Paris is taking space back from cars. Here's how.

September 18, 2021 11:11 PM

The Liberation of Paris From Cars Is Working - "The French capital is quickly cutting automobiles out of daily life. David Belliard is the deputy mayor behind it."[1,2] (previously)

Over the past six years, Paris has done more than almost any city in the world to take space back from cars. Mayor Anne Hidalgo has opened linear parks in the old highways along the Seine, phased out diesel cars in the city, opened bus lanes, raised parking meter prices, and plowed bike lanes down hundreds of streets. When COVID hit, Paris eliminated cars from the Rue de Rivoli, its major crosstown thoroughfare. Plans are in the works to pedestrianize the Champs-Elysées and plant thousands of trees to green, clean, and cool the city.

also btw...

• Socialist Paris mayor enters race for French presidency - "As mayor of Paris, Spain-born Hidalgo has won plaudits for converting the once traffic-choked banks of the river Seine into bustling promenades, for getting tough on polluting vehicles and creating new bike lanes during the COVID-19 crisis."
• Fulgence Bienvenüe - "In 1886, Bienvenüe moved on to Paris to design and supervise the construction of aqueducts for the city, drawing water from the Aube and Loire Rivers.  Next, he built a cable railway near the Place de la République and created the park of Buttes-Chaumont. In 1891, he was appointed as Engineer-in-Chief for Bridges and Roads, the most prestigious engineering job in France. Paris city officials selected Bienvenüe to become chief engineer for the Paris Métro in 1896."
• Wuppertal Schwebebahn - "Its original name is Einschienige Hängebahn System Eugen Langen (Eugen Langen Monorail Overhead Conveyor System). It is the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world and is a unique system in Germany."[3,4]
• Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis Electric Railway - "It was built by a group of Cleveland, Ohio, electric railway entrepreneurs to serve as a high-speed, showpiece line using the most advanced technology of the time. It served Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis, Maryland, for 27 years before the Great Depression and the rise of the automobile forced an end to passenger service."[5]
• Why Are There Zero Republican Mega-Cities? - "Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors."

posted by kliuless (44 comments total)

Obligatory joke: But surely the cars ate Paris?
posted by dannyboybell at 4:35 AM on September 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Fifty percent of public space is occupied by private cars, which are used mostly by the richest, and mostly by men, because it’s mostly men who drive, and so in total, the richest men are using half the public space.
posted by signal at 4:59 AM on September 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

Kudos to Hidalgo for moving the agenda forward in Paris. But, I will talk about the car trip I made from Lyon to Normandy last week. Worth mentioning that, despite France's large size, it is quite centered on Paris: you can find signs on the outskirts of towns pointing the distance there - even when the city of light is several hundreds of KM distance - the the roads lead there like a hub on a wheel. My GPS told me that a route which avoided Paris would take maybe 2 hours longer (and more re-charging stops) than one which did not.

Turns out that avoiding Paris would still have been quicker: the outer roads that ring the city were crammed with trucks and cars who were orbiting the city to circumvent it - either locals trying to get from one part to another or non-locals trying to get from one part of France/Europe to another. France has an outstanding train network which can provide an alternative for some passengers and freight - but cars and trucks, ICE or otherwise, remain as an issue to be dealt with. It sounds like sending some of them on routes which are longer, but which avoid skirting the capital, is probably a good idea.
posted by rongorongo at 5:35 AM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is slowly happening in Austin, and I’m mostly all for it, but it seems to be missing a visionary element of how people should get around in absence of vehicles. Public transit initiatives are fought tooth-and-nail by the “keep mah taxes low!” Ignorati, and when they do pass, are subject to sometimes decade-long delays from a culture of committee and focus group infighting about implementation that seems to stall everything. Some of the environmental concerns about implementation over any of several karst aquifers are all too real.

