Car-free cities?

Calliban · 2022-08-24 11:22:29

Can we make cities car free?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g9-9CxCxrVE

In one respect, the answer is definitely yes. The city as a concept has been around for at least 5000 years. The car has been around for only 2.5% of that time and mass motoring only since the 1950s. But 'car free' does not neccesarily mean pedestrian. For a city to be entirely pedestrian, it cannot be more than a couple of miles in diameter. Many preindustrial cities were built on rivers to allow transportation of goods along their banks. Some extended this with canals. Prague has much lower levels of car traffic than Los Angeles. But people make heavy use of trams. And most goods delivery still relies on trucks. But the examples in this video suggest that a slow transition to a lifestyle that relies on the car far less is not only possible, but desirable. At least that is true in Europe, where many cities predate the industrial revolution.

On Mars, it will be true from Day 1. Building car free allows cities to be far more compact and habitable volume will be expensive on Mars. This will have a dramatic impact on urban architecture, which is likely to be pedestrian centric for small settlements and rail-oriented for larger cities.

It is more difficult to see how American cities could adapt to this model. US cities in particular, are just too spread out for this to work. They were built around the car. If the car ceases to be available or affordable to most people, they will need to be rebuilt.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-08-24 11:26:53)

tahanson43206 · 2022-08-24 13:02:43

For Calliban .... Best wishes for success with this interesting new topic ...

I do have a serious quibble with your assumption about city size ...

Before the modern age with individual motorized transportation, cities extended out for great distances thanks to efficient rail transport.

I think you know this, and I'm pretty sure you've written about it, but for some reason the figure of 2 miles seems to have a strong attraction ...

The city can be pedestrian for a couple miles to the side of any track, and the tracks can be all over the place.

Washington DC comes to mind as an example of how citizens can live well outside the city center, and enjoy a brisk walk from home to work and back, with a relaxing commuter ride in between. There are many other American cities which I ** know ** have similar conveniences.

Your vision of Mars cities without mobility pods seems quite realistic to me.

(th)

RobertDyck · 2022-08-24 13:02:49

An idea I had in the 1980s: subway taxi. Build a residential neighbourhood with no streets. In the 1940s a neighbourhood was built in Winnipeg with no streets. It's organized in bays, with land allocated for streets, but instead of paved streets there's grass. There's a central walkway down the centre the same size as a sidewalk, but just one. There are back lanes, but just one lane, and they're marked one-way. What I would do is build a subway tunnel underground beneath the back lane, and restrict back lanes to moving trucks, construction vehicles, and utility vehicles. No private vehicles allowed in this neighbourhood. The subway tunnels would have a computer driven rail taxi the size of a taxi cab. Each house would have a private subway station the size of a single car garage, with a door to the basement of the house. In a city such as Toronto that already has a subway system, the rail taxi could drive on the larger subway system. Eg: rail taxis that want to go downtown to drop off people going to work. Several rail taxis would connect up, bumper-to-bumper, to form a "convoy". The convoy would then merge onto the tracks of a subway train. In Toronto, the existing subway has 6 coaches for each train. A convoy would merge, and stop at a subway station to drop off passengers. There would be sidings for rail taxis to get out of the way of rail trains. You could order a rail taxi with an app on your smartphone. You could order it to show up at your house every morning every working day at the same time, with the same destination. To order a taxi downtown, you would require your smartphone with the app active to prove you're standing on the platform waiting for the taxi. When the taxi arrives, get in right away. The computer for the taxi would recognize you by GPS coordinates and the app on your phone. Or tapping your smartphone on a reader, using near field just like using your smartphone to "tap" to pay for something in a store. So no one could "steal" your taxi. You put your destination in the app when ordering the taxi, so the taxi knows where to go before you even get in. No delay at the subway station. However, the taxi could wait for you at your private station attached to your home.

