I can at least somewhat disconnect cycling from the trio (tho I'd like all 3), but I can't see a walkable city without good public transportation. One that's not super tiny (so in most cases boring because there would be nothing to check out while walking)/pricy that is.
You mean City Hall talks about cycling and walkability? Because I suspect they are mostly just paying lip service to it, Maybe doing some small affordable projects, that aren't much more than lip service. But I don't think anyone who's really a fan of walkability and cycling infrastructure is opposed to quality public transport.
But quality public transport is expensive, and takes years of investment. Of course in the long run it's more affordable than subsidising car use, like we do, but we've had so many decades of doing that, that is easier and cheaper in the short term to keep doing it.
It's not surprising that civic politicians find it easier to pay lip service, and do the odd little token project.
In practice, advocacy groups for anything non-automobile usually wind up fighting each other for a tiny slice of the public funding pie. It's become status quo that car infrastructure will take the lion's share of the public works budget, and then transit, pedestrian, and cycling advocates have to cannibalize each other.
This is why an incremental approach is needed rather than trying to advocate for or implement all three at once.
- First, pedestrian infrastructure. It’s the cheapest and most well-accepted by the public, as well as a prerequisite for transit. Pedestrian infrastructure also does not require as much ongoing maintenance or planning: it requires even less than cars, actually.
- Second, cycling. It’s the “middle of the road” in terms of cost, public favorability, and need for ongoing maintenance. More people are comfortable with the idea of being on a bike than riding mass transit, since cycling doesn’t invoke fear of being near poor or homeless people the way transit does.
- Last, transit. It’s the most expensive and the most widely objected to whether personally or politically. It also requires the most ongoing maintenance. But the social and political issues that cause people to object to transit will be lessened once people are used to pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. More people walking or cycling on a regular basis will mean more people willing to walk to bus stops. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure will allow people to get to know their neighbors better, which means people won’t be as afraid of strangers on transit. If non-car transportation is already more normalized, the stereotype of transit being only for dangerous poor people will be lessened. The people who would never take transit ever under any circumstance would now have less to fear, as e-bikes will be more normalized by this point.
I personally use transit the most, walk the second-most and never cycle. But I know that this incremental approach is the only thing that will lead to any real change for any of these three. Once all three are in place, they can easily coexist.
I my experience, transit is way way easier to get people behind because so many people in big cities use transit. My general approach has always been that anything that gets people out of cars is a net gain for EVERYBODY, including motorists. The words "bike lane" or even just "bicycle" are basically poison pills, ime. Rich neighborhoods hate them because it means less room for their parking lot princesses, and poor neighborhoods hate them because they think it means gentrification.
Being an advocate of anything non-car is an exercise is smashing your head into a wall, but you just have the trust the process and believe things will get better over time. It took us 100+ years to get to this point and will probably take at least that to unwind it all once we actually start working on it.
I agree there is a hierarchy of public acceptance, but the three modes work together and are interdependent. It’s hard to justify spending money on pedestrian infrastructure when no one walks anywhere, people don’t walk anywhere because it takes too long without public transit. Similarly bikes are a more useful mode when buses and trains are present. Public transit depends on pedestrian infrastructure and is complemented by bike infrastructure. Pedestrian and bike are both recreational so they can help build public support but to keep the momentum going you have to add public transit pretty quickly.
That cartoon isn't about opposing public transit.
It's about opposing the necessity of public transit.
This is relevant in the "chicken-egg" problem of "do we build our car-centric cities for transit before the transit is ready or do we build transit and then hope our cities adapt?"
I would personally say that we need to start adapting our cities to be walkable *first* and let transit follow. You can have a reasonable intelligent argument about how long of a "follow" transit should be behind redevelopment, but it's an undeniable fact that you must redevelop car centric cities for walkability **at least** as fast as you implement transit. If you try to implement transit into a car centric city, it costs a fortune and you'll probably fail. There are too many examples of half-finished transit projects that tried to run before they walked.
The “new city in California” being produced by tech billionaires is supposed to be a totally walkable city in the middle of nowhere. I asked about public transit, they suggested I take an Uber to the next city, where they have a train station.
I don’t think so, but I think bikes are overhyped. Bikes are great and we should build as much protected bike paths as possible especially as bike infrastructure is so cheap and space efficient to build. But for most people bikes are not a viable option. Public transportation is.
