dissuaded demand?

December 17, 2019 11:22 AM

15 major cities around the world that are starting to ban cars[BI] in an effort to reduce emissions[Bloomberg], speed transit[Vox] and remove deadly vehicles from city streets[Guardian]. Cities Worldwide Are Reimagining Their Relationship With Cars[NYTimes]
posted by the man of twists and turns (41 comments total)

Good.
posted by SansPoint at 11:34 AM on December 17, 2019 [18 favorites]

From The Guardian article:

SUVs are a paradox: while many people buy them to feel safer, they are statistically less safe than regular cars, both for those inside and those outside the vehicle. A person is 11% more likely to die in a crash inside an SUV than a regular saloon. Studies show they lull drivers into a false sense of security, encouraging them to take greater risks. Their height makes them twice as likely to roll in crashes and twice as likely to kill pedestrians by inflicting greater upper body and head injuries, as opposed to lower limb injuries people have a greater chance of surviving. Originally modelled from trucks, they are often exempt from the kinds of safety standards applied to passenger vehicles, including bonnet height. In Europe legislation is being brought in to end such “outdated and unjustified” exemptions.

Not sure what they meant in the typo about "a regular saloon," but this paragraph is a fantastic summary of the problems with SUVs.

And there's no surprise as to why SUVs are so popular:

“In Germany in 2018 they spent more on marketing SUVs than on any other segment; they actually spent as much as they spent on other segments together” says Von Dassel. “This is not some accident that people suddenly are really into these cars, they are heavily pushed into the market.”

In Europe, sales of SUVs leaped from 7% of the market in 2009 to 36% in 2018. They are forecast to reach nearly 40% by 2021. While pedestrian deaths are falling across Europe, they are not falling as fast as deaths of those using other modes of transport.

Although EU-wide figures don’t break down the type of car involved in collisions, in the US the link is clearer. “Pedestrian crashes have become both deadlier and more frequent,” says the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). “The increase has been mostly in urban or suburban areas, away from intersections, on busy main roads and in the dark. Crashes are increasingly likely to involve SUVs and high-horsepower vehicles.”

That article opens by referring to "aggressive marketing by carmakers of highly profitable 4x4 vehicles," but doesn't get into the profit-element any further.

Why American auto companies no longer want to sell actual cars (Janet Nguyen for Marketplace, Nov 26, 2018)

The Big Three automakers — which includes GM, along with Ford and Fiat Chrysler — are all moving toward larger vehicles in the U.S. because they bring larger profits. And to help the growing trend of SUV and pickup sales, gas prices are low.

“You know, carmakers always say they build what people want. But they never mention the fact that they spend billions to tell them what they want,” Dan Neil, an automotive columnist for the Wall Street Journal, told Marketplace earlier this year. “It wasn’t just that consumers spontaneously desired a truck that was as big as a house. No, that was a gradual process.”

Also: Crossovers and SUVs fatten profit margins -- Sit-high vehicles' transaction prices dwarf those of cars (Jesse Snyder for Auto News, July 24, 2017)

Automakers have learned to build roomier vehicles — crossovers and SUVs — that retail for more but with minimal additional manufacturing cost, said Jack Nerad, executive market analyst for Kelley Blue Book.

"A taller vehicle isn't significantly more difficult to manufacture than a shorter vehicle such as a sedan," he said, noting that SUVs and crossovers "are margin builders for automakers."

SUVs could be banned from city centers, or taxed more heavily to drop that profit margin. Or both.

My (small, possibly achievable) dream is for new car information stickers to include not only MPG, but also price per mile for fuel, plus price per year with national travel average, in that same BIG BOLD FOND.

