Opinion | I've Seen a Future Without Cars, and It's Amazing - The ...

I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing
As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world’s metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars. City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens.)
Farhad Manjoo Is Discussing a Carless Future
So it is. It is Friday. I spent several weeks working on this article that posted yesterday about cars and about the future of cities and why the in this time where you might think that you know this would be the wrong time to kind of make a bet on public transportation because people are worried about, oh, me media peeps know t.k. OK So t.k. is out. Well TV decided to come. So that’s Tuesday. So you know, I’ve been thinking for a while. So I love cars. I’m a huge kind of gearhead. Do I look like a gearhead. Really but that’s what I am. I always want I buy cars more often and eat too. I always want cars that are like, cool rather than practical. And whenever we go on vacation like to a new place I always want to kind of like, rent a cool car. I’m a big fan of cars. I grew up in Southern California, which sort of is the reason I think that I’m a big fan of cars that much for his so shiny. This is not a good luck Really. But like in the last few years, I’ve become kind of increasingly disillusioned about cars like that the everywhere in the country traffic has gone traffic is just, like, impossible in New York where I don’t live. But I visit often in Manhattan. Traffic is really kind of at the record low before the virus. The average speed in midtown for four car traffic was five miles per hour, which is slower which is slower than riding a bike and about just a tiny bit faster than walking. And so traffic is one. Number two is like I’ve spent a lot of time following what the tech industry has been doing to kind of improve cars. You know the last decade has been kind of the decade of like cars in the tech industry. So we had Uber, you know in 2009 which kind of led the way to this shared vehicle. Look at cars where you know, you wouldn’t have to own a car, you could just kind of buy fractional time on a car. Eventually you wouldn’t even need the driver there because there’d be self-driving cars and this. And the way that Uber talked about it. And the way that Lyft talked about it was that this would reduce car ownership. And it would reduce traffic in our big cities would be kind of a boon for the environment as well as for consumers because you didn’t have to buy a car, you didn’t have to park a car. You didn’t have to have the worry of you know the hassle of owning a car in a city you just get fractional time on a car in a car. And in fact, you know a lot of people use it. It’s been it’s been extremely popular. But there are several problems with it. One is that it’s like doesn’t seem to be a profitable business. So it doesn’t seem to be economically viable Uber lost 8 billion last year. And so number two, it’s really not great for like labor and drivers. But the third one is that it’s just really increased traffic like in every place where Uber has operated traffic has gone up the gains to kind of aiding carpooling haven’t really paid off. What really happens is that there are previous cars on the road and there are now Uber cars on the road and others are sort of circling and parking everywhere and kind of blocking roads. And so that is increased congestion. The other thing that was going to change the car industry was electric cars. So you know, Tesla has really transformed the car business with its vision of electric cars and they’ve sold a bunch of them. But the idea there was that like. It would spur the rest of the industry to go electric. And that’s not really happening. There are a lot of car companies that announced electrics but they don’t make a lot of money on electrics and so they sort of pause you their developments. Tesla is like you know one of Tesla, if you will, in the market for an electric car today you could get a Chevy Bolt you can get a Nissan leaf. You can get sort of one kind of plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius but really like your options are Tesla and the. So you know it may lead to sort of big change if carmakers kind of join the bandwagon but they make a ton of money on SUVs and a lot of the companies are you know, running their electric programs are called out basically like what people in industry call compliance cars. They’re making electric cars. So they can sell enough of those. So they can like lower their fleet average. So that they can have room to sell a very profitable SUV. So it’s sort of like the electric is like allowing car companies to sell gas guzzler SUVs that are extremely dangerous which are also going to be on the road for like 10 to 20 years. So you know like. And so the estimates for when we could get full electric is like you know of the American fleet is something like 15 to 20 years. So it’s going to be a very, very long time before we turn to electric. And there’s also not not really a electrics are better, more efficient than gas powered cars. But it really depends on how we generate electricity. Some of them are not very good options and also like it takes a lot of materials and takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of like mining of minerals of you know cup cobalt lithium other things that you need precious resources. So they’re not really like an environmental panacea. You have self-driving cars, which is sort of like the holy grail of the Silicon Valley car industry, which is like we will make cars that don’t hurt people that are super convenient that you don’t even need to drive. That will kind of transform the car industry. And this is the promise they’ve been telling. You know they’ve been this is a vision they’ve been promising us for 10 years and really like the last five it’s been like, oh electric cars will be around the corner. They’re not it’s going to be a long time before we get electric cars everywhere. I mean self-driving cars everywhere. They’re running into lots of kind of human and infrastructure and weather and other problems. And so you know like you can bet that cars are going to be like reliably killing people for the next five to 10 years. It’s not going to change. So I started thinking about this. And I started thinking about like how all of these car industry kind of promises for change and Silicon Valley promises for change. We’re really kind of not really addressing the major problem. The major problem is like we have these vehicles. Now that are killing in America about 90,000 people a year about 40,000 people die in car crashes about 50,000 people die in kind of premature deaths caused by emissions from cars. And you know it’s like all big cities. If you go to areas where there are lots of freeways just around the freeways you can see there’s much higher concentrations of you know breathing problems, asthma lots of problems caused by air pollution. And you know thousands of people Tens of thousands of people are dying every year because of that, we. And so then the coronavirus happened and suddenly overnight around the world, people stopped using cars. But mostly because they were staying at home. But that because there were no cars on the road. People started looking at the streets in different ways. Like in all over the United States there were cities that closed down streets to cars and people started biking biking became see for walking became safer rollerblading became a thing. Skateboarding sales were up and in New York people started using city bike more and something amazing happened with the air pollution everywhere that cars kind of left the streets. You like in New Delhi which has terrible air pollution. People suddenly reported being able to see the blue skies you could see mountains in