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Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

theguardian.com

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Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#71

Post by adrianN »

koolba wrote: post #59
montenegrohugo wrote: post #3

This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…

In cities sure, but there’s plenty of us who do not want to live in cities. Heck, I don’t even want to live within eye sight of neighbors, stores, or really anything else except some pristine woods. That’s not possible without a car.

There won't be many pristine woods left if everybody lives like you though.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#72

Post by dagw »

koolba wrote: post #59
montenegrohugo wrote: post #3

This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense…

In cities sure, but there’s plenty of us who do not want to live in cities. Heck, I don’t even want to live within eye sight of neighbors, stores, or really anything else except some pristine woods. That’s not possible without a car.

Sure there are always going to be people like us who want an 'archaic' life style which require an archaic mode of transportation, but the world shouldn't be optimizing for these people, and I see nothing wrong with making these people pay extra for the externalizes their lifestyles impose.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#73

Post by Tade0 »

Population: 82.5k - obviously cars have no business driving through such a place.

I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it.

That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink.

Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#74

Post by dexen »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43
rnatkins wrote: post #4

>How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space? Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.

I feel like we should be charitable on the actual wording of the statement as the speaker is being quoted in their non native language. I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".

The problem isn't the wording, it's the hare-brained idea that public and private shouldn't mix and cooperate. Flip the statement, make it about education - "How can it be that private benefit – the education – is financed by the public money?" - to clearly see the implications.

We finance the baseline of education/transportation infrastructure from public funds because we believe that improves productivity, and performance of civic duties in a democracy across the board. Purely privately owned education/transportation is politically contentious for various reasons, right? Enclosure of the commons, economic inequality, limited avenues for upward mobility and all that, right?

Lastly, a pedestrian on city-founded sidewalks is "a private citizen occupying public space" just as well. There's no moral qualitative difference between an individual pedestrian, an individual on a bicycle, an individual in a car [1], or a group of individuals in a tram or bus. We can argue about occupancy and all that, but that's just quantitative difference of maybe an order of magnitude at worst. The use of public space should should primarily support the main activities of the general public.

[1] pollution from ICEs aside, but we're on track to fix that permanently.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#75

Post by ginko »

hesk wrote: post #64
TomMarius wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.

Unless there's ice on the road, I ride my bike year-round in Berlin.

If there's ice on the road people in Norway just switch to studded tires.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#76

Post by gaius »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #43
rnatkins wrote: post #4

>How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space? Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.

I feel like we should be charitable on the actual wording of the statement as the speaker is being quoted in their non native language. I read this as more that we can't just default to subsidising private cars in a public space. Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".

Roads, parking and other infrastructure that de facto subsidize and encourage private car usage but which often are considered "free".

Taxes on fuel raise £50Bn/year for the exchequer, which is double the amount spent by the government on all transportation of all kinds. No one considers it to be “free”, and in fact drivers subsidise everything else.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#77

Post by doikor »

ajuc wrote: post #34
TomMarius wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.

Biking in autumn is perfectly comfortable. You are just wearing more clothes (which you would wear anyway if you're outside). It's not like people never leave their houses in USA, right? Biking in the winter is fine too, as long as there's no snow (and the snow is usually only 1-2 months, depending on the location). And some people do drive in the winter too (but that is harder and most don't).

Actually biking in snow is fine too as long as there isn’t too much of it. The real problems are around the melting point when everything melts a little bit during the day and three freezes over the night and thus you have to bike on ice. This can be fixed by studded tires but most don’t bother. Main issue for me for biking in the winter is the cold. Not really a problem anymore as I moved to Helsinki where it rarely is cold enough to be a problem.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#78

Post by claydavisss »

betterunix2 wrote: post #12
fredley wrote: post #2

Pedestrianisation works well in European cities, especially small ones. It's quite common here in the UK, often there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out. However this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even wit…

It took major redevelopment for many US cities to become car-centric, so I am not seeing why we could not do another redevelopment to create pedestrian-friendly cities.

It hasn't happened because most in the US don't need or even want to live in pedestrian focused cities.

Americans tend to live in detached single family homes.

Americans tend to want space between themselves and their neighbors.

Americans do not see their cars as liabilities.

Most people don't live in SF/NYC and/or don't read StrongTowns

Replacing American suburbia would cost $100 Trillion dollars. More suburbia is being created every day, far outpacing investment in "New Urbanism".

In America, when your city/suburb becomes blighted, you can move.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#79

Post by lloeki »

Freak_NL wrote: post #52
TomMarius wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.

Please send a note to the Dutch (and the Germans, the Danish, the French, the Belgians, …) to tell them to stop riding their bicycles in the midst of winter. In the past five years there was one day when I couldn't cycle to work due to black ice covering most of the roads, and even that resolved itself in the afternoon. Snow just means you need a bit more dexterity than usual. As for comfort; proper clothing means yo…

> black ice ... snow

The ultimate irony of the point attempted to be made is that people don't drive when ice or snow cover on the road (or suck at it, take undue risks, fail to, and ram into curbs/cars/people).

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#80

Post by dathinab »

I thing "banning" cars in a Town/City work well for smaller cities, through you still might want to have some time frame in which e.g. trucks can bring new goods to super markets, fire fighter etc.

For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses, you just need to deploy enough of them with a good rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).

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