What Happens to Kid Culture When Streets Are Closed to Cars • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by ritchiea » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 10:52 AM UTC

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…

Wow, I grew up in Chicago and thus lived there for 18 years, and I continue to return to visit family. And I had never heard of the Pedway.

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

#182

Post by flexie » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 11:10 AM UTC

seer wrote: post #156

manmal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the place where I live (Austria, town with 30k residents), the Fußgängerzone in the center is currently dying. Shops close left and right, and migrate to the three big shopping centers. This town is a strange mix because almost everybody needs to own a car (bus system is underdeveloped) to take kids to school or shop groceries, but the town itself is not that big (a lot of places are reachable by bike). Most peopl…

I’ve seen a similar thing happen in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, but with a twist. When there were no malls, all the high end shops were located at the center in the pedestrian friendly zone. Then they started building them like crazy, all the shops moved there, and the center started dying. But something interesting happened, since it was still valuable real estate, those people didn’t go down easy - all those former…

I noticed the same. Other factors played in too.

Around the time the malls came to Sofia, the municipality also started renovating the main streets in the city center turning Vitoshka into a real pedestrian street and building proper sidewalks on others (like Shisman). The renovations are still going on (Solunska, Graf Ignatiev) and this will only accelerate the process of turning the city center into a recreational area. It's really nice to see how new restaurants, bars, juice bars, soup places, sandwich places, and cafes pop up on streets just months after they have been renovated.

Other factors accelerating the process has been the large expansion of the metro, which happened at the same time as the malls were being being built, the renovation of tram tracks, purchase of decent trams, and the almost complete replacement of the old city buses with modern ones, all of which has given people from the neighborhoods easier access to the city center (which has never been very accessible by car).

Sofia is slowly becoming a modern metropolis.

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

#183

Post by williamdclt » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 11:11 AM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #180

oska wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do parents feel the need to take children to school in a small town in a very safe country? Why can't they ride a bike or walk?

In the winter it is too slippery for bikes and it sometimes gets biting cold - or worse IMO: cold, wet and windy. We pay for bus for our 3 oldest kids in the winter. Also wolves are returningnin some parts of Europe and while people say wolves are so shy and afraid of humans I understand extremely well why parents don't risk their kids in an experiment to see if the predator that lives off moose actually is afraid of…

That's the first time I hear that parents take their children to school because they're afraid of wolves

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

#184

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 11:35 AM UTC

wenc wrote: post #125

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 think the right conditions have to exist for pedestrianization (don't ask me what they are -- I have an intuition about them but can't really articulate them). Lincoln Square for instance would a great candidate for pedestrianization -- lots of nice little shops in a high density location. As for the Pedway, one of problems is like most underground walkways, navigation is difficult. There's no official map that tel…

I think they're pretty obvious. Either you need good public transport (New York, London, etc.) or you need a lot of reasonably priced parking near the pedestrianised zone (Bristol, Ipswich, etc.)

There are some special cases - tourist / student towns, but I think the gist is that people need to be able to get there.

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

#185

Post by Vinnl » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:08 PM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #55

I 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…

Heck, I've been allowed to get a driver's license for over a decade in the Netherlands, but neither I nor my partner has one. Granted, most of my friends to have one, but almost none of them have a car. It helps that we live in a large city, and one that actively discourages driving and encourages public transport and cycling (even by Dutch standards), but not only is it not necessary to drive, it's often the worst transportation option.

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

#186

Post by Annatar » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:28 PM UTC

There is one major reason why this isn't practical in the United States yet: Europe has a well developed, often tax payer or state subsidised public transport network. Americans don't have that at scale: they must use their cars to go to work, else they cannot work. Solve the problem of public transport first. You can start with tax payers' funding and move on to a purely for-profit, no subsidies model gradually by incremental optimisation.

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

#187

Post by Annatar » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:34 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #180

oska wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do parents feel the need to take children to school in a small town in a very safe country? Why can't they ride a bike or walk?

In the winter it is too slippery for bikes and it sometimes gets biting cold - or worse IMO: cold, wet and windy. We pay for bus for our 3 oldest kids in the winter. Also wolves are returningnin some parts of Europe and while people say wolves are so shy and afraid of humans I understand extremely well why parents don't risk their kids in an experiment to see if the predator that lives off moose actually is afraid of…

Then you know little of wolves: they would only hunt a moose in a large pack. And yes, they are very shy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YybY5sEeZUU

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

#188

Post by m_mueller » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:44 PM UTC

rumcajz wrote: post #176

oska wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do parents feel the need to take children to school in a small town in a very safe country? Why can't they ride a bike or walk?

In Switzerland (at least where we live) parents are actively discouraged to bring kids to school or pre-school. The kids are supposed to get there on their own.

I think that’s all over the country. I’ve also asked Romands friends, same there.

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

#189

Post by _ph_ » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 12:46 PM UTC

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 don't think many cities were "built around cars", that was mostly a process of evolution. In Europe, many cities had their cores layout even by the romans, latest for sure in the medieval times[1]. At the time the first cars arrived, cities had large roads, used by pedestrians, riders and horse carts. Allowing cars on those streets was the logical thing back when there were not many of them. And while the cars were pushing out pedestrians from the streets quickly, fundamentally the cars still "worked". Street side parking could still deal with all cars, you could drive to the shops you wanted to visit and park there - which still holds true in extremely low density areas today.

With each decade, car ownership grew significantly, but back then it was decided to deal with the increasing traffic by making cities more "car friendly". To a certain point that worked, but later even large efforts couldn't keep up, but the damanges were done to the cities. To reverse them, it will take a long time, as the car traffic needs to be replaced by other means of transportation.

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

#190

Post by aga98mtl » Sat, Dec 29, 2018, 1:07 PM UTC

autokad wrote: post #165

Theodores wrote: post #164

I don't drive but I am into electric cars. I was in a ICE car over Christmas on a drive across country to see some relatives. We went through a local town that I didn't value much when I was growing up, with 'fresh eyes' I think I could see what the problem was, and it wasn't the car. The pollution is the real problem why people shun the street in front of their door. This pollution being the fumes and the noise. Wit…

as an extensive walker, car fumes are never a problem for me. usually the biggest problems are lack of mixed zoning and really wide streets which leads to very long walking distances.

Diesel car fumes smell bad. It's not an issue in Canada/USA because only bigger trucks use diesel. However, many European cities are full of diesel cars and polluting mopeds.