I've also been musing on promoting what I'll call the "Death Profile" of SUVs and large trucks, compared to lower vehicles, after reading the Detroit Free Press article Death on foot: America's love of SUVs is killing pedestrians (July 1, 2018). The slightly misleading image of two people standing next to a car and an SUV (screencap, for ease of review) made me look at every vehicle I walk past and imagine getting hit by them. And then imagine my kids being hit by them.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:48 AM on December 17, 2019 [15 favorites]

Just got back from Lisbon, where they should definitely ban cars more on the ridiculously steep, curvy, narrow city streets. But also they should provide more mobility services (smaller electric trams/vehicles? escalators?) because it seems like a very bad place to be disabled.

In general car-banning should always come with discussion of why people use them (mobility, hauling around children/groceries, lack of infrastructure to get around otherwise, etc.). I don't actually think most people LOVE to drive in heavy city traffic; they just think the alternative is worse. And sometimes they are right about that and that's something that can be improved.
posted by emjaybee at 11:53 AM on December 17, 2019 [19 favorites]

I live in Madrid, and we have a new major who ran on a platform of pollution. As in, "progressives are anti-pollution, so I guess I'm for it". His main electoral promise was to "unban cars from the city center". The candidate from his same party who ran for governor (in american terms), said "3 am traffic jams were part of Madrid city life". They both won.

The attempt to unban cars was stopped by the EU's air quality directive. They then attempted to forfeit tickets to offending drivers. This was stopped by 3 different judges.

Meanwhile, the ban on cars has meant that business are thriving. You guessed that right, the conservatives are trying to oppose a measure that's in no uncertain terms good for business. So that's what we're up against all around the globe:just pure contrarianism.
posted by valdesm at 11:55 AM on December 17, 2019 [45 favorites]

Not sure what they meant in the typo about "a regular saloon"
Saloon in UK English = Sedan in US English
posted by delicious-luncheon at 11:55 AM on December 17, 2019 [20 favorites]

Also, I imagine it's easier to say "no cars in the city center" when congestion is bad, and there's limited parking, making driving already a hassle. But I look forward to more major cities doing this, which will in turn show people who live near and visit those cities to reconsider their concept of what it means to live and travel in a city. Reclaim the roads as public spaces for everyone, not just those in cars, SUVs, and trucks. For high-speed travel and mobility for all, keep buses with 5-15 minute headways. Freight deliveries could be scheduled after hours.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:55 AM on December 17, 2019

Not sure what they meant in the typo about "a regular saloon"
Saloon in UK English = Sedan in US English

To the point that my coworker in the UK had no idea what a "sedan" was, and I had to spent like 15 minutes explaining why guys in cowboy stories where not actually always getting drinks and into gunfights inside their 4 door cars.
posted by sideshow at 12:00 PM on December 17, 2019 [22 favorites]

One of the most delightful weeks I spent was in Ghent, Belgium, which has (I believe) Europe's largest car-free city center, a network of streets and plazas. It was stunningly easy to get around by transit, bike, or on foot - and, I observed, by car too (there are large buried parking garages underneath some large pedestrian squares). There were just fewer people choosing that mode because everything else was fast, easy, and safe.
posted by entropone at 12:09 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

So that's what we're up against all around the globe:just pure contrarianism.

Do not discount the extent to which political parties across the spectrum in many countries, but certainly right wing ones, have been captured by the fossil fuel industry, legacy utilities, etc.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:11 PM on December 17, 2019 [14 favorites]

In NYC (where I live), 2000 people die prematurely each year due to PM2.5 (a kind of air pollution). That's 1 out of every 20 deaths in the city. In the past 5 years there have been over 1,200 deaths due to vehicle crashes. There are so many benefits that can be reaped by dramatically reducing cars in cities.
posted by entropone at 12:13 PM on December 17, 2019 [16 favorites]

My (small, possibly achievable) dream is for new car information stickers to include not only MPG, but also price per mile for fuel, plus price per year with national travel average, in that same BIG BOLD FOND.

This basically is the current (US) reality.
posted by kickingtheground at 12:25 PM on December 17, 2019

Bristol is set to become the first UK city to ban diesel cars in a bid to improve air quality.

