571–580 of 756 posts
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Too many cities have physically been designed around driving
Have you seen pictures of Atlanta from 1930ies and now? There are two major interstates cutting thought the city. TWO!
And intentionally designed to destroy communities that were experiencing very high economic growth and an easy way to implement redlining and segregation.
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Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life. If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking…
I totally agree about the noise and health benefits, but to me it's more a matter of respect and safety. In the U.S., we see too many pedestrians die each year. Our roads are built for cars only, with everything else as an afterthought. When I cross the street, drivers act like it's my responsibility to stay out of their way. If some people need to use cars for mobility or business reasons, that is fine with me. But…
But all of those things seem to be an expression of the US majority way of thinking. That is what needs changing; if you don't pedestrians will still be run over by drunk drivers, etc.
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worth visiting an old city like Rome. I was shocked by how walkable it was. It was maybe the second night we were there, we causally strolled around after dinner and just happenstance managed to walk by all the major attractions. That's no mistake but honestly when you experience it's so magical. To create a tech analogy I remember the days before Google when search when would have 20 buttons and could take regex and…
i've never been in rome but i visited trieste - a very walkable city - a few weeks ago and i was shocked how cars were clogging up everything there. not necessarily cars driving, but parked cars. maybe trieste is a bit special because big parts of it are on a steep hill so it's not that well suited for cycling but none the less, i was very disappointed. not a pleasure with kids. i asked an italian friend about it and…
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throwing money at urban problems does not necessarily have a great track record, and NYCTA has had lots of issues with corruption when they do have money to spend. Id be pretty skeptical that giving them a lot of money would mean you can hop on a train in 5 minutes at 2 am, it wouldnt even be cost effective to run that many trains at odd hours. Cars are terrific for this use case, however. NYC cops have like a billio…
NYC is one of the safest places in the US... and even with fairly poor mass transit system - it's still is incredibly good by American standards. I moved from NYC an hour north, to be more isolated than the "impersonal big cities". I barely know any of my neighbors - because there are no sidewalks and everyone is forced to drive for anything. Car dependence kills people, kills communities and reduces your QoL.
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nothing about living in a city or riding a bike instead of driving a car is "elitist". elitism is using a vehicle that has an average annual ownership cost of $12000 and takes up a parking space everywhere you want to go.
> average annual ownership cost of $12000 Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been? My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access. If you don’t ha…
i've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit" argument feels a bit hollow to me.
and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude, tbh.
Something I’ve thought a lot about is why don’t we have more support around golf cart and golf cart adjacent vehicles? They are fairly cheap compared to a car, can be BEV, drive around on most city streets, fractions of the weight and danger to pedestrians etc. I know it doesn’t work in a lot of areas due to weather etc, but it seems like an obvious stop-gap solution. It is also kind of “cool” to drive around in a go…
That was over 20 years ago, and it seems that with the growth of the place and the supply-limits imposed by the local government, the carts have become insanely expensive. [0]
[0] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/golf-carts-a-must-h...
I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…
How exactly could do this by 2030/2050?
So much of the existing infrastructure is built at a low density with the expectation of having a car to get around.
What do we have to do? Rebuild all our cities at Japan level densities so we can have reasonable tranit options? Ban living in those cities and force everyone to move to a few high density cities? Rebuild all our highways/roads with enough transit infrastructure and staff to let people travel their existing routes without a car?
"Make it way way more easier to get by w/o a car" sounds less feasible to me than scaling up EVs.
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None of those problems you name are inherent in a bus though. Those are common problems with buses, but they don't have to be. A bus should not "chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination" - design a better network. A bus should stop so close to where you shop that it is easier than carting that stuff to your car. A bus stop should not be so far away that bad weather is a problem. You s…
These problems are inherent in buses. Buses will always be open to the entire public. If "the public" includes raving lunatics, then they will find their way onto the buses. To build a better network, you need to either throw a vast amount of money at it, or have a super-dense city. The public transit in London & NYC is merely OK. In other cities, it will always be prohibitively expensive. And to say that "the bus sh…
I've said it before and I'll say it again: building the future around cars of any kind is completely unsustainable. We cannot reproduce the rates of rich world car ownership in the developing world without mass catastrophe (raw materials/labor needed for construction and maintenance, raw materials/labor/space needed for roads and parking lots, literal tons of waste--batteries, tires, steel, plastic, foam--, energy ne…
Fully agreed. And while everything you said is super important and true, one piece that really makes me pumped about this movement to ditch cars is more around quality of life. If you have to get in a car and drive to a parking lot somewhere to get groceries, commute to work, go out with friends, get healthcare, etc. You will obviously live a less healthy life both physically but also mentally because of it. Walking…
Living car free in a city built for it can be bliss. But tons of people do not live in cities built for it. Do we rebuild those cities? Force them to move?
This has turned in to a r/fuckcars thread. Zoning reform is the cure, if we want 15 min cities. The market will do the work, if you let it. Plus, many problems are just housing problems in disguise (including homelessness). Rhetoric I see here about banning cars is both redundant and ridiculous. If people have more convenient options, they won't use cars anyway. If you deign to "ban" cars without a replacement people…
Yeah, this is what annoys me with a lot of the fanatics. If your carrot is apparently so good, then why do you need the stick? Almost nobody has a problem with building walkable neighborhoods and "15 minute cities", what they have a problem with is the direct attempts to just make driving worse rather than making the alternatives better. Frustrating cars is a goal loudly and proudly declared (hence the name of that s…
Because car traffic was prioritized over everything else it created a situation where improving any alternative will unavoidably require some sort of compromise.
Although, somewhat non-intuitively policy choices which discourage driving can free up space on roads and create a better experience for other drivers. (I can't find an original source, but I remember hearing about a planning study in some European city which found that about a third of the drivers who contributed to the traffic jams in that city's downtown were just going for a drive and didn't have any specific destination)