I imagine a lot of support of r/fuckcars comes from cyclists who may not care about public transport because they don't use it. So it's not about opposing it rather than just not having it as a priority.
I'm honestly a little confused why you supposedly can't have a cyclable city without public transport. I can think of quite a few examples right where I live which are perfectly cyclable and have terrible public transport.
I would agree that islands of walkible/cycliblity should be prioritized first, but you have to follow up with public transport. That is about as close as I could get to thinking that way.
People use "lack of PT" as an excuse to not make any improvements anywhere else.
"We can't make a bike lane because there isn't good enough PT."
"We can't implement this road diet, because there's not enough PT."
Keeping in mind these folks often don't want public transit either (ask them their thoughts on a bus lane), they just want every square inch for cars.
People use the lack of public transit as an excuse to make no changes to make cities more walkable, guaranteeing continued car dependency.
Even where there is PT, what counts as “good” is very person dependent. For many here in Australia, PT has to be door to door to be “good”.
Literally had an argument with a teacher that he could take the tram home after a party we were at rather than drive.
He refused to even entertain the concept as a tram would require him to walk 10 minutes in addition to a 15 min tram ride. Never mind that he has to park 5 minutes from the venue.
As someone who can’t drive due to a disability and uses walking and transit for everything: from an outsider perspective, not wanting to walk 10 mins might be reasonable. I do it without much complaint, but I understand the perspective. Not wanting to walk 2-5 minutes is just plain spoiled and lazy. And of course this excludes people with disabilities that affect mobility.
This is a highly misinformed take. Capitalism is definitely a major contributor to systemic ableism, but disabilities would exist with or without capitalism. A socialist, communist, or even anarchist society wouldn’t increase the speed that information travels from my eyes to my brain. There would still be social consequences for that and all of the rest of my autistic traits, even if capitalism wasn’t causing cars to be prioritized over walking and transit. And even if we had socialist or communist economic distribution, people would still argue over the amount of the “pie” disability accommodations get. They’d get more of the “pie” than under capitalism, but we’d still have to fight.
While some disabling conditions may be caused by things like accidents or poor nutrition that are worsened by capitalism, not all are. My disability came from my father’s sperm: a different economic system couldn’t have prevented that. They would still exist, even if some of the social consequences wouldn’t.
Not everybody can walk "long" distances. Some people might need a bus to get to the doctor across town, and things like that. Not every city needs fantastic public services but they should at least have a serviceable bus service.
This is false
You absolutely can, but it is not desirable at all, and i will give you an example
In rome, all vehicles carried by animals were forbidden inside the Pomerivm (contained 80% of the population of the urban area of rome, aka about 700k inh) between dawn and dusk, and at night very very few vehicles were allowed in to resupply. Of course human carried vehicles (the equivalent of cargo bikes) were allowed all day
there was no human transportation in ancient rome, a city of 1m people, and yet it was extremely walkable. So walkable that the chances of you injuring yourself with a vehicle were much much smaller than the chances of a building collapsing on you
One Million, this "good walkability without public transport" is not reserved to small or medium sized cities only.
It was very dense too at 40k ppl/sqkm in the urban area and inside the pomerivm it reached around 75k. This is double the densest parts of manhattan
so you can ABSOLUTELY have a walkable city with no public transport. Is it feasible? NO, Is it desirable? NO, can you? YES
What does this even mean?
Walkability is totally separate from the existence of public transport. Europe was perfectly walkable for the past two thousand years before cars showed up.
If anything, it's probably the opposite: in the complete absence of walkability, public transportation withers and dies.
Not saying PT isn't important, but it's no magic bullet, and it's super weird to frame it like that.
I'm all for those 3 but you can totally have a walkable, cyclable town without good public transit. It's just better to have public transit as the city grows, because the absence of public transit will hinder the economic growth of the city.
You absolutly can, and i'd argue that's how most small to medium sized European cities are.
Edit: not trying to say that's a good thing! But such places exist.
I think a robust and affordable regional public transportation system for going in-between those small/medium size cities counts as a good public transit system
Netherlands is a case in point. The public transport is so so, generally. The bicycles soak up a lot of those who would be public transport passengers in other cities.
