> We still decry bike lanes as a "war on cars," even in our allegedly progressive West Coast cities
Do we? I see a lot more articles like this one about how we have to take back the streets from cars.
Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
>no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution Yes there is - the city government that controls the parking spaces, also controls the transit system.
And it controls infinite amounts of money? As I've said in other comments, I'm all for investing heavily in transit infrastructure. If you want a solution that totally ignores the fiscal reality of the world, then yes, I agree, dumping massive amounts of money into public transit would be part of it.
Where is the fiscal reality in grinding a city's economic activity to a halt because people can't get anywhere?
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
>no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution Yes there is - the city government that controls the parking spaces, also controls the transit system.
And it controls infinite amounts of money? As I've said in other comments, I'm all for investing heavily in transit infrastructure. If you want a solution that totally ignores the fiscal reality of the world, then yes, I agree, dumping massive amounts of money into public transit would be part of it.
Hardcore anti-car people don't live in reality.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0]. You could get rid of cars and with all that newly avai…
>shitty environmental health People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation. My argument he…
I suspect that the driver of a new car will never recover in gas savings the negative impact of harvesting resources and building an additional vehicle.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your problem is that you live in Hyde Park. It is quite isolated from the rest of the city. I agree with you that CTA should step up service to the south side, but living on the north side or west side you would much more easily live without a car. Source: lived on north and west sides for past 5 years and don't have/don't want a car.
I agree that there are places where this isn't a problem. Taking the cars away from places like Hyde Park won't magically make it one of them.
I can't speak to Chicago specifically, but the problem in tons of places is that there's enough of the transportation budget spent on roads that you can never achieve a decent level of service.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
>shitty environmental health People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation. My argument he…
Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile. I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and…
>Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.
Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#157I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. Growing up in the suburbs without a car, I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago). I'm on the opposite corner of the neighborhood from the business districts, so a little errand like CVS or the grocery store is around half an hour by foot each…
>I feel compelled to dissent against initiatives to directly take cars off the road, rather than improve alternatives. I was really excited about carless urban life. Then I actually experienced it (Hyde Park, Chicago).
And you have the experience of using transit on what's generally considered a Top-5 system nationally! The transit experience elsewhere is often significantly worse than yours. We have "urbanists" here trying to block cars in our tiny little city, where a 10-minute car commute takes 90 minutes by bus (a bus which often does not run on nights, weekends, or holidays).
I totally support trying to be more environmentally friendly, and increasing density to do that, and making places more pedestrian friendly. But we really need to come up with some real, functional mobility solutions to do that. Telling folks to "walk everywhere" simply isn't a solution, for the same reason we haven't shut the internet off and told people to "mail CD's everywhere".
No amount of banning cars is going to magically make bad transit better -- we need to start building good transit first.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it controls infinite amounts of money? As I've said in other comments, I'm all for investing heavily in transit infrastructure. If you want a solution that totally ignores the fiscal reality of the world, then yes, I agree, dumping massive amounts of money into public transit would be part of it.
Where is the fiscal reality in grinding a city's economic activity to a halt because people can't get anywhere?
Cities can, have, and do function with fewer cars than most American cities. Reducing parking is the fairest way to reduce the usage and eventually necessity of cars.
And again, it's far more realistic than hoping that a transit authority is going to find a buried treasure chest to invest in infrastructure while the public is investing more and more into cars.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#159To me the answer is making dedicated travel roads for bicycles and pedestrians. This idea is ok, in that it slows cars down, and maybe that's enough, but what I'd love in a city like San Francisco are dedicated roads that allow bicycles to safely travel across the entire city without having to worry about getting run down at every intersection. There are some streets that are safer than others, but what would be grea…
Chicago has a few streets like these and they're great. The bike line is protected from traffic by the parking lane. Parallel parking a car is easier, and the bikes are protected from the driver-side doors as well as traffic. The pedestrian lane is, of course, the sidewalk.
You just have to really commit - a few protected blocks is nice, but people may not feel safe until it's the majority of their journey. Left turns are still intimidating.
>delivery trucks.
I'm extremely perturbed when there are large trucks stopped in the street. Loading docks are a thing - that building's decision to not have one is a classic case of dumping what should be its costs on everyone else.
I'm more sympathetic to taxi/uber pickups and dropoffs, since although they also tend to block traffic (and frequently encroach on the bike lane) it's still better than more cars driving and parking.
Re: Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile. I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and…
>Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute. Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives…
What are you talking about? Removing, say, 10% of parking spots per year for 8 years wouldn't require any of that. It would result in the same frustration that people already have and already cope with: "it sucks to park in the city."
It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!