the distance in Harlem in Manhattan Air pollution fell 20% like toxic air pollution just because of the removal of cars. I mean, you know, you think of Manhattan as a relatively car free place. But you know all around. There’s a toxic air pollution there’s a lot of cars that are stuck in traffic that are causing air pollution in Los Angeles trapped. The air pollution went to record lows not seen in like 2005 years. So it was an amazing change. And I began to think like, why can’t we. Why can’t we keep this. Well, so one reason why you can’t keep it is people are very worried about public transit. So when New York when other cities with transit kind of open up fully. People are worried that the trains are going to be overcrowded. And you may get the virus on there you know by riding transit or a bus. And so it seems like cars are the safest thing. The problem is that cars are not safe. They are actually dangerous. They kill people. And there’s not enough room for them. So you know with Manhattan traffic for example, if it was already at 5 miles per hour. If more people choose to drive. It’s just going to be no one move. So cars, even though they seem like a safe alternative for from the virus standpoint, they’re not really like a good formative to you know, all the other modes of transportation. So what do we do. I started talking to a lot of urban planners and people who think about. And if the future of mobility and in particular, I started talking to v Sean chucker party who is a former urban planning official in New York City who runs this architecture firm in Manhattan he’s the incoming dean of the architecture school at Berkeley. And he and his firm had been putting together this really, really intricate proposal looking at all of the benefits you could get if we took over the space that you use in Manhattan for cars and gave it to other more accessible forms of transportation and cheaper forms of transportation. So you know, if you so that the number the thing that really wanted to focus on was the kind of amount of space that we give to cars in cities. So, you know, it’s everyone knows like cars are dangerous. Everyone knows cars are expensive cars are bad for the environment. I think a lot of people don’t look at how much space cars use in our big cities. And you know we America’s major cities are the most precious resource is is like physical space. You know in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York in d.c. and kind of many, many major kind of economic hubs. Housing is super expensive, because there’s not a lot of supply there because there’s not a lot of room and you have like restrictive zoning laws that prevent building. And so you have limited land supply and also people have to commute in from really far away, because you know we’re not building dense. And because because of cars kind of feed sprawl and so you have people living really far away because housing costs. You have people commuting very far. The removal of cars like giving up some of that space that we use for cars and using it for other things like housing better transportation could just revolutionize cities. If you just think about the amount of space that cars use and how better. We could use them. I think a lot of people understand that you know this is not cars are not the most efficient use of space. But I really wanted to figure out how to show that I mean, a lot of people have been talking about this. But so I started talking to v Sean and three of the other architects there about like the gains that we could get from banning cars in the most obvious place to start to look at ways is Manhattan because New York is already one of the most kind of car fleet free places in the country. It’s one of the few places where most people don’t own cars. So in New York City about 48 47% of people own households own cars. So like is a majority non-current car owning city in Manhattan. It’s something like 75% of residents don’t own cars. And the people who do own cars. I got a lot of pushback on this saying, you know this is going to be bad for lower income people to ban cars. But in fact, like that. If you look at any kind of stat about car owners car drivers. They are wealthier than non car owners in every part of New York City. And so you know it’s a real. It’s sort of an interesting thing where the city is giving up this vast tracts of land to relatively wealthy people who are driving for their own kind of convenience and pleasure. And that land is not really being kind of paid for in any way. You know all the things you think of as like a charge on cars like gas taxes and tolls and stuff really don’t cover the building of roads and the space devoted to roads. And so it’s really kind of like a gift of all this precious land to car users to car drivers. And so like how better to use that space. And so Sean and his team came up with these really this really amazing plan for how much better life in New York could be if Manhattan alone banned not all motor vehicles. But just private cars. So there could still be Uber there could still be lifts there could still be delivery trucks there could still be emergency vehicles there could still be a lot of people said that I didn’t sort of mention problems for disabled people. But there could be you know Paratransit would every other form of. And you know accessible public transit every other form of transportation with the absence of cars would be made better. And what do I mean by better. I mean faster better, more availability better service. So last year Manhattan closed parts of 14th Street to car traffic and in order to make the 14th Street as in lower Manhattan and in order to make bus Crosstown bus service much faster. So it used to take something like 40 minutes to get across town. And now it’s like half that because there’s no cars. And that would be that’s sort of the gain you get from cars. So from giving up space to cars. So instead of, you know all Manhattan residential streets pretty much all of them have street parking on the side and a lane of car traffic in the middle. And the bigger roads have several lanes of car traffic plus street parking. Plus a lot of like medians and other kind of safety features you need in the road to prevent cars from hitting everyone else. If you remove that space, which is the space devoted to cars in Manhattan is something like a third of the island’s space, which is an incredible amount. If you remove that space from cars you could have room for bus rapid transit, which is like a bus system where it goes has dedicated lanes has platforms for people to get in on buses really goes much faster. You can have bus rapid transit across Manhattan and from on the bridges and tunnels coming into Manhattan. So you know if you’re in one of the kind of bedroom communities around New York City. If you live in one of the outer Boroughs you could come into the city either on public transit or in either on trains or in something like bus rapid transit which would you know connect to outer Boroughs. And like further off. Right and the plans would also include Uber and taxis would also be available on the island. And the other thing that you would get space for would be big sort of two lane protected bike lanes on pretty much every street in Manhattan. And you don’t the streets those lanes don’t have to be used for bikes. There’s all these new sort of micro mobility devices, things people hate like scooters and an electric skateboards. But the reason people hate those is because they’re taking up. They’re taking up sidewalk space. Now because there’s not. And people hate them because they’re running into pedestrians. But if there was more space for bikes and there was more space for pedestrians and less space for cars those other things wouldn’t seem as annoying either. People are annoyed by scooters because they’re just like