Edinburgh is planning to ban cars which fail to meet strict pollution limits by the end of 2020.

It is notable that diesel lorries and buses, often the heaviest polluters, are not yet included in these plans.
posted by Lanark at 12:44 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

When I was looking into the origin of the Amsterdam's bicycle culture, I was surprised to learn that the enormous infrastructure that supports it (e.g.: separated bike lanes, etc...) is relatively recent. For some reason, I assumed that it came into being roughly at the same time as bicycles themselves, like maybe the late 19th Century. Nope. The majority of it came about in the 1970s as a result of a protest action against car-vs-child fatalities.

I guess my point is if the Netherlands could uproot and remake its physical traffic infrastructure as late as the 1970s, there's really no actual, practical barrier to making changes of similar (or lesser?) magnitude elsewhere. It's merely (or, rather "merely") political will.
posted by mhum at 12:47 PM on December 17, 2019 [9 favorites]

The social ideology of the motorcar
posted by The Whelk at 1:10 PM on December 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

What we need is a mayor to say something like "Look. We've failed you. I understand that you need your car. But it's our fault for not providing high quality, frequent public transportation."

You gotta make not-driving more possible/attractive than driving. Then you can start turning up the dials on dissuading people from driving, through higher gas taxes, higher parking fees, congestion charging, etc.

European cities are leading the way, because they already have high quality public transit, where driving a car is only something you do if you have to. But here in Philadelphia (for instance) we have had a desired subway expansion on the books for decades. We can't even get a short extension to the Navy Yard (employment center) done. The regional rail network runs way too infrequently. We have politicians openly saying that driving to the corner store is "part of our culture".

Oh, and SUVs should be straight-up illegal.
posted by Automocar at 1:10 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

And yet in my US city, people are ready to impeach the mayor for creating a few bike lanes.
posted by octothorpe at 1:11 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

I just got an ebike and it's kind of nuts how a minor assistance in pedaling takes you from making any excuse not to ride your bike as often as you can to "oh it's only 12° F out, totally fine to ride around." It's interesting how once you can hit ~20 mph easily, all of a sudden it's viable transportation and you feel like it's no big deal getting across town, even though it honestly wasn't that much different under pedal power and things like mopeds never felt viable for some reason. And I'm heartened by what seems like a lot of interest in ebikes from people decidedly unenthusiastic about bicycles or electric vehicles otherwise. I feel like there's a possibility of seeing a strong surge in ebikes as regular transportation over the next few years in a way that might displace a lot of older, cheaper, more polluting cars, because of how well it works as basic transportation and how low the costs are relative to even the cheapest used cars.
posted by jason_steakums at 1:11 PM on December 17, 2019 [17 favorites]

It's also worth noting that Amsterdam had a dense car based infrastructure that they sent the 70s and 80s tearing up and replacing with a tram and bicycle Centric structure
posted by The Whelk at 1:12 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]

Also a reminder that New York City's no Private Car 14th Street busway has been an unalloyed success and business booster and there's nothing stopping us from doing it on 42nd, 36tg 72nd, 59th, etc
posted by The Whelk at 1:18 PM on December 17, 2019 [6 favorites]

Interesting to read that about the proposed LEZ for Edinburgh, Lanark, I hadn't seen that, despite living in the city.

Worth noting that Edinburgh actually has a bus service that continues to be pretty decent, despite the city council's best efforts to fuck it up by constantly digging up major roads. It was a real culture shock when I moved here many years ago to hear people praising the buses (having previously lived in London, where complaining about public transport vied with complaining about house prices for favourite conversational topic).

And - it can be no coincidence - Edinburgh's bus company is publicly owned - a plc which is 91% owned by the city council, with the remainder owned by neighbouring councils which receive some of its services.

