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Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

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Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#131

Post by carapace »

In re:

> Heading out west, San Francisco’s government has voted to close Market Street to cars. Market Street is one of the main thoroughfares in the city’s downtown

It's not closed to cars, just private cars, if I understand correctly. There will still be cars and buses, and car traffic will still be crossing market street.

http://www.bettermarketstreetsf.org/docs/bms-vehicle-circula...

- - - -

Edit: The more I look into this the worse it seems. I thought I was reading the picture wrong, but they have bike lanes running between bus stops and pedestrians:

> At curbside transit stops, the protected bikeway would be placed between the transit stop and the pedestrian through zone. Boarding and alighting transit customers would be separated from the bikeway with a raised railing-like feature and provided a designated place to cross the bikeway. On the sidewalk between the bikeway and the pedestrian throughzone, there would be the 3-foot buffer zone provided except at the aforementioned designated crossing places where there would be crosswalk markings and other features.

~"ResponsesToComments_Vol1_Better Market Street.pdf" from https://sfplanning.org/project/better-market-street-environm...

It seems to me that the new Market St. would maybe be safer, but it will be much less convenient for each mode of travel. It seems to me to combine all the right elements but in all the wrong ways.

E.g. the "protected" bike lanes aren't really separate from the pedestrians, so bike riders are not going to be able to go fast on them, because there will be people there.

This obviates the bike path: If you can't ride faster than pedestrians anyway then you might as well just mix the two kinds of traffic and let people sort it out naturally.

The new plan doesn't seem to me to help people commute by bike.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#132

Post by helen___keller »

Currently living car-free. Pedestrian only streets are a godsend for quality of life. But considering that a couple generations worth of capital went into building a nation dependent on cars, I don't expect car-free streets to be too widespread and certainly not in the places I would really want them (e.g. I would love to have a pedestrian-only path feeding neighborhoods to train stations, so my morning commute isn't subject to the dangers of the car commute that I wanted to avoid. But it won't happen.)

Car free streets are mainly in downtown shopping districts where cars never made sense in the first place (and everyone just goes two blocks over to grab an Uber so it's not really freeing congestion from roads or anything)

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#133

Post by damnyou »

teucris wrote: post #102
sandworm101 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are like a doctor complaining about my i unhealthy dependency on water. I just had to drive 40km between cities for a meeting. There is no train, no bus, no electric skateboard alternative. Sure, maybe we could do the meeting remotely and implement digital signatures on the documents, but that isnt a legal option at the moment. The car-free utopia lies on the other side of countless other revolutions in how soci…

Again, this feels like a strawman argument. Nobody is advocating that we outlaw cars altogether! Urban reform advocates are (correctly) pointing out that car-centric cities promote a self-fulfilling prophesy. In my book, changing that is revolution “A”, and very few people are advocating the nationwide ban on cars revolution “C”.

"ban cars" is a very popular sentiment on urbanist twitter.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#134

Post by ogre_codes »

ctdonath wrote: post #81
tomtheelder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great, so if we can't all have something, none of us should have it! Forget the fact that the vast majority of families own and benefit from personal transportation, the important thing is that we're all equal, even if the equal case is on average worse for everyone, right? This is entirely the opposite of what the car-free movement is trying to accomplish. Car-free is strictly concerned dense urban areas, where pr…

Impression of the "car free" movement is complete elimination of vehicles, urban and rural alike. "Move closer to a train station" seems axiomatic.

Your impression is largely wrong here. The goal here is to make dense urban areas safer, cleaner, and improve the quality of life in those dense urban areas where getting around without a car makes sense.

That may mean people who live in sub-urban and rural areas have to stop at the fringe and catch a bus, walk, or pedal the last leg of their journey, but it doesn't mean they need to give up their cars for transport outside those dense urban areas.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#135

Post by matchbok »

ctdonath wrote: post #120
adimitrov wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why? It seems patently absurd to me, especially when you're visiting. I'm visiting Berlin right now. It's a car friendly city in a car friendly country and I wouldn't want to drive anywhere here if you paid me. Too much of a hassle. Besides driving is so incredibly boring. If you're visiting, you're not going to really experience the city from behind the windows of a metal box. Maybe Northern America…

Public transit, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I'd have to pay to park (including time spent trying to find a decent spot), walk a non-trivial distance to the station, coordinate movement of multiple people (including young children) amid crowds, wait for transit arrival, board, find seat (!), wait, stop at every station before exit, switch transit multiple times (repeat wait…

Car ownership, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I rely on the city to massively subsidize my car parking that takes up tons of space for a vehicle that is used for about an hour a day. The rest of the time it is just sitting there, doing nothing.

I have to buy a car, pay for insurance, pay for gas, sit in traffic for an average of an hour a day, deal with strange/unpleasant/criminal drivers, never mind the dealing with car robberies and damage.

Jokes aside, but rural/suburban life is much more dependent than city-dwellers. 100% dependence on a single car every day, depending on subsidized roads and gas, etc.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#136

Post by ogre_codes »

dahfizz wrote: post #66
ogre_codes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the technological and class divide will only widen. Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society. You are required to have parking for those cars, both at home and at your work. Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in so…

> Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive. You're right. We should charge them thousands of dollars per month so they can live downtown and walk everywhere instead. Problem solved!

A bike costs less than $500 once and reliably gets you several miles fairly quickly. eBikes get you further faster and are also a fraction of the cost to own/ operate than a car.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#137

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

big_chungus wrote: post #126
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's expensive to live in a city that's 40% asphalt to move cars around and park cars in. You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space. Great way for car companies to force externalities onto everyone else. Don't like cars? "Oh well, you're paying for the road and parking anyway. You can't beat the problem, so you may as well join it."

If induced demand is a problem for cars, might it not be a problem for cities? A higher potential density will lead to a higher density.

People appear not be a space filling curve anymore. It looked that way prior to the Industrial Revolution and the advent of Birth Control. But it doesn't look like people will infinitely fill all space available to them anymore. Perhaps it's because we're running out of space (artificially, by not building) in places where there's till opportunity. But I'm not sure we have convincing evidence of that. We do have evidence that people aren't wildly reproducing in almost every advanced economy, though.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#138

Post by davidw »

tharne wrote: post #129
davidw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we just stop subsidizing the shit out of cars? Let them pay their own way. Also, we do not need 'one size fits all' solutions for the entire US. What's appropriate for Wyoming might not be appropriate for the California Bay Area, which is plenty dense.

They already do pay their own way. Gas taxes, tolls, vehicle registration, emissions fees, license fees, premium taxes on car insurance, traffic tickets, parking tickets, parking meters, sales tax on the purchase of a car. Very few things in the United States are taxed as exhaustively as private vehicles. I'm not sure when "subsidizing" came to mean "giving people something back for the money you took form them in th…

No, they do not:

https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ &&

https://taxfoundation.org/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-o...

Drivers are heavily subsidized.

Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm

#139

Post by ogre_codes »

jjoonathan wrote: post #58
ogre_codes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the technological and class divide will only widen. Car friendly infrastructure widens the technological and class divide. They create a base state where you are required to own and maintain an expensive piece of equipment in order to be an equal member of society. You are required to have parking for those cars, both at home and at your work. Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in so…

Decreasing someone's range increases their costs, a lot, because it effectively makes real estate more scarce and removes distant retail competition (in addition to increasing the real estate cost of retail). My intuition says the effect size is going to be a multiple of what it costs to maintain a cheap car.

This has been demonstrated to be false.

Probably one of the biggest reasons is real estate increases in the denser areas as parking infrastructure gets phased out. Parking is a massive waste of land.

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