You could even have a small strip mall in a residential neighbourhood. A larger rail vehicle the size of a 10-ton truck could run on the rails. This would deliver supplies from a warehouse or wholesaler to a small neighbourhood grocery store. Full-size grocery stores use 18-wheel trucks. Could an automated rail truck carry a container, like a 53-foot shipping container (intermodal container) and drop off at a store?

Writing software to drive a vehicle on rails is a lot easier than a road. The options are forward/backward, fast/slow, stop. A subway tunnel means no one is supposed to be in the tunnel. And rails are easy to deliver electricity, so the rail taxis would be all electric.

Here is a front "street" of Wildwood Park in Winnipeg.

RobertDyck · 2022-08-24 13:06:22

Such a neighbourhood could be built well outside the city. With subway tracks designated for 120km/h (75 mph) into the city. And at the edge of the neighbourhood, a parkade. That's a Canadian word for a multi-level parking structure. With a rail taxi station at each level. If you insist on owning a car, you can take a rail taxi from your house to the parkade.

Calliban · 2022-08-24 14:52:12

Robert, maybe Mars will be a good place to try this idea out. Even if future Martians build suburbs with stand alone domes for each house, they would need to be wearing a space suit to exit their cars and enter their houses. Having rail based vehicles in underground tunnels would actually simplify things on a world without a breathable atmosphere. The tunnel can be pressurised, allowing commuters to exit the vehicle without a space suit.

J. Crawford envisaged that car free cities could rely on rail for both human and freight transport.
https://www.carfree.com/

In his concept, you have a pretty much standard subway system, with a town district built around a subway station. The same subway station would receive freight, which would unload in a separate siding. This allows quite easy and rapid transportation, powered by direct grid electricity through a third rail power supply. Crawford imagines cities that consist of loops of densely populated districts, connected by an underground railway.

From a technical viewpoint, this could certainly be made to work. I have no idea how much this would cost. But it has the undeniable advantage of not requiring so much as a drop of fossil fuel, beyond the tiny amounts of mineral oil needed to lubricate the train moving parts. No lithium or other rare materials are needed, because the third rail powers the train 100% of the time and directly connects it by wire to the generator at the nuclear power plant. So the only materials needed are carbon steels and a modest amount of aluminium for the passenger train cabin. Electric trains are unique in providing a transportation solution that is both fast and very energy efficient, thanks to very low friction of steel wheels on steel rails and low frontal area per passenger. If all of the annual passenger-miles in the UK (or Canada) were provided by electric suburban trains, then a couple of large nuclear reactors could power all transportation in either country.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-08-24 15:22:43)

RobertDyck · 2022-08-24 15:15:03

Mars will likely be apartment buildings, shopping malls, and office buildings connected by enclosed walkways. Indoor gardens. Factories may be separate with a rail taxi system. Mines would have a company bus take workers out to the mine every day.

The system above is for a city like Toronto. Here in Winnipeg, we have room, cars work. However, Toronto is crowded. While Winnipeg has a few streets that clog during rush hour, bumper-to-bumper start-and-stop traffic, Toronto is like that for the entire city. I lived in Toronto from July 1987 through July 1990. Rush hour traffic, both morning and late afternoon, was unacceptable. And it's gotten worse. Cars just don't work for a city like that. The rail taxi system means new suburbs can be a significant distance away, and you don't have to deal with traffic. In fact, you don't need to own a car at all.

I visited Manhattan one weekend. Worked sent me to their corporate head office in Elizabeth New Jersey for a week. Rather than fly me home for the weekend, I asked them to pay for my hotel and car rental. It cost them less. Traffic in Manhattan in 1996 was... I don't have words. After driving through the Lincoln Tunnel, turn left and park at the first parking lot. Do not try to drive in Manhattan. At all. Period. The island is only 11 blocks wide, so you can walk from the west river to the east river and back. I did.

