is New York City dead?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/nyregion/nyc-subway-coronavirus-safety.html

hunter s thompson's platform for mayor of aspen included disarming the police, ripping out all the streets, replacing with sod, and making everyone put their cars in garages outside the city limits

basically i'm saying, it's time for freak power

otm, ban cars in cities is a good incremental start

I'd happily ride buses (at least in non-pandemic times) if the buses had a place to put unfolded strollers like good old London town but no this city hates babies.

I mean, there's barely any room even to put folded strollers. The only aggro I've had since moving here was from a sitting woman as I tried to carry a toddler and a folded stroller past her while the bus was moving.

otm. I was not on team cars until I had kids. Public transit is extremely hard in NYC with babies. Many subway stations don't have elevators, the ones that do are often out of order, escalators also often out of order, and buses are fucking impossible - you try folding a stroller while holding an infant and holding the hand of a 3 year old.

Banning cars first is not an "incremental solution" it's "fuck you and hope this gets fixed in the future somehow"

Agree. Ban kids first, then ban cars.

"fuck you and hope this gets fixed in the future somehow"

this could also describe the complete takeover of cities by cars. which goes a long way, of course, towards explaining why provision for pedestrians is so poor...

Many subway stations don't have elevators,

Add elevators?

the ones that do are often out of order,

Repair elevators?

escalators also often out of order,

Repair escalators?

and buses are fucking impossible - you try folding a stroller while holding an infant and holding the hand of a 3 year old.

asked and answered tbh

the buses had a place to put unfolded strollers like good old London town

*monkey's paw twitches in Brighton*

what have i done

xp This is a small example, but where I used to live in Queens (which actually DID have good public transit access if you were going into Manhattan, as opposed to between boroughs which was abysmal, and notwithstanding said problems for children and the elderly) they took some steps in the direction of "ban cars first." Massive bike lanes were added on main thoroughfares and lots of street parking was removed. After a few years, it was still the case that virtually no one was using the bike lanes and everyone was complaining about the parking, especially elderly people (of which there were a lot in my neighborhood). No evidence that it has led to some massive public transit improvement push. Infrastructure is unfortunately massively expensive and massively hard to build/change. That goes both for the antiquated NYC subways system and the unfortunate design of much of the city around roads. Of course, I guess this is all theoretical since it's also politically impossible to ban cars. Maybe that will change in a generation or two.

But it's still a bit narrowsighted to be like "Well I (healthy childless 30-something) can get by just fine riding my bike to the coffeeshop and carrying a bag of groceries home and ordering a lot of takeout, so the city doesn't need cars and trucks"

tbh i feel like the vast majority of car-owning citydwellers i know hate the millstone around their neck of needing a car for whatever they need it for, and would be glad to be rid of it if they could.

*raises hand*

I think cars are terrible and yet...I love owning a car in the city. Especially when I was heavily involved in nightlife. So long as you know when you can or can't drive and where you can or can't find parking it can be really convenient. Especially in Queens. And especially since having a kid.

It would be cool though if the entire city only had revel style rentable cars for everyone.

I don't know Queens at all though. Maybe you can't walk to grocery stores? I live in a European city & before the pandemic we shopped for food daily, it's a 5 minute walk to three small but thorough enough supermarkets. now we do it twice a week. we have three kids.

the solution to the stroller problem is to ban strollers too. they're a blight on getting around for everyone else. just get a sling or an ergo or whatever.

lol @ sic. let's make him the president of the mta, a notoriously easy job.

We could walk to a couple of overpriced and somewhat crappy but adequate grocery stores. I guess arguably we could have done all of our food shopping there. There are certainly parts of Queens where you can't though, a lot of it is semi-suburban. We had a car primarily because I was working in a place that would have taken two hours each way by public transit, but it was admittedly very nice for Costco runs and regular visits to the in laws and weekend trips out of the city in nice weather. Also I don't think I would have been able to do stuff like take both kids to the hall of science by myself when one was little and the other was a baby -- yes, in theory I could have put the baby in an ergo, carried a huge bag with their lunches and diapers and all of that, force marched my late-walking three year old and waited for the bus with them (sometimes in the rain) and then walked 20 minutes from the stop, but it made a heck of a lot more sense to just drive 5 minutes and park in the lot. And this was in one of the most transit-accessible parts of Queens.

Also, the baby carrier became impossible pretty much as soon as my unusually long first daughter's legs dangled enough to constantly accidentally kick me in the nuts. Not really gonna address the "ban strollers" suggestion, that's silly, especially if you want people to be able to do shopping with their kids and without a car.

Many subway stations don't have elevators,

Add elevators?

the ones that do are often out of order,

Repair elevators?

escalators also often out of order,

Repair escalators?