So while the city council is doing a fab job of identifying biking and walking corridors and implementing them in swift fashion, reducing car lanes and parking, the light rail that is supposed to ease access from our sprawling suburbs lingers in the planning stages, and we have ended up with two classes of people- those who live within biking & walking distance of the city center, or can afford taxis/ubers, etc. and a second class of Austinites who are for the most part excluded from the city center by lack of rapid or affordable access.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:40 AM on September 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

Meanwhile southern France has some of the most car-heavy infrastructure I’ve seen in Europe. Big box stores, hypermarkets far from city centers, commuter suburbs, malls, strip malls, etc.
posted by romanb at 5:45 AM on September 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also relevant, especially when anyone says "But X is not (Amsterdam|Paris|Copenhagen)!", is How the Dutch got their cycling paths and the video documentary. There is a 1972 film of the children and parents organizing that shows there were people who opposed "stopping the child murder", like the guy at 4:18 in the film who tries to tear down the improvised barrier and the politicians who won't commit to any changes.

Fifty years later, it is still an ongoing process, such as removing all the parking from the Herengracht and converting an Utrecht motorway back to a canal and burying a double-decker tunnel and building a park over it in Maastricht, although the end result is really worth it and makes for such a more pleasant place to live.
posted by autopilot at 5:55 AM on September 19, 2021 [20 favorites]

This type of stuff is SO DOABLE and it's vital changes to make for sustainability, to deal with climate change, to improve accessibility, and to improve public health in myriad ways - traffic injuries and fatalities, air quality, and physical activity.

Love to see it happening. Hope to see it happen at a real scale in my home city.
posted by entropone at 6:17 AM on September 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Why Are There Zero Republican Mega-Cities? - "Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors."

At the risk of being pedantic, a city of 1 million people would not be considered a megacity in any of the typical definitions globally (usually starting at around 10 million residents). The US just doesn't have many genuinely large cities.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:10 AM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

This kind of stuff is wonderful to read / hear about, but also very, very dispiriting because I know that the city I live in (Toronto) will NEVER be this way. The most frustrating thing about living here is how car-centric it is. More and more intersections are getting lights that won't change for pedestrians unless a button is pushed--and if you miss the button by one second, you have to wait out an entire other cycle; it's not safe to ride a bike; they're allowing motorized vehicles in the bikelanes; etc. It's infuriating.

There's an intersection near me (Parkside Dr and Howard Park Dr) that they did construction on last year that involved them removing the poles that had the beg buttons on them. For 2 months the light never changed for walk-through traffic because you couldn't push the button because there was no button to push. For literally 2 months the light wouldn't change east-west unless a motorized vehicle set off the sensor, essentially cutting the neighbourhood off from one of the largest parks in the city which sits on the west side of the intersection.

Toronto is the polar opposite of what Paris is doing.
posted by dobbs at 7:16 AM on September 19, 2021 [15 favorites]

The overwhelming share of Republican vote is middle class white people. Middle class Americans (of all races) like big(ger) houses on big(ger) lots and low(er) prices, good public schools and car-friendly infrastructure, none of which cities with population over 1 million offer with any consistency. Regions with lots of minorities have lots of heavily minority suburbs, which tend to vote Democrat, albeit (in most places) a suburban-lifestyle-friendly flavor of Democrat you don't hear a lot about.
posted by MattD at 8:12 AM on September 19, 2021

> Yet even if you broaden the sample to cities with just over a quarter million people, the vast majority of cities still lean left.
posted by Clowder of bats at 9:10 AM on September 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

At the risk of being pedantic, a city of 1 million people would not be considered a megacity in any of the typical definitions globally

True but irrelevant. Globally, virtually nowhere has ether a Republican, or Democratic mayor.

So while the city council is doing a fab job of identifying biking and walking corridors and implementing them in swift fashion, reducing car lanes and parking, the light rail that is supposed to ease access from our sprawling suburbs lingers in the planning stages, and we have ended up with two classes of people- those who live within biking & walking distance of the city center, or can afford taxis/ubers, etc. and a second class of Austinites who are for the most part excluded from the city center by lack of rapid or affordable access.