SpaceNut · 2022-08-24 18:28:49

One of the issues is the higher you go the more issues you have for the buildings to contend with. It's also why having tunnels near them is also a problem as the structural mass of the building would cause the tunnels to need greater levels of reinforcing. The height of building gets somewhat regulated away from these skyscraper buildings which cannot be fire supported. It's that one issue which makes a city begin to have sprawl.

Calliban · 2022-09-09 14:51:50

Freight delivery bikes for short range transportation of goods.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022 … -vehicles/

This sort of thing can work in towns and cities, where a truck or railway delivers the stuff to your town. The bike takes it the last couple of miles to your door.

tahanson43206 · 2022-09-09 17:08:01

For Calliban re #8

This is not intended as a criticism of the notion of freight bikes to expedite delivery .... I would be entirely in favor of the notion if you were thinking of drones.

What I'm bothered by is the concept of human beings performing such labor into the future. To me, the idea of someone privileged expecting someone else who is NOT privileged to perform such duties is questionable.

I hereby question the notion of human beings doing drone equivalent labor.

Is it possible for privileged persons in human society to arrange things so that everyone else is privileged?

That has certainly NOT been the human tradition.

Perhaps there are privileged humans who resent those who are not privileged having the temerity to envision a better life.

We're in a topic about Csr-free cities.

I admit my post here will have a hard time wrapping back to car-free cities but I'll try ....

A car-free city can deliver all manner of goods using electric powered drones under human supervision.

There!

(th)

kbd512 · 2022-09-10 14:40:12

The only way you can do away with motor vehicle transport inside a "city" is by having everyone living in a series of exceptionally large buildings above or below the ground. Otherwise, it's impractical to do. Prague has a lot less traffic than Los Angeles or New York because there's a lot less going on.

Czech Republic GNP: $245B
Los Angeles GMP: $1T
New York GMP: $1.67T

Czech Republic Population (2020): 10.7M
New York City, NY Population (2020): 8.38M
Los Angeles, CA Population (2020): 3.97M
Houston, TX Population (2020): 2.31M
Dallas, TX Population (2020): 1.34M
Prague, Czech Republic Population (2019): 1.31M

It'd be hilarious to watch someone from Czech Republic try to walk around Dallas, so long as we have a dedicated ambulance to re-hydrate and air condition them periodically. That's why we drive cars. It's impractical to get around in a reasonable amount of time without them. In a future not dominated by "limited pie" ideologues, owning and driving a car won't be a problem. Dr. Zubrin has spoken about this pernicious evil idea at length. It's always been a bad idea and the people who believe it aren't any the wiser for it.

I have a 4,000 pound Dodge Charger with a 195hp V6. I very rarely use more than 100hp. The engine's redline is about 6,000rpm. I seldom make it to 3,000rpm and mostly stay below 2,500rpm. We can make 1,200 pound plastic chassis cars with 65hp that perform every bit as well as my much larger and heavier Charger. For commuting, such cars will do just fine. It's not a race car and doesn't need to be. Therefore, a plastic chassis car could have 35hp and still accelerate well enough to get an expensive speeding ticket. The Charger's engine runs near 2,000rpm at 75mph. If you're going any faster, then you're speeding.

This notion that we're going to have a future without improvements to personal transport is downright silly. Equally silly are passenger cars with 400hp or more. In the 1950s, that engine power level described heavy duty semi-trucks, not family cars. The sports cars didn't make that much power. We went the wrong way. We failed to recognize that the best way to keep the cost of a car low, along with its impact on other people or the environment, was to stick with the 1940s / 1950s concept of what a car was. A simple, low-cost, low-complexity box on wheels, capable of carrying 2 adults and 2 children with a modest amount of cargo, such as the week's groceries.

Cars were invented because they're useful additions to the economy of both the individual, the nation, and the world as a whole. They're more efficient than horses, they don't leave crap all over the road, and what little emissions they do have don't represent a significant problem compared to not having a job because you can't get to work reliably, can't take your kids to school, or not having enough food or distribution to feed everyone.

