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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

#331

Post by skh »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #297
Avalaxy wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fair comparison though. Yes, the salary is lower, but you can free or almost free healthcare, you get many vacation days, you get vacation money (at least in the netherlands), you get paid time off when sick, more job stability, unemployment benefits, etc.

The healthcare argument isn't really that compelling, because most white-collar professionals in the USA have pretty good health insurance through their work. The extra time off is excellent, but you can put a dollar value on it and it doesn't come close to adding up to the paycut. You also pay higher taxes, and the cost for other goods and services (food for example) is often higher. Disposable income for a senior d…

It goes beyond these things. You get a quality of life enhancement by being in a more community centric environment. Less pressure overall. No one wonders if there is something wrong with you when you take 3 weeks off in a row. Being able to walk to the bakery, grocery store, and having better access to quality food. The fruit in the U.S. is quite bland compared to what you get in Europe. Having people out and about makes a place worth living in. The focus on the financial aspect is a very American trait. The overall quality of life is just better in Europe. Being able to take a train to a nice destination is great. Being able to walk from one village to the next is awesome. Going to a lake that isn’t fenced off due to private property obscuring access to the shore is wonderful.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#332

Post by refurb »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #277
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…

This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but western Europeans own more cars per capita than Americans: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/08/it... Your overall point is correct about how car-centric cities are in the USA vs Europe, but just wanted to point this out.

For all this talk of how the US is so car-centric, every European city I've visited is absolutely packed with cars and the parking is worse than SF.

Based on how people talk about the EU, I thought it would be different, but it looks about the same as the US to me.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#333

Post by astura »

tjr225 wrote: post #305
yodsanklai wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have also a good public transportation system in New York. There are many big cities with much worse traffic than NYC but there are simply no alternatives to cars.

I believe the poster was making a joke :P

It's a paraphrasing a joke from Futurama[1]. That joke itself being a play on a classic "Yogi-isms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#%22Yogi-isms%22

>On why he no longer went to Rigazzi's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

[1] https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:The_Lesser_of_Two_Evils

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#334

Post by tokyodude »

I grew up in the suburbs in Los Angeles. I lived on a cul de sac. Think the family house in ET. We played in the street all the time. That seems pretty normal for suburbia isn't it? I would ride around the block or over to the next cul-de-sac from like 4yrs old.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#335

Post by briandear »

the_gastropod wrote: post #313
rimliu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about speed it is about freedom.

Marketers for cigarettes [1], gogurt, lunchables, cell service, guns, etc. make similar claims. It doesn't make it true. Cars bring convenience, sure. But freedom ? Not owning a car, I've never lost sleep worrying that someone was breaking into my car, I pay no car insurance, no gas, no car maintenance, never pay for toll roads, never get road rage, never sit in traffic. I feel significantly more free today than I ev…

When you have to evacuate, how much freedom do you have then? Going to rely on someone like Ray Nagin to drive you in a school bus?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#336

Post by ummonk »

Urbanists who hate cars like to tear down freeways. E.g. in SF they tore down the Embarcadero and Central freeways, instead of repairing and extending them. This of course forces more cars onto the streets, making life worse for everyone.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#337

Post by NPMaxwell »

crikli wrote: post #248
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…

"But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society." Don't assume that every place is like the place you know. Visit the US, particularly the Midwest, and you'll come to understand why privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are the only solution to this particular transportation problem. The major cities are too dispersed with countle…

There is a huge difference between cities that have done most of their growth after 1940, when cars have been common, and cities that developed their physical structures before the car. The car-oriented physical structure has to be retrofitted for walking -- streets narrowed or replaced with housing, shopping, and offices.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#338

Post by closeparen »

sunshinelackof wrote: post #329

As a kid in the early '90s the corner market, grocery store, schools from elementary to high, both jobs I had, and park were all within a 10 minute walk -- and that was in the suburbs. Cars don't need to be a requirement for daily life even in the suburbs it just requires good planning or planning at all.

It’s expected that suburbs are walkable for children and maybe even stay-at-home parents, but working members of the household usually drive to work and take the family to activities (restaurants, youth sports, shopping, other adventures) outside the walkable bubble.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#339

Post by wott »

simias wrote: post #120
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berlin is the most car friendly city in Germany, both east and west (and the united city) spent a lot of money on car friendly streets - and still is. It's funny that the German political party SPD which is responsible for most of this now wants to rebrand itself as bicycle friendly. But the largest sausage producer in Germany is now also the largesg vegan 'meat' producer. And soon pigs will fly.

Times change and mentalities with them. I think many European cities had a "cars everywhere" mentality during the post-WWII "renaissance" (maybe inspired by the USA) but then we realized that we hit a limit and started scaling things back starting sometime in the early 90's I'd say. Many projects from the 70's that were hailed as the future of transportation are now seen as huge warts we don't know how to replace now…

> Take the Boulevard Périphérique around Paris for instance: a nuisance for people living nearby, often gridlocked, super dangerous and atrociously ugly. People realized that this approach wasn't sustainable and now more and more work is done to undo it, that's a good thing IMO.

Do not worry, we still go on building ring roads and bypasses around cities. Either where there were not yet any, or farther from the centre and the existing ones where there are already existing ones.

- But this time, they will be enough far away from the city, and they will make traffic jam disappear, we promise.

- Yeah, that's what you said 40 years ago about the first ones, and then urbanisation exploded around them and they quickly got swallowed by the city and its suburbs...

Bus yes, it is true that the fad of building expressways ending right inside city centres has stopped quite a long time ago.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#340

Post by briandear »

oftenwrong wrote: post #197
jayess wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My medium-sized city made its main retail street pedestrian-only in the 80s. It quickly died and nearly all stores went out of business. The road was re-opened to traffic and now the area is booming. One size doesn't fit all. What is your personal preference may not be others' prefereces. Making a blanket statement like cars "are not effective in today's society" is profoundly off base.

There is an "activation energy" to walkability. If you drop pedestrian-only development into a car-dependent area, nobody is going to visit. Personal preference is largely a reflection of the status quo, and in the US the status quo heavily sculpted by federal policy that has favoured car-oriented development for 60+ years.

The weather has a lot to do with it. Most people advocating this car-free stuff never lived in New Orleans, Houston, or Miami from June until October.

The last thing I want to do is walk to a grocery store and carry home food for a family in the 95 degree heat and 95% humidity.

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