Hoboken has been getting a reputation for not having a traffic related death in 7 years. At lot of the attention has been focused on street design, which is important, but concurrently to this, there is a culture of walking.
The most impactful thing you can do to make a city safe for people outside of a car is to build a culture of getting around without a car.
People walking in Hoboken.
Motorists are on the lookout for pedestrians if they expect to see them. You can have mediocre street design in Manhattan, and the mediocre design is mostly cancelled out by pedestrians being common place.
Canal Street in Manhattan feels threatening, but there are so many people always around, so motorists expect to see pedestrians.
I really push for building "complete neighborhoods", where just about everything you need can be found within a 15 minute walk. I have heard people complain that 15 minute cities suck. Somehow it's a United Nations conspiracy to make us shop at the single supermarket that's a 15 minute walk from home. Obviously, if you live in a commercial desert where you can only reach a one supermarket and there is nothing to do, life would be fairly miserable. These people have not experienced living in a true city.
A complete neighborhood does not mean you have 1 grocery store and 3 restaurants. Take a visit to a random neighborhood of Manhattan (or visit any walkable city in the world) and you might find 4 supermarkets, 20 bodegas, 2 library branches, 20 dentists, 3 walk-in clinics, 50 restaurants, 3 parks with playgrounds, and 2 public schools within a 15 minute walk. A quick litmus test to determine if you are in a complete neighborhood: Would I get FOMO here without a car?
Oh no, without a car, how will I get to the dentist?
In a complete neighborhood, you do not have to do much to build a culture of walking other than to make it possible to walk. Street design is important as well, but motorists will be conscious that there will be people walking around, which is the largest factor making it safe. You also do not have to do anything to build a transit culture either. People ride transit to places where they can arrive and have an enjoyable time without a car. So, if you have two complete neighborhoods - two places with a culture of walking, and run a transit line between them, ridership will sore.
Vail, Colorado is a small town with a culture of walking. Just about everyone arrives via a car, but they park at the edge of town an enter on foot. When I visited, I rode the bus in Vail, and it was very crowded with Americans and their families.
It is hard for most American cities and suburbs to imagine this. It would require radically redeveloping just about every neighborhood.
I want to walk, but why is everything so far away? Woodbury Township, New Jersey.
Imagine living in the above neighborhood and going for a walk. People would only walk recreationally (taking the dog around the block) and not as a serious means to get from A to B.
- There is not much within walking distance. The closest grocery store could be 4 miles away. Even for a fit person, that is a 3 hour round trip (with hands full of groceries).
- Even if there is a destination worth visiting in walking distance, there are threatening stroads that are even more dangerous on foot, often dividing the residential areas from commercial areas.
Walking here is just miserable and a waste of time. For these places, the next best thing is to build a culture of biking. But, you encounter a similar safety problem; riding a bike is safer when motorists expect to see people riding bikes. Many American urbanists focus on biking, because it is a realistic intermediate state in the neighborhoods they live in. That grocery store that is 4 miles away becomes a 30 minute round trip instead of 3 hours, and there are cargo bikes that are designed to carry bulky goods.
Pet food loaded up on the back of a cargo bike.
There are plenty of reasons why you would still want to build a culture of biking in a place with a culture of walking. The fares, schedules, and routes of public transport do not work for everyone.
Even in a city with excellent public transit such as Tokyo, there will always be someone who will want to commute perpendicular to your transit lines.
For example, for me, there is no easy way to reach Journal Square in Jersey City from the middle of Hoboken via public transit - it is an hour walk or a 20 minute bike ride.
A route from the middle of Hoboken to Journal Square.
Giving people options is good. Ideally, options that do not encourage you to drive a car. Cars are a tragedy of the commons; something that is good if only a few people use it, but with overuse its value diminishes. Getting around a city in a car is often comfortable and convenient, but once everyone drives a car everywhere, you are clogging the streets with the most space inefficient mode of transportation.
How much space the same people occupy in cars, bikes, and on buses.
I like that cars are an option. I appreciate that I can open a ride sharing app on my phone and have door-to-door service after surgery. Or when I am flying with kids and grandparents and we are worn out after an international flight and want someone to take us and our 5 suitcases to our door. I get a reputation of being anti-car, but my view that they should be treated as the luxury option. We don't have to ban cars, but if cars are not neccessary, we eliminate the vast majority of traffic. It was a bad mistake to build a system where a lot of what life has to offer (beaches, national parks, job opportunities) is inaccessible or miserable to visit unless you have access to a car, and so unfortunately we view having access to a car as a requirement to live a meaningful life.
We have a housing crisis, especially in our most desirable cities. Modern urban planning has replaced the traditional mechanism that cities grew by, from one allowing thousands or millions collectively acting in their own self-interest organically optimizing the neighborhood, to one of studies, standards, and committees. Modern government has empowered neighborhods and committes with veto power over development in their neighborhood. The loudest and most frequent complaints about building more housing tend to be not wanting more cars in the neighborhood.
