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Living car-free in Berlin is ridiculously easy. I have my own bicycle, but still grab a Jump bike when I've walked somewhere and need to get home faster/easier.
But this is the summer. I haven't done the winter here yet. That'll be the test.
Its amazing to me how cheap these changes are, and how much people love them after they are implemented. You go to a neighborhood meeting in the US and all you hear about is "loss of parking", "traffic", but when you remove the cars, everyone loves it.
Europe has had fantastic public transportation for a long time. I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one. I traveled all over western Europe.
It's going to be tough doing this in a lot of US cities, especially those which had most of their growth after WW2. So much was built with the assumption that all transportation would be via car (or bus as an afterthought, sometimes). You can probably do it in an old downtown area but good luck trying it in suburbia
It's a lot easier for Europe to go carless than the USA. They have better intra-city public transit for one. Also, most (all?) of their major cities laid out their grids before the invention of the car.
In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.
That being said, I don't understand why new cities in the US aren't being planned around being carless. I guess it's just so engrained in our culture that it will be hard to overcome?
EU has the advantage that most of its small and old cities are very dense. I think it makes a lot of sense to start removing cars from their city centers. Cars are not particularly efficient or convenient anyway in narrow streets. That being said I really wonder why Amsterdam still allows cars to drive in its rings.
If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.
I live in a suburb of Seattle, I haven’t owned a car for about two years. It used to be owning a car was liberating, but now I think the day I sold my car was one of the most liberating days of my life.
On vacation in Rome this summer, there is so much foot traffic on the major streets there is often no room for cars, and they need to inch forward until the people in front of them notice them and move out of the way.
Seemed like almost all the cars were taxis, too.
So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.
I wish the UK was a little more forward thinking when it comes to small electric mobility devices but they actively fine you here for using them on public roads and cycle lanes.
Imagine that people have been riding electric scooters for a hundred years and along comes some new technology, a diesel van. It can transport all the things we buy online to our doors and would be beneficial to society. The problem is that there have been a few fatal accidents between vans and scooters. One of the van drivers was a celebrity. The scooter drivers die, no one else gets hurt. The government decides to ban the new vans because they are too dangerous to OTHER people. There is a big uproar and people would rather scooters be banned instead because that solves the problem too (well, except for bicycles and... people).
Not just Europe! Tokyo, for example, is a remarkably pedestrian and bicycle-friendly city, despite also supporting quite heavy traffic in some areas. And of course, the extensive train network completely eliminates the need for a car in daily life.
If you pick a random place on the map (like [1]), you'll see that the high-speed traffic is very well-separated from residential areas, with infrequent intersections. There is also little incentive to take a "shortcut" through residential areas since neighborhood roads are so narrow. The result is that neighborhood are safe and quiet enough that parents feel safe letting their small children walk along the road. I even see wildlife!
In many ways developing nations can and do have the option to skip auto-based transit and go directly into mass transit if only because many up and coming consumers don’t have the capital to invest into a depreciating asset.
India, Indonesia, much of LatAm, including Mexico, most of Africa, etc. They could make autos cost prohibitive (in many places they in essence are) and invest heavily in mass transit. Skip roadways and other infra for personal vehicles.
China is in the cusp. They could simply decide to ban cars nationwide after a vigorous campaign promoting transit values.
I have lived in both Europe and US for years. It is not fair to compare both places as the population density is totally different. You still do need a car if you are living in suburb area in Europe (in my case the Netherlands). And in US there is much less people living in the city.
Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk. I truly believe it makes a huge positive impact on happiness when you can just walk anywhere instead of having to drive. Also you'll notice that in Korea/Japan there are way more small businesses and things to do (eg. karaoke, cafes, etc) because people of this. In America there's relatively less to do because leaving the home is more of a hassle and less interesting, so people just stay in more.
My least favorite thing about living in America is the dependence on cars (outside of a select few cities like NYC). Now that my parents in the suburbs sold their spare car, whenever I go back to visit, I'm stranded there during the weekdays because the nearest bus stop is like a 40 minute walk, and the nearest subway would be maybe a 90 minute walk. If I need to go anywhere, I'm dependent on Uber/Lyft. Even if I get access to a car, there's relatively much less to do as I mentioned above.
Last year in the Netherlands more e-bikes were bought than regular bikes. And on average the e-bikes cost twice as much as the regular bikes. What the Dutch have discovered is that an e-bike is more of a substitute for a car rather than for a pedal bike, it's expands the range of running errands up to 10km or 15km while being more convenient and often faster than a car.
This is future of most cities worldwide sooner or later.
Car free in downtown Minneapolis for a while now and lease out my parking spot for $200/month.
Don't see how it could be any more convenient, easy, affordable and stress free of owning a car. Winter is easy with the Skyway [0].
