Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

The "car mandatory" suburb sprawls are a huge part of the problem.

Most of them are deliberately deprived of decent public transit, because a segment of people don't want buses and especially don't want trains in/near their neighborhood. The most common explanation I've heard is that public transit attracts the homeless, the poor and criminals.

A lot of suburbs are even designed to prevent walkability for the same reasons, leaving out logical shortcut footpaths and bike paths between streets and cul-de-sacs.

This obviously speaks to a whole host of societal problems and paranoia, to be honest.

With a good local train network with stops in every neighborhood, you could just leave the car at home and not have to worry about parking in the city.

Does buying a car really make sense in a Zipcar/Getaround/Silvercar world? The numbers just don't work out IMO. Not once you factor in fuel, maintenance, damage, insurance, interest, car payments and/or depreciation, $300+/month in parking fees and the fact I still have to rent a bigger car if I need to pick stuff up or drop stuff off or shuttle more people. I gave my car to my parents a couple years after I moved to SF and have never looked back.

It's just so easy to get a car in SF whenever you need it for a few bucks -- sometimes in 15 minute increments.

The mere presence of cars actively hurts walkability and increases the risk of accidents for pedestrians and cyclists.

Cars need special roadways with expensive construction methods, maintenance, signaling and provisions for parking their bulk.

This takes up huge amounts of space that could have been used for waking streets, bike paths and attentive urban spaces, instead of large expanses of boring black asphalt.

Ask a shop owner whether she would rather have thousands of people in cars driving by her store and not even look at it, or hundreds of pedestrians who stop and look at her display windows.

Ask a cafe owner whether he would prefer to have his outside seating right next to a major thoroughfare, or on a busy walking street.

Cars actively make environments hostile and uninviting to people.

Europe's cities had room for cars?

> Walking or biking does not always imply high density!

Right, and yet it will get parroted each time the subject surfaces here (i.e. twice a week).

I never had a car. At the moment, I live in a municipality of less than 750 inhabitants. I've lived in small towns of less than 4000 inhabitants, in areas below 1 inhab. / km². I've never had a problem, everything has always been 1 or 2 minutes away with a bike, or less than 10 minutes by foot. In such places, the farthest possible shop would be a mile away, at worst. By definition, we might say! since the urban area doesn't spread farther.

Density is not needed and it often doesn't makes things better.

In dense areas, things are sometimes closer (which improves walkability, but has little effect or bikability), sometimes not. But everything is slower. Not only cars, but also cycling and walking. Cycling: because of all the cross-roads every 100 yards, with traffic lights or without, because of the need of taking care of the erratic behaviour of pedestrians, of parked cars, of cars going in and out of parking slots, because of traffic jams or traffic density causing irregular pacing, etc. Walking, the same: traffic lights again, erratic movements on the pavement, being limited to pavement and a very limited number of crossings, which lengthen the route. I can ride over 10 km and visit 3 villages in the countryside, in the same time I needed to ride 5 km in a city (not even in the centre of the centre).

Hell, American suburbs should be perfect for cyclability, if not for walkability. Either the hard grid type with its huge number of streets/lanes/alleys every 100 yards with very very low car traffic; or the smooth shaped housing estate suburbia with its super-wide and empty streets; even on inter-blocks streets, the car traffic is much less dense than in Europe because those streets/roads are 3 or 4 times as wide as European streets/roads with similar role! Yes, there isn't a small shop at every street corner of American suburbia, but even if a supermarket/mall world, almost of the suburban area is with 1 mile or 2 of distance of one of those supermarket or mall, which is perfect biking distance; in most cases you'll have something half-a-mile away from home. Yes, there are also places where people chose to build a fancy house in a fancy estate on a hill-side, which make everything harder, but the bulk of suburban area is not like that.

I am not advocating for urban sprawl, I just say that arguing that walking and especially cycling would be only possible in dense areas is plain wrong: both suburbs and countryside small towns and villages can be plenty bikable.