Strong Towns often says that bike infrastructure is one of the most high-return investments a city can make. We end up with a chicken and and egg argument - why build bike infrastructure (especially if it means taking away space for car infrastructure) if nobody bikes? Perhaps nobody bikes because there is no safe way to get from A to B on a bike, not because the local populace is just lazy.
These cyclists are very brave.
If you want to provide options other than driving, retrofitting your most dangerous roads to provide a safe and protected path for cyclists to encourage biking is much cheaper than tunneling a subway line or completely rebuilding the area into a complete neighborhood. On your most dangerous roads (those with traffic 45 miles per hour or above), you should provide a route where bikes and not sitting right next to cars. For example, building a parallel road for bikes, divided by some space with trees or a fence.
The Hudson River Greenway in Manhattan gives bikes their own road that's separate from cars.
Now, let's assume that it is possible to get around on foot and bike, the next biggest barrier is building a complete neighborhood. Let's talk about the phenomenon known as import replacement.
When I think of imports, I think of physical industrial and consumer goods being shiped from distant continents entering through shipping ports. Cars from Japan, vodka from Russia, computers from China. These tend to be national conversations around trade wars, tariffs, and jobs. A local community may lament about the closing of a factory or subsizide manufacturing, but it's mainly about jobs. Nobody is campaigning for homes in Florida to have Florida-built washing machines instead of importing them from Michigan. Food is the exception; everywhere I have lived there has been a small, but passionate community of people who push eating local via farmers' markets, farming collectives, and farm-to-table restaurants.
Importing services and experiences look different to importing physical goods. Services and experiences tend not to get shipped to you, but you travel to them. For example, in a tiny town without any barbershops or hair salons, importing a haircut means travelling to the nearest larger town to get your hair cut. If your town lacks a movie theater, importing the experience of watching a movie means driving to the next town over and spending your time and money there. As cities grow, many of the services and experiences we import by travelling to the next town over or a larger nearby city get replaced by businesses in your city. As a city grows, you expect to find movie theaters, a variety of restaurants, banks, furniture stores, supermarkets, and optometrists. In a city of a million residents, you expect to find zoos, universities, and museums.
As we thicken up our neighborhoods, which many cities are doing now with zoning reforms we need to allow a mixture of uses. Increasing residential density without bringing amenities closer is going to add more people while keeping the places you want to go divided by car scales. This will result in more traffic, and the prophecies of the NIMBYs will come true; there will be more cars, and it will take longer to get around.
I made a traffic simulator back in 2014 that showed that mixing land-uses together resulted in shorter commutes than segregating land uses.
To grow a culture of walking, we need to bring ameneities within walking distance, which means evolving our neighborhoods towards becoming complete neighborhoods. The phenomenon by which this happens is import replacement. By bringing amenities closer to people, we can give the option of replacing car trips with walking trips. It will be a tough sell for somebody who cannot envision grocery shopping without their SUV to tell them to "walk to the supermarket," so we start much humbler. As cities modify their zoning codes to allow thicker housing can should also loosen our zoning codes to allow fine-grained neighborhood amenities such as a gelato bar or a barbershop.
A cornerstore that blends in with on a leafy residential street.
In a retail scene dominated by big box stores, strip malls, and power centers, it could be hard for locals to envision any kind of commercial use that is not the destination of regional car traffic. A small coffee-shop without parking is going to target people within a half-mile walking radius or a few-mile bike radius. The "commercial traffic" would be the occasional delivery once a week, no larger than the typical FedEx truck delivering Amazon packages to a suburban home, or the owner driving to buy more coffee, milk, napkins, and other ingredients for croissants and doughnuts. There are more upsides than downsides living in a community with these small-scale businesses within walking distance.
A restaurant integrated into a house in Hopewell, New Jersey.
We can utilize the yards of detached homes to build accessory commerical units, with the commercial entrance flush against the street.
A suburban home with an accessory commercial unit on the corner of a block in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
A house with a bar, in Portland Oregon.
Or, we can repurpose the ground floor of residential buildings to be commercial.
The ground floor of what looks like it was once a residential duplex turned into commercial space in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Loosening our zoning codes to enable this fine-grained, incremental thickening of our neighborhoods is a better solution than a vetocracy that requires the capital and patience of a large developer to push through any up-zoning or development project. The latter results in a long period of no-change, then a total transformation.
Incremental versus sudden intensification.
“No neighborhood can be exempt from change. No neighborhood should experience sudden, radical change.”
— Strong TownsCitation18
This is what the incremental thickening of a street looks like at a later stage. The building behind the tree looks like it used to be a residental building, with the bottom protuded out as if it the commercial unit was added later, to be flush with the street.
In 2019, a two story building (behind the treet) stood in Jersey City.
With an increase in land values and foot traffic, it is now a five storey building with seven residential units and one ground-floor commercial unit.
In 2022, a five story building stands in the same lot.
Along with designing our streets to be safe, making a city safe to walk around means bringing ammenties close enough that they can be walked to. Enough that it starts to become common sense to replace a few automobile trips with walking trips. This starts with unleashing the swarm to incrementally thickening our neighborhoods with a mixture of uses.