181–190 of 246 posts
I hope we remove cars from city centers in Europe and replace them with more bike lanes and public transport. Ie the small particle pollution from cars is making pedestrians and cyclist sick. I hope we put car parking centers outside the city center and offer good inbound public / private transport. I would say clean air is an example of Tragedy of the commons, where the pollution is an externalized cost. https://en.…
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As an asthmatic person, I hope this too. Berlin is quite bad on some streets, especially due to people's love for diesel cars. This also includes trucks and diesel buses.
I don't want to trash your hopes, but the particles are pretty much independent from traffic nowadays (see how Stuttgart is doing these days). The drought around Berlin will probably kick way more fine particles into the city than all Diesel cars together. The only thing that could help would be more trees and less dense cities.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/georgia-helicopter-causes-...
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Kinda agree but thats a model that works for many places that switched to car free centre. In many cases parking lots already exist in outskirts of the centre. Completely car free city is a pipe dream. Diversity is good.
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…
I'm talking about creating boundary around downtown to which remaining of metro can travel to by either means.
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There was so much fear-making in Vienna when they pushed for a pedestrian-first shopping mile in the city center. It would destroy economy.. People wouldn't come anymore with there car to buy stuff.. And what happened? A lot more people came, people going just for walks etc. Business increased substantially and now the chamber of commerce (which was heavily lobbying against it) wants even more "Begegnungszonen" as th…
Reminds me of bars in NYC back when smoking bans were implemented. They all thought they would lose business. They gained it instead as new customers who had been avoiding bars because of the smell of smoke flocked there instead.
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You should probably see the trains in some Eastern European countries then. Slow and dirty.
East Europeans need to stop this self-colonizing attitude. The trains are reasonably OK, with great variations from place to place. Is there room for improvement? Sure.
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I don't want to trash your hopes, but the particles are pretty much independent from traffic nowadays (see how Stuttgart is doing these days). The drought around Berlin will probably kick way more fine particles into the city than all Diesel cars together. The only thing that could help would be more trees and less dense cities.
More trees [1], less particle pollution, you say? [1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/georgia-helicopter-causes-...
I hope we remove cars from city centers in Europe and replace them with more bike lanes and public transport. Ie the small particle pollution from cars is making pedestrians and cyclist sick. I hope we put car parking centers outside the city center and offer good inbound public / private transport. I would say clean air is an example of Tragedy of the commons, where the pollution is an externalized cost. https://en.…
"Park and ride" is common in the UK, but I never see it in Spain.
Might have become better since, but 10 years back Paris certainly was not, the public transport inside paris was pretty good (though cycling was bad, that I know is getting better at least), but if you came in driving from the suburbs there was no good way to transfer, no "transfer nodes" where you could easily leave your car and hop onto the metro or your bike.
For multi-modal to really work you need easy and cheap ways to transfer between modes, e.g. parking on the edges of the dense public transport network which is either free or included in the transit pass to encourage use, otherwise the incentive is to keep driving inside.
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I never even got a drivers license and have lived just fine so I'm also always shocked by the comments here in transport-related threads when people talk about not having a car as if this is somehow a fantasy utopian vision. And this also I might add includes families with children. While I don't have any I know a lot of parents who don't rely on cars either.
I’ve raised three children in Manhattan without owning a car. None of my children (who are all college age) know how to drive, which is always an amusing point of interest among their new friends when they get to college. So when they were younger, there are times when you simply do need a taxi. It’s infrequent — buses, subways, walking cover most of your needs — but there are times when you really need one.
Sometimes a rental car/van/truck is the proper tool for a task.
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I've always wondered why they don't do 'assigned seating' in a metro train. It is feasible to know everyone's destination station at the time of boarding. And it is feasible to know current occupancy of each car in the train. So potentially, people can be assigned to a specific car (need not be a specific seat), such that crowding in each car can be capped and more cars per train can be added without having to increa…
> It is feasible to know everyone's destination station at the time of boarding. I challenge you to find a mechanism that works for this and is quick enough to keep up at rush hour in the average Tokyo train station. Additionally, people move at different speeds through the station due to factors like age, familiarity with the network, disability, bladder capacity etc. It’s a non-trivial problem to solve, and likely…
I suspect the reason this isn't valuable is that the feedback loop is already pretty good at high occupancy rates: when one car is at capacity, every other car is too.
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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…
Again, you are conflating city centre vs remaining city. If a shop owner has a shop next to a 4 lane road - what the hell was he thinking? I'm talking about creating boundary around downtown to which remaining of metro can travel to by either means.
In a lot of cases (at least here) the shops were there first, and the thoroughfare grew in use next to them. This road cuts directly throuhh the middle of the entire city.
Specifically a stream that had decent walkable paths alongside was put underground and a big thoroughfare put on top of it. I'm part of an initiative to reopen the stream and put the traffic in a tunnel underneath, in order to create a park/urban space for people, rather than cars.
I want the entire city to be pedestrian first, bicycles second and cars dead last.