littering the sidewalk. But if they didn’t have to litter the sidewalk and then were sidewalks bigger you know, even scooters would be sort of better. So they should have like every everything in favor like you look at this plan and it’s really hard to think of a downside for people. Even a downside for the car driver. So one thing they found in coming up with this kind of plan for no cars in New York is you remove cars from Manhattan bus service becomes so fast it becomes sort of as fast as the subway. So you can get from uptown downtown in something like 20 to 30 minutes you could get you know like trips that used to take two hours on buses get down to like 30 minutes you get huge gains for the speed of buses you know, coming into the island from you know the outer Boroughs or in cities in the cities around New York would be cut dramatically that the amount of time people spend on the ride. So it’s even better for people who do drive cars one of the things we noticed they noticed in the plan is like if you ban cars from Manhattan. There will be so much less traffic around Manhattan that like if you started even trips that didn’t involve Manhattan. So like if you went from one place in Brooklyn by car to another place in Brooklyn by car or the Bronx for example, you get less traffic on those routes because all the traffic going sort of clogging up the outer Boroughs through and through on the way to Manhattan is not there. So you know even if you’re a car driver who doesn’t drive in Manhattan you’ll get better traffic. And then the public health benefits are amazing in Manhattan as a result. By banning cars you get a 50% reduction in toxic pollution. And in the outer Boroughs where there’s a lot of pollution because there’s a lot of cars kind of sitting on the road idling on the roads you get a 20% reduction in toxic air pollution. So you kill fewer people by accidents you kill fewer people by air pollution and you get around faster and it’s cheaper, it’s more accessible for people on at every income scale. You don’t have to have you know money to buy a car to maintain a car to sort of live in access like the economy of New York. To me, it was just like a home run sale. And so we came up with this way of showing all these benefits in in graphical form. In the article, and it it really resonated and got a lot of it. I feel like, you know a of people have written about burning cars in various parts of the country and in New York specifically in Manhattan. People have been calling for banning cars since the 60s. What I really thought was interesting about this model from fission is that it had just a lot of kind of detail. And it shows off the benefits that you would get. OK So I got a lot of comments criticisms about it. I’m going to go through them. We can talk about the issue. If you have any thoughts to you can or questions you can write them random right here. OK So on Twitter Kevin de good said, we cannot simply assume this change would be uniformly beneficial for residents of every age and ability level as of 2018. Only 119 of two. So 25 percent of New York subways were fully accessible. New Jersey Transit is a bit better, but not much rate like this would require an improvement of public transit generally for accessibility but also just for capacity like if there are no cars more people would need to use the subway and the buses and everything else. And you wouldn’t need you would have to. It would have to come after like a long build out of infrastructure. So this is like the cost of it. We have to change the roads we’d have to change the creative bus rapid transit system. And you have to make sure those are accessible and accessible for four disabled people, but also accessible in terms like economically accessible. This is like I think a lot of people are skeptical about just the idea of relying on public transportation because public transportation in every major city and in particular and in New York with the subways has been like underfunded badly managed like compared to lots of other parts of the world. Public transportation is not great in America and like it’s a hard sell to say, well, you can get rid of cars, but like you’ll have to rely on the buses when the buses aren’t great like the kind of current way that people understand how buses work is not like a picture of like speed and efficiency. And so it’s a leap of a kind of a leap of faith and you’d really need to have a plan for creating alternatives. And I think that’s the real difficulty in life. I think that could be sort of one source of pushback as like there’s not a lot of alternatives for public transportation and so you need to build those first. And I think that’s a good criticism ds nip I have from Twitter said so I’m all for Greening cities. But this is not the moment to take the option of car travel from urbanites especially those of us who are older have underlying health conditions or other covered related reasons may not feel safe getting back on the train right. Yeah, like the train. It’s true like the train seems like a dangerous place like indoor overcrowding is not good in this pandemic. And you have a lot of people on the train with a lot of people in buses. That sounds bad. It is not clear that there have been any kind of super spreading events from subways or transit in general in any part of the world. There’s no sort of obvious link in New York for the high cases tying it to transit many, many places in the world have huge transit systems and really didn’t suffer huge coronavirus related outbreaks and then you know, the idea here is that you would rapidly expand the buggy would significantly expand the number about the capacity of these systems. And so you would have more trains and you would have more buses and you would have more pedestrian space in order to allow people to kind of be not so closely packed in. But this requires infrastructure. And I can see why people would be worried about it like it, it does seem unsafe especially when there’s just not a lot of capacity on current systems. So that’s another thing where you would need to kind of balance people’s risk by increasing capacity and making sort of bigger changes. And I can see how people wouldn’t really I don’t know trust for that to happen like it’s just really hard to believe that under and under managed cities, cities that to have an end like government at every level in America seems kind of not to be doing a great job recently. So I can see how people would be skeptical that it would happen. Nick in Brooklyn said something similar, which is covered. There’s no way I’m hopping on mass transit anytime remotely soon in fact, we’re renting a car just so I can avoid trains so as to protect against bringing something home to my newborn and aging mother until adequate investment is made. So I don’t have to stand in someone’s armpit for 20 minutes on the downtown for during rush hour. No thanks. Yeah, I mean, I hear you. I feel like if the trains are extremely overcrowded now it might make sense to get a car. But like if everyone gets a car No one’s going to move. I think there’s a real sort of like traffic was already at really an unsustainable levels before. And so if more people get cars. I don’t think you’re going to have kind of an easy or better way to get into the city. This seems like a time to kind of dump you know increase our investment in public transit because that’s the only way to efficiently move millions of people cars. Really can’t do it. Like if everyone in New York had a car. It would not be there would be no space for anything else. If everyone in New York drove, and you made enough room on the roads for everyone in New York to drive there would be nothing else like there’s just physically not enough room in New York for everyone to drive a car. And that’s true in every city. It’s true even in Los Angeles. Like