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Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

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Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#121

Post by octo888 »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #7

In Norway the public transportation in Oslo has become so bad that it's essentially no longer reliable. If I want to get somewhere in time, I have to use a car or a bicycle. Also, the violence and sexual assaults on public transport is getting worse, the times that it does work it's completely overloaded, and the prices are insanely high and quite frankly becoming unaffordable with the insanely high inflation and int…

Not to be a doomer but I think public transport has peaked in many places in Europe except the big famous standouts like Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg etc

The UK government for example is reducing subsidies for the railway and raising prices sometimes even 12-14% per year. This would be unimaginable 10 years ago. We have many railway workers who feel underpaid and some that feel they deserve the same pay as speciality doctors. This gets directly paid for by price rises. It is strike again /again/ for the railways.

I think the time is now that governments don't care about public transport

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#122

Post by alerighi »

The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20.

That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it, while the salary that you get in the city rests more or less the same. Having a lot of people concentrated living in a small place produces also other unwanted effects, that lower the quality of living.

Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers of 20 floors but with nice houses where everyone can afford, for example, to have its own property, with its own garden, its own peace, without having being forced to share its living space with people he didn't choose.

To me cars, and now also remote work, are a benefit because they allow us to live in a more sustainable way. Thanks to car we can think of reclaiming villages where all the population migrated to the cities in the past years.

Example in Italy, where I live, why should I go to live in Milan, where houses cost 10 times the rest of the country, while having a car and a job that allows me to remote work at least half the week I can live in a small village near Milan and reach it by car when needed?

To me a society without cars is a less free society, in fact the development of the USA to me is to take as an example, while where they didn't have cars is the Soviet Union, and look at it...

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#123

Post by vjk800 »

yostrovs wrote: post #70
silvestrov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars. One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... (edit: spelling)

Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.

Oh yeah, public transportation is fucking horrible. Still, it is basically the only viable way to support a large population density and not turn everything into a wasteland of parking lots and car lanes. Let's face it: cars just take an order of magnitude or two more space than e.g. metro for the same number of passengers and, in big cities, space is a very scarce resource.

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#124

Post by [deleted] »

CalRobert wrote: post #59
colejohnson66 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not a personal pod on a pseudo-train that a tech-bro could sell me

I’m sure we can find a way to make cargo bikes a status symbol.. hoodmaps already shows the part of Utrecht I couldn’t afford as cargo bike moms :-)

[deleted]

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#125

Post by dijit »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #9
stephen_g wrote: post #4

I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around - Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in…

Simply & beautifully satirized by the "bro just one more lane bro, bro I swear just one more lane and it'll fix the traffic bro," meme from a few years ago. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...

I actually counted these two: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/417/129/282...

If it's an average of 1.2 persons per car (which is the typical average) and counting roughly 1,200 cars on those images (in aggregate) it would take roughly 28-29 rail cars to transport this number of people.

That's 3-5 trains worth. All that traffic could have been saved (in theory) by 3-5 trains.

I don't imagine a train would serve all those people, but imagine the massive dent it would make to have good train systems between large population centers.

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#127

Post by thelastgallon »

yostrovs wrote: post #70
silvestrov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car oriented people seriously underestimate how many people that can be transported in a subway train and how much highway space it would take to transport the same number of people in cars. One subway line can transport more people than even the widest existing highway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... (edit: spelling)

Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.

Life is full of impossible choices. Do I worry about the perfume of a lady on the train or worry about death/disability from a drunk driver on the road. Car deaths per year in the US are about 40 - 45K; injuries, some of them permanent are most likely 20 - 30x. Deaths and disability from perfume on a lady on the train are most likely far higher.

I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.

---

Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#128

Post by fayten »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #28
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway. Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.

> Public transport gives much better ROI for more people That's a bold claim without data.

This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.

There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury

Well done video essays:

Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg

Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd

Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm

More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N

Articles:

https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...

https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...

Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.

Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.

Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L

The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.

In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#129

Post by CalRobert »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #92
CalRobert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, last summer we contemplated moving back to CA for work but wouldn’t want that for our kids. And hello from Houten :-). If you’re here and want to talk bikes maybe we could have a coffee some time!

Hacker News bike meet when? We'll have to get jerseys! :^)

Sounds good! I’m in Houten :-)

Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"

#130

Post by pclmulqdq »

lm28469 wrote: post #85
yostrovs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.

I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know. I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking…

You can also design things so that people are not crammed in at a rate of hundreds of thousands per square km. Then, car-based infrastructure gives you a lot of freedom to place homes and businesses far apart and have reasonable travel time and capacity for everyone.

When I moved from Manhattan to an "evil" suburb full of "stroads," my door-to-door time to pretty much everything decreased. Getting rid of waiting for the elevator was a big time saver. Waiting 10-15 minutes if you get unlucky about the arrival of the train was pretty bad. Added all up, most walks took at least 10 minutes to go each direction and non-local trips took 30 minutes or more.

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