shhhh

January 7, 2025 9:47 AM

What happens when you take cars out of cities.
posted by latkes (24 comments total)

The sudden quiet of a Tokyo morning after the rare significant snow dump is amazing.
posted by torokunai2 at 10:02 AM on January 7 [9 favorites]

As a militant bike/micromobility advocate and as someone who has spent a week in Barcelona the past three summers, this one hits close to home. The city is incredibly beautiful and walkable. They are only adding more and more bike infrastructure and lanes. And even the cars and motorcycles that are there are quite respectful of crosswalks and pedestrians. It's really baked into the culture. Sure, they have some busy thoroughfares like the Diaganol, but even those utilize the space to have fully protected bike/walking paths.

It's magical.

It makes my time in big American cities like LA, Orlando, Houston, New York (but congestion pricing might help until a new administration attempts to dismantle it) feel like such wasted opportunities. And it's nothing about the age of the cities. Barcelona is over 2,000 years old. Paris is much older and has completely reinvented itself in the past two decades and prioritized bikes/scooters.

I hope that day will come for America but I know people will fight it tooth and nail. They'll grip the wheels of their lifted F-250 pickups as tightly as Heston gripped his rifle. In which case we'll just have to pry it from their cold, dead hands.
posted by robot_jesus at 10:10 AM on January 7 [31 favorites]

That’s odd. Here in NYC, we are hearing a constant whine when we try to get rid of some cars.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:12 AM on January 7 [20 favorites]

One of the nice things about early into the pandemic was that when I stepped outside it sounded like Christmas or New Years morning, only the sound of birds and empty space. you could hear little details like a mouse rustling in the brush across the street.
posted by Dr. Twist at 10:16 AM on January 7 [13 favorites]

As Not Just Bikes puts it, "Cities aren't loud. Cars are loud."
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:36 AM on January 7 [37 favorites]

The only reason it took me forty years to escape from the city is that I was born and raised there.

Now I live somewhere where I don't hear traffic. Instead, I hear cars. I can listen to a car approaching our main street when it's still a kilometre away on the highway, and I can hear it either turn the corner to follow the highway or continue straight along the road past the pub that goes back to the coast, and sometimes I hear a truck come down the hill.

But things I hear much more often than I hear cars include birdsong, crickets and frogs.

I love living here.
posted by flabdablet at 10:38 AM on January 7 [9 favorites]

There's been people advocating to make New Orleans' French Quarter a no-car zone for a while and they've gotten a burst of activity in the wake of the dude who drove a truck up Bourbon on New Year's. It'll be interesting to see if something actually comes of it. Honestly the streets in the Quarter are so shitty that nobody's going more than about 5mph anyway most of the time.
posted by egypturnash at 10:40 AM on January 7 [13 favorites]

a burst of activity in the wake of the dude who drove a truck up Bourbon on New Year's.

In Copenhagen, I live on one of the main arteries, and it was blocked in the middle of the busiest section several years ago. So now it is as quiet as the street in the video, specially at night when the buses only come through once an hour or something. (The buses can still go through the block).

I've always suspected that the real reason for closing the street was more to limit options for the local gangsters than improving our lives, and actually a lot of local stores have had to close, because they depended on people from other districts arriving by car. Don't get me wrong, I love it, and gradually, very gradually, a new type of businesses are coming in.
posted by mumimor at 11:02 AM on January 7 [7 favorites]

I grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, and moved back here about ten years ago after my first daughter was born. St. Augustine, for those who aren't familiar, is a cute little former Spanish colony on the Atlantic Coast of Florida. It has an old stone fort and a seawall and palm trees and a little harbor and narrow cobblestone streets with houses built hundreds of years ago and a beach and a lighthouse and all manner of other cutesy stuff.

Last spring, my family and I travelled to La Rochelle, France, to visit my sister-in-law. La Rochelle is a cute little French town on the Atlantic Coast of France. It has an old stone fort and a seawall and palm trees and a little harbor and narrow cobblestone streets with houses built hundreds of years ago and a beach and a lighthouse and all manner of other cutesy stuff. And it is better in every conceivable way than St. Augustine, with the exception of "hot sauce availablity in restaurants."

The single most important way in which it is better is that most of its streets in the city center are set aside exclusively for pedestrian and bicycle use, and many others which actually do allow cars do so only grudgingly, with low speed limits and lots of stop signs. St. Augustine, by contrast, is a car-choked hell on most nice weekends, and because walkability and bikeability is so poor, there are almost none of the kinds of businesses like little neighborhood grocery stores that make neighborhoods truly liveable. I had spent nearly 20 years living in NYC but before going to La Rochelle had never really understood the degree to which a town could be car-free, rather than just a big city. And I have been angry every day since.
posted by saladin at 11:26 AM on January 7 [39 favorites]

(Saladin, I'm going to La Rochelle for five days next month. Any recs? Can I memail you?)
posted by CheeseLouise at 11:42 AM on January 7

Absolutely MeMail me!
posted by saladin at 12:20 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]

"Cities aren't loud. Cars are loud."