a lot you know a place where lots of people drive. But like not everyone drives and you know a lot of people in major cities take public transit and the fact that it’s getting worse and pushing people to driving is going to make traffic just like untenable in lots of places. So I really don’t think we have a real option here. In a lot of these changes are not any way going to happen before you know immediately. And so it’s possible. We have a vaccine or other things for it to allow for public transportation Karen in Des Moines said, thank you for doing the math on this. It makes the argument even more compelling. I think another point to be made is that as the country ages older adults need city spaces where they can safely walk run errands and socialize. I hope Manhattan paves the way for such a plan. Yeah, I think that’s also the other thing that I noticed doing during Katrina virus is that like the outdoors without cars. It just became kind of psychologically safer life. I noticed that I was just like walking on the streets because there were. You wanted to social distance and the streets near where I live. We’re not like officially closed down. But there were so few cars that you could kind of walk on the roads in residential areas. And it felt like you had this whole new like sort of landscape that you hadn’t thought of as like belonging to people. It belonged to cars. And now now it suddenly was given back to the people and you and you had some sort of sense of like it was like liberation. I didn’t worry all the time. That is going to run off the road and get onto the sidewalk and hit my kids, which is something I think about often because you know what actually does happen like cars kill 40,000 people a year. And we just kind of conveniently forget about it because because like it’s too hard to think about. We said, we think like should realize the cost and the damage can be caused by cars and they try to mitigate that. So yeah, I really thought that there was like some really a big change in how I thought about the city. And how about that. In the end like the possibility of the city. When When cars were gone. I should say like a lot of people responded and sat and asked like what should we do about this. How should we make this reality. And it’s not going to be easy at all. This is like people have been calling for an end to cars in Manhattan for a very long time. And in the case for it has always been really good. And it’s like there is a political kind of constituency sort of really loyal to cars. And then there’s also this like kind of all this cultural baggage like you know for 100 years. The car industry has been spending on ads and kind of cultural propaganda and that’s what I call it. Like all of these movies that kind of feature cars that like put cars at the center of our world, like in America cars just have like the kind of physical landscape of the other country is kind of built around cars and like it’s really hard to escape that idea that we don’t need cars that cars could be like a outdated technology that we don’t need to improve on upon them. We need to kind of move beyond them. I think it’s a really hard case in all of America, and even in a even in a car food place like Manhattan. But I feel like you know, we’ve seen this movement in the last few years of cities pulling back land from cars and like the livability increasing enough that like there’s really a lot of kind of popularity around these changes, like the pedestrian is the pedestrian of like lots of places of in New York’s times square being turned into a pedestrian plaza 14th Street in San Francisco market street no longer allows cars in Paris they’ve pulled away. They’ve reduced the amount of like they’ve pulled lock lots of roads and other parts of the city away from cars and there’s been a 40% reduction in traffic in the past decade just an amazing decline and like that has been a really effective way to change how people think about cars. And I think that’s like there’s room in the political and the politics for us to push that. What about self-driving cars. I mean self-driving cars are not a thing. They just like they work in very limited circumstances. Google has a trial in Arizona where it’s always sunny and there’s sort of few weather disturbances and there’s big suburbs and like there the roads are make sort of relative sense. But in other places and lots of other places, there’s just it’s just not viable. And it’s going to be a long time before it’s like works. And you know further away it gets further away every year. Car companies were promising kind of self-driving cars for sale in 2020. That is not happening. I would be surprised if you could buy a self-driving car before 2025. And it’s a complicated thing and it has to kind of interface with humans on the road with pedestrians and do so in a way that doesn’t cause like unnecessary like doesn’t cause deaths doesn’t cause danger. But also doesn’t sort of change the culture of the road and a lot in big ways. And I just think that we shouldn’t kind of bet on the future of self-driving cars as a way to free us from the problem of cars and electric cars have a whole bunch of similar problems right. Like they’re just they cost a lot to produce. They cost a lot of kind of resources to produce and other than Tesla just know a few car companies are really betting on it anymore. They’re all doing it to just get compliance with them with gas mileage standards. So that they can sell a better, more SUV like that’s sort of the whole business model of the car industry because SUV is or where the money is so and those SUV are going to be on the road for more than a decade. So I just feel like we have to do something we really can’t afford to wait until we get self-driving cars and they’re not going to be like the obvious kind of panacea. They’re not going to solve all the problems. And in particular, they’re not going to solve the problem of space like the car is an electric car or a self-driving car. Like self-driving cars may be able to pack in closer to each other on roads on freeways and so maybe you’d have less traffic. But that’s like a fairly long term goal you’d need a lot of the cars to be self driving for that to happen. Just kind of in the short run. Like a single electric car doesn’t solve the space problem. You still need to pocket you. It still takes up a lot of room on the road. It still requires things like parking garages street parking and it’s still super inefficient like one of the things that I was really eye opening in writing about this was that. But just in a given amount of space in a city cars are just way less efficient in terms of how much room they use to transport people like you can pack you know, 50 people on a city bus and transport that and you move 50 people on one city bus, which has a square footage of like 500 square feet or something less like a studio apartment. If you wanted to move 50 people in cars like most cars have just one or two people you’re looking at like 30 to 50 cars 30 to 50 cars, which take up, you know like many, many more times the amount of space just on the road. And then if you account for like the amount of space. They take a parking lot gets just a very, very inefficient way of moving people around compared to buses and buses are really like we in America are not fans of buses like buses are seen as like I don’t know old technology, not the way you’d want to travel. That’s just not the case in Europe. I went to London recently. And you know London has like world famous buses that are really super convenient. You can get anywhere on a bus like I went to London for six days did not travel on a car any kind of car not even a taxi in anytime in a week in the week. You could go on a subway or on the bus. The buses are not as fast as they could be because there are still cars in London. But