The expansion into running trams has surprised everyone with its success, though I must admit I am gritting my teeth ahead of the several years' worth of roadworks along my commute as they prepare to extend* the route. I try to comfort myself with the thought that it's good to live in a city that's investing in publicly-owned transport infrastructure.

*I say extend, I mean run the route to its original intended terminus, rather than the truncated route they were forced to build following a massive stooshie with their contractors and escalating prices meant the original plan got too expensive for phase 1.
posted by penguin pie at 1:33 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Oh, and the word sedan does exist in British English but it has a different meaning/connotation that would frankly only add to the confusion if you used it in a conversation about transport.
posted by penguin pie at 1:48 PM on December 17, 2019 [5 favorites]

Toronto has limited car travel on ONE street (King St, downtown). This limitation permits cars to drive one block after which they must exit.

Oh, the howling. It was all the same, tired memes: that the restriction would destroy business, it would not actually help, deliveries would become impossible, and so on.

The effect has been WONDERFUL. King St has a light rail line on it - and now it moves like a dream. The increase in ridership has massively increased the number of people who commute on King St. The street is so much more useful!

Now that cars are out of the way, there is room to expand restaurant patios, install public artwork, and generally walk comfortably. Business is up. WAY UP. And King St is so much nicer now.

This fantastic outcome was accomplished without even banning cars. But honestly, due to the knee-jerk howling, I wish they had just gone for the ban in order to establish precedent. Sure, the King St. lane restrictions were expedient, low-impact, relatively safe, etc... But the blowback was as bad (insane) as if they had banned cars.

This project appears to have generated NO momentum, unfortunately. In Toronto, a new bike lane will still be debated for decades. The nearby businesses (which now have evidence to expect their sales to increase) will inevitably howl and protest.

I fear that half-measures aren't accomplishing the progress we require. But that's just the story from Toronto.
posted by iandennismiller at 2:19 PM on December 17, 2019 [10 favorites]

Munich has done well by limiting cars in the city center. Coming from a car-centric city, it's very odd to walk around and not hear, smell, and feel cars all around you. It's very pleasant and makes the city much more livable. There are still millions of cars in Munich, of course, but they have done a good job of limiting them beyond what I've seen in other places of that size.
posted by chaz at 2:34 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

The War on Cars Is Real, and It's Being Led by Cities

The 'War on Cars' Is a Bad Joke

Most communities are automobile dependent, making it difficult to get around without a car. This is no accident; for the last century, transportation planning emphasized automobile-oriented infrastructure design and investments to the detriment of other modes. This ultimately harms everyone, including motorists who face increased congestion, crash risk and chauffeuring burdens. As a result, smart communities are starting to implement more multi-modal planning, with more investments in walking, bicycling and public transit, complete streets roadway designs, and reduced parking subsidies. That creates a more efficient and equitable transportation system in which travellers can choose the most appropriate mode for each trip, and people who cannot, should not, or prefer not to drive receive their fair share of public resources.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:46 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'd love to see externalities like noise, pollution, crashes, parking, urban land use, and roadway construction/maintenance baked into car sales on the assumption that the cars would drive 240,000 miles over a 10 year "lifetime". So you buy a 2,750kg+ ICE SUV/Truck and you or your financing company pay the extra ~$30,000 or so right at time of purchase. This would basically let the market sort out a lot of the problems of escalation of vehicle size and hopefully reduce the cyclic demand for SUV and subcompacts that gas price fluctuations cause.

I know this seems regressive, and hopefully a sane government would increase subsidies to low income families or make public transit free to offset.

I know in the US instead we get dumb bonus depreciation for oversized vehicles further compounding our problems.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:11 PM on December 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

A person is 11% more likely to die in a crash inside an SUV than a regular saloon.

This is an old and obsolete statistic from 2003, covering vehicles mostly built in the 1990s when SUVs first started coming into the market and ESC was not standard yet.

