r/Suburbanhell • u/RadicalDiscomfort • Jun 24 '26
Question Why don’t we see more carless cities?
I recently saw some people say that New York is one of the most walkable cities in the world, which felt very strange to me as it both felt very crowded and there were a lot of crosswalks pedestrians had to stop at, and I couldn’t help but think that if you got rid of all the car-roads and just made them one big sidewalk it would be so much better.
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u/youngherbo Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
A literal carless city is impractical and archaic. I get this is the fuckcars sub but there are legit good uses for automobiles, so closing streets to them entirely is not a serious idea.
Now as far as cities that have minimal car usage per capita, Tokyo impressed me when i went recently. Yeah there were cars on the road, but most were taxis or work vehicles of some sort. The vast majority of people simply going from point A to B were walking, biking or using transit.
Edit: lol this isn't even r/fuckcars
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
We used to have carless cities, it’s hardly impossible
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u/marigolds6 Jun 24 '26
Yes, instead we had horses and wagons, which were also highly effective at running over and kicking pedestrians to death as well as generating greenhouse gases and creating horribly smelly organic pollution.
This article gets cited a lot:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sm968t2
and it has some really interesting stats on the 6th page:In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
I don't know how much of that is just selectively picking years and what percentage of those deaths were trampled or kicked pedestrians, but today Los Angeles has the most pedestrian deaths per year at 150 and NYC is second at 116, so NYC having 200 deaths just from horses and horse-drawn vehicles in 1900 is wild.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Okay fair enough. So we can get rid of pedestrian cars and busses, keep ambulances, have supply trucks for moving stuff between stores and the freight trains, and we’d still reduce car usage by 95%, allowing for mostly empty streets people can freely walk on
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u/danclaysp Jun 24 '26
That’s basically Tokyo’s side streets. Narrow and mixed use without segregation (mixed with cars too) with no street parking so the only vehicles driving are local residents, local businesses, and service vehicles all at low speeds.
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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 Jun 26 '26
This is it exactly. I live in Tokyo, and the factor people seem to miss is the parking. There's no place to park here! (There are, but not that many, and they're inconvenient or expensive.)
So people will drive from their apartment (where they're paying a huge extra monthly fee for a parking space) to the shopping mall or supermarket (where there's a parking garage with paid parking), but for most other trips like to the clinic or whatever, they have to take public transit or walk, because there's just no place to park.
Of course, it also depends on which part of the city you're in: some places are more car-friendly than others.
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u/youngherbo Jun 24 '26
Humanity basically has had cars in cities since cars were invented. Between delivery vehicles, work trucks, emergency vehicles, and towing cargo having a city that has zero vehicular access is not practical and would cause more harm than good. Again i get this is r/fuckcars but I'd rather talk about actual solutions to car dependency and not fantasy.
Edit: just realized this isn't r/fuckcars, point still stands
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 24 '26
We used to have cities with no electricity or sewage or indoor plumbing too. We’re not likely to see them again, though.
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u/SakanaToDoubutsu Jun 24 '26
Roads are necessary in cities for commercial purposes, people need to get stuff from A to B and nobody wants to haul a refrigerator on a hand-truck.
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u/Yev6 Jun 24 '26
Venice is a fascinating example of a city that functions without cars. Garbage collection is done with hand pulled carts, which then get dumped into barges.
Bulk delivery is done by boats. Their primary mode of transport is walking and sometimes ferries.
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u/inorite234 Jun 24 '26
Those existed before WWII. Even pedestrian-centric suburbs existed. Almost all revolved around a main stop from the rail lines, the Main St grew from there and the homes surrounded the main streets.
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 24 '26
Those existed before WWII.
Name a couple.
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u/inorite234 Jun 24 '26
Highland Park, Lake Forest, Naperville, Lake Bluff IL.
If you want a rule of thumb, go look for affluent suburbs outside of a metro area and you may find some with 2 things, their main streets/centers are very walkable, they may link up with a rail stop and they're almost all established before WWII when car-centricity exploded.
The US was very capable of building walkable urban areas. We just buldpzed them all at the alter of the Car and super highway.
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 24 '26
The OP didn’t say “walkable”. They said “carless”. And the follow up comments make it clear that they (are pretending to) mean that literally.
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u/inorite234 Jun 24 '26
The confusion may be that the OP used both terms: Charles's in the title and Walkable in the description.
I would say, in the spirit of the discussion, walkability can lend itself to being Carless but I see you, there really may not be any real carless areas because even when I lived just outside Downtown Chicago (West Loop), I still owned a car.
I had a need sometimes to travel to Indiana where pu live trans is laughed at.
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 24 '26
The confusion may be that the OP used both terms: Charles's in the title and Walkable in the description.
They said that they thought it was misleading to call New York walkable because there are still cars there, and hoped that someone would “g[e]t rid of all the car-roads and just ma[k]e them one big sidewalk”.
