I feel really bad for the children who seem to grow up in the backseat of some monstrous luxury SUV. I can't imagine it leads to the best types of citizens.
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What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
61–70 of 241 posts
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
In America driving at 6 km/h (3.7mph) in a parking lot would induce road rage in other drivers. Trying to make roads with a 6 km/h speed limit would be political suicide for any politician that recommended it.
that's an absurd speed. i literally cannot go that slow in my car without lugging the engine or slipping the clutch the whole way. no thanks.
I could put my car in neutral, open up the door and push my car that fast.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#63I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infrastructure was good enough/I had a bike. In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main a…
> Fußgängerzone
We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”.
You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well.
And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#64According to Richard Branson “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” The same goes for cities. Take care of the citizens, and the citizens will take care of business.
Removing parking may be bad for local shops in the short run, but good for the citizens and the city in the long run.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you increase the enforcement of distracted driving?
Cameras overhead. There is a trial to catch drivers on their phones in Sydney IIRC. Edit: found it https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/17/drive...
in general I prefer not to lobby the government for even more surveillance, but maybe enforcement of phone use while driving is an acceptable situation. by the way, is "distracted driving" generally understood to mean "using a phone inappropriately while driving"? I took it to mean a much broader set of things that might distract a driver, which would require more invasive techniques to detect.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#66I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infrastructure was good enough/I had a bike. In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main a…
> Fußgängerzone We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”. You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If…
They're both Germanic languages! Learning Norwegian definitely helped me brush up on my German for free - at least, reading and to a lesser extent speaking.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative to underground is 'at the back'. For example you can have a car free shopping street where cars can only park at the back sides of the shops.
Which quickly becomes the front for businesses advertising to passersby.
Those businesses would be foolish not to advertise on both sides. There is a kind of strip mall in Marina del Rey, CA that advertises businesses on the back entrances for cars driving by on busy Lincoln Blvd (with some parking back there, too), but has the main entrances on a pedestrian-facing side away from Lincoln.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#68I don’t get why cities are built around cars. As much as I love to jump into my car right outside my house, I’d love it even more when there was no car sound in the streets and children could safely walk everywhere. In densely populated cities cars should be banned outside of major roads
This was brought up in Adam Ruins Everything, and his Automotive episode was so misleading that I don't trust anything he says. >I don’t get why cities are built around cars. Sure there is a fantasy that we could have cities that don't require roads. However our modern 5,000,000 population Metro areas wouldnt exist. Instead housing prices would skyrocket, and the lowest income people would be forced to live in rural…
You assume the issue is binary: cars or no cars. Nobody is asking for no cars. We want less cars.
Right now, cars are first class citizens in every American city. Motorists get what they want, and walkers, cyclists, and transport users get what's left over.
It doesn't have to be that way. European cities get by fine without cars in city centers.
Do you really need a car to get to work in midtown Manhattan? Why are the 2 subway systems with stops every 5th block, 3 rail systems, and 2 bus systems that serve it not good enough? Do you really need 6 car lanes on 6th Ave while cyclists fear for their lives in the traffic and pedestrians smoosh on the sidewalks?
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#69I don’t get why cities are built around cars. As much as I love to jump into my car right outside my house, I’d love it even more when there was no car sound in the streets and children could safely walk everywhere. In densely populated cities cars should be banned outside of major roads
Building a city around cars means building it around people who live far away. The people who live out in the suburbs and commute in get a lot more out of the roads than the people who are a block away from every place they need to go.
Aka, the superwealthy.
Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars
#70I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infrastructure was good enough/I had a bike. In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main a…
This was tried some places in the US in the part. Unfortunately most times they failed. Unable to attract enough people, they felt even less alive than the streets and entered a cycle a of death. However there are some signs of a rebirth: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_...