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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

#411

Post by mschuetz »

nrjames wrote: post #100

Raleigh converted Fayetteville Street to pedestrian only back in 1977. It ended up killing all of the businesses there. https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/ The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy: https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-... I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedes…

As a counter example, Vienna largely converted its second major shopping street, Mariahilfer Straße, to a mostly pedestrian + bike zone, with parts of it also shared space with cars, though they do not have priority over pedestrians. Gets very crowded during core shopping hours, so much that biking there is rather difficult. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Wien_07_...

First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only.

https://www.streifzugmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AM...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Vienna%2...

I'm looking forward to more streets getting closed off to cars. Way too much space is reserved for cars already.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#412

Post by psalminen »

claydavisss wrote: post #133
dagw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But in the US, it is the (vast) minority who wants to live a pedestrian lifestyle. If you look around the US you will see that even today, investment in suburbia far outpaces investment in "urbanism". Trucks and SUVs are slowly cannibalizing sedan sales in the US. So not only do people like driving, the vehicles they tend to purchase are increasing in size. If you are suggesting that society somehow prioritizes the 0…

Can you back up any of these claims?

Google reports the population of the US at 325.7 million, and the population of New York City at 8.54 million. So, your "0.3%" is a tenth of the population of one urban core.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#413

Post by komali2 »

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.

I take slight issue with that - for example, what prohibition on males was there when women were given the right to vote? I suppose one could argue the male vote was diluted but realistically no pain would be felt.

I say this because oftentimes for social services arguments, conservatives will ask me "well who's gonna pay for it," which I can often answer with "literally nobody. You are generating property value for yourself by housing homeless / increasing the value of your currency by educating disenfranchised youth / whatever."

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#414

Post by kristjansson »

davidw wrote: post #373
nrjames wrote: post #100

Raleigh converted Fayetteville Street to pedestrian only back in 1977. It ended up killing all of the businesses there. https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/ The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy: https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-... I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedes…

The town I'm from, Eugene, Oregon, did this too. They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise. Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolut…

There’s something to be said for joint car/pedestrian spaces as a permanent situation. Pike St outside of Pike Place market and Hanover St in the North End of Boston come to mind. Both are nominally streets, and cars attempt to drive them, but the speeds are slow enough, and there are enough pedestrians that both are on relatively equal footing. Cars are cautious of the pedestrians, and pedestrians weave around the cars, everyone has their choice of mode of transport.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#415

Post by yodsanklai »

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

Since when do we make jokes on HN :)

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#416

Post by GauntletWizard »

wahern wrote: post #316
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…

This is why I like theme parks.[1] It's sad because in America we've largely relegated what should be a normal living environment to fascimiles of imaginary places. Actually, I live in San Francisco and the "downtowns" of each neighborhood do allow kids some freedom away from their parents (e.g. to dart in and out of stores and restaurants without waiting for the parent), but it's limited to a single block unless you…

The area your talking about, where there's little places where kids can play: it's called the Suburbs. Growing up in the suburbs, cars went slow enough that we could play in the street. The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to stop. There's not the density of little shops that you might find in SF, but as a kid you don't need that density (I don't need it as an adult; the suburbs I live in have a nice downtown, but if I need serious shopping, I have Amazon)

Suburbs, much reviled here, are the answer to all of the density problems that people are complaining about. Mass transit works with commuter rail. There's no argument except prestige to stay in the city.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#417

Post by amatecha »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #416
wahern wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like theme parks.[1] It's sad because in America we've largely relegated what should be a normal living environment to fascimiles of imaginary places. Actually, I live in San Francisco and the "downtowns" of each neighborhood do allow kids some freedom away from their parents (e.g. to dart in and out of stores and restaurants without waiting for the parent), but it's limited to a single block unless you…

The area your talking about, where there's little places where kids can play: it's called the Suburbs. Growing up in the suburbs, cars went slow enough that we could play in the street. The neighborhood grocery was about two miles away and we could walk or ride our bikes, and we had plenty of friends houses along the route should we need to stop. There's not the density of little shops that you might find in SF, but…

+1, grew up in the suburbs (which are regularly the butt of jokes in "the city"), actually explored all around town with my friends without fear of being run over or really any other problem endemic to high-density living. Plus, the older I get the less I appreciate a dense city, and realize just how unnatural and problematic that kind of living is.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#418

Post by gaius »

Shorel wrote: post #229
gaius wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society For people with a very limited lifestyle restricted to a few city blocks perhaps this is true. But the majority of people do not live that way and have use cases for cars that you have not considered in your analysis. change always requires some sacrifice, By other people, funnily eno…

It's good to have a car and use it for long trips - or whenever you want to. It is not good to need a car and having to use it every day for several hours.

Indeed - in fact that is exactly what I do. Walk/train to work, drive to the hills or the coast at weekends. What I am responding to above is the assertion “I don’t need a car myself therefore no one should be allowed to have one”.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#419

Post by breatheoften »

Its insane to me how large space-wise small towns in the us (Oregon in mind as I write this) are — with a huge percentage of the real estate devoted to parking lots. Even setting aside the traffic, it’s silly to walk across these towns because businesses are separated from each other by massive parking lots.

The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the major highway which has speed limits within the town but still sees so much traffic as to be very dangerous for pedestrians.

These towns need the commercial visitors brought by the highway to survive — but the design common in Europe for this scenario is so much better. There will be a sign for an exit off the main road for the “city center” exit — there will be a single parking lot for the city center, and then comfortable walking distance to the businesses ... superior design.

Many small, especially old, towns in Europe have ancient road layouts that are too narrow and steep for cars within the town — which resulted in these car free designs for free. It’s beautiful. Parking is easy because there is only one place to do it on the outskirts — and then walk everywhere. There is no improvement for a small town to be designed otherwise in my opinion.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#420

Post by [deleted] »

adrianN wrote: post #264
gaius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reliably brings home a week worth of groceries, drives me 2hrs to meet family, and occasionally delivers tools and materials to various points. All that on the cheap, and with easily calculable costs All the talk of banning cars seems to come from people so privileged that other people invisibly provide all the services of the road network to them, delivering their stuff and so on. I mean if a person’s entire life is…

You can be in favor for banning personal use vehicles without banning delivery and ambulances. And as you'll note the city in the article only banned cars in the city center, so talking about an hour outside of London is not relevant. If London banned cars in the city center you could drive to the closest rail station at the border of the exclusion zone and take public transport from there.

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