For more up to date information, there's the IIHS report from 2011 which says that since the development of electronic stability control, SUVs are pretty much the safest vehicle you could drive in the US. They looked FARS data* and computed deaths per million registered vehicle years - the average across the US was 48, for SUVs it was 28, for sedans it was 56. Within each category there was also a clear bias towards being safer in the large vehicle - within SUVs, small 4x4s had a death rate of 31, while very large SUVs had a death rate of 19. Within 4 door sedans, mini cars had a death rate of 82 while very large cars had a death rate of 46.

IIHS did note that the death rate for SUVs dropped by 66% when comparing models built in 1999-2002 (death rate of 82) versus models built in 2005-2008 (death rate of 28).

They pin the causality squarely on ESC - in 2002 ESC was standard on 10% of SUVs, while in 2006 models it was standard on 96% of SUVs - and the data shows that SUVs built in 2006 have lower than average death rates in rollover accidents.

*basically, anything related to vehicular safety in the US will inevitably come from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System which records the detail of every fatal accident.
posted by xdvesper at 3:52 PM on December 17, 2019 [7 favorites]

...pay the extra $30,000 or so...

From 2008: Quantifying the External Costs of Vehicle Use: Evidence From America's Top-Selling Light-Duty Models notes that it skips over a whole heck of a lot of external costs that aren't directly tied to per-mile vehicle travel, and comes up with:

Using a sales weighted average over vehicle makes and model, our estimates for these five costs are about $0.236 per VMT.

So your 240k miles is at least $56,640, adjusted for CPI from 2008 to now that's closer to $70k, and I bet good arguments have been made for quite a bit more than that. That's for the average light-duty automobile, so, yeah, more for that truck and/or SUV, and I believe that in the last 10 years we've discovered even more ways in which the impacts of the automobile are massively under-priced..
posted by straw at 3:52 PM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Sure, $70K is fine. I don't have a clue what the actual dollar amount is, but just wanted to say what externalities I'd like to see captured. I was using a PV calculation with $3840/year for ten years at 6% interest. I don't know what the actual summed up externality cost would be. I find studies all over the map, and insurance effectively bakes in the crash cost to some extent.
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:41 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's a poorly researched article based on the safety record and emissions of 1990s SUVs, and seeking to reduce emissions by banning passenger cars just as they are rapidly switching over to be zero emission EVs. We are on the lower part of the EV hockey stick graph right now.

New SUVs became safer than cars once they got standard active stability control (see xdvesper's post above) and standard rear view cameras.

Vehicles in general are experiencing a rapid improvement in safety from the spread of rear cross traffic detection (tells you if it is unsafe to back out), blind spot monitoring, automatic emergency braking, lane departure detection, tire inflation detection, more sophisticated airbag systems and a host of other safety hardware.
SUVs being higher up the range and having more internal and exterior space for hardware, tend to adopt these features sooner and have more of these features both standard and available at any given time.
posted by w0mbat at 5:30 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Vehicles in general are experiencing a rapid improvement in safety

Mostly for people inside them. Not so for those outside and around them, which is a larger problem. Traffic-related injuries have been sharply rising in recent years.
posted by entropone at 6:31 PM on December 17, 2019 [23 favorites]

My understanding, which doesn't seem to be addressed in the 2011 report, is that the SUV vs SUV fatality rate is similar to the car vs car fatality rate, and it's only in the SUV vs car situation that the SUV comes out ahead. So SUVs make everyone else less safe. That this is true for pedestrians has been well established. I think it's true for other drivers as well, but I don't see that talked about as often.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:49 PM on December 17, 2019 [11 favorites]