I've seen people go get Starbucks in their pajama's, I can go to the gym, work, grocery store, Target, and more all through the Skyway when weather is bad.
The two light rails are only a block away and go from downtown to Mall of America and University of Minnesota. I have multiples of bus stops right outside my condo.
I usually just fill up a GoToCard with $20 when needed and go when ever and wherever I please without issues. Which gets me access to any bus or light rails.
The only downside I have so far is that I haven't found a good stop off the bus or light rails where I can conveniently and quickly get to play outdoor pick up hockey.
I’m personally not a huge fan of driving everywhere. But I wonder whether HN’s view on this isn’t out of touch with the average middle class American’s. The average American commute is 48 minutes round trip, significantly shorter than France (71 minutes), Italy (65 minutes), or Spain (61 minutes): https://www.oecd.org/els/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling...
That’s mainly because Europe has higher public transit use, and public transit is slow. Parisians who work and commute by public transit spend an average of 116 minutes a day on public transit: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160418/parisians-spend-23-days-a-y....
Viewed from a different perspective, a country where most people can spend 48 minutes a day commuting, because it’s rich enough for everyone to afford a car,[1] might be considered better than one where many people have to endure two-hour public transit commutes. Maybe utopia isn’t Paris, with rich people living in beautiful walkable downtowns, but rather Houston, where middle class people can afford big houses with a pool and a short, direct commute.
[1] The median disposable income per US household is a staggering 50% higher than for a French household.
Most big cities have a majority of the population without cars at this point. These cities naturally favor more legislation against cars and this is causing city administrators to over time introduce more restrictions for cars. E.g. many Dutch cities got a head start on this to make more room for bicyclists in the nineteen seventies already. Simple measures include raising prices for parking and parking permits, introducing park and ride areas where people can park and hop on a bus to the downtown area, making lots of streets one way only and segmenting off different parts of the city such that you can only drive there via the ring road, making large parts of the down town area car free, etc. Cars are for getting in and out of the city not for driving from A to B inside a city.
I live in Berlin which is comparatively car friendly because of the German car manufacturing lobby. You can drive to the downtown area and expect to find street parking. This is very un-european at this point. Forget about doing that in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Madrid, etc. Not a thing there anymore. Even a few decades ago that would have been a bad idea. You'd be stuck in traffic for ages and your only option for parking will be a full (probably) parking garages charging massive fees. These days it's flat out not allowed or at least enormously expensive.
Even so, owning a car does not make much sense in Berlin and most tech people with comparatively decent incomes I know here in the massive startup scene don't own cars and many of the few that do rarely use them.
I always used public transport (metro/train/bus) to go to work.
Two years ago I had to commute daily by car (just 20 minutes) and felt miserable. For me it was a total waste of time and energy.
Two months ago I switched jobs and started to go to work on my bycicle because the office is just 1 metro station away from home and I have bycicle way from home to work (which is very unusual in Madrid, by the way). This is probably the best job perk I ever had.
In the last winters it barely snowed in Berlin, so I know quite a few people who kept riding their bikes all through the year.
Of course, use your head - if it is damp and then below zero, be careful. Common sense, really.
If all fails, public transport is decent enough to get you anywhere on foot. It's not perfect, I think mostly because Berlin is spatially huge and comparably empty. Cities like Paris have a much more dense public transport infrastructure. But I think you never need to walk more than ten to fifteen minutes (compared to a max of five minutes in Paris and London), which is acceptable.
There really isn't much of a reason to own a car if you live within the S-Bahn ring.
I never knew loss of parking was even a thing in the US.
I can't imagine it being as bad as within European cities where most of the streets (and adjacent buildings) have been built before cars were a thing. Probably one of the main reasons why alternatives to cars are well-received is that cars have never been an option anyways, especially in historic districts.
Big cars are another dimension of this problem.
American cars are usually larger because they don't have these types of issues.
You won't see a majority of people driving pickup trucks in Europe.
Where I live, the two biggest fears about non-car transportation is that it's a) inconvenient or stressful and full of delays (for public transport) or b) too dangerous (for stuff like electric scooters).
There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake.
The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine.
The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can imagine other alternatives.
The problem of the US is that outside of major cities, the entire country was designed and built on the premise of cheap, individual transportation. Everyone has his own little house with a little garden. No town centres. This lack of density means that public transport or bikes will never be able to be able to provide a serious alternative to the automobile, and so people will never given them up.
In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as compromise iirc.
Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Also the stores are thriving. Now the part that was kept as street feels odd. Change is difficult.
I think there's a growing realization that designing around car traffic is a losing proposition going forward. There's still a lot of political inertia to overcome, but we're starting to see bills liks SB50 (legislating to build housing around mass transit) be proposed and get traction.
I am lucky to live on the outskirts of Brussels and cycle for 17km to work once or twice a week. I would have done it every day, but I have to put kids in school and pick them up by 17:20.
