The rest of the traffic is disruptive to the trams.
I also moved to Melbourne recently, and my theory is that the love of trams is inertia from a time where congestion wasn't so bad.
I prefer to walk within the city loop, but both activities would be so much faster and more pleasant without the cars.
There are quite a few Teslas that drive around here with wanky number plates like they're doing the world a favor, which in a city with such usable public transport always makes me cringe.
I agree entirely. People are also somewhat blinded to it as well. They will complain about how trams slow down car traffic, while they are waiting on foot at a busy intersection that breaks up a shopping precinct. Completely ignoring the enormous impact that cars are having on their current space.
My city has caught on, and there are a bunch of car free streets and alleys being made in the CBD. They have boutiques and restaurants with outdoor seating, and it changes the dynamic of the area entirely. People are relaxed, not rushing, chatting with eachother without yelling . You get a lot more friendly encounters with strangers. It feels like you've reached some kind of special community area, just for you and the others there.
Looking at aerial photography of Melbourne, it there are an awful lot of cars for a city that takes its liveability seriously. I can't imagine that bikes were taking MORE space than the cars?
Australia does well, but not everywhere. We also had our few decades of automania, that saw our tram lines ripped up in the burbs, and sprawl reach outward with highways. I had to battle this old auto-topian design this week in order to take my car to a mechanic, ironically.
There is a train station about 500 meters behind the workshop, as the crow flies. I thought I would just drop my car off, walk to the train, head into the city.
It took 45 minutes of detours and a lot of sketchy sections to actually get to the train station. Lucky to have the suburban train for sure, but this particular old suburb had assumed everyone was in a car, and it simply hasn't put in the work to make it traversable to pedestrians. No sidewalks, lots of dead end roads and uneccessary fences. At one point I was staring at the station, with no way to get to it. Looong impermeable business parks etc. I just wasn't meant to be there by design.
Cars tend to diminish quality of life. Local, walkable and cyclable neighbourhoods on the other hand enable people to flourish. When people have to travel by vehicle, trains and trams are superior to cars.
They didn't. And, as a car obsessive, it was a mistake.
commute times are probably the same (45 minutes walking/tram with a 4~5 mi dense city core, vs 45 in the freeway and a 60 miles of low suburban development) and we don't have the infrastructure for alternatives to travel outside the city.
As to the need for speed itself. I used to like big fancy fast cars.
I lived in the Inner West (Camperdown and Chippendale) for about 15 years. I felt really lucky that I could walk everywhere (with some effort, and I had reasonable free time) and didn't need a car. It was fun, learning all the routes and being able to see what was going on in all the suburbs around me. I was also lucky that I was pretty near a main road (Paramatta Rd) and buses were easy to catch.
I moved away a few years ago to a much smaller city (Canberra), and find it's actually more car-centric than where I lived in Sydney, which is a shame. I also see my co-workers (still in Sydney) who have transportation centred around their car, although about half commute via public transport.
The problem with cars is the huge negative effect it has on city planning and neighborhoods. It is not really about cars vs public transport. It is about cities built for cars vs cities built for people. I live in the Netherlands and have lived many years in a big western style modern city (Melbourne). It is day and night.
Neighborhoods for cars:
* Noise
* Pollution
* Dangerous for all, especially children and cyclists
* Discourages simple outside exercise like walking or jogging
* Forces car ownership. You can't do anything without a car.
* Massive amounts of space are required for roadways, parking etc.
* Sprawl. Everything has to be spread out.
* Anything immediately outside your home is unpleasant.
Neighborhoods for people:
* Quiet
* Less pollution
* Safe. Children can play outside and go to the park or shops by themselves, or visit their friends by foot or bike. (I sent my 7 year old to get a couple things from the supermarket last week.)
* Biking and walking is pleasant
* You don't need to buy a car
* The neighborhood isn't full of ugly car parks.
* neighborhood is compact, making biking and walking much more viable.
I agree with your assessment - the transport design for many cities is held hostage by the transport choices of the surrounding areas.
Which creates a feedback loop. The city is redesigned to accomodate car commuters so it’s less pleasant to live in so more people move to the suburbs so the city is redesigned for those extra car commuters so it’s less pleasant to live in…
Australia has the same problems as America regarding sprawl and autocentrism.
I now live in Berlin, which is incredibly walkable, prioritises bicycles over cars (except on the autobahns), and has I think four different train systems (u-banh, s-banh, trams and intercity), plus a great bus service. Oh, and now about half a dozen scooter and bike hire apps, plus Uber (and clones), and at least 3 short-term car hire apps.
I lived in Perth for ~10 years without a car, and it was painful. The contrast is incredible.
Given that Berlin was completely rebuilt in the same timescale that Perth was built, it's got nothing to do with history. It's about attitude. Everyone has to expect to live in an apartment (or townhouse), without a car, near their work, and demand adequate public transport (and use it when it arrives).
It is the Holy Grail, but it's not some mythical artifact unobtainable by a rational set of people working towards the common good.
