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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"

#251

Post by vid »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #189
vid wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.

> Plan your route so you get access to a seat What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this. Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path…

Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.

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

#252

Post by gman83 »

alerighi wrote: post #122

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 (o…

Nobody is seriously advocating for a society with zero cars. The goal is simply to have a more balanced system. It's about creating towns and cities where you have the freedom to walk, bike, or take reliable public transport, so you're not forced to use a car for every single trip.

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

#253

Post by nick486 »

evolve2k wrote: post #190
Ajedi32 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads. The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident. Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes. Taking a…

>Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.

Not for all the other people around you, no.

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

#254

Post by adrian17 »

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…

> From a quality of life point of view

The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".

Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.

For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

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

#255

Post by bluGill »

ericmay wrote: post #144
xnx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a design choice Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.

They by and large don’t though. Instead, big houses and yards are the only options on the table for most Americans because of zoning regulation and developers just copy/pasting designs to save money. There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing. You either have the existing housing stock, which is astronomically more valuable, or you don’t. There’s no developer building tho…

> There isn’t an option for new brick house in neighborhood built before cars were a thing

Every time I look those houses are on lots of similar sized to modern lots. People back then choose space as well. They did allow stores in those neighborhoods though, so you could do some of the basic things in life without getting on the streetcar or walking. Those neighborhoods were also closer to jobs or close to a streetcar (depending on era) because you obviously couldn't drive. However the size wasn't much different from today.

Brick is much less common today - but that is because brick is a terrible building material if you look at it like an engineer. It is hard to change, has a poor R value, it is expensive, and slow to put up. People whose knowledge of building comes from "the three little pigs" think brick is great and sticks are bad, those who understand real engineering understand the real complexity and trade offs. You can get brick today if you want - but it is almost always a decorative facade for engineering reasons.

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

#257

Post by akudha »

mschuster91 wrote: post #80
forgotoldacc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing. I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town s…

> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first. > I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being full…

okay, can't we have a middle ground then? On one side, nothing happens because of corruption, regulation, partisan interests etc. On the other end, there is authoritarian regime that can get things done at insane speed but at the cost of the environment and its people. Is it that hard to build stuff for the greater good of the public but respect mother nature and workers' rights at the same time?

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

#258

Post by halper »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #196
qwertygnu wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US. It shou…

Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.

We lived in Sydney until our oldest child was three, and never owned a car. Your statement is reasonable: for driving around small kids, car is essential. We instead took ferries, buses, trains and so on. From the hospital we took a taxi (or the modern equivalent), by the way.

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

#259

Post by meetpatelcurry »

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…

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

#260

Post by pornel »

Aurornis wrote: post #162
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)

People don’t pick their mode of transportation based on space efficiency. They pick their mode of transportation based on their needs and priorities. Taking the subway works when there’s a stop near your home, a stop near your destination, and you have all of the time necessary to wait for it. If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey. There’s…

High-throughput transit isn't there to be better in 1:1 comparison with one person's car trip, but to make better cities possible.

If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.

The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.

Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.

Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.

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