Schools (and kids, by extension) are a major traffic issue and impediment to cycling.
The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward.
There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city planning and massive infrastructure spending to get us our suburban dystopias. It could take decades still for transit-focused cities to become the new norm.
Unfortunately “new cities” develop in places where everyone is used to driving, so it takes a lot to overcome a car centric culture.
I live in a college town in a rural area. The transition to public transportation happens when parking becomes expensive or impractical (such as at the university) so people park and ride on a bus.
But that still requires cars. Frankly cars have value that’s hard to replace when there’s a disperse population. Which maybe is the real problem in the US: there’s a culture around “I want my own land”. It pervades even in progressive circles...
> I lived in Germany for three years in the 1980s, never had a car, and never felt I needed one.
You don't know what you're missing. I pity the people who have to use the hot, crowded, smelly, slow public transport every day and don't know any better.
> So navigating the city with a personal car seemed completely impractical.
YMMV, I spent my last 2 holidays in Italy with my car and went pretty much everywhere, including the old town of Siena, the center of Florence, Lucca by car. Italy is exceptionally car-friendly, but some tourists seem to be afraid to go.
There are also no cars on Bald Head Island, in southeast North Carolina. There's not even a bridge to the island from the mainland... all access is via boat or ferry (unless you're a really good swimmer).
> In the USA, even older cities had all but their city centers designed around cars, and if you look at the top 10 cities, 7 of the 10 saw >90% of their road construction after the invention of the car.
I feel like this can be spun as a positive, every street is 3 lanes wide + parking on both sides. So much room to convert for more pedestrian and micromobility space – in European cities it's often either/or.
I'd argue that even the suburbs of Netherlands are super bike-friendly. It's always a reasonable bike ride to the nearest train station, buses fill in the rest, and the roads are setup to be safe for bikers. That's not really the case in most of the US.
In the same situation as you. Currently living with parents out in the suburbs. Plan to move later so I don't need or want a car but I'm basically stuck at home when not working. The only thing there is to do here is cycling which is relatively safe but you can't realistically get anywhere so I do it just for sport. The car culture is pretty bad in Australia as well.
we build new cities next to existing cities. very few cities spring up in the middle of nowhere. if you want to connect back to the original town, say mountain house to oakland, you’ll drive in to oakland. or drive to bart and bart in. it’s not realistic that everyone lives close enough to public transit that they can bike or walk or bus to it. a big draw of living out of the most populated areas is having your own house and land somewhere quiet. and this is definitely engrained in our culture, it’s the american dream to own your own home
That is not completely true. 50% of the US population live in just 35 metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; San Bernardino, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Minneapolis, MN; Orange County, CA; San Diego, CA; Nassau, NY; St. Louis, IL; Baltimore, MD; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; Oakland, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Miami, FL; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Portland, OR; Kansas City, MO; San Francisco, CA; Fort Worth, TX; San Jose, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Orlando, FL; Sacramento, CA; Fort Lauderdale, FL) that together have 173328 square miles. That is a density of
654 inhabitants per square mile or 253 inhabitants per square kilometer. Compare that with the 232 inhabitants per square kilometer in Germany, or the 118 inhabitants per square kilometer in France. And yes you can live without a car even in rural Germany (at least if you don't have kids).
The 20 densest metropolitan areas contain 25% of the US population and have 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, comparable to the 416 inhabitants per square kilometer averaged over the Netherlands.
The lack of public transport in the US is not a density problem. That is just the excuse because people don't want to change.
EDIT: Before anybody says "but the density in German cities is much higher": I lived for years in a German district with a density of 217 inhabitants per square kilometer, without needing a car.
I'm cycling year round in Berlin. It's really no big deal. Get some good gloves and something to protect your ears and you'll be fine. It hardly snows anyway and the roads are cleared fairly quickly when it does.
I tend to agree, but I think it's worth considering that public transit commutes might be longer because people find time on public transit more pleasant, and are willing to do more of it.
To look at two extremes, 45 minutes of bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go driving is a lot less compelling than 45 minutes of reading on a commuter train with a comfortable seat.
Don't let be fooled by the "tourist impression".
Staying for some days isn't the same as living in a place, involving commuting to work, bringing children to school, etc
Every city looks nice as a Tourist, but then it's hard if you live there and in the false zone of the city (=farest away)
It's the case not just in Korea and Japan but in most cities outside of America. It's one of American peculiarities, like checks or no public health care.
China has a fantastic subway system in most big cities, for example. I once took a subway ride from the Shenzhen airport to the Hong Kong border, crossed the border, switched to another subway and arrived in downtown Hong Kong. That's around 65km (40 miles) by public subway!
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2026-02-26 12:20
dlq
Dead-lettered after 1 attempts: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality