Originally Posted by
McBTC
An obstacle has been those raised in the beehives of Old World thinking who came to a place like California to get away from the high-rise, elevator, rat race, fast-talking lifestyle and then corrupted the politics by stealing highway improvement monies and allowing dense building right up to the 'shores' of our highways, turning open spaces into the beehives that caused them to flee the big cities in the first place. The Jetsons is a good example of looking to a future that still allows for the independence of personal transportation. It's a fanciful notion given the technology, which is why we have and use automobiles but for many, personal transportation it's still a better lifestyle than looking down on the streets of a city from the 40th floor and see nothing but ribbons of yellow...
But a lot of people like to live in a beehive, especially with less noise, less pollution and less congestion. That's possible, but that's a governments job and a dysfunctional government for won't do.
Originally Posted by
tandempower
It is a cultural slight-of-hand to say that motor-cars are newer and more modern than bicycles. Really, the motor-car was invented in the 19th century around the same time as the bicycle, and technological advances in both types of vehicles has been progressing ever since.
Not really, the commuter bike hasn't improved much since the 20s when the car was still very difficult to start and drive and had a lot more room for improvement. But you're right, it's not just about newer, for most people a bike was affordable and a car wasn't. Driving a car has always been a next step in life, a sign of maturity or wealth.
Sociologists like C Wright Mills and David Riesman noted how people are never so alone as in a crowd, but I think generally there is this philosophical problem of social isolation that's put forth by people who have a political bias against individualism and independence. Really, whether you're interactive or non-interactive, denser urban environments can bother you. E.g. if you're looking for interaction, you'll find that people in cities avoid eye contact, scoff at smiles, etc. while if you're trying to avoid interaction, you'll feel like you can't get away from it even in the most remote situations, like nature preserves etc. where you'll always seem to run into other people or at least feel like you're going to if you do something that might upset someone, like go off the trail.
I think it's a matter of personal preference. In a big city, you're likely to have a lot of nice but superficial interacions with people you don't know everyday. People tend to be afraid of unpleasant interaction and will avoid it the outcome is unpredictable and there's no nowhere to go like in public transportation. But when I travelled a lot between Amsterdam and Groningen, which is about 2.5 hour train ride, I ended up in a conversation more often than not. But walking on the street it's already different because if you don't like the interaction you can just walk away. When there's mass cycling there will be interaction too, there's a lot negotiating and eye contact going on to prevent braking or colliding. Cycling friendly cities are more generally friendly cities. A big city doesn't need to be alienating, and public transport doesn't need to be a hostile environment.
It's funny that this post is in response to Stadjer, who lives in a Dutch city. My impression of Dutch cities is that they have been actively prevented from growing into modern metropolises with tall skyscrapers, etc. with maybe a few exceptions in the biggest cities. Generally, my impression of Dutch density is that its dense enough to facilitate commuting convenience by bicycle and transit, but it's still pretty green and suburban in most places. I think the bicycle made this possible, because biking as transportation allows pretty fast traversing of medium distances, but not to the same degree as motor-sprawl in the US, where driving has allowed much lower densities to emerge.
But Dutch cities aren't dense and towering like NYC, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, etc. I think.
Usually you can just count the number of floors in a 19th century appartement block to size up a European city. A typical Paris appartement block has 6-7 storeys for it's 6 million inhabitants. In Amsterdam (1m) it's 4-5, in Barcelona (2m) it's 5-6 and in Groningen (0.2m) it's 3-4. Berlin is an exceptional spatious, wide area city by European standards, while Amsterdam and Barcelona are very much constrained by geophysical features, more than Paris, and Groningen was a fortress town and only started building outside the defence walls at the end of the 19th century. Any tourist in Amsterdam will hear that the 17th century houses are that narrow because the council of that day taxed houses on width. But they taxed on width because they wanted people to build higher, otherwise the population couldn't grow much.
But there are a lot more limitations. Europeans have always admired skyscrapers, but more as something typically American than as an example to follow. You can't just overshadow the Eiffeltower, in Amsterdam it's the Wester church that has to remain the highest building in the centre, skylines are protected. Despite it's mild climate, Europe is much more northern than the USA, making daylight scarce a large part of the year, and it comes in at quite an angle. So if you build a skyscraper, you'll have to have open space around it to not block all the light. If you put al lot of them close together like in NY or Chicago it would get very gloomy in the streets. So the skyscraper style buildings tend be on the city skirts in office parks, or appartement buildings with a park around it, and not often higher than 200ft because it's not efficient with elevators taking up floor space and time, building costs, land price etc. And it's a matter of scale, NY and Chigaco are really big cities, especially for their age. It's probably a natural evolution for a post 1800 city to have very high rising building towards the centre where the a square foot of land is the most expensive, but not for older cities.
Sprawl isn't easy too. There are the natural bounderies like rivers and mountains, a good spot for a city met very different criteria in the middle ages than in the 19th century, and fast and easy growth wasn't a main one. And there wasn't much choice, not just because Europe is quite small but also because of politics. Nowadays a lot of the land around the city is already taken, by villages who don't want to be devoured by the city, or there are monumental villas with gardens and parks you don't just take down. A lot of the land around it is privately owned, but a new development wouldn't necessarily raise it's value because it was already used. Or it's privately owned since a very long time ago by a non profit organisation, like a football or tennis club, a church or some foundation, who are legally bound to serve other interests than make a profit no matter how huge, so you'll have to wait until the club is in financial trouble and has to sell to survive. A lot of land around a city just isn't for sale.
It's not that different for a lot of European cities, but the Netherlands is a bit extreme because it's more densily populated in the country-side too and there's water everywhere. People don't want endless cities, you can put a tree next to every single parking space (which is quite common practice nowadays) and have lovely parks, but there has to be 'real' nature (usually farmland) within reach from the city, but also between villages. Villages aren't allowed to just sprawl and grow together either. So the main bounderies of today are legal ones, to protect happiness basically.
Another (legal) boundery is congestion, if you've finally found the space to house the population growth, you'll have to find the space to transport them efficiently. To work but also to enjoy themselves and spend money, that makes cities rich. If it takes an hour to get to the cinema or a bar, people won't spend their money. It's not really that much a problem, you just need to plan ahead. For example it's more than 25 years ago the railway started ordering double decker trains, because with the current number of passengers conventional trains would exceed the length of the platforms in the densily populated west of the country. Of course there's no space to lengthen the platforms, but it shortens the walk of the passengers too, allowing the trains to depart sooner, so you can have more trains getting in and out every hour.
Cycling is of course a huge part of the solution, it is now in the densily populated Netherlands and it will be very soon for European cities outside the Netherlands. But I don't believe it has really shaped European cities, not even in the Netherlands. There is the town of Houten, but that's a different story, it was a tiny village and it was picked 50 years ago and entirely designed to grow to a 100.000 and has benefitted hugely from the wide consensus on growth of cycling that has been here for more than 25 years. But the basic shapes of the cities were already there when the cycling revolution started with individual cities experimenting in the 70's, there's not really much to change about the lay-out of old cities without getting everybody mad. The pre-70s idea that cities would become clusters of skyscrapers with 7-lane highways above eachoter cutting through was really silly and no one still wants that. The older parts of cities don't really change much, there are just suburbs added to it where they managed to find a spot. But cycling allows those cities to grow faster without getting congested towards the centres.
The need for mass cycling just comes with population density, first in the most dense cities, but for more spatious cities there will be a point in the future where it's either get people cycling and use public transport, or stop growing.