris!). It’s a transition that requires planning, money, and political will. But if we want to address housing costs, then there is no other way.
Is it collapsible, for the journey to the store? I’ve seen models that are, but there’s no intermediate shelf, making them either low-capacity, or hard to use inside the store.
JSM addressed it already but we’re not going to get rid of all personal cars, just eliminate the need for one for a good chunk of the population. I know plenty of people who don’t own a car in my town, and we don’t even have much density here. If they need a car for a road trip or a big shopping trip to the big mall an hour away they can rent one. Not owning a car frees up quite a bit of $$ as well.
knoath covered this above, but many models are collapsible. It’s easy enough to find one that is if it’s important for you.
That’s cool. But we’d need major structural, cultural, and lifestyle changes to pull off something like that in the US.
IMO, counting on something to be in-stock the same day I plan to cook with it is… a gamble.
That’s what I’m saying we should NOT be trying for.
I detailed why in the AO thread on AVs where some were predicting that AVs would bring about the end of car ownership. No. It will reduce car ownership and make it much more attractive to be a one-car family. But there is way too much convenience attached to owning your OWN car to make a serious attempt at getting rid of it all together. I think it’s folly to try.
Many cities in Europe largely consist of buildings up to 6 stories, and that’s plenty of density to support enough stores within walking distance. While higher density can support even more, just allowing more midrise construction would go a long way towards making neighborhoods more pedestrian and cycle friendly