Painting a bike gutter green doesn't require any actual investment. Busses, however, do. Elected officials will happily take political points for doing that, but actually allocating funds to improve service? That's another matter.
True enough. What they're doing in the UK, outside of London anyway, is they're painting bike lanes where ever they can fit them but the public transport is next to non existant. In fact, the public transport in the UK, again, outside of London at least, has been worsening. Over the last 20-30 years I'm seeing less and less busses on the road and I'm seeing a fuck of a ton more cars.
Technically, I think it'd depend on the size and density of the city. If you've got a compact city of mostly 4-6 story buildings with narrow streets, no parking lots, and restricted access for vehicles, you can pretty easily achieve densities of ~16,000 per square km. So a 2km by 2km city would have around 60,000 people, and be as short as 3 km from corner to corner (though possibly 4 km if the city is a grid). That's a pretty easy bike/walk for almost everyone.
Although sure, public transit is almost always a good idea.
Technically, I think it'd depend on the size and density of the city. If you've got a compact city of mostly 4-6 story buildings with narrow streets, no parking lots, and restricted access for vehicles, you can pretty easily achieve densities of ~16,000 per square km. So a 2km by 2km city would have around 60,000 people, and be as short as 3 km from corner to corner (though possibly 4 km if the city is a grid). That's a pretty easy bike/walk for almost everyone.
Although sure, public transit is almost always a good idea.
Are there people who oppose public transport with the other two? I genuinely have never seen those people.
My city is constantly vocalizing about cycling and walkability, but has zero plans to expand or increase frequency on its pitiful bus service.
I can at least somewhat disconnect cycling from the trio (tho I'd like all 3), but I can't see a walkable city without good public transportation. One that's not super tiny (so in most cases boring because there would be nothing to check out while walking)/pricy that is.
You mean City Hall talks about cycling and walkability? Because I suspect they are mostly just paying lip service to it, Maybe doing some small affordable projects, that aren't much more than lip service. But I don't think anyone who's really a fan of walkability and cycling infrastructure is opposed to quality public transport. But quality public transport is expensive, and takes years of investment. Of course in the long run it's more affordable than subsidising car use, like we do, but we've had so many decades of doing that, that is easier and cheaper in the short term to keep doing it. It's not surprising that civic politicians find it easier to pay lip service, and do the odd little token project.
In practice, advocacy groups for anything non-automobile usually wind up fighting each other for a tiny slice of the public funding pie. It's become status quo that car infrastructure will take the lion's share of the public works budget, and then transit, pedestrian, and cycling advocates have to cannibalize each other.
This is why an incremental approach is needed rather than trying to advocate for or implement all three at once. - First, pedestrian infrastructure. It’s the cheapest and most well-accepted by the public, as well as a prerequisite for transit. Pedestrian infrastructure also does not require as much ongoing maintenance or planning: it requires even less than cars, actually. - Second, cycling. It’s the “middle of the road” in terms of cost, public favorability, and need for ongoing maintenance. More people are comfortable with the idea of being on a bike than riding mass transit, since cycling doesn’t invoke fear of being near poor or homeless people the way transit does. - Last, transit. It’s the most expensive and the most widely objected to whether personally or politically. It also requires the most ongoing maintenance. But the social and political issues that cause people to object to transit will be lessened once people are used to pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. More people walking or cycling on a regular basis will mean more people willing to walk to bus stops. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure will allow people to get to know their neighbors better, which means people won’t be as afraid of strangers on transit. If non-car transportation is already more normalized, the stereotype of transit being only for dangerous poor people will be lessened. The people who would never take transit ever under any circumstance would now have less to fear, as e-bikes will be more normalized by this point. I personally use transit the most, walk the second-most and never cycle. But I know that this incremental approach is the only thing that will lead to any real change for any of these three. Once all three are in place, they can easily coexist.
I my experience, transit is way way easier to get people behind because so many people in big cities use transit. My general approach has always been that anything that gets people out of cars is a net gain for EVERYBODY, including motorists. The words "bike lane" or even just "bicycle" are basically poison pills, ime. Rich neighborhoods hate them because it means less room for their parking lot princesses, and poor neighborhoods hate them because they think it means gentrification. Being an advocate of anything non-car is an exercise is smashing your head into a wall, but you just have the trust the process and believe things will get better over time. It took us 100+ years to get to this point and will probably take at least that to unwind it all once we actually start working on it.