Not just cars. One of the loudest cities i remember was Florence with 100s of Vespas taking off after a traffic light changed.

This was in the 90s, hopefully there are more electrics these days.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:36 PM on January 7 [1 favorite]

> What happens when you take cars out of cities.

This conjured images of hatchbacks frolicking though meadows.
posted by lucidium at 1:13 PM on January 7 [13 favorites]

The hatchbacks were “sent to a farm upstate”?
posted by meinvt at 1:22 PM on January 7 [6 favorites]

> What happens when you take cars out of cities.

a low key soundtrack of easy to listen to ambient music imposes. Strange to think it was there all along.
posted by philip-random at 1:50 PM on January 7 [4 favorites]

Don't think I'll ever be rich enough to live in a city. When I've visited them I notice how loud they are but not as much as how they smell, which helps accepting I'll never live in one.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:40 PM on January 7

Where I live, you can tell where you are in the calendar based on the din of traffic. In the spring and summer, the trees muffle the noise. In the winter, it's inescapable.

I'm in metro Boston, where the evil bike mafia is installing one bike lane after another, the din is slowly receding. Not as fast as I would like.
posted by ocschwar at 2:51 PM on January 7 [1 favorite]

I live in Vancouver, BC and would love to live like this. However, my job, which I need because of its pension, moved to a suburb and after 8 months of chaotic commuting by transit I had to get my first car. I hate, hate, hate the commute that takes me through some of the worst driving hotspots in British Columbia, but 3 and half hours a day on our grotesque transit system, which is horrendous outside of the major routes, makes it impossible not to. We had a chance, we really did, but the abysmal history of civic planning in Vancouver, other than a few bright spots like the the post war social housing boom, have made that impossible now. Now all we seem to care about is how many insane developer projects we can cram into this city without the proper infrastructure to support and sustain it.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 3:57 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

When Chicago closes DuSable Lakeshore Drive for the Bike the Drive fundraiser it is so incredibly quiet it is beautiful. It's what the lakeshore should be. I usually walk the lakefront trail at some point on that morning just to experience it without the roar of cars (I run it or near it 3-4 times a week and I bird on the lakefront on days I don't run). Then on my return during Bike the Drive I have to walk two blocks into the city and the first north/south street I have to cross is four lanes of moderately steady traffic at mid-morning and it is like being punched in the gut after the quiet of a closed down DLSD. That's the real point where I realize just how much the steady drone of constant traffic is normalized in my life.
posted by srboisvert at 4:20 PM on January 7 [6 favorites]

Mayor Daley brought jackhammers to Miegs Air Field at 2 AM to take the runway out of commission and establish that the field would close.

A mayor with guts could do the same to Lake Shore Drive. The suburbanites would wail and gnash teeth for a few days, and that would be the end of it.
posted by ocschwar at 8:20 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

Eh. It was a common trope in stories I used to read a long time ago of "City Kids", such as grew up in NYC, who for one reason or another had to move to the country. *They* couldn't sleep because of all of the insect/frog/wind type noise. They hated it.

Personally, I sleep with a high traffic local type main street about 25 feet from me. No problem. And as a (poor) kid, we could only afford a trailer type place where 15 feet away (on the other side of a chain link fence) ran a local rail line. The trains ran about 3-4 times a night. The first few weeks were hell, then we got used to it. I'd wake up (barely) as they went by and dropped right back to sleep. Only lived there for a few years but the "training" stayed with me.

Then when I was older I went to an observation point on a fairly high hill/mountain. There was just silence... like I'd never heard it before. Not brief pulses of silence between the noise. And then weird rushing sounds that I finally realized was wind. But in far, miles away, trees.

I'd like to get used to that.
posted by aleph at 10:51 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

A mayor with guts could do the same to Lake Shore Drive. The suburbanites would wail and gnash teeth for a few days, and that would be the end of it.

What do the suburbanites care about DLSD? It doesn't...go to any suburbs.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:03 AM on January 8

Where's the sound of a million whirring air conditioner compressors?
posted by jordantwodelta at 2:30 PM on January 8

I live in Amsterdam and visiting any (non-Dutch) city now I’m always floored by how loud it is.
posted by antinomia at 6:17 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]