Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

I spent a week in Berlin recently. The transit system is so good I had no desire to use a car, and I traveled around the city to see the sights.

I'm sorry, I'm not fortunate enough to be a native English speaker or having formal English learning?

But I though that a simple word was enough to be understood.

I'll do my best, why do you say the streets would be crowded?

Next time, you can save your insult and think that not everybody is an English speaker.

That's not the requested example of breaking 'corrupt local monopolies'...

And also to point out that the main effect of uber is to shift responsibility to drivers and government. Replace licenced, trained and properly contracted drivers (paying retirement and health insurance payments) and fully maintained and insured cars with untrained, uninsured and precariously 'employed' drivers, which gain no long term safety for sickness and retirement and use their own cars which may or may not be well maintained, and where they bear the complete business costs and responsibilities.

It's fully and completely exploitative, that's why it's cheaper.

For the user experience much works better, that doesn't make it a good company and certainly not healthy. The cost you save you'll pay back in taxes that have to cover drivers that fall into poverty, or when you have an accident and find your driver was not properly insured. YMMV depending on city and country, but the exploitation of the 'sharing economy' is just painfully obvious and it's your personal choice to support this.

The article asserts many things about the city.

I don't bring my Mum to Barcelona by a few reasons, and one of them is that she could be unable to cross most roads, as a pedestrian, on time for the traffic light.

Of course that's one of the smallest problems, delinquency being the main one (attracted more in this months by the tourism).

Also people is uncivil with old persons here, the locals and the tourists.

Walking on bike in the sidewalk thinking you have preference over pedestrians also is common here. I've see many fights start by this.

The traffic? for me it's all day car horns. Without any good reason. Always just for the sake of the mass hysteria.

Stressed drivers pushing pedestrians to finish the cross. The same when walking, people push you for the space, even if they are just slow walking and doing shopping and you go clearly to work.

All those theories about traffic are nice. The article tries to make it even more nice asserting stuff.

I don't want my childs to grow up in barcelona, and I don't want my mum to live alone in this city like she can do in others.

I have attended and helped enough persons who had been stolen, kicked, violated, run overs, and what not in just two years.

I cannot take a single beer, without watch traffic problems in Barcelona. And I'm talking of a two channels street, where the main traffic mass, can vary from 5 to 9 cars in the same direction.

Oh you are the owner of this car? a bus just did break all the side of your car, he did go away without stopping. Take man, I did a photo, you can see the car number. This was yesterday.

Traffic is better than Madrid. But still is a "bad thing" for the quality of life of the city. Also in barcelona you need air conditioner, or sleep with the windows open... this is... all night long and in the main hours, old, big, vibrating and poorly driven trucks and buses all around. stopping with squeaky brakes, in each of those corners, and starting again with the engine noise that could not pass a decibel measurement by police.

It mixes with the drunken people and nightly prostitution noise... so at the end, the harley/truck/whatever is just one more noise in the Barcelona's non-stopping symphony.

Squared streets and all that, bike accidents are common here, bike Vs pedestrian problems too. Old people and children cannot walk alone even in relaxed areas. And the traffic (for me that don't own vehicles) and the air pollution is one of the worse things when I try to "live" here.

I live in a small town in France and in the villages, there is often zero parking. The effect on the village? Less economic activity than the ones that have parking. Just eliminating parking does solve a problem, but it creates another problem as people seek convenient alternatives. Taking 3 toddlers with strollers on public transport to go grocery shopping isn't as easy as some single guy jumping on the train to go get a beer. How does one transport things back to their house? Using only public transport means that you can only buy what you can easily carry.

Public transport makes it really difficult to carry any amount of cargo. Ever tried to bring grocery bags into the subway in NYC during rush hour? It's impossible. Now do that with a kid. Now do all that and end up at one of the majority of stations without elevators. No matter how 'good' NYC's public transport it, it still sucks if you are in a wheelchair, with small children, carrying any amount of cargo and traveling at anytime other than 12am.

Public transport has its place, but to suggest a car-free world is madness -- unless we have cargo carrying robots bringing stuff to our doors.

I will say Zurich does a good job -- their trains are super easy to board, they are spacious and uncrowded. The platforms are wide and easy to navigate and have no stairs. Still, even that doesn't solve the problem of cargo. One could use Amazon, but that requires a truck to deliver things, which requires roads and unloading zones.