While congrats to Paris, I suppose (never been there, let alone lived there to make any kind of assessment), it's kind of terrible that so many reflexively cheer on car reduction without context. A while back, someone complained that here in Los Angeles, Venice Blvd was cut down, and was attacked by the "but studies show..." crowd. This very same crowd would also bemoan gentrification and rapidly rising housing costs. Which is exactly what cutting down that road means. Sure it was great for those who don't need to commute often, or at all. But the majority of actual working class people do. That particular corridor is densely populated with suck folk. In a place like L.A., that almost certainly means an automobile makes living possible. But the choice to limit traffic made moving out a more necessary option for that same working class, and made the area a more attractive place to live for people who aren't chained to a physical place of employment for a living. Which tend to be higher wage earners. I've generally been in favor of gentrification, particularly in places like L.A. where property owners have much greater benefit of improved neighborhood and personal worth, translating into better options for cashing out or not. In the case of discouraging transit by car, it was a policy that favored higher income households over existing working class households, owners and renters. Yes, traffic is being limited and nicer amenities are popping up, and it's an increasingly desirable place to live. That's because working class commuters are discouraged from staying, and higher income people with more money to spend are replacing them. And at the same time, "look how much the area has improved with less traffic and higher income households" is the lesson taken.

I can understand anti car sentiment. I cannot endorse that sentiment when the actual situation on the ground does not translate to an actual improvement. It puzzles me that so many, particularly on the left, cannot imagine a reason why someone would own a car, when the vast majority of car owners rightly determine that owning a car is their key to their own increased prosperity. That is the reality cities have to deal with.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:11 AM on September 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

The fact that a city is doing a poor job of adequately replacing cars does not mean cars are good. Aside from the whole global warming thing, aside from the rampant cancer and asthma which disproportionately affect minority communities, just car crashes alone are the leading cause of death for American children. But a city did a shit job of implementing rapid bus service so instead of making the buses actually functional, we ought to keep giving every teenager a planet destroying death machine until… well, until.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:22 AM on September 19, 2021 [33 favorites]

Nobody is saying that inadequately replacing cars means cars are good and they're going to be handed out to everyone (this isn't a thing by the way, that's not happening anywhere), but if people have to spend 4+ hours a day on public transportation to get to and from work no problem has been solved except for people who can afford leisurely time in parks, and/or can afford to be tourists.

There is no point if solving the transit issue isn't the primary function, unless we want to pay people to stay home until we can finish building the nice parks and then get around to completely revamping the transit infrastructure.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:28 AM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

LA punishes non-car owners by design, and has since before WW2. It's often been used as the poster definition of sprawl. Putting a bandaid on a shotgun wound and then claiming the real problem is advocating for fewer cars when it fails is ridiculous.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 9:29 AM on September 19, 2021 [22 favorites]

The last line of the article was pretty good:

The gilets jaunes is what? People saying, “We’ve had enough of gas prices going up.” Frankly they’re right. When I was in Vesoul, I was obliged to have a car, the car was not an object of emancipation but of servitude. I could do nothing without my car. So evidently, we are asking them to pay ever more for something they are required to use. The question of alternatives is the fundamental question.

posted by clawsoon at 9:48 AM on September 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

The Paris that ate cars
posted by Going To Maine at 9:49 AM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

and they're going to be handed out to everyone (this isn't a thing by the way, that's not happening anywhere),

Clearly I didn’t mean they’d be handed out for free by the government. I meant they would continue to be seen as a necessity for life that everyone must have or else they will suffer, which is more or less exactly what you said in the comment I responded to?
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:55 AM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Paris isn't quite handing out vehicles, although France does have a 50% (up to 500 euros) government stipend for e-bike purchases and a 200 euros tax incentive to bike to work.

(Funnily enough, one of the quotes in the Reuters article says the incentives "will not turn France into the Netherlands, but it is a start", echoing the usual refrain with a more hopeful tone...)
posted by autopilot at 10:12 AM on September 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Most cities in the US are ridiculously car-centric with bad public transportation. Paris happens to be a city with very good transportation, and is also fairly dense, so everything you might need in your daily life could be had within walking distance.