there are fewer cars than elsewhere because they have congestion pricing. If they had no cars in London buses would be even sort of e just even better. But like you can get a lot of places very quickly on a bus in London because the buses are nice and they move quickly and they have like a lot of capacity. And we can easily do that in a big American cities. In San Francisco in New York in Los Angeles like in Los Angeles, where the bus system is not great, but lots of people use it because they can’t afford a car because like you need some kind of few motor vehicle to get around Los Angeles because that’s how the city is designed. If you just complain young gave a ton of money to the bus system and like had buses everywhere you would it would just be just amazing thing for us for lower income people for older people or for disabled people who feel just like a lot of people in the city who don’t have the access and means that wealthy car drivers do. And we are really like one thing. I sort of realized in reporting on this is like city officials and kind of even citizens are just really stuck in the mindset of why cars are the way to get around. Until very recently in many parts of the country you were required if you built a building if you built any other kind of structure you were required to prove to create space for cars. Yeah, that’s insane. Like no other system in no other system of transportation gets like a gimme in the law and says like you will. We will require this form of transportation, but we won’t require like bike lanes. We won’t require like you know bus stops everywhere. It’s just like insane. We an end and the way we the reason we do that is because cars are so space inefficient that you have to like it. The only way the car industry sort of took over the roads was by making the car like the default alternative the default way of traveling and then it just sort of it’s like a contagion really like every car that one person buys. You need to create enough roads space for it. And you need to create enough parking space for it. And as soon as you create the road space in the parking space that’s its only can be used by cars. You create and you create demand for people to buy cars. And then you need more space for the people buying cars. It’s a cycle that ends in every part of our cities being covered in like paved roadway and so the only way to break that cycle is to pull land away from the cause. Like you you are if the worse you make try driving the more inconvenient and expensive. You make driving the better everything else becomes. And yeah. I just think I don’t like cars. Do you have any other questions than this. Should we move on from cars. The other thing I’m really freaking out about is schools, whether they should open whether they should not. What we’re going to do in the fall about schools. I have two kids who are in elementary school. Elementary school age. They were home for like from March onward. They’ve been home. My wife and I worked full time. We’ve worked full time from home and we work full time from home during the pandemic. And so it’s like two parents and two children in the house while with no childcare. Other than us while we’re working. And it’s just was an impossible situation. And I cannot leave. We have to do that again, because we were so bad as a country, as a society in fighting this virus and now we have to our school. I think our school is going to be opened three days a week or two days a week and then the other days of the week, the kids will be at home. So that like you can have social distancing and you could have staggered schedules and I will just not get any work done like I will probably do these Twitter chats because that’s the only thing I can do while my kids are home because like it’s really difficult to get any leg sustained work done. So don’t expect columns from me. I really am though I really am like, I have no idea what we’re going to do in the fall not just me, but I mean, everyone like I just have no idea how society is going to function with home with like massive required home schooling that the real problem is like there’s no, we haven’t like the places that have opened up schools have really opened up schools only when there was no kind of community spread of the virus, or there was reduced community spread of the virus. And so the science on this like our schools safe when there’s so much of the virus going around. We don’t really know like there’s much lower transmissibility among kids and kids get less sick from the virus, but they could. But like if there’s a contagion and they get it and they get pass it to other people in their household. To me to my wife to my parents. And so it really makes it a scary thing like it. It works. It works to open schools when there is no kind of free floating contagion. But when or when you’ve reduced it. But no wonder the 30 has died from Cobain. That’s not true. And it sort of is and it isn’t even on point rate. Even if people no one under 30 has died. People under 30 are back in contact with people over 30. And so you even if they don’t even if my kids don’t get sick from the virus. They could bring it to other people. And that’s super scary for me and for my other the rest of my family. And it’s really opening the schools are not opening the schools like there’s no real there’s no real good decision here. Like the only answer. The only answer is for us to have done a better job four months ago, and we miss that chance. And now we’re just like as a country, you no good options. I’m an immigrant to the United States and like I I’m like, I have been in like them in. I don’t know like a love affair with the United States for much of my life like. I feel incredibly grateful for coming here. I feel like the country changed my life and gave me opportunities. But I am more have less faith in the future of America than I ever have had. Like it’s just I feel like it. Like at the point where life people who can should try to figure out like if there’s another place to go in the world that might be better at handling crises that are going to be caused by like a changing planet that are going to be caused by like disease that are going to be caused like economic crises like we are just like our government at that at the federal level. And it’s to mean, it doesn’t even have to be a partisan thing like just like the entire system of government is not working like Congress can’t pass anything the president doesn’t seem to be have a plan for anything. And then at various parts of this. And like you know we’ve had real successes of like federalism in this country on the virus like some places have done a lot better than others, but like it doesn’t really save you because people have freedom of movement in the United States. And it’s really difficult like we’re all in this together until and so I don’t really think like being in California, where there may be better government can save you from like a whole lot because you know people from elsewhere can come here. It’s just like a problem that having to do with like the fundamental parts of our society. And I just really don’t know how we’re going to change that. I wrote a column a few weeks ago saying like I am more pessimistic about the future than I ever was before. Like it’s time to go full Duma and like I am more full Duma than I was even a few weeks ago when I wrote that. So I don’t know. Is there like deep doo like I felt like there was you know maybe four or five weeks ago, there seemed to be a light at the end of this tunnel for coronavirus. We seem to be going in the right direction. If we just kind of stuck with mitigation efforts but we didn’t blink. We just like the kind of slavish Ness toward capitalism. It’s just crazy. Like people had to reopen. People had to. Even if it was not like even if there were clear dangers like people