my dream: urban roads (and parking) underground and multimodal streets above-ground severely road-dieted, with ample trees and micromobility lanes along them all. trees provide shade, reduces the heat island effect, reduces noise pollution (a bit), reduces air pollution (a bit), preserves soil and helps it hold more water, and overall reduces stress for pedestrians. adding mixed-use everywhere, with smaller pedestrian/micromobility alleys for accessibility, means people have somewhere to walk to rather than hopping into their cars for everything.
then you don't need to rely so much on speed limits, signs, and signals, because you've segregated (most of) the cars from people.
It's a beautiful dream but we can barely manage upkeep in our existing road network, which is mostly just layers of dirt and asphalt. If we need to maintain tunnel systems I imagine the maintenance goes up by at least an order of magnitude.
japan has an extensive network of tunnels and manages them just fine. and it's not a money problem. california, for instance, is the 5th largest economy in the world (~$3.6T), with greater LA ~$1.2T and the bay area ~$1T of that. cars have great utility, and while the economic benefits of roads/streets more than offset their cost in urban areas, a better mix of transportation reduces the amount of roads & streets we need overall (not to mention needing to repair them less often when usage is lower), mitigating the cost issue a bit.
people react viscerally to moving away from a sole reliance on cars, but most people intuitively enjoy human-centered environments more than car-centered ones. i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
Japan has an extensive network of tunnels for trains, not cars. It's a totally different problem, and doesn't require remotely as much space because trains can carry so many more people and are pretty narrow and don't need lots of lanes for passing. Asking for all the major roads in a city to be moved underground is lunacy; you can do a few tunnels here and there (like big cities such as DC and NYC already do), but that's about it. The answer isn't more car-based infrastructure, the answer is to make cars inconvenient and move people into trains, and make ground-level streets better for pedestrians and cyclists.
>i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
You can't have it both ways. If you make it possible for everyone to have a car, then it becomes impossible for people to not have a car. You can do what we have here in Tokyo: make car ownership extremely inconvenient and impractical, by making the streets narrow and basically eliminating parking, or having a small amount of very expensive parking. Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course).
japan also has tunnel infrastructure for cars. one of my most vivid memories of visiting there is driving in and out of many-miles-long tunnels, and coming out of the last one smack dab in the middle of kobe. it was magical.
you'll never get change if your goal is to make cars so inconvenient that it pisses off the overwhelming majority of voters. cars are here to stay, so let's accept that reality and work around it. what you can do is demonstrate a better version of the world that people can get behind. but yes, it's not to create more car infrastrastructure, but actually less, because tunnels are expensive, so we'd be more selective about where to put roads. then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking, but also lane number and width), reclaiming much of our limited surface area for people first.
> "Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course)."
yes, let's build denser/closer together, build trains/dedicated busways, and let's not build (surface) parking lots. that's not incompatible.
off of the underground roads, you can put central, underground parking to serve urban neighborhoods and eliminate the need for permanent street parking (obviously services could still have surface space for intermittent parking). you could have fun little green alleyways aboveground (like in japan!) to access the central parking lot. you could even use a single underground car alley under the middle of a primarily residential block to provide access to underground garages under homes/apartment buildings. imagine how cool it would be to replace the street between you and your neighbor and set up a sports field or a garden or a picnic area, or any number of possibilities (even a whole row of new housing could fit down most "residential streets" in many places).
>you'll never get change if your goal is to make cars so inconvenient that it pisses off the overwhelming majority of voters. cars are here to stay, so let's accept that reality and work around it.
What world do you live in? In my world, cars are extremely inconvenient. They're expensive, the parking is very limited and expensive, and to go anywhere you usually have to take toll roads, which are expensive. As a result, most people don't have a car, and use the subway, or take trains between cities.
>apan also has tunnel infrastructure for cars. one of my most vivid memories of visiting there is driving in and out of many-miles-long tunnels, and coming out of the last one smack dab in the middle of kobe. it was magical.
They're not highly common in Japanese cities. There are a bunch of car tunnels in the mountains though (no subways there). They tend to be really narrow; there's no way to pass in them.
>then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking
Do you have any clue how much it would cost to build gigantic underground parking garages? Or how much the parking fees would be? This is lunacy.
the tunnels i went through in japan were all at least 2 lanes in each direction. there were plenty of cars and traffic in the cities i visited so it can't be that inconvenient.
it would be roughly $600B to build enough neighborhood parking garages in LA to serve all its residents. that's just half a year's worth of GDP, which is not nothing, but certainly within reach. with just that, LA could remove all on-street parking in neighborhoods and turn it into bike lanes and/or extend the curbs to add more trees and sidewalk.
The main factor that I feel that people forget is that once you build something, fixing it requires undoing it and that’s extremely expensive. Like if you design an API wrong, release it, then realize to change it requires a massive deprecation effort (if you don’t want total disruption).
You’ll notice throughout history that things like earthquakes, fires (see Chicago) or wars (see parts of Europe) have had extremely major effects on redevelopment.
Of course, we don’t want disasters because they cause total disruption, but when we talk about redeveloping an area, you can’t compare two entirety different places and just say “oh we can do it because we have more money” — you always need way more money to redevelop than to develop the first time.
It's a beautiful vision, and I mean that. But I must also ask: How much more in taxes should Californians pay for the privilege? Give it a number. Because your average HN reader in California is paying close to 60% of their salary in state and federal taxes.
I appreciate that taxes are higher in California than many places - but a married couple earning $300k pays much closer to 26% in income tax, and 5% in FICA/SS in California.
Note that in these contexts (comparing with European, Asian cities) tunnels are typically employed to (1) carry mass transit (which requires and in turn supports density), and (2) carry through traffic through dense urban centers without having to take up as much surface space.
Keep in mind that low-density sprawl is likely to
* create much higher infrastructure costs (in terms of streets, utilities, etc) per capita (I believe Strong Towns has written extensively on this topic);
* force more people to buy, drive, & maintain a car (and spend more time commuting) when they would not otherwise need to (if you like driving, good for you, but it isn't for everyone).
I don’t know how rich the average HN reader is but, for a bit of perspective: I’m solidly middle class and I only pay about 30% total (and that’s if you include property taxes).
Yes (should be obvious from context). This includes federal, state, and local taxes.
Edit: point being, if your taxes are super high, it's usually a combination of very high income & owning very expensive property.
Edit 2: if you have very LOW income and own very expensive property, then you could end up with astronomical tax rates overall if you include property taxes. But that's usually not what people talk about in this context, and is kind of a separate problem (cost of housing).
I agree it's not a money problem, but it seldom really is when we're discussing big projects. It's a problem of priority and perception. These might seem like trivial things when you're making grand designs but it matters a great deal when it's time to actually do something in the real world.
It's not a money problem because we spend vastly more money on much more trivial and wasteful things. If there is anything I have learned, it's that if powerful interests care about a thing it doesn't really matter how much it costs.
there are places like you describe and they get along just fine without those underground car roads. if you're going to the enormous expense of tunneling you should get your money's worth by building high-capacity transit.
then you don't need to rely so much on speed limits, signs, and signals, because you've segregated (most of) the cars from people.