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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"

#151

Post by CalRobert »

freetime2 wrote: post #133
CalRobert wrote: post #19

My favourite thing about living in the Netherlands is that kids have freedom. They can bike to school, their friends’ houses, sports, town etc and parents aren’t their taxi. Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive.

> Growing up in suburban California I was basically in an outdoor prison until I could drive. Just as a counter point, I grew up in suburban Massachusetts and this wasn't the case for me. My friends and I rode all over town on our bikes. Bike lanes weren't a thing back then at all, and this was in the 90s when violent crime was at its peak in the US. We just tried to stick to streets with less traffic, rode on sidewa…

I think New England towns are better, especially back when we sold cars and not giant SUVs and trucks.

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

#152

Post by alfor »

So a tax financed site telling how it's great to have more tax and regulations. Not surprising. Find it very weird to have government trying to gerrymander things just as we are on the cusp of EV transition and autonomy. Go take a ride in a Tesla with FSD, the future is here, let it come in, get out of the way. In a few years with autonomous vehicles the need for vehicle ownership wild radically decrease and with that a huge need for parking space will simply vanish.

What I suggest instead: make electricity super cheap use all the ways possible create space for charger system but let brands compete( don't over regulate) Allow autonomous system to operate, be a trailblazer in the field.

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

#153

Post by AlexandrB »

One factor here is the perception of safety. To choose public transit over a car, you have to feel safe walking to/from the station and you have to feel safe riding the train. This is especially true if you are at a physical disadvantage because of gender, disability, age, whatever. Because it's a perception thing, this is not just about statistics. A dirty, chaotic subway station just feels threatening to passengers.

I've ridden public transit in a bunch of cities, and this makes a huge difference to how welcoming the experience is. Hong Kong is #1 for me. The trains and stations are clean enough to eat off of - probably cleaner than my car. On/off boarding is fast and orderly even during peak travelling hours. This is not a universal, and there are definitely cities where I would hesitate to take public transit if I had some other choice - which is the root of the problem when you're trying to convince a population to fund and use such a system instead of bringing their cars.

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

#154

Post by pclmulqdq »

dijit wrote: post #96
npteljes wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume. Or urine. Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".

Come to Europe, especially northern Europe. The wealthy population also take public transport, it's sort of expected that its for everyone... this seems to alter the behaviour of people in a positive way. Maybe through enhanced enforcement by police? or perhaps social conditioning through higher expectations? idk. US Public transport is not a model of what public transport is like; it's only an example of failed infr…

The upper middle class in the US also takes public transit, but there is not enough sense of social shame to get people to behave well. I also highly doubt that people who are truly wealthy in northern Europe take the train.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

maxerickson wrote: post #60
dijit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. You've hit on the central, infuriating paradox of car-centric cities. We're told that building more roads will bust congestion, but the exact opposite happens. It's a self-destructive cycle and a betrayal of drivers. We're sold a promise of freedom and speed, but what we get is a constant, grinding battle. We spend our lives in traffic and our wallets on fuel/tax, and the very infrastructure meant…

I suppose it is because Florida has a lot of modern development, but the number of disconnected subdivisions there is relatively extreme. In much of the US you can easily walk to the thing you can see.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by troyvit »

jcranmer wrote: post #108
markus_zhang wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus. I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to b…

If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.) What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there…

I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.

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

#157

Post by sebstefan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #153

One factor here is the perception of safety. To choose public transit over a car, you have to feel safe walking to/from the station and you have to feel safe riding the train. This is especially true if you are at a physical disadvantage because of gender, disability, age, whatever. Because it's a perception thing, this is not just about statistics. A dirty, chaotic subway station just feels threatening to passengers…

[flagged]

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

#158

Post by mykowebhn »

There are (at least) two Youtube channels, Ray Delahanty | CityNerd and Not Just Bikes, that really drive home the point in their videos that car-centric cities really stink.

https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd

https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

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

#159

Post by jcranmer »

gspencley wrote: post #115
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)

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense. From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs en…

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

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

#160

Post by jeromegv »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #130
lm28469 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. Now tell us how much time it took to get to your office in Manhattan and how much it cost to park there. The suburb is built around the fact that people live there but travel to the main city every day.

Now if you have decent train service to the main city, this is starting to be interesting urban design.

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