561–570 of 699 posts
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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.
- Truck delivery to businesses such as large stores/shopping malls
- Ambulance, police car services
- Disabled/old people wanting to move around
If you allow any or all of above, you still need roads for vehicles only, traffic lights etc, right?
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It seems that the city in this article strikes a great balance - parking on the periphery for people who commute in, but the city center is car-free. The same could work for the US midwest. You drive to the edge of Chicago and then take an (improved) subway in, for example.
Why would a commuter want to drive only to connect to a subway?
You would then want to drive as far as you can, park, and take the alternative in.
It's made for people that don't live walking distance from a train/bus line, but also don't want to deal with the traffic/cost/overall hassle of going by car end-to-end.
There are 80 Park‑n‑Rides throughout the my metro area.
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how about they just charge you really high tolls and congestion tax instead? ;)
Thereby driving up demand for living downtown, further driving up rent? Excellent solution.
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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.
Do NYC subway stops all have functioning elevators yet? If not, then it’s not a “good” system. It’s a good system for single adults carrying their Manhattan Portage bag. Not so good for kids in strollers, carrying groceries for a family, people in wheelchairs, elderly with difficulties on stairs. It’s not a “good” system at all. Zurich’s trams — now that is a good system.
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…
Being able to drive places feels much more like freedom to me than having to walk everywhere. As a kid I literally never walked into the road because I knew it was dangerous, so maybe that's just a problem of communicating the risk properly.
To obtain this freedom you must : 1. Get a license and learn to drive 2. Buy or lease a large, rarely utilised machine 3. Keep it maintained 4. Keep it fuelled 5. Ensure your tax dollars are spent on enormous infrastructure projects 6. Continue paying for the maintenance of said infrastructure 7. Undergo the significant risk of getting in a vehicle, and impose higher risks on all those around you 8. Pollute the air around you with fumes 9. Warp the development of all living spaces around you to suit your convenience, regardless of cost or benefit
Your freedom sounds like my tyranny.
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I love small walkable shopping centers that are organically grown over decades that mix residential, commercial, and retail uses. I live in such an area and it is great, but, if society wants to find a way to move to a better human scale constructed landscapes, it might be a good idea to stop referring to people in cars as non-human inhabited objects and use a more human focus word like motorist. We use pedestrian fo…
Cars are typically utilized under 5% of the time. A car most of the time is a non-human inhabited object that is wasting a lot of space
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I’m not so sure. How much land would you need to be completely isolated, no other houses in sight? A square mile? More if you live high on a hill (which many people would like to do). Wikipedia says the area of the USA is only 3,794,100 square miles, so there aren’t very many square-mile patches to hand out compared to the size of the population.
If you were to distribute all people in the US uniformly, everybody would have about four soccer fields of space. If you distributed them over the forest area of the US everybody would have about one soccer field of space. In either case if you account for yards and access roads you wouldn't have what I'd call pristine woods anymore. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+%2F+population+densi...
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>>> Life in the Spanish city that banned cars >> ban cars > unrealistic statements You, sir, are funny.
The United States is not Spain. Nitpick all you want - the vast majority of populated places in the US will never ban cars, at least for the foreseeable future.
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What really amazes me is the creation of new "Shopping Centres" - miles and miles of independent stores and nothing between them but parking lots. They took the mall and scaled it up so everyone gets a store, and now if I want to go to two places I have to actually drive from one to the other because it's nothing but parking lots and pedestrian hostile roads separating them - sometimes it's a two minute drive, but th…
This is precisely what shines so much in Pontevedra (the city featured in the article) and e.g. Oviedo (another Spanish city that aggressively adopted this policy in 1991). Local shopping benefited so much from banning cars downtown. Little specialty shops and cafes blossomed vs suburban malls. Sadly, I think this is only easy to accomplish in mid-sized densely-populated cities ( Paradoxically, shopping associations…