I mean, yes, of course. Rarely works out that easily in reality though. Elevators and escalators all over the CTA are routinely out of order for months at a time. But, of course, this goes back to mass transit being criminally underfunded.

overpriced and somewhat crappy but adequate

NYC in six words.

man alive, thanks for that. the only American "city" we ever lived in as parents was Palo Alto, where we did a fair bit of grocery shopping by foot, but also a fair bit by car (had two kids, a baby & a toddler at that point). I biked to work. But getting to SF was awful, either by car or by Caltrain, and going to like Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz, not sure how we'd do that without cars.

I have a friend who teaches at P1tz3r & lives in LA without a car, with two toddlers. Because of her I'm willing to listen to people trying to recruit me to socal jobs even though I think it must be complex to live that way.

my "ban strollers" thing is not to be taken seriously even though I seriously believe in it

yes "complex" is the word. It's not that these things *can't* be done, it's that there are layers of complexity and difficulty that become increasingly tiring and challenging, or else limiting. We could have spent even more time in our neighborhood and ventured outside of it less, for sure. We would have survived. Or we could have taken our kids to the Natural History museum on transit when they were 2 and 5 (I think we did this once), it's just the added 1-2 hours of travel time total, plus the fatigue from carrying the 2 yo up and down many steps and over city blocks when they get too tired or are moving too slow or sit down on the sidewalk in frustration, the stress of not knowing if the train will get stuck underground right when your kid needs a bathroom, the unlikelihood that you'll have seats, the likelihood of crowdedness, etc. Logistics of shopping, errands, everything just gets more complicated, time-consuming and tiring. I guess you could argue that if everyone was forced to live like that, it could potentially increase the availability of amenities within one's own neighborhood and just make us more neighborhood oriented.

I'm not saying I need a car because I live in Queens. I'm saying Queens is more car friendly.

There are certainly parts of Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx where public transportation is bad or non-existent. Not where I live though.

When I moved here I said it was like a mix of living in Brooklyn and New Jersey. I could walk out of my apt, go to the pharmacy and drug store and supermarket, hop on the train to work etc.

OR I could get in the car, drive to Home Depot and Ikea etc.

Parking was much easier in my hood when I moved here than Brooklyn, but over the years even that's gotten harder.

As an occasional DJ, I'd find myself coming home at 4am driving around looking for a parking spot. Certain neighborhoods perhaps where there's more car commuters, it's easy to park before 10pm or so but at night it's hard.

We got a spot in our building's garage after 10 years only before our kid was born. I didn't relish the idea of pulling up at the fire hydrant, unloading kid and groceries etc then going to find a spot etc.

But it's also great to just come home from a party or whatever at whatever time (pre pandemic of course) and not worry, just pull into my garage. Certainly worth 175/mo. Was 150 when we started.

Now if we lived in Boerum Hill and garage parking was 500/mo, that would be a different story.

As far as how great having a car is, it's just so fun to explore the city (and to get out for day trips) and I suppose if you're the type who lives in Park Slope and using your car to go to the hamptons 1 weekend out of the month, well that sucks, but if you find yourself driving to College Point for dinner on a weeknight, I mean, you try taking public transportation to Little Pepper!, or driving to the rockaways and stopping at L&B or whatever on the way back. Or going to Wave Hill or Untermeyer gardens. It's great that you don't need a car in NYC, but it sure makes a lot of things easier.

yeah that is also true

It still sounds like you are underrating the fun level of spending hours on the bus

it's fun! the bus is great! you can let your mind wander or look at people or just cease to exist

maybe I just don't know what children are like which is fair, I haven't seen a child in a year

actually no I saw a colleague's child over zoom last year

There are two busses I've taken. The B24 from my old printshop to my house, it was the but that went from east williamsburg to queens and back down to greenpoint. It was the G train of busses and I got nauseous every time.

I sometimes take the Q32 to and from jackson heights.

Actually I used to take the bus 2 stops when taking my daughter to her pre-k in sunnyside, then I'd get some empanadas and jump on the 7 train to work. She loved taking the "city bus" to school with daddy. It was actually a really special thing we did together. Her mom would never take her on the bus because she gets way too car sick.

I just took a bus - to drop off my car! - and will be taking one to pick it up this afternoon hopefully.

How’d you get the car on the bus?

lol silby

this could also describe the complete takeover of cities by cars. which goes a long way, of course, towards explaining why provision for pedestrians is so poor...

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, January 6, 2021 10:41 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is exactly right.

pre-COVID I took the bus all the time; compared to the subway it is a delightful experience. like taking a cab but it's $2.50

now let's talk about tipping

(also, I can only really speak for the lines near me but much more accessible than the subway, granted that is a low bar)

I've taken the bus in Bk a lot and I usually find it full/crowded and not especially pleasant, plus very slow. But all of those conditions are choices of the system and can be changed. And yeah, in general the bus is WAY more accessible than the subway!

granted this is in Manhattan but there have only been a handful of times the bus was even close to being as crowded as the subway, and every time it was because the 1 was fucked up

this could also describe the complete takeover of cities by cars. which goes a long way, of course, towards explaining why provision for pedestrians is so poor...