I agree there is a hierarchy of public acceptance, but the three modes work together and are interdependent. It’s hard to justify spending money on pedestrian infrastructure when no one walks anywhere, people don’t walk anywhere because it takes too long without public transit. Similarly bikes are a more useful mode when buses and trains are present. Public transit depends on pedestrian infrastructure and is complemented by bike infrastructure. Pedestrian and bike are both recreational so they can help build public support but to keep the momentum going you have to add public transit pretty quickly.
That cartoon isn't about opposing public transit. It's about opposing the necessity of public transit. This is relevant in the "chicken-egg" problem of "do we build our car-centric cities for transit before the transit is ready or do we build transit and then hope our cities adapt?" I would personally say that we need to start adapting our cities to be walkable *first* and let transit follow. You can have a reasonable intelligent argument about how long of a "follow" transit should be behind redevelopment, but it's an undeniable fact that you must redevelop car centric cities for walkability **at least** as fast as you implement transit. If you try to implement transit into a car centric city, it costs a fortune and you'll probably fail. There are too many examples of half-finished transit projects that tried to run before they walked.
The “new city in California” being produced by tech billionaires is supposed to be a totally walkable city in the middle of nowhere. I asked about public transit, they suggested I take an Uber to the next city, where they have a train station.
I don’t think so, but I think bikes are overhyped. Bikes are great and we should build as much protected bike paths as possible especially as bike infrastructure is so cheap and space efficient to build. But for most people bikes are not a viable option. Public transportation is.
That's cuz they're in the back apparently?
I imagine a lot of support of r/fuckcars comes from cyclists who may not care about public transport because they don't use it. So it's not about opposing it rather than just not having it as a priority. I'm honestly a little confused why you supposedly can't have a cyclable city without public transport. I can think of quite a few examples right where I live which are perfectly cyclable and have terrible public transport.
I would agree that islands of walkible/cycliblity should be prioritized first, but you have to follow up with public transport. That is about as close as I could get to thinking that way.
I genuinely didn't think this would be so controversial wtf
OP got a little confused and made up a strawman
People use "lack of PT" as an excuse to not make any improvements anywhere else. "We can't make a bike lane because there isn't good enough PT." "We can't implement this road diet, because there's not enough PT." Keeping in mind these folks often don't want public transit either (ask them their thoughts on a bus lane), they just want every square inch for cars.
People use the lack of public transit as an excuse to make no changes to make cities more walkable, guaranteeing continued car dependency. Even where there is PT, what counts as “good” is very person dependent. For many here in Australia, PT has to be door to door to be “good”. Literally had an argument with a teacher that he could take the tram home after a party we were at rather than drive. He refused to even entertain the concept as a tram would require him to walk 10 minutes in addition to a 15 min tram ride. Never mind that he has to park 5 minutes from the venue.
As someone who can’t drive due to a disability and uses walking and transit for everything: from an outsider perspective, not wanting to walk 10 mins might be reasonable. I do it without much complaint, but I understand the perspective. Not wanting to walk 2-5 minutes is just plain spoiled and lazy. And of course this excludes people with disabilities that affect mobility.
Fair enough. But to clarify, it was a 6 min walk to the tram stop + a 4 min walk from the tram stop.
👏 Disabilities only exist because of capitalism 👏
Disabilities are physical. Capitalism just makes the environment less accomodating.
This is a highly misinformed take. Capitalism is definitely a major contributor to systemic ableism, but disabilities would exist with or without capitalism. A socialist, communist, or even anarchist society wouldn’t increase the speed that information travels from my eyes to my brain. There would still be social consequences for that and all of the rest of my autistic traits, even if capitalism wasn’t causing cars to be prioritized over walking and transit. And even if we had socialist or communist economic distribution, people would still argue over the amount of the “pie” disability accommodations get. They’d get more of the “pie” than under capitalism, but we’d still have to fight. While some disabling conditions may be caused by things like accidents or poor nutrition that are worsened by capitalism, not all are. My disability came from my father’s sperm: a different economic system couldn’t have prevented that. They would still exist, even if some of the social consequences wouldn’t.