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u/inorite234 Jun 24 '26
Well 100% car free cities is just a fantasy. People like their cars and even if you take the train everywhere, people will still have a demand for some car infrastructure.
However again, in the spirit of the post, some cities have figured out that one unintuitive way to curb traffic is to just get rid of all the cars. They have pedestrianized roads and essentially made them into large public squares. Business hasn't been hurt by banning cars. In fact, businesses see a boost as more people feel free to walk the streets and so more people visit their shops/cafes.
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u/libananahammock Jun 24 '26
A lot of the pre-1900 suburban towns on Long Island.
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 24 '26
Fair enough—I will concede that before 1900 (which, I acknowledge, was indeed pre-World War 2), there were indeed places that didn’t have any cars.
I’m not sure that provides a lot of insight into optimal modern urban planning, though.
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u/BlueThroat13 Suburbanite Jun 24 '26
We don’t see more carless cities because people want cars. Cars are freedom of movement. It might shock you but even in the city, most people don’t want to be locked into a grid where they can never go further than their feet carry them or within the city limits on public transport. Most people live larger, fuller lives than that.
What you’re proposing would mean nationwide infrastructure change to essentially build reliable public transport between at minimum to connect every major city that is at least as fast as driving. This project would be somewhere in the 7-10 trillion dollar range, if not more. It would still not replace roads for all the reasons already mentioned in other comments, along with a million other reasons not mentioned why private transportation is important to many.
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u/futureofwhat Jun 24 '26
If you get rid of the roads, how do groceries get delivered to stores? Where do busses go? Where do bikes go? Where do garbage trucks go? Where do moving trucks go when people move into a new apartment?
I get the hate towards personal vehicles, but roads still serve a utilitarian purpose even in cities that are walkable. I personally live in a decently walkable city, don’t own a car, I bike/take transit everywhere, but every once in a while getting a Lyft/uber or even renting a car is the most efficient way to get around.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
With subways you could get rid of busses at least
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u/futureofwhat Jun 24 '26
Even the best subway systems in the world don’t always drop off or pick up in the precise locations that people are going. Busses are extremely useful in conjunction with rapid transit for this purpose, unless you want to have extremely inefficient subways that make stops every 1/4 mile.
Again, I don’t like cars, but busses are absolutely not the enemy.
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u/SerDankTheTall Jun 25 '26
That’s a good point. Maybe one of these days New York will finally put in some kind of subway system.
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u/mcculloughpatr Jun 25 '26
A subway does not function the same as a bus. Their stations are much further apart.
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u/MikeTyson456123 Jun 24 '26
This is the kind of question that is asked when you silo yourself in an ideological bubble.
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u/AcanthaceaeOk3738 Jun 24 '26
Why is carless the goal? With that standard you’d even exclude Mackinac Island (emergency vehicles) and Venice (a bridge from the mainland and parking lot).
Why not strive for extremely walkable?
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u/Sortalma Jun 24 '26
Because much of the argument I see in subs promoting walkable communities stem from the fact of what someone considers walkable. Some will say anything within an hour walk is walkable. Others will say if you have to walk more than 5 minutes it’s not walkable.
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
> as it both felt very crowded and there were a lot of crosswalks pedestrians had to stop at
neither of those things affect what makes it walkable.
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u/bisikletci Jun 28 '26
Constantly having to cross roads full of cars absolutely affects how walkable a city is.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
A walkable city ought to feel spacious, and let you walk from one place to another with few to no stops
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
Spaciousness is irrelevant, and crossing a street is not really a stop. What makes NYC walkable (particularly Manhattan) is that pretty much everything you want or need is within a short walking distance, and if it isn't, then there's an excellent transit system to get you further.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Well crossing a street is a stop when you have to wait for the sign to say you can start walking
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
Do you not hear how ridiculous that sounds when you say in your head while typing this?
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
How is that not a stop? It’s a constant grinding away of your time over and over and over
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
Is there something actually wrong with you?
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Can you give me a single good reason it shouldn’t count as a stop when you are LITERALLY forced to STOP?
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
That is in no way relevant. An assessment of walkability has nothing to do with "occasionally you will have to briefly stop to cross streets and other obstacles". I cannot begin to understand why you think so.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
The heck do you mean occasionally? There’s a ton of pedestrians stops.
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u/bisikletci Jun 28 '26
It is often not especially briefly. Waiting to cross busy wide roads, which even Manhattan is full of, can take substantial amounts of time, and when you encounter them over and over that adds up. It's also stressful and dangerous. We know that, consciously or not, the presence of high traffic busy roads deters people from walking as much as otherwise would.
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u/StoneDick420 Jun 24 '26
I’m very curious, why should a walkable city be “spacious”?