Requiring that cities not have cars is an even more expensive trade-off which only finds favor with ideologues who utterly fail to recognize that humans choose to own and use cars because of the possibilities they present that were functionally impossible before cars were invented. Both the energy cost and environmental toll associated with transforming a city into such a place will be every bit as expensive as cars. The idea only looks appealing if you draw a very narrowly and impractically-defined box around what you take into consideration, as it relates to pollution, CO2 emissions, etc.

If you have to construct an entire modern city (one that has electricity, heating, cooling, plumbing, garbage removal, readily available food, quality education, furniture, some form of entertainment to keep the young people from rioting or otherwise wrecking the place, and jobs that actually need to be done because they add net economic value), from scratch, so that personal transport is not required, the energy / materials / labor input into that will be much higher than what we presently have. It will take decades to build and tweak so that everything works smoothly.

Is this technically feasible to do?

Yes, but only if you accept all those other caveats. That list includes very limited personal mobility, job opportunities largely limited to a single city, few possibilities of moving very far from where you start at, and acceptance of being surrounded by an increased number of people who exhibit anti-social behavioral traits or other mental issues, as well as drug and alcohol abuse problems. I've lived or worked in some of the largest cities in America. I know there are larger cities in other countries, but Los Angeles and New York are pretty expansive. I also spent 3 years in Japan, which has some of the greatest population density in the world. The streets of Japan are filled with cars, trucks, and pedestrians. With all of their technology, they still use cars and lots of them, even if ownership rates are lower. The same is true in New York and Chicago, but the cars are still there.

Since the Europeans spent centuries trying to mass murder each other over tiny parcels of land because they couldn't find a way to live with each other, Americans will not be adopting their overall strategy, even if we do consider such ideas and eventually rethink how we build our cities. We have the labor force, know-how, and capital to do this, but we need to stop looking for ways to mess with each other if we do go this route. One distasteful aspect of most American cities is the self-segregation that occurs. Maybe there's a reason for that, though. Maybe black people don't want to deal with white people problems, or vice versa. Unfortunately, that leads to less tolerance, very narrow thinking that's often negative, greater offense over minor issues, and generally a more coarse persona lacking the hospitality and good nature of country people who don't live on top of each other. You take them out of those places and over time they transform into different people. When they're not worried about how many different genders there are, or what Cardi A had to say about Cardi B, or other mental health issues that someone is trying to "share" with the rest of the world, it's as if they discover that being human isn't about money or social status or other similarly nutty ideas without merit. Sadly, many of the people living in cities are not happy to see each other, which largely defeats the ultimate purpose of building places where large numbers of people can live in close proximity to each other. This is not always the case, but exceptions don't disprove the rule.

As is the American way, we'll construct an entire series of endless experiments with no two alike. That's the same way we built nuclear reactors and other complex science or social experiments. We constantly experiment to see what works and why. So long as the scientist accepts the results of their experiment and refrains from pursuing ideas without merit, experimentation is typically a net-positive way to discover what right looks like.

SpaceNut · 2022-09-10 15:53:18

I have noticed in my, out in the country area more of those Fat tire E-bikes being used by many a walk of life.
Roads are not designed for a bike's safety very few have marked safety lanes for a bike on inner or rural areas. The cities do once and a while but for the most part you are looking for routes to make use of the break down lanes.

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#1 2022-08-24 11:22:29

Car-free cities?

#2 2022-08-24 13:02:43

Re: Car-free cities?

#3 2022-08-24 13:02:49

Re: Car-free cities?

#4 2022-08-24 13:06:22

Re: Car-free cities?

#5 2022-08-24 14:52:12

Re: Car-free cities?

#6 2022-08-24 15:15:03

Re: Car-free cities?

#7 2022-08-24 18:28:49

Re: Car-free cities?

#8 2022-09-09 14:51:50

Re: Car-free cities?

#9 2022-09-09 17:08:01

Re: Car-free cities?

#10 2022-09-10 14:40:12

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#11 2022-09-10 15:53:18

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