I have lived in cities all my life, mostly NYC, and I have never owned a car. Pre-pandemic, it was very easy to live here without a car, and actually difficult to live here with one. Like Paris, it is dense, so most of what I need can be gotten within walking distance, and commuting by subway was straightforward. The pandemic has made people avoid public transportation, but it is the wealthier people here getting cars. The amount of money to buy and maintain a car, anywhere, is pretty shocking to me.

It is 100% absolutely possible to live comfortably in a city without cars, and I obviously prefer it, but it's true that certain conditions must hold. I once spent a week visiting a friend in LA trying to get around without a car and it was painful. But cutting back on cars is an absolute necessity for fighting global warming. I don't see how you can argue otherwise.
posted by maggiemaggie at 11:26 AM on September 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

Paris (France overall) also reimburses 50% of commuting public transport costs, and many employers make up the difference.

I’m pleased about this from an eco point of view, but as a disabled person living here, the metro should also be made accessible to compensate, currently the majority have stairs without escalators or lifts and I am forced to use ride sharing apps a lot around Paris or take two to three buses on days I cannot do stairs.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:23 PM on September 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

Paris did the hard work of building out the framework of a proper transit system century and more ago. They still get value from that work today--but it was a lot of effort at the time.
posted by gimonca at 12:29 PM on September 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Who lives in Paris? Nothing against you, but you presupposed that everyone in Paris is rich, which isn’t true.

I do enjoy it when people slap Slate around.
posted by doctornemo at 12:30 PM on September 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

A very good interview.
Bit by bit to the solarpunk future.
posted by doctornemo at 12:33 PM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

A good opportunity to plug The War On Cars (the podcast, but also, like, the concept), which had an episode almost a year ago in which they interviewed Paris's Deputy Mayor about these changes and what it took to get them. I'm not associated with it, just a satisfied listener.
posted by valrus at 1:09 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

At the risk of being pedantic, a city of 1 million people would not be considered a megacity in any of the typical definitions globally (usually starting at around 10 million residents). The US just doesn't have many genuinely large cities.

The second definition for mega as a prefix in almost every dictionary is 1,000,000 of the specified unit. /mega-pedantry
posted by srboisvert at 1:57 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

The last line of the article was pretty good:

The gilets jaunes is what? People saying, “We’ve had enough of gas prices going up.” Frankly they’re right. When I was in Vesoul, I was obliged to have a car, the car was not an object of emancipation but of servitude. I could do nothing without my car. So evidently, we are asking them to pay ever more for something they are required to use. The question of alternatives is the fundamental question.

This is something most Americans very studiously avoid thinking about: cars are extremely expensive and quite regressive, approaching a third of income for the poorest quintile:

In 2016, in the US, the lowest earning 20% of the population earned an average of $11,933, and spent an average of $3497 (29%) on transportation costs. The poorest get hit the hardest by the (lack of) transport system. For those making roughly $30,000 a year, their transportation expenditure was about 22%, then 17% for the next quintile. As Americans move from lower to higher income, the portion of their expenditure going towards transportation decreases. This makes sense. Personal vehicles are not cheap, and are not subsidized. Because American cities fail to provide people with alternative transportation options, people are forced to travel by personal vehicles. This leaves people with low incomes left with few options. While criticisms of lack of public transportation focus on the toll to the environment, they should also consider the issue of equity. Lack of public transportation is a financial burden – by not having good options, people are forced to make burdensome financial decisions and are left in a cycle of poverty that becomes harder to escape.

That’s before you get into the indirect costs: healthcare due to replacing active transportation with sedentary driving (with poor people facing disproportionately long commutes), heavy traffic routes (which tend to be in poor neighborhoods) reliably producing injuries and pollution-related illnesses, higher general taxes to pay for road construction and maintenance, and parking subsidies forcing you to pay increased housing and retail prices even if you don’t use a car.