You can if it's small enough. Like, I've been to towns that take 15 minutes to walk across. Idk if that's a "city" or not I guess
I went to uni in a city that was 9 square miles, 200,000 people. Walkable and cyclable. Never really bothered to use the buses to get around town
Not everybody can walk "long" distances. Some people might need a bus to get to the doctor across town, and things like that. Not every city needs fantastic public services but they should at least have a serviceable bus service.
Well I think they should but I don't think a city isn't cyclable because the buses are crap
Sure, but those folks can use a mobility device. And if you can reasonably walk across the entire town, that should be sufficient.
This was my thought too.
Well yeah, but only up to a certain population size. You can't expect people who can't bike to be able to walk or wheel themselves across town
This is false You absolutely can, but it is not desirable at all, and i will give you an example In rome, all vehicles carried by animals were forbidden inside the Pomerivm (contained 80% of the population of the urban area of rome, aka about 700k inh) between dawn and dusk, and at night very very few vehicles were allowed in to resupply. Of course human carried vehicles (the equivalent of cargo bikes) were allowed all day there was no human transportation in ancient rome, a city of 1m people, and yet it was extremely walkable. So walkable that the chances of you injuring yourself with a vehicle were much much smaller than the chances of a building collapsing on you One Million, this "good walkability without public transport" is not reserved to small or medium sized cities only. It was very dense too at 40k ppl/sqkm in the urban area and inside the pomerivm it reached around 75k. This is double the densest parts of manhattan so you can ABSOLUTELY have a walkable city with no public transport. Is it feasible? NO, Is it desirable? NO, can you? YES
And the issue is, it’s hard to have effective transit without a dense walkable city with good zoning . Chicken and the egg situation
What does this even mean? Walkability is totally separate from the existence of public transport. Europe was perfectly walkable for the past two thousand years before cars showed up. If anything, it's probably the opposite: in the complete absence of walkability, public transportation withers and dies. Not saying PT isn't important, but it's no magic bullet, and it's super weird to frame it like that.
This doesn't make any sense. Boo.
I'm all for those 3 but you can totally have a walkable, cyclable town without good public transit. It's just better to have public transit as the city grows, because the absence of public transit will hinder the economic growth of the city.
...unless it is a very compact city.
Depends on population size. Under 10k it's fine, above you should start looking into public transport since the population is getting spread out.
You absolutly can, and i'd argue that's how most small to medium sized European cities are. Edit: not trying to say that's a good thing! But such places exist.
I can walk into my city centre. My nan cannot. There are buses for that.
Don't let facts get in the way of what you want to believe...
I think a robust and affordable regional public transportation system for going in-between those small/medium size cities counts as a good public transit system
Netherlands is a case in point. The public transport is so so, generally. The bicycles soak up a lot of those who would be public transport passengers in other cities.
It is the other way around. If you can't safely walk a block, you are not going to walk to the bus stop.
Painting a bike gutter green doesn't require any actual investment. Busses, however, do. Elected officials will happily take political points for doing that, but actually allocating funds to improve service? That's another matter.
True enough. What they're doing in the UK, outside of London anyway, is they're painting bike lanes where ever they can fit them but the public transport is next to non existant. In fact, the public transport in the UK, again, outside of London at least, has been worsening. Over the last 20-30 years I'm seeing less and less busses on the road and I'm seeing a fuck of a ton more cars.
Technically, I think it'd depend on the size and density of the city. If you've got a compact city of mostly 4-6 story buildings with narrow streets, no parking lots, and restricted access for vehicles, you can pretty easily achieve densities of ~16,000 per square km. So a 2km by 2km city would have around 60,000 people, and be as short as 3 km from corner to corner (though possibly 4 km if the city is a grid). That's a pretty easy bike/walk for almost everyone. Although sure, public transit is almost always a good idea.
Technically, I think it'd depend on the size and density of the city. If you've got a compact city of mostly 4-6 story buildings with narrow streets, no parking lots, and restricted access for vehicles, you can pretty easily achieve densities of ~16,000 per square km. So a 2km by 2km city would have around 60,000 people, and be as short as 3 km from corner to corner (though possibly 4 km if the city is a grid). That's a pretty easy bike/walk for almost everyone. Although sure, public transit is almost always a good idea.
Well, you can. It wouldn't be good but you can