I’m right there with them. I spent 7-8 years in a larger city and enjoyed not having a car the entire time. No renting a parking spot or fighting over who gets to block in who with the upstairs or downstairs neighbors. No snow shoveling or scrambling to park on one side for street sweeping.
I’m now temporarily in a place where buses are at an hour interval and only go to 1 place so I took one of the family cars. Despite the car being “free” I’m paying more than an unlimited transit pass on insurance alone, and I have a great rate at the expense of having to let my insurance track my accelerating / braking through GPS/accelerometer (at least for a few weeks before I can uninstall the app and enjoy the lower rate). I’ve had to pay for an inspections, tags, fixing a tint that was legal at home but illegal where I am now (over $100 even if I just had them remove it), and I’m still needing to spend on extras like oil to top up in between oil changes, new wipers, coolant, and it’s looking like it’s almost due for tire rotations, brake and transmission flush, and other regular maintenance which is just another expense.
The car was free and it’s so expensive still. I miss being able to hop on a bus and zone out too.
This is also in my city which during summer feels like an actual hellscape. It's a great idea overall but damn if it's the last city I'd pick for walking about 40% of the time.
The development’s buildings… are clustered together intimately to create inviting courtyards for social gatherings and paved – not asphalt – “paseos”, a word used in Spanish-speaking parts of the US south-west to denote plazas or walkways for strolling.
Importantly, such an arrangement provides relieving shade from the scorching sun – temperatures in these walkways have been measured at 90F (32C) on days when the pavement outside Culdesac is 120F (48C)
After many years of driving different cars/trucks/other I want to know why at some point in the year 2000 decided that vision out of a moving vehicle was secondary to swoopy body lines. Get in something from the 60’s and you can see amazing (even in a boat of a car) yet by 2006 you can not see shit. for example:
Safety priority for those inside the vehicle. Significant improvement in side impact protection came around in the 2000’s. At the cost of thicker pillars, taller thicker doors, heavier cars.
Gothamist has more info, but passenger vehicles and motorcycles only pay once per day. For other vehicles, the toll is incurred every time the vehicle crosses into the zone below 60th Street/Central Park. There are a bunch of discounts and details for evening hours and tunnel users that already pay a toll, and additional surcharges for rideshare drivers. It’s a little complicated.
(US Here) Even my more progressive friends won’t go downtown because every business doesn’t have free dedicated parking. Street parking is free for the first hour and when I still drove I had lunch with no problems that way 1000 times, but nope unless where they’re going has it’s own dedicated parking lot, they aren’t going.
I live in Sweden but my girlfriend is from Seattle so I have visited there a couple of times. There are a few cultural differences that I think play a major part in why pedestrian deaths have gone up in America but not elsewhere.
As already mentioned in this thread Americans tend to be more relaxed about using their phones when driving. It didn’t seem like a big deal to read a text message or anything.
Another thing is reflective clothing. Driving at night in Washington I saw nobody wearing anything reflective at all. Here in Sweden outside of city centers at night more often than not pedestrians will wear something reflective to actually be visible.
Lastly the drunk driving culture was very different. In Sweden people would hesitate to have a drink with lunch if they knew they had to drive later that day. In America we went to a brewery whilst waiting for the ferry.
It could be that it’s more normalised, or that post-Covid people don’t want to share public transport as much.
Whatever the reason, it’s good news as the more cyclists there are, the more that planners will have to take them into account - making it easier for more to become cyclists. Let’s just hope the momentum continues to fuel this virtuous cycle.
You’re probably right about the post-COVID thing of not wanting to be in enclosed spaces, actually. There was also a big increase in cycling right after the 7/7 bombings, for similarly depressing reasons.
Yes, I think the increase in WFH is likely the biggest factor. Still, the bike lanes are probably helping more people make active travel decisions and keeping them safe when they do, so it’s all good!
So why is this? The answers so far seem unsatisfactory, since things like phones, SUVs and car-centric infrastructure are on the rise in other countries as well, without that staggering rise in deaths.
I spent about 3 minutes browsing the report linked in the article, and am rather less confident than before. For example, on pages 25 and 26 they look at the share of SUVs in deaths and sales. And while both figures are rising, the bodycount from non-SUVs has gone up as well.
The answer is probably not a single factor anyways. Can anyone make a more or less informed guess what might explain the US being so bad?
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