Now, it’s true that many cities have avoided investing in transit (racism has entered the chat) but the solution has to be addressing that directly. We’ve tried everything but fixing the root cause and there’s a reason it hasn’t worked.
posted by adamsc at 2:01 PM on September 19, 2021 [13 favorites]

I'm going to second the War on Cars podcast if this post is your sort of thing. Not every episode is great, but enough of them are interesting enough for me to keep coming back.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:05 PM on September 19, 2021

> this isn't a thing by the way, that's not happening anywhere

It sort of is, though? Car travel is massively subsidized with everything from free parking to tax-funded road construction, and much more. Car drivers like to think that they pay their fair share and more, via gas/registration/other taxes, but the data show that they are actually heavily subsidized.

Or if you want me to more narrowly address the "cars aren't being handed out" argument, consider for example that e-car purchases receive a direct federal tax credit paid to the owner of up to $7500 - with no such tax credit for e-bikes (or any bike at all for that matter).

Perhaps the most powerful impact of car culture is that even we the people who argue against it have been influenced by it into failing to consider its inherent biases, false constructions, and elisions and end up giving cars more leniency than due.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:50 PM on September 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

Reminds me of these charts I came across recently. The lowest income quintile in the US spends ~30% of it's income on transportation compared to the EU where the lowest income quintile spends ~8%. Car dependency is an enormous cost for the poorest people in the US.

@nateaff on Twitter (Follow link for charts)
posted by misskaz at 4:18 PM on September 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

by not having good options, people are forced to make burdensome financial decisions and are left in a cycle of poverty that becomes harder to escape

This is very much on purpose.
posted by aramaic at 5:43 PM on September 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I look at what Anne Hidalgo has been doing in Paris on this issue, I'm inspired. She has not let the emergency of the pandemic go to waste.

When I compare it to all that Bill deBlasio has failed to do in NYC, where I live, I'm deeply disappointed. Even in the closing months of his final term, when he doesn't have to cower before the minority of his constituents who drive cars -- like he's been doing for eight years now -- he still is. (And he still falsely claims they're the "working class" -- flatly false, according to all the data. NYC car owners are much wealthier than the transit-riding majority.)

He has spent years resisting and then slow-walking congestion pricing, which would impose stringent tolls on cars in most of Manhattan south of Central Park. He preaches "Vision Zero", a campaign to eliminate pedestrian fatalities, but the deaths keep happening, and he does virtually nothing to change the conditions that cause them. He could have massively expanded bike lanes and bike rental programs, but instead let them grow at the most glacial pace possible.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:18 PM on September 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

On this topic, I'd recommend Adam Something's video "How our Streets got Stolen from us" - He recounts the story of how car manufacturers in the US ran a successful campaign to turn public opinion from being anti-car (machines owned by rich joyriders who kept running into people and each other) to anti pedestrian (all those jay-walkers putting themselves at risk by stepping into the traffic). By way of how to fix things - he cites the developments in Paris - but also talks about "Superblocks" of the type which have been proliferating in Barcelona since 2016. Barcelona has capitalised on the fact that it was one of the world's first cities built on a grid. It has created superblocks - which limit traffic to locals and focus on pedestrians instead - in both rich and poorer neighbourhoods. The superblocks have shown substantial decreases in air pollution as well as up-ticks in commerce. They have less asphalt which makes them cooler in hot weather. The idea is being copied in Vienna - it does seem like it might be worth trying in US cities. Here is a simulation. More details.
posted by rongorongo at 10:56 PM on September 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

When I compare it to all that Bill deBlasio has failed to do in NYC, where I live, I'm deeply disappointed.

