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What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

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Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#101

Post by alistairSH »

stefan_ wrote: post #78
alistairSH wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn’t have anything similar, at least not normally. Roads are almost always wider than needed, I assume because it feels safer, but really just makes people drive faster. Any redesign that deprioritizes cars in any way (even if it just appears to do so) is ridiculed and fought against.

In a lot of cases, US roads are wider than needed because the fire department wants to continue riding the 30s style fire engines you know from the kids books to their missions, 99.9% of which do not involve fire. And the tradeoff is that a lot more people die from vehicular crashes than ever would to fires. It's stupidity at work, and government committees are the environment that fosters it.

I'm sure it's a bit of a circular problem. Fire dept has big trucks, so roads are built wide, so fire dept buys more big trucks, so more wide roads are built, etc. It's a hard cycle to break, even if everybody agrees it's the right thing to do.

But, yeah, the US really does suffer from a "bigger is better" complex. There are no small fire trucks for tight areas. Ambulances are all mega-sized, built on heavy commercial truck chassis. Personal vehicles are huge - SUVs and dually pickup trucks instead of sedans and hatchbacks.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#102

Post by alistairSH »

glangdale wrote: post #57
gnulinux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha you're underestimating Boston drivers. Out of all the places I lived in my life (SF, Berlin, Paris) drivers in Boston drive by far the fastest. Streets being narrow doesn't make people drive slower, instead it makes people drive more aggressive which puts stress on drivers, bikers and pedestrians alike.

Yeah, we have these streets here that are "2 way but only one at a time". So you have to get on it and go the whole length of a block or more. Amazingly this results in more perverse incentives...

Interesting, my family's hometown in the UK (Blairgowrie, Scotland) is full of those types of streets. And with street-side parking, the open lane can vary. It doesn't seem to be a problem - people are used to it. Granted, small farming town vs big city, but still, there's no fundamental reason people should suddenly turn into arseholes just because the streets are narrow.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#103

Post by ip26 »

baxtr wrote: post #28

I 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

I figure the best way to understand it is as an incremental set of small choices that each seemed like a good idea at the time. Fundamentally people like traveling in cars, and hate traffic. These two things pretty easily make the case as the underlying principals of everything driving car-centered city design today- parking minimums, wider & wider roads, cannibalizing trolley track, marginalization of pedestrian & bicyclists, etc. Then you begin to get second order effects- because everyone drives, things like storefront design codes are just inherently designed for the gaze of the automobile driver. (That one was an eye-opener for some of the subtle effects of car-centric worldview)

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#104

Post by leetcrew »

clairity wrote: post #84
leetcrew wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

agreed that state-sponsored surveillance isn’t a great option. but there are companies creating in-car cameras/sensors combined with machine learning to identify distracted driving of all sorts (not just phone use). some insurance companies will lower rates for less distracted driving, for example (not that this is a great solution either). even just posting a distracted driving rating on your car as you drive might…

> but there are companies creating in-car cameras/sensors combined with machine learning to identify distracted driving of all sorts (not just phone use). some insurance companies will lower rates for less distracted driving, for example (not that this is a great solution either).

while not perfect, I am actually a fan of this approach. in my ideal world, the government only administers sanctions to a citizen when they cause material harm to another person. let the insurance companies be on the hook (and possibly require the purchase of such insurance) for the actual penalties and have them calculate the risk. then excessively risky behaviors become de facto illegal because the insurance payments are not economic.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#105

Post by Scott_Sanderson »

reaperducer wrote: post #60
kingo55 wrote: post #23

I live in St Kilda, Australia and our council recently changed one of our iconic streets to almost exclusively be for pedestrians and trams. Businesses protested for months about potential lost business, however as a resident I feel so much safer walking down the street. It feels like foot traffic has increased there, too. It's such an improvement. I also like to think tunnels to apartment buildings could help us tak…

our council recently changed one of our iconic streets to almost exclusively be for pedestrians and trams. For whatever it's worth, Chicago tried both of these things, and they didn't work out. The main shopping drag, State Street, was pedestrianized in 1979. You can see it for a few seconds in the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation . It didn't work. It was re-opened to traffic in 1996, and is now far more vi…

The Chicago State St. experiment was not a good pedestrian zone. It was more like a smelly bus depot. Chicago has more than enough density to make a good ped zone work. But this is 'murica, which was built by the pilgrims for cars, not walking.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#106

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

darkerside wrote: post #72
thomasahle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

I haven't been to Times Square in a while, but I have to assume that's a good example of a busy pedestrian zone in America.

Times square is basically just a tourist trap and not representative of a commercial zone that serves the local residential population. Locals are only there because of the transit access.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#107

Post by leetcrew »

tom_ wrote: post #98
leetcrew wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The speed is not defined by a number: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... (comprehensible, though probably more poetic in the original German) It's not my place to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway: I expect you can get away with simply just driving as slowly as you can, assuming that isn't ridiculously faster than the 7km/h that is suggested. (My old automatic car (1.4L) would prob…

fluid-coupling automatics do have an advantage here, as they can essentially creep at any speed without causing undue stress to any of the vehicle's components, although you would need to use the brakes to go really slow.

when driving through complicated areas with lots of pedestrians (eg, parking lots), I usually travel at the lowest speed in 1st gear that puts the engine in a happy RPM range (as low as ~1200 in my car, maybe 1500 up a hill). this is definitely faster than a human can comfortably walk for a long time. if that's sufficiently slow, I guess I don't have any objections.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#108

Post by benc666 »

smallnamespace wrote: post #86
wenderen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And of course 'footganger' almost makes sense in English — 'gang' in the sense of a passage is preserved in 'gangplank', and modern 'gang' has the related sense of 'group of people who go together'.

In Afrikaans - spoken in ZA (south africa) - that is pretty much the actual word :) "voetganger"

"voet" - foot/feet "ganger" - someone who moves along using the former noun

The Latin Root is what connects many European languages.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#109

Post by dba7dba »

Few years ago I visited a large apartment complex about 30 minutes south of Seoul in South Korea. The complex has Dozens of 30+ stories high apartment buildings. Assuming 30 stories high, 8 units per floor, and 25 buildings, we are talking about 6000 units. The unit I visited had 4 bedrooms. Despite such a high concentration of population, the complex itself felt like it was in the country side.

The key factor was underground parking (resident and visitor), with entrance to the underground parking connecting directly with the road. Within the complex are streets for cars with sidewalks like normal street, but strictly for emergency vehicles and moving trucks.

As I walked around the complex day and night, I couldn't believe the peace and calm I sensed as there were no cars moving around me. I kept looking around as I crossed the street as a reflex, but there were no cars to worry about.

Re: What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars

#110

Post by lmm »

ip26 wrote: post #100
reaperducer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

our council recently changed one of our iconic streets to almost exclusively be for pedestrians and trams. For whatever it's worth, Chicago tried both of these things, and they didn't work out. The main shopping drag, State Street, was pedestrianized in 1979. You can see it for a few seconds in the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation . It didn't work. It was re-opened to traffic in 1996, and is now far more vi…

I mean, we can go back and forth with datapoints forever. The London Underground uses subterranean pedestrian tunnels, though personally I've only walked the one at Heathrow, at night. As it's the main way between terminals I expect it sees lots of foot traffic during the day.

Most of those pedestrian tunnels are pretty unpleasant; everyone I know regards them as a necessary evil at best. Tunnels are inherently not human-friendly spaces (limited natural light) so I don't think you'll find any real success stories for pedestrian tunnels; better to put the cars in tunnels if you must go that route.
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