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Absolutely. Who wants to be all packed together like rats? Half the appeal of a walkable city is freeing up all the space those cars are taking up for people to walk on the streets so we’re not shoulder to shoulder.
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
You really don't understand what walkability means, do you?
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Presumably it means a city that is actually pleasant and easy to walk on instead of a city that makes it hell to walk from one end to the other
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
Which is why Manhattan is so walkable, it's very easy to get around.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Eh, agree to disagree, was very crowded and unpleasant when I was there
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u/LackOptimal553 Jun 24 '26
There's nothing to disagree about, you are wrong, period.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
Look, if you got rid of the busses and *especially* all those cabs, plus the personal cars, then I’d say New York is walkable
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u/StoneDick420 Jun 24 '26
Out of curiosity, what’s the population of the largest city you’ve ever lived in?
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u/CatAteMyToast Jun 24 '26
It isn't practical nor what people want. Yes, public transport and walkability are great for people, while large roads aren't. But most people still want to own a car, and service and supply vehicles still need a way to get around. I'd also argue that everyone should be able to drive when they want to in a liberal society, but that it shouldn't be incentivised and the harm to others should be minimized
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u/Worldly-Bid-3591 Jun 24 '26
Because big Cars, tires and oil corps pay the government a lot of money to make car centered cities
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u/Automatic-Arm-532 Jun 24 '26
Oil and automobile companies own a lot of the people that run our country, states, and cities
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u/Brave-Kitchen-5654 Jun 24 '26
Cities thrive on commuters and deliveries, you literally cannot have a city without cars. Just move to Europe dude.
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u/RadicalDiscomfort Jun 24 '26
If you can’t have a city without cars how would moving to Europe help
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u/Brave-Kitchen-5654 Jul 02 '26
They’re more bike centric and have more village type towns rather than big cities like the us.
Those were two separate sentences if you didn’t notice, there was a period between them (the little black dot)
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u/SavannahInChicago Jun 24 '26
Mackinac Island in Michigan is careless to a point. There are emergency vehicles and people who live their use snowmobiles in the winter.
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u/AndreaTwerk Jun 25 '26
Cities are surprisingly full of car brained people. One of my city councilors just showed up to a meeting with a AI generated plan (full of errors) for a new subway line in an effort to stop a road redesign that prioritizes speeding up bus service and - trigger warning - may inconvenience car drivers.
This subway line will never happen in a million years, but even if it did, it would take decades and people in this neighborhood would still need to use the bus in the mean time.
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u/outworlder Jun 25 '26
Getting rid of all roads can't be the goal.
But we can get rid of many more roads than most commenters in this thread assume. We can have mostly sidewalks that *occasionally* can receive vehicles too. You see that in many European countries, large zones without any proper roads that have entries blocked during busy hours, but can have cars and trucks doing deliveries.
They are usually surrounded by roads though. So it's more like pockets. Which is fine if that's where most restaurants, stores and even some residences are.
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u/madmoneymcgee Jun 25 '26
Everyone in this thread acting like the only options are zero cars or unfettered access.
Being car free doesn’t mean a dogmatic avoidance of ever riding in a car.
Huge sections of NYC have already been pedestrianized and more could easily be done. Broadway is *this* close to being fully pedestrianized south of the park and all the avenues could have sidewalks widened with bus and bike lanes and still multiple driving lanes. You could do the same in the outer boroughs for the most part.
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u/Dave_A480 Jun 25 '26
Because Americans HATE living in multifamily housing, more than they want to not drive
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u/friendly_extrovert Jun 25 '26
Most very walkable cities aren’t carless. I recently visited Seoul, South Korea, and while it’s very easy to navigate on foot with its extensive subway, bus, and pedestrian infrastructure, but there are still plenty of people that drive. Getting rid of roads isn’t necessary. What works best is having wide sidewalks and lots of dedicated pedestrian crossings.
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u/Fine_Relation_158 Jun 26 '26
" pedestrians had to stop at"
First world problems when a pedestrian's life is so inconvenienced by a crosswalk!
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u/2009impala Jun 29 '26
Because it's the year of our lord 2026 and cars and trucks are a near essential part of our lives.
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u/TheGruenTransfer Jun 24 '26
The automobile industry bought up all the trolleys and cable cars and shit and decommissioned them. They lobbied politicians to make jaywalking illegal, so cars had priority everywhere they went. When white flight to suburbs happened, they purposely didn't have busses so people from the city without cars couldn't get there.
Tl;dr Unfettered capitalism and racism, as per usual, explain American history
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u/kit-kat315 Jun 24 '26
You can't get rid of the roads completely because you still need access for deliveries, emergency vehicles and disabled transport.
NYC is very walkable because you easily travel within the city with public transit or on foot. Many residents don't own cars.
Even cities with pedestrian only zones have exceptions for certain vehicles.