Bikes and ebikes and restricted cross streets and subways are all very well if you are not disabled or limited in your strength.
Getting around NYC will become a bit more dicey and will be more so if car services are limited or banned or taxed beyond the affordability of people like myself already struggling to get around. Do try to think beyond the healthy, youthful folks who can bike everywhere. I used to walk everywhere in the City, but things change, you know?
posted by alwayson_slightlyoff at 8:16 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yeah the elderly and disabled who can't benefit from etrikes & motorized wheelchairs being able to get around more easily and safely can hopefully have much more expensive car share / paratransit / taxi services subsidized for them rather than subsidizing universally and ruining our cities, killing our children and giving us all lung disease. I'm aware that changing policy can leave people behind if we aren't cautious, but a status quo that actively harms everyone is not defensible.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:14 PM on December 17, 2019 [19 favorites]

It is a horrible shame that the MTA can't make subways more accessible what are they at a quarter or third of all stations?
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:17 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

New Arizona Development Bans Residents From Bringing Cars - "A $140 million residential project is banning privately owned cars in favor of scooters, bikes and ride-sharing, testing demand for a new type of walkable neighborhood."
posted by kliuless at 1:26 AM on December 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

Do try to think beyond the healthy, youthful folks who can bike everywhere. I used to walk everywhere in the City, but things change, you know?

Personally, I think about this all the time when I see cars doubleparked, parked in the crosswalks, parked blocking curb cuts, parked on the sidewalk, running reds with gridlock packing the intersection so tightly it's simply hard to cross squeezing between bumpers... Frankly, urban auto congestion crises create in my mind an ableist hellscape.

Though in a game of telephone the answer to it sometimes gets framed or heard as "everybody should bike everywhere" but that's really not quite it, and I understand that that discourse leaves some people behind, but the actual work of reducing car reliance is broader than that, and creates safer, more accessible cities that often solve the issues erected to block it - pro-car rhetoric often tries to pit bike lanes, for example, against ambulance mobility, but when we get unnecessary car trips off the road, then important trips are faster and better.
posted by entropone at 4:20 AM on December 18, 2019 [22 favorites]

In general car-banning should always come with discussion of why people use them

This includes status and preening. Cars are signifiers of so many things. It helps explain why supercars are driven around and through ancient European cities.
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:50 AM on December 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

You could honestly view the entire history of the 20st century though automobiles , from the bitter lake agreement that set into motion thr modern Middle East to the invention of sit down strikes and mob take over of auto unions to white flight/suburbanization/public transit dismantling to chain stores, the death of Main Street to climate change and alienation and atomization.

Hell you could even add the atmospheric lead hypothesis in there as well. Cars literally made the 20th century a dumber, more violent place.
posted by The Whelk at 10:53 AM on December 18, 2019 [10 favorites]

Do try to think beyond the healthy, youthful folks who can bike everywhere

There's a whole class of disabled people for whom walking any distance is impractical but cycling is absolutely fine, since it's less demanding on the body. In the Netherlands, distance cycled goes *up* as people get older.

My understanding is the number of disabled people who get around cities by car are vastly outnumbered by the number who only occasionally leave home because they don't have access to a car and sidewalks and public transport are inaccessible/limited.
posted by grahamparks at 2:13 PM on December 18, 2019 [13 favorites]

grahamparks, that's a great way to put it and look at it.

i used to work with a big nonprofit that did a lot of senior/elder care programming, largely centered around providing services so that people wouldn't be isolated. mobility was a huge issue for the people they served, but it was mostly within-neighborhood mobility. they had difficulty going a few blocks away to the grocery store or doctor's office. the kind of trips that a car doesn't replace, but that a car-dominated streetscape and lack of safe pedestrian space really threatens.
posted by entropone at 4:25 PM on December 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

So SUVs make everyone else less safe. That this is true for pedestrians has been well established.

Better car design could prevent pedestrian deaths, says NTSB report

In May, a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that examined federal crash data concluded that “fatal single-vehicle crashes involving SUVs increased 81 percent, more than any other type of vehicle,” between 2009 and 2016. Although cars and SUVs seemed to hit people at the same rate, when SUVs hit people they were more likely to die.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:08 AM on December 19, 2019