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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"

#341

Post by stetrain »

xyzelement wrote: post #331

I love walking - both in places as a tourist, in NYC where I lived most of my life, and in my small north shore Long Island town today. But similar to any other "product" the evaluation depends on the user's needs. As a single guy I loved that NYC was dense and walkable - because that meant (among other things) literally millions of date-able women within a 30 minute walk radius of my house. Great! Now as a dad of 3…

There is also a gradient of density and walk/bike-ability between NYC, one of the densest cities in the country, and super spread-out car-dependent cul-de-sac suburbs, but the US often skips those middle steps.

Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated communities up and down a 4-lane 45mph highway and where the line of cars picking up kids from school each day backs out onto the road and blocks traffic.

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

#342

Post by mschuster91 »

skitter wrote: post #247
anonymars wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with buses?

They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.

I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.

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

#343

Post by KaiserPro »

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.

> Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density.

For places like london, paris, amsterdam, you can totally be car free.

So long as you have a pram with space under the seat for storing stuff, its totally not a problem to take kids out and about. The other thing thats invaluable, is that you can concentrate entirely on your kids without worrying about crashing.

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

#344

Post by throw0101d »

christina97 wrote: post #215
gspencley wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book. Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty. My two observation…

> Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life.

Being on a motorcycle in a jurisdiction where lane filtering is allowed/tolerated is awesome during rush hour (or any hour, really).

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

#345

Post by bluGill »

dijit wrote: post #45
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…

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…

> 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

That is a bad reading. If there is more congestion it is because you made some trips that were impossible before possible and so people are better using your city. The point of a city is all the things you can do - otherwise people would live in a rural area with less options but not traffic - so limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city. You need to build enough to get out of this, eventually people will no longer find new/better opportunties opened up by building and congestion will no longer increase (if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway).

Note that I'm not advocating you build a road to get ahead of congestion. Generally it is much more cost effective to build a good public transit system. However system is the key here, roads only where because you can get anywhere on them anytime you want to go, if your transit system isn't the same people won't use it.

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

#346

Post by alistairSH »

okdood64 wrote: post #280
deltarholamda wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing. I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc.…

Thank you for this. This is precisely my issue with public transport in the US (granted my experience has only been in SF, Oakland, NYC and Chicago). It’s emotionally taxing when you need to keep your guard up all the time. I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be on someone if they had kids to tow around as well.

I can make most of the same arguments about driving.

People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.

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

#347

Post by daveliepmann »

Ekaros wrote: post #283
bluGill wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't be packing people like sardines. If your subway is that full then you should be adding more trains, or building more lines to ease congestion. (depending on your cities exact situation). In the US we have made building for a reasonable price impossible and then say it is impossible to fix the problems, but it shouldn't be like that.

I thought building more lanes does not work. So why would building more lines work. Soon there will be induced demand and they will be even fuller.

Because rail infra scales really well, bus infra scales well, and bike infra scales well -- while car infra scales disastrously.

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

#348

Post by throwaway894345 »

silvestrov wrote: post #52
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…

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)

I don’t think it’s the number of people transported that is hard to get one’s head around—it’s imagining using a subway to get to all of their destinations which are spread all over and separated by at least a quarter mile of parking lots and 8 lane highways. In their mind, this would require an absurd amount of subway or bus lines and tons of transitions and it would take an eternity to get to their destination and they might interact with lower class people and so on. The thing they don’t understand is that without cars you can build all of those destinations much closer together in a single walkable place that you just need transit to get to/from. When you take away the cars, you don’t need gargantuan parking lots or 8 lane highways.

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

#349

Post by Ekaros »

irusensei wrote: post #340
pjmlp wrote: post #139

First sort out how people can manage to visit cities without having to own a car on first place. Most European villages and town are unreachable without cars. Some can already consider themselves lucky if there is a daily connection into one direction. Everyone likes to think we are all living in Paris, Berlin within city boundaries.

A lot of people in the US seems to have a candy colored version of the EU in their heads that mainly consists of an idealized version of these cities and free shit.

Ofc, things look great if you spend a few days in expensive hotel or furbished AirBnB ruining things for locals. And in that time visit a few local places for food or get groceries for a few meals. But this is vastly different from living such places for years and trying to pay for it with local wages...

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

#350

Post by jajko »

NickPollard wrote: post #268
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a 4 year old and an 18 month old, and I don't own a car (nor does my partner). We rent a car ~10-20 times a year, but that's usually for vacations or trips out of the city to visit family. Regular weekly family life we use buses, the underground (metro), trains, or sometimes taxis. We are considering eventually getting a car, but we've managed for 4 years with children to not need one and it's not been an issu…

London has abysmal transport situation - any time I needed to traverse through city, it was 3+ hours of buses and trains/subway mix. Of course doing the same with car would be even worse.

Imagine when people don't live in such shitholes, and spend weekends travelling ie to nature or mountains or culture or history or whatever, on non-congested roads. Heck, imagine going to nature even evenings after work, ie for rock climbing. Public transport would be 2-3x that travel time, if possible at all. Also, much more expensive compared to a single car drive, even when accounting all taxes, maintenance and purchasing costs of a car.

Thats how most of Europe lives. City center folks can keep their car-free existence, just please for god's sake don't force it down everybody else's throats like that's the only way to live.

Some people would happily lose half of paycheck to avoid such life, exactly because they spent part of their lives in city centers and know very well what lifestyle they reject, if they can and can afford it. Quadruple that for families with small kids, like my own.

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