New York's pandemic response has been a downright progressive Utopia compared to Chicago's. Near as I can tell my city's pandemic response has been to protect Christopher Columbus statues and the mayor's house, give cops a 20% raise and funnel almost all of the pandemic relief funds to city's creditors. They ran some puny lotteries for rent relief last year. I cannot think of a single thing that has changed as a result of the pandemic other than the loosening of some booze delivery laws - though the city is starting to push to reduce hours of liquor sales to even earlier than pre-pandemic hours so maybe that won't last? Our cops openly defied the mask mandate and now the vax mandate with zero repercussions. Our vice-mayor even ran his restaurant for indoor dining for an unknown length of time in violation of the city mandate, and it is extremely like he was serving cops (he was outed by a cop blog which went private two days after the story broke). He received the minimum fine of $2000 due to his cooperation over his "mistake" and is still vice-mayor. There is no word on whether he had to repay the hundreds of thousands in federal covid-19 relief money he received. New York may not have lots of blessings compared to Paris but you should count the ones you do have because you could be stagnant or even regressive like Chicago. I feel like Chicago can explain a lot of why the Democratic party is so politically pathetic.
posted by srboisvert at 5:21 AM on September 20, 2021 [5 favorites]

Most cities in the US are ridiculously car-centric with bad public transportation. Paris happens to be a city with very good transportation, and is also fairly dense, so everything you might need in your daily life could be had within walking distance.

I'm not sure how you undo the last 70 years of suburban sprawl in US metro areas. My city has OK public transportation and some nice walkable neighborhoods but the city itself has only 1/8th of the total population of the metro area that it sits in. How do you re-engineer the other 7/8s of the metro area that's almost all very low density suburban housing with no sidewalks and no town centers to be less car-centric. I'm all for the idea but I've never really seen a mechanism for making that happen.
posted by octothorpe at 7:24 AM on September 20, 2021

srboisvert: " The second definition for mega as a prefix in almost every dictionary is 1,000,000 of the specified unit. /mega-pedantry"

If I may up the pedante, 1 megacity = 1,000,000 cities, obviously.
posted by signal at 7:27 AM on September 20, 2021 [8 favorites]

I don't find the 'No Republican mayors of cities greater than 1m people' very correct. Again, local politics has little to do with national politics and people again and again conflate the two. How someone votes at the national level has little correlation to how they vote on local issues. That US cities are as car-centric as they are suggests there are actually very few progressive mayors of major US cities.


How do you re-engineer the other 7/8s of the metro area that's almost all very low density suburban housing with no sidewalks and no town centers to be less car-centric.

There are two ways: Either the city itself changes such that more people can live there, and the suburbs return to the earth (not a bad idea) or the suburbs form nodes of density and connect those with mass transit (worse idea, but doable). The city I live in is doing #2, often called 'density without urbanism' but the urban (stuff to do, mass transit options) comes second and takes time. Santa Ana CA is another one in this process- over 10k people per sq mile average density, just now adding some mass transit options.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:52 AM on September 20, 2021

An example in this thread about the serious lack of progressive mayors would be srboisverts's point.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:54 AM on September 20, 2021

How do you re-engineer the other 7/8s of the metro area that's almost all very low density suburban housing with no sidewalks and no town centers to be less car-centric.

I think it’ll require two hard things: ending the car subsidies – $8/gallon gas would do it but it’d be a political earthquake – and removing the laws preventing density. There are a lot of areas where transit or bike infrastructure is marginal because there’s just too much space between the things people want to do and too few residents to pay for infrastructure (often the roads are crumbling for the same reason). Allowing greater density and mixed use is a slow but necessary prerequisite for almost anything other than letting suburbs crumble because the numbers just don’t work otherwise. State level rules like what California just did are a step in the right direction for at least slowly moving in that direction.
posted by adamsc at 8:21 AM on September 20, 2021

State level rules like what California just did are a step in the right direction for at least slowly moving in that direction.

Predictably, Nextdoor exploded with people complaining about the "character" of their neighborhoods changing. Like, jesus christ, your neighborhood doesn't have any character! It's a featureless 1963 wasteland!

...if I were legally allowed to build a Chicago-style three-flat here in CA, I would do it in the blink of an eye. Instead, I've got height limits that, combined with setback requirements (gotta have them nice lawns!) mean the most I can do is add a microscopic ADU roughly the size of a prison cell which doesn't help density at all. Even though I'm now allowed to have more people living on this land I'm not allowed to give them room to live, I guess?