just had to go get their haircuts and had to go to bars. It doesn’t seem to me that we open bars before we open schools y and end like that impatience the inability to do something to sacrifice for the greater good. And the sacrifices you are small there. You know there are like like things like even small sacrifices like wearing masks like it’s just becomes like a huge culture war controversy that we have a difficulty even like coming up with like rational responses. The way other societies do like. It’s just it just feels like we are not doing a good job as a populace as a society as a political body dealing with crises. And it’s not I mean, it’s just happened for like time and time again, like we responded badly to 9/11 but going into an unnecessary war. We responded badly to the great recession and that we kept the banks alive. But we didn’t really like bailout ordinary citizens from like loss of life, and we didn’t like stimulate the economy to the degree that we could have. And you know we’re going to fail this we’re failing this like what. When a country is repeatedly sort of given huge crises and sort of fails to stop them. And makes life worse for most of its population think I don’t really know what you how you fix that. We seem to be in sort of like an intractable paralysis regarding like fixing problems. And it’s like radically dispiriting to think about. So you can thank the electoral college for so much of those failures. Yeah I mean, the electoral college the I think the Senate is worse. Like the fact that we have kind of minority rule in the Senate the way that that minority rule in the Senate shapes the courts, the way that just like voting. And like every other part of the sort of federal apparatus is designed to kind of frustrate majority rule. It’s just like there’s lots of problems in. We don’t have a real solution to any of them. Indoor bars have now shown to be a major source of Super Spinner events and should be shut down. I mean, it’s crazy to me that even people opened up bars. I saw that some places were closing. Movie studios and like, why were the movies like movie like movie theaters like, why were the theaters like open in the first place. It’s just insane that we kind of move so quickly to doing that. OK, I’ve been talking about cars and the virus for nearly an hour. We’re really quickly. I just talk and talk. I got to say who’s coming up next week. Jen senior on Monday at 1:00 PM eastern 10 AM Pacific on the NIT opinion channel Tuesday. Nobody’s set yet. We will see Wednesday. Kara swisher Thursday Nick Christophe and Friday me again and again next week. So thanks so much for joining me. Good luck with this terrible time in our country. Good luck on the virus. Good luck with everything else. Talk to you later. Cars of the west.
But there is a catch: Cities are beginning to cautiously open back up again, and people are wondering how they’re going to get in to work. Many are worried about the spread of the virus on public transit. Are cars our only option? How will we find space for all of them?
In much of Manhattan, the average speed of traffic before the pandemic had fallen to 7 miles per hour. In Midtown, it was less than 5 m.p.h. That’s only slightly faster than walking and slower than riding a bike. Will traffic soon be worse than ever?
Not if we choose another path.
Rather than stumble back into car dependency, cities can begin to undo their worst mistake: giving up so much of their land to the automobile.
The pandemic should not stop us. There is little evidence that public transit is responsible for the spread of the coronavirus in New York or elsewhere; some cities with heavily used transit systems, including Hong Kong, have been able to avoid terrible tolls from the virus.
If riders wear face masks — and if there are enough subway cars, buses, bike lanes and pedestrian paths for people to avoid intense overcrowding — transit might be no less safe than cars, in terms of the risk of the spread of disease. In all other measures of safety, transit is far safer than cars.
What’s that you say? There aren’t enough buses in your city to avoid overcrowding, and they’re too slow, anyway? Pedestrian space is already hard to find? Well, right. That’s car dependency. And it’s exactly why cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is neither the only way nor the best way to get around town.
A few weeks ago, I began talking to Vishaan Chakrabarti, a former New York City urban-planning official and the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, a Manhattan-based architecture firm. Like other urbanists, Chakrabarti believes that the pandemic has created an opportunity for New York and other cities to reduce their reliance on cars.
Manhattan, already one of the most car-free places in the country, is the best place to start. Chakrabarti’s firm, known as PAU, had been working on an intricate proposal to show what it might look and feel like to live in a city liberated from cars, to show how much better life in New York might be with one simple change: Most cars would be banished from Manhattan.
PAU’s proposal would not ban all motor vehicles, just privately owned cars. There would still be delivery trucks, paratransit, emergency vehicles, and taxicabs and rideshare cars, if you needed them.
But private cars account for so many of Manhattan’s vehicles that banning them would instantly improve life for just about everyone who lives and works in New York.
Delancey Street
In parts of downtown, pedestrians have to cross wide roads designed to carry traffic from the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges.
In a car-free world, the city could expand sidewalks to give those pedestrians more space.
Two-way bike lanes could replace car lanes in both directions. A concrete barrier would protect bikers.
Dedicated bus lanes, free of car traffic, would efficiently shuttle people in and out of Manhattan and relieve congestion on the subway system.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
You already know what’s terrible about cars: They’re dirty. They’re dangerous. They’re expensive to buy and maintain, and environmentally hazardous to produce and operate. Automobiles kill around 90,000 Americans every year — about 40,000 in car accidents, and an estimated 50,000 more from long-term exposure to air pollution emitted by cars.
But Chakrabarti is among a group of urbanists who’ve been calling attention to a less-discussed problem with cars. Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.
In most American cities, wherever you look, you will see a landscape constructed primarily for the movement and storage of automobiles, not for the enjoyment of people: endless wide boulevards and freeways for cars to move swiftly; each road lined with parking spaces for cars at rest; retail establishments ringed with spots for cars; houses built around garages for cars; and a gas station, for cars to feed, on every other corner.
In the most car-dependent cities, the amount of space devoted to automobiles reaches truly ridiculous levels. In Los Angeles, for instance, land for parking exceeds the entire land area of Manhattan, enough space to house almost a million more people at Los Angeles’s prevailing density.
This isn’t a big deal in the parts of America where space is seemingly endless. But in the most populated cities, physical space is just about the most precious resource there is. The land value of Manhattan alone is estimated to top $1.7 trillion. Why are we giving so much of it to cars?
Without cars, Manhattan’s streets could give priority to more equitable and accessible ways of getting around, including an extensive system of bike “superhighways” and bus rapid transit — a bus system with dedicated lanes in the roadway, creating a service that approaches the capacity, speed and efficiency of the subway, at a fraction of the cost.
