Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

greeneuropeanjournal.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 994 posts

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

#391

Post by mlsu »

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.

I’m worried that my young child will die crossing the street. Sorry—these two just aren’t the same!

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

#392

Post by tim-fan »

I'm hoping for a self driving taxi + trains combo to maybe solve the problem.

For one a self driving taxi fleet could take up vastly less space - you'd no longer need one car per person, you'd need far fewer parking spots, most cars could be single or double seaters again taking less space and running more efficiently.

The space savings could be used to boost rail-based public transit options, which would see more adoption as self driving taxis make last-mile transport cheaper and easier. A bunch of positive feedback loops driving public transit adoption and improvements.

Result is cleaner and more efficient transport for all, and vast amounts of space returned from serving cars to serving people.

At least that's the dream!

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

#393

Post by nehal3m »

hammock wrote: post #285
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-centric does not mean driver-centric. Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric. Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.

'Climatists' is a strange way of putting this because pulling everything we do back to human scale will be a huge boon to solving the climate crisis. As someone who's worried about threats to the future of the species in the form of climate change I'd be all for a human centric movement.

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

#394

Post by deltarholamda »

Fricken wrote: post #338
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.…

My daily bicycle commute takes me right through the heart of my city's homeless district, and like with many cities things have gotten a lot worse since COVID. Cars are far and away the biggest threat to my safety, and the source of all the harrassment I receive while out in public. I mean, every now and then some guttersnipe blurts out incoherencies at me, but that's not something to be afraid of. I regard driving,…

Do you have a wife? Kids? Would you let them bicycle through the homeless district?

I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.

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

#395

Post by acomjean »

AlexandrB wrote: post #174
sebstefan wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No amount of "transit is more efficient" statistics is going to convince someone to ride it if they feel unsafe. Pretending that these are not real concerns just makes sure that we'll keep building monster highways.

You have to take people’s concerns seriously, but “cities are so dangerous” has returned as a political thing and is hard to change as long as one group is making these claims for political reasons.

I’ll point out that we had a postdoc in the lab I worked in from India, then Germany. When he told people he was going to Boston people told him he was crazy to come to crime ridden america where everyone has guns. He laughed about it hind-site but that image is real and gave him pause. It does real damage.

Cities aren’t perfect, but traffic needs to get bad enough or too costly and people will take transit (as my cousin pointed out about living in NYC). I just ended up riding my bike 50 minutes to work.

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

#396

Post by Zigurd »

vixen99 wrote: post #213
bythreads wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any city the shortest distance in total time spent is by bike. Even if it is widely dangerous to do so (most american cities i've ever visited) You can hem and haw - but its pretty bang on When you then add finding parking at the ends of your trip to it it is crazyly more efficient timewise. Now even copenhagen denmark has rain causing many more to take a car or public transport (that works). But it is very clear…

Agreed. What's the way forward though? https://www.romania-insider.com/insurance-union-one-cyclist-... 'In Romania, one cyclist dies every two days'

What's the number for pedestrians? Half of all road deaths are of people not in cars. That's not an argument in favor of cars.

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

#397

Post by lucideer »

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…

This. The quickest & most pleasant places to drive a car are the places with the fewest large single-mode roads & - importantly - even fewer cars on them.

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

#398

Post by Based-A »

nonethewiser wrote: post #249
vjk800 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why wouldnt I prefer having orders of magnitude more space, given the option?

Because there is only a fixed amount of land a city can ever possibly sustain. Urban sprawl all you want, but eventually you run out of land to keep expanding into or the city goes broke because there aren't enough revenue generating properties in a given area to cover the cost of servicing those areas. At some point more has to turn into better and more efficient.

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

#399

Post by mothballed »

mlsu wrote: post #373
cvwright wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces. Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.

How many indiscriminate neck stabbings are there per year in your town? And I can’t help but ask the obvious, how many indiscriminate deaths by car (i.e young child struck by truck) are there?

I looked up, i.e. Chicago. There were double the number of homicides vs fatal car accidents. I don't pretend those can be compared 1:1, but I'll note when I took public transit it wasn't just the risk of being on the transit but also getting dumped out near areas that were violent assault / murder hot spots.

The public transit stations I rode in the eastern part of Cleveland would become or already were hood rat hangouts where I would routinely see vicious beatings. I eventually started biking, which was a bit safer, although still then someone tried to rob me at gunpoint when my bicycle got a flat near the public transit line. I finally moved to somewhere with no public transit and haven't dealt with such violent threats since. I learned public transit = robbery/gang express, get further away and you get further away from their getaway -- although many of them know not to 'shit where they eat' by doing it right on the train car. Another plus of getting off public transit was the ability to carry a weapon, in case some jackass tried it again.

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

#400

Post by epolanski »

haspok wrote: post #281
sandworm101 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above. Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the cor…

Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to…

In switzerland you pay income taxes based on your city/neighborhood.

This means that cities have generally higher income taxes as they offer more services.

But here's the catch, since suburbs and neighboring villages have lower income taxes...property is still expensive, because high earners are going to raise the prices in order to pay less taxes.

It's a very balanced system.

In any case, most Swiss cities have pedestrian downtowns and areas combined with normal car-friendly roads.

Post reply on HN