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, January 6, 2021 10:41 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is exactly right.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Wednesday, 6 January 2021 17:48 (twenty minutes ago) link

Take this with a huge grain of salt as I’m no urban planner, just a guy who read part of the Power Broker and stuff, but the difference to me is that NYC was sort of on the precipice of all this dramatic growth and change and could either have chosen to dramatically improve public transit or build infrastructure for cars and chose the latter. Now we already have all that infrastructure for cars and huge parts of the city are built and designed around it. Therefore it seems a better approach to me to say “going forward and planning for the NEXT wave of growth and change, we focus on public transit.” And over time people may migrate away from cars if you can make public transit sufficiently accessible and cheap and usable. But banning cars first and hoping this will somehow cause the improvement of public transit (which would take many years even if it worked) doesn’t make much sense to me. Make a bunch of peoples lives miserable so they’ll advocate? No, they’ll just whine that they want their cars back.

what we should do first is ban caring about cars. too many tracksuit dudes fast and furiousing up and down fresh pond road.

they could improve public transit before they ban all the cars. Where's my X line? https://citylimits.org/2019/06/19/call-to-study-new-transit-line-linking-bronx-queens-and-brooklyn/

In the last 20 years there's been a huge transformation of the outer-boroughs and public transit has mostly gotten worse.

Remember those maps showing all the trolley car routes between queens and downtown brooklyn?

Yeah one of them used to go down my cross-street. :(((

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/1930s-trolley-map-shows-how-connected-brooklyn-was

"In the mid 1920s General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires—noticing that the privately held, long term electric streetcar franchises all around the U.S. were up for renewal—wanted to expand their business opportunities by forming a 'shill' Holding Company called National City Lines. Using every form of legal and illegal tactics, such as murder, blackmail, and the bribing of elected officials, NCL gained control over forty Streetcar companies around the U.S.

"Their very first victim, was Manhattan's NY Railways, the operator of that borough's profitable electric streetcar system. In a pattern to be repeated all around the U.S., NCL gained control of the streetcar franchise by bribing elected officials, and immediately ripped out the tracks, wires, and streetcars, replacing them with GM busses (formerly their Yellow Coach Div., now called Nova Bus, located in Canada in the very same GM bus factory), burning Standard Oil gasoline (later diesel), and rolling on Firestone tires."

Murder? Diamond points us to this book, "which documents a Midwest reporter who was machine gunned to death in front his home, in the presence of his wife and 5 year old daughter, because he threatened to expose the NCL conspiracy."

That's kind of a weird route -- it has so few interconnections with other lines that get you places you'd want to go in Brooklyn. For example, from Forest Hills, I would have had to take the EFMR to Jackson Heights, transfer to the "interboro" and then if I wanted to go to, say, Barclays Center (a big destination and hub, just using for illustration) transfer to the 3 all the way down at Livonia and then ride it 7 stops. This would actually be significantly slower than taking the subway to Manhattan to get to Barclays. Maybe it's a bad example because Barclays is pretty close in to Manhattan (and also served by the G, which already does go from western queens to western brooklyn). All for creating more interborough lines though. Also I imagine a lot of the stops were chosen to serve underserved transit areas, which is why there probably aren't as many connections.

man alive i can't believe you're disagreeing that the only way to improve the quality of transportation in new york city is by 1) banning all cars in new york instantly and then 2) slowly, if ever, getting around to improving public transit i mean sheesh

lol @ sic. let's make him the president of the mta, a notoriously easy job.

my proposition: during an 18 month period when millions of people cannot take the subway for public health reasons, and are being paid to stay home, use that time to carry out a massive repair / upgrade program performed by masked workers.

say what you will about sic he made the trains run on time

that would never work because it's very expensive to borrow money for big infrastructure projects right now *pauses.. puts finger to earpiece, listens...* well, i mean, there's a real shortage of people to do the work *listens to earpiece again* well, i mean, there's no real business case for improved public transport in the 5 boroughs *continues*

interesting blog post here on the challenges of governance facing transport development

The Regional Rail proposal’s political obstacles are not exactly a matter of cost. It’s not that this should cost $4 billion (without the North-South Rail Link) but it was estimated at $15 billion and therefore there’s no will to do it. No: the Baker administration seems completely uninterested in governing, and has published two fraudulent studies making up high costs for both the North-South Rail Link and rail electrification, as well as a more recent piece of fraud making up high costs for Boston-Springfield intercity rail. The no comes first, and the high costs come second.

This history – no first, then high costs – is also the case for New York’s subway accessibility program. The MTA does not want it; the political system does not care either. Therefore, when disability rights advocates do force some investment, the MTA makes up high costs, often through bundling unnecessary investments that it does want, like rebuilding station interiors, and charging these projects to the accessibility account. A judge can force an agency to build something, but not to build it competently and without siphoning money.

lol @ sic. let's make him the president of the mta, a notoriously easy job

better to make him governor instead