I mean, it's certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad the law was enacted, but there's just so many more moves that need to be made.
posted by aramaic at 8:49 AM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

$8/gallon gas would do it

In other words, pricing gasoline at or just slightly above what's the normal price in a lot of countries.
posted by gimonca at 12:59 PM on September 20, 2021

...if I were legally allowed to build a Chicago-style three-flat here in CA, I would do it in the blink of an eye.

Good news! Governor Newsom just signed SB9 to allow “up to 4 homes in most single-family zones, regardless of local zoning. You can use SB9 to split your lot, add a 2nd home to a lot, or both (split lot and have 2 homes on each lot for a total of 4 homes).” NIMBY groups are predictably losing their f#$%king minds over it. We aren’t likely to split our lot, but we can legally add an ADU with no off-street parking required thanks to our close proximity to transit so we’re probably going to do that next year.
posted by migurski at 1:21 PM on September 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

From where I'm sitting (inside a 1900s-era "streetcar suburb"), the obvious way to take back space from cars is... to take back space from cars. Yes, there's a lot of pushback, but places like these won't just survive the conversion of car-space into people-space, they'll thrive.

But of course these spaces are the exception, rather than the norm, and one of the big arguments against the movement is "gentrification"-- that the people who get to enjoy these car-free spaces are the people who live here, who are rich, and that we must take into account all the people who live in places which aren't as amenable to car-free living, and that the way to do it is to allow them access by packing as many cars into every space as possible.

I don't buy it.

Part of de-emphasizing cars means opening up quite a lot of space for other uses, including housing, which increases the number of people who can use the space.

Housing may be more expensive here, but allowing people to not drive saves them a lot of money, so overall costs may be similar, or in some cases lower (e.g. if your budget allows for a room in an apartment, the difference in price between a room here and in a car-mandatory area is significantly less than the cost of owning and operating a car).

In the long run, it's far easier for public policy to reduce the cost of housing (if that were the goal) than it is for public policy to reduce the cost of automobility (including all the infrastructure, services, and environmental costs).

A major obstacle: the fundamental understanding that housing is an investment, and will provide for retirement. This leads to public policy that is hyper-focused on never allowing housing costs to drop, and so any assistance to people who are struggling financially must come in other forms, like reducing the cost of auto-mobility. Indeed, subsidizing cars is one of the few forms of socialism that everyone in the US seems to agree on, and so it's not too surprising that people fight hard when anyone suggests drawing down on it.

But it looks like we're making progress, step by step. Cars have been restricted from some public spaces. Car storage is no longer the unquestioned default in new construction, provided for every future resident-- it's now considered separately from housing, and its benefits and costs are evaluated against alternatives, like more housing-- and often found wanting. Public street storage of cars is gradually changing from "human right" to a "limited resource which should be allocated thoughtfully, and should benefit all residents, not just car owners".

It'll take longer in currently car dependent places. Here, the car has been sold as the ultimate in accessibility, and the places are built around cars to the extent that alternatives are laughably bad. But if urban cores start moving away from universal car access, cars will start losing their luster even in the suburbs. They will no longer offer the cheap and convenient access to urban cores that they were "supposed" to (considering traffic, they may have lost this some time a. To some extent this may make these areas less desirable (and thus cheaper, which is nice). But it'll also open the door for local downtowns to become more successful, and transit to be more cost-effective and attractive. It will require some foresight and planning on their part, but instead of being communities where everyone gets in the car in the morning and gets on the freeway, they can become places where some people stay local, while commuters get on more-frequent transit connections, and that can be nice too.
posted by alexei at 1:21 PM on September 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of the unexpected positives of the 'rona, at least in Santiago, Chile, is how many streets have been closed or reduced to accommodate outdoor dining. I really hope they make it permanent.
posted by signal at 2:17 PM on September 20, 2021