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Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

economist.com

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Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).

I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?

There is a thing called road diet, take 4 lanes (2 each way), reduce it to 2 lane and add turn lanes and bike lane.

Car traffic hopefully slows and makes things safer for pedestrians crossing the road and much safer for cyclist.

The wikipedia only lists a few examples where it has been implemented:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_diet#Examples_of_implemen...

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend a bank-robber style facemask. But I'm regularly dealing with colder temperatures than Seattle.

Note that these are not legal everywhere.

Intent matters. When it’s -20C, it’s fine. When it’s +30C...

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#83
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are they the same stores? It's probably fine for the landlords, but if you're leasing storespace and selling bulk/heavy goods, or something so specialized that people from afar drive to you, you're going to have trouble. If you're running a restaurant or cafe, you're in a great situation. It's a solvable issue, but it may be ignored.

I think the ideal solution is to migrate business which depend on transportation into commercial areas like it has been done in the US from the beginning (because everything could be planned from scratch without "technical debt"). Of course it is hard to convince stores to move out of the historic districts of major towns into these kind of areas, but it actually makes sense for them if they're combined with other bu…

I agree. But migration can be difficult when your restaurant supply store is on a 20 year lease.

There’s a store near me that sells just hockey goalie equipment. Moving to pedestrian-only would be a net negative for them since most of their business isn’t local foot traffic.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).

I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?

I believe the person means something like taking an existing 2 or 3 lane road and making one lane a bus lane. So you took away a lane in a way. In Seattle they have done that but the buses work really well when they don't get stuck in car traffic. Buses are often faster than cars here. There's a huge number of buses, they get good use out the special bus lanes. On the freeway it's carpool lanes than include cars and buses. In the city they do have bus only lanes.

If you didn't have buses that go places people need and lots of them then converting a lane to bus only might not be useful. People make exactly the same claims you do about seattle but the bus system here is really effective.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#85
post #79

If you want to experience a car-free place in the US, you should check out Mackinac Island in between the Upper and Lower peninsulas of Michigan. Horses, bikes, and feet are the forms of transportation—motorized vehicles have been banned since 1898. There’s great history, Victorian architecture, and Great Lakes beauty. It’s a pure slice of Americana.

How does that work out during the winter up there?

The only thing happening on the island is tourism, which is pretty much gone during the winter, and access to the island is marginal at best when the ferry shuts down for the season. All of the labor is seasonal as well, mostly from overseas.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#86
post #12

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In Vienna in 2010 the city decided to transform a huge shopping street into a pedestrian area. There was a lot of fuss and heated discussions. Media reported on it for months. Some people feared the proposed change will lead to fewer customers and this in turn will lead to stores having to close. Public opinion was split but leaning towards the transformation. One segment of the shopping street was kept a street as c…

> Fast forward to 2019 and people love it. Some people do, others don't. Currently they are complaining about homeless and drunk people hanging out there. To be honest, it's more crowded and looks desolate now. The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd. And everybody complains about bicycles going 30 Km/h and endangering pedestrians.

> it's more crowded and looks desolate now.

"desolate" means the opposite of "crowded".

> The shops aren't deserted, but it's a different crowd.

So the shops are missing the kind of people you would like to see shopping, but full of a "different" kind of people. What kind of people are those?

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#87
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever want to reverse that opinion, I suggest taking London's tube and/or Paris' Metro or RER at peak hour in the morning.

I used to drive into west London for 10am, most days it would take 45 minutes to travel a mile from Hammersmith to Shepherd’s Bush.

Note for others not familiar, if you go Hammersmith Tube Station to Shepherd's Bush Tube Station overland by bicycle then it takes five minutes, depending on traffic lights. That is actual five minutes, as in three hundred seconds.

Clearly both areas are larger than their respective train stations but the stations are representative.

To actually get a tube or other train between the two is not entirely direct, you would probably get on the wrong Hammersmith station at first (there are two), spend five minutes crossing the road to get to the other one. Then at the end a bus or long walk would be needed, so you would soon be in 45 minute territory.

The traffic can be mostly ignored if doing the route by bicycle except on the various mini ring roads they have to keep traffic deadly. Hammersmith itself is like a six lane motorway ring road of hell, easy to die on that one. Then at Shepherd's Bush there is that green bit where the traffic just goes round and round very slowly. On the bike you just go straight without getting sent around these merry-go-rounds of car fumes.

No idea why anyone would want to drive in such parts of London even though I have had to do it for work myself. It is not even driving, just slowly shunting along, blocking the way for 'serious' road users who care about their time and arriving promptly. As a cyclist I don't see myself as a serious road user, I assume those people in cars have more important journeys than mine so I am deferential to them. Yet, if being prompt matters to you and you do work in London, the bicycle is the only reliable means of getting from A to B in a dependably timely manner.

By that definition, those people in their posh cars, inching along, can't really be that serious. If they thought about it properly they would abandon their tin boxes or find better jobs. Travel by car is that silly in London.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is done either for public use (tearing out a lane of public travel, and replacing it with a lane for buses only) or privatizing the street altogether (tearing out a lane, and replacing it with front yards, or restaurant seating, or whatever).

I believe you but have never heard of cities anywhere removing roads or lanes, only adding more. Can you give any examples of cities that have actually done this?

UT Knoxville did this on Cumberland ave and other roads around campus to push people into driving around the campus rather than through it.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#89
post #24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is pushback against car-impacting measures in Europe too, make no mistake. The yellow jackets in France started as a protest against increase in tax on petrol. The previous president in France, Hollande, had to roll back a toll system. It took Paris 2 years of legal battles to close the roads along the Seine. The major difference, compared witg the US, is that at least in an urban setting, in Europe you can ima…

I don't know how it is in the USA but in France (and I suspect most old European cities) the richer people who can afford to live in the city center are generally in favor of removing cars because they either don't have a car or can afford to pay for a private parking spot while people who live in the suburbs and take their cars to work every day have to suffer the consequences. So you end up with this "class warfare…

> rich people live in wealthy suburbs and go everywhere by car while poor people stay stuck in the city centers.

In Seattle the complaint is it's the other way around. Only the well off can afford to live in the city, and the less well off drive in.

Re: Europe is edging towards making post-car cities a reality

#90
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. It makes a lot of sense -- it's where the capital, culture, resources are concentrated. I don't think we'll see a car-less suburbia in the foreseeable future, but we can certainly build and modify our cities to be walk/bike/transit-first going forward. There seems to be this ambient feeling that everything is as it will be, ah well, but it took decades of (bad) city p…

> The US is seeing a large move back toward cities. Is it really, or are you using "US" to mean white middle class? I googled and can't find a reference for this - do you have one? Edit: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.GROW?locations=U... As far as I can tell from this graph, urban population growth in the US was lower in 2018 than it's ever been.

Well, a lot of America is white and middle class. The push to move to suburbs was fueled by the white middle class, who fled the cities during and after desegregation, and was termed the White Flight.

There's a very real displacement problem that's linked to the urban population growth that you seem skeptical of; marginalized communities are being priced out of their long-time homes, being pushed out of urban centers and into suburbs and exurbs.

Anyway, census data shows strong growth of urban areas, and tepid growth of rural areas, which are a shrinking fraction of the US population.

Some cities have seen astonishing growth:

> Among urbanized areas with populations of 1 million or more, the Charlotte, N.C.-S.C., area grew at the fastest rate, increasing by 64.6 percent, followed by the Austin, Texas, area, at 51.1 percent, and Las Vegas-Henderson, Nev., at 43.5 percent.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_censu...

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