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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

#621

Post by bogomipz »

Razengan wrote: post #593
bogomipz wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? You are still beholden to visa requirements to relocate permanently. How do you exercise your vote given that?

It’s not as easy as it should be, yet, but if you can get a job somewhere they would help you relocate, or you can look for places that offer residence via investment.

>"... or you can look for places that offer residence via investment.

Interesting, I know that the Netherlands has such a program, might you know any other? Thanks.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#622

Post by ced »

alkonaut wrote: post #273
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…

I left the city when we had kids, and the thing that drew me to suburbia is that kids can just roam around outside unattended, biking around, building tree houses etc. Basically it's centered around 2 themes 1) As a parent I don't want my kids outdoor time to be limited to the times I can follow them, and 2) The idea that since my childhood was happy, I should give my kids the same experience. I don't necessarily thi…

I use public transport for most of my needs (including commuting) and drive very few miles per year

As a city parent, every morning I walk with my kid to the daycare and have to cross traffic mostly from suburbanites whose kids are A-OK while they put my kid at risk on their way to work. Thank you for taking public transit!

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#623

Post by strongtown »

gaius wrote: post #69
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…

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…

Interestingly, most people don't need to do anything to build a new building. So far, I've only seen immediate neighbors show up to complain about their "view", which isn't a sufficient reason to prevent hundreds of apartments. Otherwise, people who live out in the 'burbs have to do zero to support density for those of us who want it. So who are the other people who need to change?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#624

Post by z0r »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #561
z0r wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is an attack on character and a bit disingenuous. If a rich person proposed a good idea, would we not listen to them because they are rich?

My point is that it is a lot easier to argue against cars when you make a good living and can afford the nicer parts of the city. When your choice is a crappy car commute or a nightmare commute via trains and public transit, and the places in your budget for you to live in don't have "cute restaurants" or "well groomed parks", things are not so cut and dry. Cars improve quality of life for many people and it's downright myopic and classist to say they ruin lives and cities.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#625

Post by rootusrootus »

ghaff wrote: post #584
the_clarence wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I meant, in the extreme case where a driver license is “needed”, you still don’t need to buy a car.

It's not "needed" to rent a car, it actually is needed. Buying/leasing a car versus combining traditional rentals, hourly rentals, and Uber/Lyft/taxis/etc. (plus other forms of transportation) is mostly an economic decision. But not having a license means that you don't have a lot of those options available to you. IOW, there's a big difference between not owning a car and not having the legal ability to drive a car.

I'm kinda curious, do rental rates change for people who own their own car versus people who just have a license? I mean, you definitely have to buy the insurance coverage then, but is that coverage itself more expensive because it's assumed you're not going to be quite as good a driver as someone who does it every day?

Edit: quick google search says some companies might refuse you, but you should be able to pay $15 or so extra per day to get full liability and comprehensive coverage if you have no insurance of your own already. And check your credit card because some of them have limited built-in coverage you can leverage.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#626

Post by ajmurmann »

topmonk wrote: post #615
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder, when/if autonomous taxis come about will the whole attitude of catering to cars over than pedestrians will cease. If people don't have cars, parking won't be a problem, and walking from one store to another rather than paying for a taxi would become preferable. Then more people would have the awful experience of walking half a mile through a giant paved parking lot which would motivate people to change it.

I'm worried that the opposite will become true. Autonomous taxis will drastically reduce the cost of taking a car ride. The benefit though might be that we get rid of the parking lots since a much higher percentage of total cars should be made up of vehicles that are shared and those shared vehicles should have much higher utilization than personal cars.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#627

Post by ajmurmann »

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…

Or we could do what they do in the Netherlands and physically separate bikes.

Edit: phone auto-"correct"

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#628

Post by jaysonelliot »

GijsjanB wrote: post #452
jaysonelliot wrote: post #425

The one question I have, that I haven't seen answered in the article or elsewhere, is how deliveries are handled. Presumably shops and businesses in a car-free city need to get truckloads of goods or equipment moved in and out on a regular basis. How is it done? I've always loved the idea of being able to live in a car-free city, but never quite understood how certain things would work, including garbage collection,…

Where I live, the municipality is seriously looking into an out of the city distribution centre with (smaller, electric) vehicles for supplying the city centre. That doesn't make it free of cars, but it will be more efficient (not every shop needs their own supply truck, supplies can be shared).

Which city is that?

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#629

Post by ajmurmann »

guelo wrote: post #523
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…

Disagree, slow the cars down. I've seen good results with "road diets" where 4-lane roads are converted to two lanes for cars and more space for bike lanes and center turning lanes. Also, adding pedestrian activated lights to stop cars.

Why do we need to slow down and even stop cars if we in your proposal even have a dedicated bike lane? Why not put up a small barrier between cars and bikes and have everyone go their own way? Speed limits on the US already are insanely slow compared to most of Europe and the bike thing seems to work better their regardless. We need more diverse infrastructure for different modes of transportation. I want trains that go 200mp/h, dedicated bike routes, and smaller dedicated roads for cars that are better organized with much higher speed limits and walkable city centers where pedestrians can feel safe from cars AND bicyclists. Sounds crazy but works in parts of Europe.

Re: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

#630

Post by ajmurmann »

jchrisa wrote: post #596
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…

You must live in America. Here in Portland, the bike are winning out and things like a city-wide 20mph speed limit are taking hold. It's faster to get across town on an ebike than in a car, because all the drivers are stuck in traffic that the bikes rarely see because they use different streets. It's far from perfect but pockets of success like this prove the investment is worth it. If you are interested in a ROI bas…

Totally agree with the sprawl issue, but I cannot see why we have to make one more of transportation worse to make another better. Not everyone can ride a bike. Either because of their physical ability or because of the for they'd need to travel. Europe has better bike lanes and higher speed limits for cars. We can have our cake and eat it too. Let's get rid of the sprawl, add some decent public transit and prohibit cars in city centers and we get somewhere. The sprawl that's subsidised by everyone is the root of all Urban planning problems in the US.
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