There's a definite "psychology" of lobbying for more car resources and the psychological fury of being "caught behind a tram" or seeing the "wasted space" or a "tram going by ahead of you", but trap the same person in a car at a standstill in traffic with less throughput and the fury disappears and a kind of quiet resentment yet passive acceptance replaces it. Put a motorist behind a tram and it becomes the object of their hatred. Put them in gridlock and the car in front becomes "just a drop in the overall frustrating flow, with the proportional amount of blame".
Secondly, back to the "wasted space observation" phenomenon. There's this paradox of space wastage observations in the higher density/high utilisation part of town made by people from low density/low utilisation parts of town.
Higher density areas provide and support services that are intrinsically unattainable in low density areas, so it's not immediately apparent that someone outside the high density area is worse off, because they now have a greater diversity of opportunity/facilities accessible even if they live outside the high density area. You can visit and access those services even if you don't live there. Personally, i'd rather live in a Melbourne suburb without a tram than a Sydney one, because the Sydney CBD is comparatively dead/pedestrian hostile.
The obvious example is the central business district or downtown. While it's a popular polemical tactic to pit the car drivers against the dense pedestrian core, it's a very "brave" position to argue that denser well-connected areas provide no benefit to those who live outside them.
The counter example is the wasted space, neighborhood destruction and bizarrely barren wastelands of some American cities: strip malls, multi lane highways, car parks, etc, and the realisation that they can neither sustain thriving local communities or neighborhoods, but culturally can only be populated with mega-stores and generic chains/stores accessible by mass cars and mass culture.
Yes, but it's the mass car usage that have caused Australian, American and many European cities to spread out to such an extent that walking or cycling or even transit is no longer an option for most people.
fit2rule said it a little brashly, but there's truth, beyond the fact that commuting in a car is just a drag. Cars have ruined the city, in very profound ways. There's the noise & pollution of course, but cars also made the city unsafe for children and seniors.
The difference between a city that's been given to cars, and a city that has resisted it is incredibly stark. Even America's "walkable" cities, like SF, NYC and so on, are ever so inhuman, due to the cars. The young and poor tolerate it, and the rich can buy nice things to make it tolerable, but a city where cars have taken over pretty much half of the public realm is profoundly flawed.
Required anecdote: I've lived and worked in Europe for a while in a city that's mostly pedestrian, and whatever traffic there was, was incredibly slow. It was basically an environment that was fully build-up, no nature-proper for miles, but it felt natural, human, and, well, "cultured". I stepped out the door in a place that was made for me, a feeble 6ft meatbag.
Looking back at it, I find the feeling incomparable, and I miss it. I live in a US city now, in a verdant, central area of town. Mobility is never an issue. It has many of the same qualities you'd attribute to attractive urban neighborhoods, like stupendous architecture, lush gardens, good walkability, a variety of things close-by. But the streets are for cars. And it is jarring. They don't belong. They are too fast. The asphalt ribbons are ugly. The noise is out of place.
Cars do have their place. They're very useful, for longer trips, hauling things, having a fun leisurely drive in the country. So I get why a family would want one or more. But cars are poison to cities, and it's been a terrible mistake to either have them take over our older cities, or design our new cities around them.
I worry that, culturally, we're too far gone. I, personally, hate driving in any place that's "downtown" by any measure. It's stressful, slow, the streets are never laid out in a sane way, etc. Kansas City, MO has a streetcar that runs north-south through a lot of the downtown area so that I can park in what city-dwellers assure me is "not downtown" right next to the northmost stop, then ride the streetcar to all of the attractions that are in the main night life district.
It definitely takes ~10-15 mins longer than if I just drove, but goodness it's just so much more enjoyable. I get to sit and look around at the city I'm in instead of focusing on driving.
I've dragged quite a few friends and family along and most people don't like it because:
1. it takes longer (have to wait for transport to arrive, it makes stops you don't need)
2. "iffy people" are on the streetcar
I laugh a bit at #2 because compared to almost any other non-car transport in the US I've ever seen, the occupants of the streetcar are just comically gentrified. Yeah there's one guy who's probably homeless, but everyone else is clearly out for a business dinner or a bunch of yuppies all dressed up to take the family out to dinner, and so on.
Thanks for bearing through me with this anecdote. But I hope it demonstrates two issues:
1. americans will put up with a lot if it makes their trip any amount shorter
2. americans vastly prefer to be annoyed and in control, versus less annoyed but not in control. e.g. they prefer car traffic where they're "in control" (can honk/drive aggressively?) vs waiting for public transport to arrive or waiting at stops they don't need
3. americans associate public transport with lower classes, the poor and homeless.
I also moved to Melbourne recently, and my theory is that the love of trams is inertia from a time where congestion wasn't so bad.
I prefer to walk within the city loop, but both activities would be so much faster and more pleasant without the cars.
There are quite a few Teslas that drive around here with wanky number plates like they're doing the world a favor, which in a city with such usable public transport always makes me cringe.
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