Eliminating most cars in Manhattan would also significantly clean up the air for the entire region. It would free up space for new housing and create hundreds of acres of new parks and pedestrian promenades, improving the fundamental health, beauty and livability of America’s largest metropolis.
There have been severalproposals to ban cars in Manhattan, and the city has been working on a system to impose a toll on cars south of 60th Street. (This congestion-pricing project was scheduled to start early next year, but it has been delayed by the pandemic.)
What distinguishes PAU’s proposal is its visual appeal. Chakrabarti says his firm aimed to show, at a street level, how much better life without cars might be for most New Yorkers. “This is an amazing way to live,” he said.
Residential streets
Parking spots and piles of trash dominate much of the space on a typical residential street in Manhattan.
Eliminating parking would create space for large trash receptacles and more bike lanes. Additional crosswalks would make it easier for people to safely cross the street.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
Any proposal to ban cars had better look amazing, because in America, the automobile has never been just a way of getting from A to B. More than a century of car ads and a good deal of hagiographic cultural propaganda has done a job on a lot of us. For many Americans, cars are not just a consumer product but a rite of passage, a symbol of national pride, and an expression of liberty nearly as fundamental as anything promised in the Bill of Rights.
I know, because I, too, have long loved cars. I love them viscerally, the way a dog loves a bone, or an Instagrammer loves a sunset, and I am as surprised as anyone to be calling for their eradication from cities.
As a teenager growing up in Southern California, America’s center of car culture, I spent endless hours lusting after the vehicles in car magazines; these days my appetites are whetted digitally, with ridiculously detailed car-review videos on YouTube. My current ride is a car that only European automobile nerds would appreciate: an apple-red Volkswagen Golf R, a “hot hatch” that does 0 to 60 in under five environmentally disastrous seconds, which I bought only because driving it very fast touched me in unmentionable places.
Yet when I got my speedy ride, I quickly realized it was kind of pointless, because most of the time there’s too much traffic where I live to go any faster than a golf cart. This is the drab reality of driving you’ll never see in car ads — a daily, rage-inducing grind of traffic, parking and shelling out to fill up; an option that many people choose not for any love affair with cars, but often because driving is the least-inconvenient way of getting around where they live and work.
I was receptive to Chakrabarti’s proposal because in the last few years, I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned about America’s tolerance for the public health and environmental damage caused by cars, not to mention the frustrations of commuting by car. And I’m losing hope that the car industry will be able to fix the damage anytime soon.
I’ve spent much of the last decade watching Silicon Valley take on that industry, and I once had great expectations that techies would soon make cars substantially cleaner, safer, more efficient, more convenient and cheaper to operate.
But many of their innovations are turning into a bust — or, at the very least, are not making enough of a difference. Uber and Lyft once promised to reduce traffic through car-pooling. In fact, ride-hailing services have greatly worsened traffic in many big cities.
When he wanted to underscore the unexpected nature of invention, Steve Jobs was fond of using a version of a line widely attributed to Henry Ford: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” Silicon Valley’s collective quest for a better car has begun to look similarly narrow: What if Ubers and Teslas are just faster horses — and what if the real way to revolutionize transportation is to think beyond the car entirely?
A more straightforward campaign against the automobile has been winning results around the world. This is a movement by urban planners, community groups and far-thinking elected officials to reduce the amount of land cars occupy.
It’s good urban policy, but it’s also a matter of equity and justice. Chakrabarti often refers to a concept he calls “street equity.”
Imagine you’d like to transport 50 people from one end of Manhattan to the other. If you were to send them by bus, you could stuff everyone in a single bus car — taking up around 450 square feet of road space, about the size of a tiny studio apartment. But if you were going to send 50 people by automobile, you’d need a lot more road. For 50 people, each driving alone, you’d need 2,750 square feet of space —basically a McMansion of roadway to transport 50 fat cats.
What does it take to move 50 people?
What does it take to move 50 people?
50 cars
55 square feet per person
One bus
9 square feet per person
50 bicycles
15 square feet per person
50 cars
55 sq. ft. per person
50 bicycles
15 sq. ft. per person
One bus
9 sq. ft. per person
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
And cars take up space even while they’re not in use. They need to be parked, which consumes yet more space on the sides of streets or in garages. Cars take up a lot of space even when they’re justlooking for parking.
Add it all up and you get a huge number: In addition to the 2,450 acres of roadway in Manhattan, nearly 1,000 more acres — an area about the size of Central Park — is occupied by parking garages, gas stations, carwashes, car dealerships and auto repair shops. There is three times more roadway for cars on Manhattan as there is for bikes. There’s more road for cars than there is sidewalk for pedestrians.
Park Avenue
Cars have a way of gobbling up urban space.
Look at Park Avenue. When it was constructed in the early 20th century, it was true to its name — a large park ran down its center.
Over the years, much of the park was converted to roads for cars. Now just a small median remains.
A redesigned Park Avenue could reclaim its former glory, with a large pedestrian promenade winding down the commercial corridor.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
The amount of space devoted to cars in Manhattan is not just wasteful, but, in a deeper sense, also unfair to the millions of New Yorkers who have no need for cars.
More than half of the city’s households do not own a car, and of those who do, most do not use them for commuting. Of the 1.6 million commuters who come into Manhattan every weekday (or, who did, before the virus), more than 80 percent make the trip via public transit, mostly trains and buses, or by walking or biking. Only around 12 percent of daily commuters get to the island by car.
“It really does feel like there is a silent majority that doesn’t get any real say in how the public space is used,” Chakrabarti told me.
New York’s drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add to the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they’ve been given, they’re still stuck in gridlock.
In that sense, even drivers should have an interest in fostering alternatives to driving.
“The one thing we know for sure, because we understand geometry, is that if everyone drives, nobody moves,” Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, told me. Even if you’re a committed daily driver, “it’s in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you’re going to be able to drive easier.”
