Posted by rbanffy 1 day ago
Tech enthusiasts: "Oh what a luddite, didn't you see the demo? This is the future!"
In the 1900s every city was walkable. Most cities had trains of some sort for the majority of transport and bikes or horses for the last mile.
It really makes me sad to see even old cartoons showing off the tram systems of the day. Those all got pulled up for "progress" thrusting us all backwards into bumper to bumper traffic.
Whats incredible is that happened almost immediately after expansion of personal vehicles.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to romanticize the horse aspect. Rather, the public transit and train shipping aspect.
In the US, at one point trains were so popular that even rural farms would have small train depots to load up crops on and ultimately ship goods wherever they need to be. You'd even find stores with train station docking.
In fact, before the national highway system, pretty much the only way to travel was by train.
We've taken a costly step backwards by building out the highway system and moving to semi shipping rather than keeping and expanding public transit.
trains are nice but cars were faster for most (until congestion - but by then there were so few users that service was bad)
It's counter intuitive but it's quiet the opposite. I've lived in the UK for a while and in some pretty walkable cities. Even in the smaller cities, what you'd find is a wealth of different shops and options catering to all sorts of needs.
But then just consider that when you are walking you are being exposed to all the shops in the city.
Cars isolate. You are much less likely to notice the hole in the wall specialty shop and you are much more likely to instead just go to a Walmart or national brand place to get what you want. And you'll much more likely want to stop at all in one stores such as Walmart because you don't want to hop in your car multiple times to get the shopping done. In walkable cities, it's almost like a mall experience in every city center. 3 doors down is the hardware store and 2 more stores is the candy shop.
And because that downtown location is a highly desirable place with lots of foot traffic, any shop that goes out of business gets quickly replaced with another. Which means you generally end up with a lot of pretty high quality stores.
You'd be really surprised. I knew smaller cities with shops dedicated to Warhammer 40k. [1] (Surprisingly, still in business :) )
> Even something like a guitar shop need a very dense area for people who live in walking distance to be enough to support it.
A guitar shop just needs enough people interested in guitars. Being walkable doesn't mean there's no transit. Usually, walkable cities will have a city center where the shops are concentrated and if the city is big enough, you'll end up with a bus station in the city center. In fact, the referenced city has several of those shops. [2]
This isn't a large city, it's around 100,000. It's also fairly isolated. Nobody is coming to this city to get a guitar.
How many of the customers of the Warhammer store walked there from their house? How many came from a different cities because it was the closest store? The store does well because it can draw from a much larger area than a pure walking (or the limited trams of back then)
Similar for guitars - I expect a city of 100k to support 1-2 guitar stores - but I expect the majority of customers are not walking. Maybe they drive, maybe they take transit.
Not in the UK but yes in the US (in the 1900s, only 10% of the UK population farmed. Most were in the service industry and manufacturing). There's also a very different city layouts in the UK vs the US.
If you were a farmer in the US in the 1900s, you'd mostly likely ride a horse.
> How many of the customers of the Warhammer store walked there from their house?
Almost 0, but a very large percentage got there via bus and walked from the bus station to the store. For these older cities that's just how it has to be because there's no room for parking.
In the context of the 1900s, biking and walking is how people would get around in the UK, they'd simply not go downtown as often. In that city in particular there are a TON of old walking trails from the outskirts to town center. I know because I walked them.
You might think "Well, it's a 1 or 2 miles away, that's just too far" but honestly when all you are used to is walking it's not. It was just more expected that taking an hour long walk happens.
> How many came from a different cities because it was the closest store?
For that city, almost 0. It's way too isolated. Even today in england you'll find a lot of people that very rarely leave the city they were born in.
> but I expect the majority of customers are not walking. Maybe they drive, maybe they take transit.
Most of it will be park and walk. You are correct in assuming that they'll likely take transit or drive to a closer location. However, because not every store has parking like the US, it's most likely that they'll have to walk some distance to and from the store however they decide to get there.
If you click around the shrewsbury city in google earth street view, what you'll notice is very few cars in the city center and a lot of people walking around.
Most of the city center is inaccessible by car. Parking your car is expensive, driving is discouraged.
Removing cars means there's more space for people. It means it's safer, quieter. I'm not in mortal panic if my 4 years old drops my hand. It means the bus isn't stuck in traffic, and is therefore really fast. It's the most vibrant place I've ever lived in. It's full of life and energy.
The city is full of small, independent shops.
A boardgames café:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Boardroom/@52.3864335,...
A guitar shop:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alphenaar+Muziekhandel/@52...
A tabletop store, hosting MTG tournaments on a regular basis:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tabletop+Kingdom+Haarlem/@...
A store fully dedicated to expensive collectibles:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Past+Joys/@52.3798456,4.63...
There's a ton of small shops, whose names I can't remember, that I only discovered because I happened to walk past them. This creates a positive feedback loop. It's rewarding to just wander about, because you may discover something.
European cities are also quite car-infected, but in many the older core still work somewhat similar to how cities worked back then: you have the daily necessities within a 10 minute walk, for anything else you can fetch transit to the city center within 15 minutes, where you generally get everything else (except Ikea)
Not the "last mile". The _only_ mile. Cities were so walkable that London had multiple distinct local accents because people were living their entire lives in one neighborhood, venturing outside only for special occasions.
This changed only with the invention of electric trams that allowed people to relatively cheaply move around. Technically, horse-driven trams were invented a bit earlier but they never got built at scale.
See the Underground for an example.
Might even be 70 years see the London-Greenwich railway for the first instance.
London and Paris were real outliners, with the early adoption of steam-powered subways. Mostly because they had to due to their size, but it really was the tram that initially allowed the working-class city population to commute freely.
It's also interesting that it coincides with the significant boost in productivity, and also with general improvements to workers' rights.
big-box stores? where??
which links to https://lccn.loc.gov/00694271 , but that does not seem to have a digital copy available
edit: well here's an archive but it's not any better https://web.archive.org/web/20231016184047if_/http://memory....
7m20s of the same video clip features a clip shot of riders on the overhead converyor/walkway.
[the original film was silent, audio is faked]
If he survived that he lived through economic crisis in the twenties and thirties and ultimately WWII including occupation and terror in France.
And ultimately if he got old enough he could have witnessed the early cold war but also European economic bounce back and begining reconciliation between former enemies.