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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

#491

Post by anoplus »

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…

Its amazing how divided Israel culture is yet the idea of having no cars for one day is totally embraced by anyone. Gives me a feeling of how polluted my daily life is with noise and gas.

Fun fact: today is Yom Kippur.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#492

Post by symlinkk »

mywittyname wrote: post #457
lexs wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually get anything out of that 50% more pay? Thinking about higher rent, healthcare etc.

Absolutely. Only a few cities in the USA are expensive on an international level. The cost of living in most regions of the USA is so incredibly low that a decent programmer has a shot of having a paid off house & car, no student loans, and $100k or so retirement account by the age of 30 (assuming graduating college @22). Where I live, the median house price is about $170k USD (avg rent is just under $900/mo) and the…

Where do you live?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#493

Post by mixmastamyk »

wool_gather wrote: post #461
electricslpnsld wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. I commuted by bike for two years or so in Po…

Sometimes they're a bit overly quote courteous unquote -- stopping unexpectedly to let you cross, holding up traffic behind them, or waiting too long to turn onto the road you're on so that they end up behind you when they could have easily gone in front and been on their merry way, etc. Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock b…

Peeve: these folks often don't realize there are other sides/lanes of traffic that they aren't able to stop. So the pedestrian still can't cross because of other lanes, but now the good Samaritan is just holding up traffic and slowing everyone down. Including the pedestrian who would normally wait for traffic to clear.

Paradoxically, in these encounters I prefer the "rude" drivers that get out of the way as quickly as possible.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#494

Post by gascan »

corndoge wrote: post #466
sunshinelackof wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. A solution is to level the planes of separatio…

Cyclists really don't belong on the road. It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit. I think this is because we conflate the benefits of cycling and the value of making our public infrastructure amenable to cycling with the opinion that cyclists should share highways with cars. It's…

If we insisted bicycles only be allowed on dedicated bicycle tracks, there would be no track because there would be no bicycles (because there was no track!)

As a bicyclist, I would love to have a dedicated network of bicycle track all over town. But it doesn't exist, yet.

Also, this is way fuzzier than you present. There's little conflict between cars and bikes on lightly traveled, spacious suburban streets or sleepy neighborhood county roads. Even on collectors & minor arterials, on an e-bike I travel about the same speed as a slow car.

Speed delta is not an incorrect observation, but varies in significance. In terms of priorities, highways are certainly top candidates for the first dedicated bike tracks.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#495

Post by 3pt14159 »

z0r wrote: post #394
3pt14159 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how it is outside of Canada, but here in Toronto what drives me insane is that Cities are essentially completely beholden to the province and it makes everything worse. Something simple like setting up a toll to use city streets to reduce congestion is completely off the table. We end up highly taxing corporate zoned housing to try to kinda indirectly tax the work place of the suburbanites that are makin…

"Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park." No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants…

I'm not arguing everyone should live in huge, loud cities. You can still have sleepy towns with trains. I'm arguing that cars ruin lives and cities.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#496

Post by z0r »

3pt14159 wrote: post #495
z0r wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of watching TV at night alone at home people could walk over to their friends place or go out to a cute restaurant or well groomed park." No thank you. As much as I like my home town, I don't want to pay a fortune (that could buy a castle or another absurdly large property elsewhere) for a crappy house or condo in the densest part of Toronto and never enjoy personal peace and quiet again. Not everyone wants…

I'm not arguing everyone should live in huge, loud cities. You can still have sleepy towns with trains. I'm arguing that cars ruin lives and cities.

I think it's mostly those who are better off than average who argue against cars. No other comment from me.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#497

Post by fuzzywalrus »

sunshinelackof wrote: post #431
breatheoften wrote: post #419

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 ma…

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. A solution is to level the planes of separatio…

As someone who lived in Eugene and now PDX, the model I advocate is the wagon spoke. You need to ferret the people between the large spaces as the population density is that of the Ukraine which presents little in the way of the geographic challenges we have here. Get people to the perimeters and in parking garages and then make it so they're able to use alternative transport. We won't be building fast rail between Portland, Salem and Eugene but we can certainly make it so you limit the amount of driving you need to perform.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#498

Post by gascan »

autokad wrote: post #473
corndoge wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyclists really don't belong on the road. It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit. I think this is because we conflate the benefits of cycling and the value of making our public infrastructure amenable to cycling with the opinion that cyclists should share highways with cars. It's…

definitely agree. in fact, one of the biggest dangers of accidents is difference in speed on the roads. Its my understanding that this is one of the primary reasons for a speed limit (note if you drive too slow you also get a ticket), which is to limit the variance of speed.

Do you have a source for that? I had always understood the speed limit as simply being an objective, statutory codification of the subjective notion of "appropriate maximum speed for conditions"

Which fits well with dynamic speed limits cropping up in places that get regular bad weather

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#499

Post by Nasrudith »

jorgemf wrote: post #257
pron wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable. Yes, but there's also a geographical difference. Countries in Europe are rather small, and a long history has restricted some land use. In many areas of the US land was almost a non-issue, so people settled more sparsely, and even cities became sprawls (e.g. Houston, LA).

Free resources shouldn't be an excuse to use them wisely. I get your point, but it is not a good reason why we cannot do things better.

Resources are optimized relative to their current values. Medieval construction was often labor intensive because it was the cheap part compared to materials. City housing got disrupted by a new technology, cars that made additional cheap real estate more available for use.

Central planning can theoretically avoid some growth pitfalls "skipping to the end" but in practice it has often had limited success beyond zoning promoting the obvious - high traffic areas are good for retail and often annoyance to residents. I am no expert but it seems predictive design performs best with planning.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#500

Post by PascLeRasc »

corndoge wrote: post #466
sunshinelackof wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. A solution is to level the planes of separatio…

Cyclists really don't belong on the road. It's such an odd collective viewpoint that a vehicle which virtually always travels far below the speed limit should be allowed alongside vehicles that travel at the speed limit. I think this is because we conflate the benefits of cycling and the value of making our public infrastructure amenable to cycling with the opinion that cyclists should share highways with cars. It's…

In hindsight, maybe training a neural network on Betsy DeVos was a bad idea.
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