Yeah, I live in Berlin and we have an increasing number of car free zones here where people can move around without being afraid of getting killed. Even children play outside again in such areas without risking their life. Not to mention the lack of noise, pollution and clogged up space with parking cars. Cafes thrive and people stroll around to spend their time and money. Businesses return from the outskirts etc. It…
I would picture a Berlin drug dealer as being perfectly comfortable riding a bicycle.
Yeah, that's true, but that's just the poor Africans who are at the bottom of the picking order.
The BMW driving Orientals who provide them with drugs don't use bikes.
Just recently a BMW 7 ran over a mother with her baby - both killed - at 6 in the morning.
I don't think it was a manager rushing to his office. Ever since more traffic barriers have been erected.
San Francisco had one street block near Union Square closed off for a looong time because of construction, and they put some fake turf on it. Occasionally there would be pop-up events, like a little Christmas fair. I would deliberately walk slightly out of my way to go up that block because it meant no cars and wayyy more room to walk. I loved it and was so disappointed to see it turned into a normal street again. Si…
> I'm curious why this hasn't happened yet There's significant support for drastically changing Market street to be car-free(er). The Better Market Street SF project was unanimous approved this past October! Starting January they will be closing Market street to private vehicles - no Uber/Lyft, only buses, taxis, and commercial vehicles (for eg, the farmer's market). This $600 million dollar project will add proper b…
I used to (stopped within the last year) walk, ride a kick scooter, and bike down market all the time. The biggest problem with that street isn’t the cars, but the vagrants. Seeing obviously stolen property for sale on the sidewalk, across the street from a cop who appears to be there only so you don’t get mugged, is extremely disconcerting. There’s barely any traffic on it right now anyway, as someone who also had a car in the city during this period I can tell you I /never/ turned down market, you can’t turn off of it. That sounds like a huge waste of $600M if you ask me.
Most street drug dealers use bicycles, EU and abroad. More freedom of movement, no license nor plate.
Drug dealers in Berlin populate the parks and subway stations mostly. Easier to hide in the crowds or shrubbery, if they hide at all. Police usually never bother them.
Yeah, but you only mean low level ones who barely earn enough to eat. I don't mean those. I mean the bigger fish.
Yeah, I live in Berlin and we have an increasing number of car free zones here where people can move around without being afraid of getting killed. Even children play outside again in such areas without risking their life. Not to mention the lack of noise, pollution and clogged up space with parking cars. Cafes thrive and people stroll around to spend their time and money. Businesses return from the outskirts etc. It…
This only works in bigger cities, where there is plenty of heavily subsidized public transport such as Berlin. Most smaller towns that went car free killed their businesses or made them move to shopping districts on the outskirts which are still reachable by car. Leading to "dead" inner parts of town and very unhappy citizens. Oh, and skyrocketing rents in the subsidized cities such as Berlin...
In smaller cities you can let people park outside and they will be able to walk in within minutes. That's even better than using crowded public transport.
Rents are skyrocketing in Berlin because everybody and their friend wants to visit us or live here. At the same time for decades no new buildings were built. Remember? Supply and demand.
Yet rents are still not as high as in New York, London, Paris, Munich or even Hamburg so that people from everywhere flock here.
Washington, DC, has one car-free street: the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 15th and 17th Streets. The odd thing is that the street was closed after a man crashed an airplane on the White House lawn.
(I except the case of blizzards--with a couple of feet of snow, you can ski or play tackle football in the middle of a main street.)
This is a findable answer[0], though this only shows 3 or more children. Looks like 7,008,000 families have 3 or more children. Looking at the same site[1] for the number of people between, say, 15 and 49 (the thought being anyone less than 15 probably isn't a "parent" and anyone over 49 doesn't have children living at home anymore, or at least not ones they need to transport), we get 150.67 million "parents". Some q…
There's certainly one hell of a shift from between 3 and 4 though. And much less for...5 kids which the comment calls out.
That's downright insulting! I'm from Edmonton. Yeah, I fear we have too much snow - while bicycles can still be used by the most stubborn, electric vehicles can't summon up that curmudgeonly spirit that will get them out of every second snow drift.
I'm very sorry to hear that! coming from a Vancouverite. I spend a decent chunk of the year in Calgary for work and last year they kept the Lime bikes during the winter and on non-snow days, it was actually useful for getting around downtown. But this year they got rid of those too. Car2go is no longer in Calgary either, so transportation options are super limited.
> I'm very sorry to hear that! coming from a Vancouverite.
Not even made - given everything going on, I'm sincerely thinking about heading out that way myself.
The EU is over 3x as population dense as the USA. Any plan to make the USA transportation system to look like the EU's is doomed to failure from the beginning. You need to be realistic. You are never going to win hearts and minds by railing against cars - Americans love their cars, and for good reason. A bus is not going to pick you up at your front door the second you walk out, and it's not going to drop you directl…
And most people I know in Europe--especially those who are not just out of school--have cars. Europe is hardly some carless utopia even if public transit is, on the whole, better than in the US.
My experience as well from traveling to Europe. Plenty of cars, crazy traffic and no parking.
I hope e-scooters never make it out of infancy. Bikes are infinitely more practical and capable. They are more stable at all speeds. They can have significantly more cargo carrying capacity. Bikes can be fitted (for the most part) with different tires/wheels to handle adverse conditions more easily than a scooter can. I hope for the infanticide of e-scooter transportation. It's a grotesque, subooptimal solution than…
I bought a non-electric, but large-wheeled kick scooter a few months ago for getting around NYC. I absolutely love it. Bikes are a little annoying to stop and start; "walking" your bike for a short stretch requires physically dismounting. My scooter allows me to constantly transition between standing, walking, and riding as environmental conditions require. Also... it's stupid, but if I have to wear a helmet to do so…
Hackerish tip for a fellow kick scooter rider. You can replace the bearings in most kick scooters with skateboard bearings for an easier ride. Most COTS ball bearings, aren’t optimized for force along the radius, skateboard bearings are. Also ceramic bearings don’t have the same thermal expansion which comes into play on a two wheel scooter. I have one of the small-wheeled ones with good bearings and it kicks ass—and it only weighs 4 pounds.
All that said, you are only more comfortable on scooters. I’ve been riding bikes my whole life, and I tend to think the opposite. I have much more control and power on a bike that I’m basically wrapped around then a scooter I stand on. I’ve gotten in accidents on both without helmets and never had anything other than sore palms, also both my parents rode bikes for decades without helmets and neither sustained a significant head injury. Able-ness defitin
I hope e-scooters never make it out of infancy. Bikes are infinitely more practical and capable. They are more stable at all speeds. They can have significantly more cargo carrying capacity. Bikes can be fitted (for the most part) with different tires/wheels to handle adverse conditions more easily than a scooter can. I hope for the infanticide of e-scooter transportation. It's a grotesque, subooptimal solution than…
I agree that bicycles are a superior ride in every way, but a large number of people who don't use bikes do use scooters, and that's enough to make me a fan of them. Also, speaking as someone who rides a pretty vanilla road bike, the rental e-bikes feel bizarre to me. You call scooters "grotesque" and "suboptimal," but have you ever tried a Jump bike? I can't put my finger on why, but after renting them a few times o…
>I can’t quite put my finger on why, but...
99% sure it’s that they all have that step-through geometry.