U.S. Cities with Most Households without a Car. Some Suprises

[thelakelander]

^^^I don't consider a theoretical 3-5% increase in carless population that significant when you're chopping off 80-90% of the city limits to get to the very core. 

I consider consolidated cities like Jax to be an exception to the rule.  Our limits not only cover an urban core and suburbs, probably 30-40% of the county is still considered rural.  I could see it being in the range of 13 to 15% if the city were not consolidated.  However, that's almost double 7.8%.  Double seems significant to me.

[simms3]

^^^I don't consider a theoretical 3-5% increase in carless population that significant when you're chopping off 80-90% of the city limits to get to the very core. 

I consider consolidated cities like Jax to be an exception to the rule.  Our limits not only cover an urban core and suburbs, probably 30-40% of the county is still considered rural.  I could see it being in the range of 13 to 15% if the city were not consolidated.  However, that's almost double 7.8%.  Double seems significant to me.

I just don't buy the argument that urban Jacksonville is more carless than far more urban, poor, dense cities with small city limits sizes to boot.  You're implying that Jax is more carless than Memphis, Dallas, Houston, Sacramento, Tampa, etc etc.

Again, I cite that 15-20% of Jax residents are below the poverty line and yet only 8% of Jax residents are carless.  That statistic alone implies that even the poorest folks in pre-consolidated Jax likely have access to a car.  Not to mention the middle to upper class folks who live in Riverside, San Marco and Springfield - I'm sure 99-100% of them have access to a car what with free parking on the street at minimum but likely a covered garage.

And then bus ridership - 42,000 avg weekday ridership (latest numbers).  This includes Clay County, the SS, and largely post-consolidated Jax (San Jose, Phillips, etc).  How many of the 42,000 bus riders originate within urban core of Jax, and then what are we calling urban core of Jax?  Is it a city limit that gives Jacksonville 150,000 people?  250,000 people?  400,000 people?  Assuming half of JTA ridership comes from a Jax city limit that gives population of 150,000 people, and assuming that none of those bus riders have access to a car, that's 14% carless at most.

Chopping off the pine forests and only looking at urbanized Jax...what is the spread in densities?  Are we going from 2,500 ppsm to 15,000+ ppsm?  I believe that Jax is uniformly dense between 2,500 ppsm and 4,500 ppsm, with perhaps some pockets of 5,000-6,000 ppsm in some parts of Riverside/Northside.  Not a large spread of density, just a difference in how the built environment is laid out.  It doesn't put Jax on a walkability/density level of most of the cities on that list.

[thelakelander]

I didn't say Jax was more than Memphis, Dallas, Houston, etc.  I just said the large municipal limits skew the numbers.  Nevertheless, all of those city's numbers are skewed as well.  I'm not as familiar with Sacramento but I do know for a fact that Dallas, Houston, and Tampa have annexed large land masses to generate tax revenue from sprawl over the last 50 years.  Thus, their numbers change with their outward expansions too.

[BridgeTroll]

City without cars...

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/city-light?single-page-view=true

At first glance, Masdar City appears a mirage. From a distance it looks like a single multicolored building, standing lonely on the horizon. Part of the illusion is due to the city’s strange setting: next to Abu Dhabi airport, just across the highway from the Arabian Gulf, in a deeply inhospitable stretch of desert. Between it and downtown Abu Dhabi lie 20 miles of the most wasteful urban development I’ve ever seenâ€"a featureless plain studded with ostentatious walled houses the size of the Supreme Court and crisscrossed by empty six-lane boulevards. But the illusion is also a matter of density. Masdar City, an $18-billion experiment, will hold 40,000 residents in only two square miles.

As the world’s most ambitious eco-city, Masdar does not allow cars. Visitors must instead leave their vehicles in a giant garage at the city’s northern edge. As I pulled in, a trim Westerner wearing a dark suit despite the heat stepped from the shade to introduce himself. Stephen Severance, a 45-year-old American, is the city’s program manager. He came to Masdar four years ago, after working at the consulting firm Booz Allen.