Indeed, PAU’s plan bears this out. Banning private cars on Manhattan would reduce traffic by as much as 20 percent on routes that start and end within New York’s other boroughs — that is, in places where cars would still be allowed — according to an analysis by traffic engineers at Buro Happold, a consulting firm that studied PAU’s plan.
Uptown avenues
Eight lanes of traffic and parking take up most of the roadway, with pedestrians forced to hustle to cross long crosswalks.
In the new plan, community members could vote on how they wanted to use the space reclaimed from cars. There would be room for curbside vendors, gathering spaces and civic and social services.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
How would people get around in a Manhattan without private cars?
Mostly on foot, by bus or by subway; often on a bicycle, e-bike, scooter, or some future light, battery-powered “micromobility” device (things like one-wheeled, self-balancing skateboards); and sometimes, in a pinch, in a taxi or Uber.
Some of these may not sound like your cup of tea. Buses are slow, bicycles are dangerous, and you wouldn’t be caught dead on a scooter, let alone a one-wheeled skateboard. But that’s only because you’re imagining these other ways of getting around as they exist today, in the world of cars.
Cars make every other form of transportation a little bit terrible. The absence of cars, then, exerts its own kind of magic — take private cars away, and every other way of getting around gets much better.
Under PAU’s plan, road traffic in a car-free Manhattan would fall by about 60 percent. The absence of cars would allow pedestrians, buses and bikes to race across New York at unheard-of speeds. Today, a bus trip from uptown to downtown — for instance, from Harlem to City Hall — takes an hour and 48 minutes. With the sort of rapid bus system PAU imagines, and without cars in the way, the same trek would take 35 minutes.
Fewer cars, faster buses
Fewer cars, faster buses
Removing private cars would shorten bus commutes into and around Manhattan.
bronx
bronx
▼74min.
Hunts Point to Union Square
▼74min.
Hunts Point to Union Square
▼41min.
Jackson Heights to Union Square
▼41min.
Jackson Heights to Union Square
Queens
Queens
▼22min.
Long Island City to Dumbo
▼22min.
Long Island City to Dumbo
Brookyln
Brookyln
▼27min.
Flatbush to Union Square
▼27min.
Flatbush to Union Square
bronx
bronx
▼74min.
Hunts Point to Union Square
▼74min.
Hunts Point to Union Square
New Jersey
New Jersey
▼41min.
Jackson Heights to Union Square
▼41min.
Jackson Heights to Union Square
▼45min.
Paterson, N.J. to Union Square
▼45min.
Paterson, N.J. to Union Square
Queens
Queens
▼22min.
Long Island City to Dumbo
▼22min.
Long Island City to Dumbo
Brookyln
Brookyln
▼27min.
Flatbush to Union Square
▼27min.
Flatbush to Union Square
Note: Assuming a traffic reduction of 60 percent in Manhattan and 8 percent outside of the borough. Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, estimates from Buro Happold
The plan wouldn’t improve just Manhattan. A ban on private cars on the island would ripple across the Hudson, altering transportation and livability across the wider metropolitan region.
Manhattan Bridge
Today, cars clog the tunnels and bridges coming into Manhattan.
On the Manhattan Bridge, for example, there are seven lanes for cars.
A new layout would replace four of them with bus lanes, paths for cyclists and a pedestrian promenade. Three lanes would go to taxis and ride-share vehicles. The middle lane of traffic would switch direction depending on demand.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
The public health effects would ripple across the region, too. The most polluted air in New York hangs over the Bronx and Queens, in communities largely populated by immigrants and people of color. New York City has some of the dirtiest air in the nation, estimated to cause 3,000 premature deaths annually.
Among other ailments, long-term exposure to polluted air is thought to increase the deadliness of Covid-19. Much of the unhealthy air is caused by traffic sitting idle on the roads leading to Manhattan. Buro Happold estimates that PAU’s plan would lead to a 50 percent reduction in toxic air pollution in Manhattan, and a 20 percent reduction in the other boroughs.
F.D.R. Drive
It’s easy to forget that Manhattan is an island because roads block the view of the waterfront.
This is especially true on parts of the borough’s east side, where Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive runs along the edge of the water.
An expanded greenway would connect with the one on the island’s west side, making it easier for people to bike, run and walk around Manhattan’s perimeter.
Source: Practice for Architecture and Urbanism
Given how completely automobiles rule most cities, calling for their outright banishment can sound almost ludicrous. (We can’t even get some people to agree to wear masks to stop the spread of a devastating pandemic.)
Instead of fighting a war on cars, Toderian told me, urbanists should fight a war on car dependency — on cities that leave residents with few choices other than cars. Alleviating car dependency can improve commutes for everyone in a city.
Chakrabarti acknowledges the political risks of trying to ban private cars. But Manhattan, he points out, is a special place. With a population that is already quite used to getting along without cars, the island is just about the only place in the country where you could even consider calling for the banishment of cars. Manhattan could be a place for all of America to witness how reducing an urban area’s reliance on cars can lead to a better life.
At the moment, many of the most intractable challenges faced by America’s urban centers stem from the same cause — a lack of accessible physical space. We live in a time of epidemic homelessness. There’s a national housing affordability crisis caused by an extreme shortage of places to live. And now there’s a contagion that thrives on indoor overcrowding.
Given these threats, how can American cities continue to justify wasting such enormous tracts of land on death machines?
Office Hours With Farhad Manjoo
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An earlier version of this article misstated the modes of transport used by commuters to Manhattan. More than 80 percent of them make the trip via public transit or by walking or biking, not by public transit only.
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Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The Times in 2018. Before that, they wrote the State of the Art column. They are the author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.” @fmanjoo•Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on , Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: I’ve Seen A Future Without Cars, And It’s Amazing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe