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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

#401

Post by njarboe »

enriquto wrote: post #310
francisofascii wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Walking with young kids is so stressful. All that kids want to do is run ahead, and I keep having to yell at them to stop, wait. You can never be at ease.

A city with fast cars running around is the least human-friendly environment that we have built on purpose. People often complain about hostile or "anti-human" architecture [1], but those are silly details. The sad tragedy is building the whole city around the needs of cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

I don't think that cars vote or really have any agency (yet). Maybe if people, who think that people who emphasize the use cars have been in charge of building cities for too long, used a word like motorist that recognized the humanity of car users, you might find less resistance to your ideas. Being referred to as an inanimate object is an quite an "othering".

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#402

Post by HillaryBriss »

wahern wrote: post #344
Barjak wrote: post #287

>People don’t like being told they can’t drive wherever they want, but Lores says that while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges. This strikes me as the fundamental issue.

Modern discourse about "rights" has become twisted. Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. A society needs to choose its rights wisely lest the unintended consequences result in less overall freedom. In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximati…

> Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition.

In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#403

Post by andys627 »

always_good wrote: post #377
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.

When people ask me why I like living in Mexico, this is one of the main reasons: The other week I walked around my neighborhood in Guadalajara to do some errands. I got my knives sharpened, picked up my repaired shoes from the cobbler, some fried pumpkin seeds from the seed guy, some meat from the butcher, and then some tacos of course. All within two blocks.

Latin America absolutely destroys the US in urbanism

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#404

Post by iaresee »

We were living in downtown Toronto during [the Northeast blackout of 2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). It was amazing to experience the city, for several days, without the usual crush of cars and trucks and busses on the roads. Really magic couple of days I'll never forget.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#405

Post by tomc1985 »

elcapitan wrote: post #126

One of the most interesting experiences in my life was visiting Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur. On that day all car traffic is prohibited (also TV stations are offline etc). It was absolutely amazing. Tel Aviv is a city with large roads and usually extremely busy. On that day, cyclists ride over the highway, kids play on the streets. I never felt that directly before how invasive the normal car situation is. Here's a photo h…

Reminds me of walking the Bijlmermeer near HVA in Amsterdam on a Sunday morning. No cars, no people, no traffic, absolutely empty streets. The only sound was that of the wind streaming through steel canyons, and my footsteps. A positively divine experience

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#406

Post by collyw »

strictnein wrote: post #247
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 an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. You're really looking at this from a very narrow mindset. It isn't going into the city that a lot of Americans really want and need cars, it's heading out of the city. This may be shocking to people with a European upbringing, but when you have a vast country with lots of open…

Do you honestly think we can't do that in Europe?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#407

Post by padthai »

Razengan wrote: post #295
skh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived for a while in Berlin. Coming back to the U.S. the first thing I noticed were too many billboards and ugly parking lots. Each store has its own parking lot. Largely underused. No nice paths to traverse the bleak endless parking lot landscape. It’s ugly and wasteful. It’s hostile to pedestrians and discourages people from going outside to just wander. Even in relatively walkable communities like the one I live…

> I wish I could move to Europe permanently. This is the "Vote with your wallet" at the international civic level. It may not have been very convenient or practical in the past but it seems to be becoming an increasingly accessible option, at least for first-world people. Move to the places whose ideals align with yours, and help them develop those, if you can't convince your current home to adopt them.

There is already a well known expression for this in European languages "Voting with their feet":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_voting

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#408

Post by etiennemarcel »

wott wrote: post #339
simias wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What Paris could have looked like if Pompidou had his way in the 70s: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_autoroutier_pour_Paris

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#409

Post by asveikau »

deelowe wrote: post #221
Sharlin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many suburbanites, however, have the entitled attitude that cities should accommodate their car trips to dense areas at the expense of people actually living there. Often their mindset is that cities are strictly where people go instead of where people live . In the US this mentality is exarcebated by the white flight and the decay of inner cities, but does also exist in Europe.

As one of these so called "white flight" people, I can't describe how much such statements frustrate me. I didn't move from the city because I'm a racist or don't want to be around people of color. I don't want to be around people period . Living in the city stresses me out. The constant noise, the issues with drunk people randomly knocking on my door at 2am, the couple of times I woke up to people fighting in the pa…

I think you may be neglecting the extent to which you are describing the self-reenforcing downsides of "post white flight" urbanism. Given the age demographics of HN, it's more likely than not that the city life you (or any of us) experienced was well after white flight ran its course, with consequent effects on crime and noise in cities. If you imagine a world in which the people who wanted quiet never left, the picture of urbanism looks a bit different. If you read about American life in pre-war cities, or the late 19th century, urban areas were a place where all types of people lived, including families, the elderly, and people who seek calm and quiet.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#410

Post by komali2 »

technofiend wrote: post #309
sebringj wrote: post #279

I don't know why this didn't occur to me but in San Juan Capistrano, CA, I enjoy that place so much with my kids because of the fairly large area where cars have to have very slow speed limit or no cars allowed at all and pure walking which was far better even. There is such freedom allowing your children to laugh and play and walk on their own pace without worrying they'll be run over and having to strictly hold the…

There is a gated neighborhood of large, well appointed homes near Rice University in Houston.* They open up every once in a while for tours, particularly at Christmas. More than once kids or adults raised there have mentioned being able to just play in the street as one of their fondest memories of the place. In car-centric Houston their experience is rare if not exactly unique. *1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha…

Ex-Houstonian here: down there we worship and give sacrifice to the motor gods. We'll build massive multi million dollar freeway interchanges[0] as monument to our gods.

No place for busses. Our attempt at public transit was a slow tram that runs up and down main street through dozens of intersections, pushing any hapless motorist not expecting a train on the fucking road it encounters out of the way.

So when rice closes off the gates, it is like a little paradise. I disagree that it's "not unique," I can't think of a single other place in tbe entirety of Houston (a city so wide that it can take two hours to drive across if you go corner to corner, in non-rush-hour) where you get to experience that.

[0]https://goo.gl/images/ZYJfEo

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