Neither of these are very good. I'd rather one problem be solved than have a choice between 3 awful compromises.
1. Cheap
2. Takes very little space
3. Good for health
4. In a dense city almost as fast as a car; sometimes faster
For people who doubt biking is possible. In Finland there is a city near arctic circle called Oulu with population of around 100 000 people. They have 2h of day light in winter. Temperatures often go to -10 degrees centigrade. And 22% of all trips are done by bikes. Including children going to primary schools.
In fact, London's taxi culture already has (or had) that sort of approach.
Your commute to and from work are now influenced by traffic. Some days are worse than others, but your boss doesn’t care as long as you are on time.
Fuel/electricity, maintenance, tires, and all the other costs for owning a vehicle add up to be a significant cost. And if you are already paying a premium to drive, might as well capitalise on that.
Eventually you move a little farther from work to buy a bigger house for less, and free up some of your income for other things. That 30 minute commute is now an hour and maybe less on a good day.
Well, if your going to spend two hours a day in a vehicle, might as well buy something more comfortable.
It is said that in the Netherlands 27% of all trips are done by bicycle - IIRC it's the highest percentage in Europe.
What is not mentioned though is that 50% are done by car.
If you look at the distance traveled it's 75% car, 8% bicycle.
The cities in that country that have a higher trip percentage are tiny, 100k towns.
Bicycles replace walking, not driving.
For huge areas of the country (and yes, this includes those classified as "urban"), the distances are too long, and the scenery too hostile or unexciting, to encourage walking. The more this happens, the more people want cars, and everything about accommodating cars (vs accommodating those on foot) worsens the area for human use: heat islands from parking and roads, danger from the same, dead landscapes, etc. Part of the problem is that cars are great for GDP (road building/maintenence, New rings of suburbs every generation as people flee the old ones, the whole car ecosystem) and horrible for building wealth, and ultimately national policy is all about GDP.
The inertia of this ugly system keeps cars nearly necessary to live and work in most places. And you can live in ways that avoid car use, but all entertainment and recreation and your friends are inaccessible without cars because most people pick the car option when faced with the question.
All of this means that there's no critical mass of people using transit to push for high level of service, and buses (and in some regions trains too) become filthy places to avoid.
For example, a local city wants to expand a road leading to the downtown area, to improve traffic flow from the highway to the downtown core area.
I'd much rather they build a parking garage where we have a park and ride lot, and run the modern equivalent of a Budd Car on existing track a couple miles into the city and back. The tracks parallel the road they want to build, and anybody who wants to drive into the city is going to park and walk around anyway, so why not reduce traffic and make it less frustrating to go downtown?
Not necessarily. Minibuses, bikes, e-scooters, even cars (park and ride, a big parking next to a train station; you get off the train and on your car for the last/first part of your trip) are perfectly viable "last mile" options.
Unfortunately massive public works are by far our biggest source of grifting. It takes an average of 20 years and $120M/mile (60M €/km) to open a new metro station.
Maybe Switzerland doesn't have this problem, but I'm all for solutions that take funds away from our politician's hands. And the car is great in that respect, as long as you don't advocate to increase road capacity at a massive cost.
Light rail transit or streetcars can be a lot cheaper than that, while still avoiding quite a bit of car traffic. The best system for any given atea is going to depend on density and local demand.
I drive daily and have nothing against cars. I hope that small semi-self-driving electric cars will eventually replace our dying public transit. There are many great things about the car. But I hate parking with a passion. In Lisbon we could easily double or triple the speed and amount of traffic flow without any investment by getting rid of a few thousand spots of street parking. Road space should be for people to go about their business, not for storing inert objects.
My hope against hope is that will one day we abolish street parking and invest in world-class automated below-ground parking. Let 1000 underground auto lifts bloom. Done properly it might even jump-start a new globally competitive manufacturing industry, something we haven't had since the 80s.
Agreed, but surely the best arrangement in a dense, traditional city centre is not to have high speed traffic at all except on a few large thoroughfares, and to reserve most other streets and alleys to pedestrian use.
Why?? That can't work with the terrain and current buildings in Lisbon, there simply isn't enough space for a car per person. And I can't imagine a livable city with so much space and money wasted for parking and roads. ( Due to induced demand )
Improving public transit is a much better option, especially considering Lisbon has some decent infrastructure already ( the tram and metro networks seemed pretty decent from my trip there just at the start of the pandemic).
In my opinion there should be no free parking in inner cities, and no requirements for parking spaces for property developers. Parking should be possible only in market priced parking garages. Parking options could still be built into apartment buildings, again at prices reflecting the cost of land/building costs. It should be markedly cheaper to buy an apartment without parking option.
Suburban areas are different of course, but cities seem to only turn really alive when cars are reduced and population density exceeds 10,000 per square kilometer.
