Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone" • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by arethuza » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #212

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…

Nobody likes to hear this, including me, But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation. Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable. So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.

"But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation."

Not if you are like me and likely to take a short nap after a long day at work...

Edit: I own a car, I use it all the time. But I also use the train a lot - all depends where I want to go and what I will be doing when I get there.

Edit2: I sometimes even drive to the train station, get out of my car and into a train!

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

#412

Post by bluGill » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #250

anonymars wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with buses?

They’re flexible (don’t need to rip up rails to change routes) but they cost a lot more to run (tyres, fuel, maintenance, staffing cost) to carry fewer people. A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver, and are way more energy efficient to boot. Then there’s ride quality (much smoother) and psychological differences - e.g. you can run them through pedestrianised areas because peopl…

> A tram can carry three, five or even more passengers with the same one driver

This is a negative! Service matters. If you have more than 50 passengers per hour off peak, or 200 peak you should be adding more service. A small 50 passenger bus can easially handle those numbers (they are per hour, people shouldn't be riding any bus for more than 10-15 minutes). Only when you are running a bus every 5 minutes should you start thinking about putting more people on vehicles you have, and thus only then is a tram worth thinking about. When a bus and tram is handling the same number of passengers the bus is cheaper to run (the bus shares the cost of the road with other users, while the road is more expensive than tracks you will have it anyway)

> and are way more energy efficient to boot.

This isn't significant enough to worry about. A bus is a lot more energy efficient than a car (assuming people use it), the additional gain from a tram for the same number of people is minimal.

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

#413

Post by Fricken » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #394

Fricken wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I see your wife and kids in trouble I'll intervene, don't worry.

Of course, motor vehicle crashes are the second biggest killer of kids after guns. I don't know where homeless people sit on the threat scale but it's a negligibly small amount.

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

#414

Post by shinecantbeseen » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

nehal3m wrote: post #327

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.

Then you would have to make the case in such a way that car infrastructure costs reside with car users only, and not spread over tax payers who don't want to pay for your choices.

That's hard to do in practice, I think. To take the inverse example: in NYC tolls on cars are used to pay for capital projects for the public transportation system. If these "independent" components were truly as independent as you imply income taxes + fares would cover the MTA, but they don't.

Each style of transportation is going to have different levels of cost associated with it, likely changing as one or the other has seemingly stable infrastructure for its needs at the time. It really seems like a more useful perspective is to look at the transportation system as a whole and consider any contribution to car infrastructure, public transport, etc as a contribution which makes the whole system better as a whole.

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

#415

Post by Saline9515 » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

darkamaul wrote: post #232

While the current Paris administration has its detractors, its policies, removing surface parking, expanding bike lanes, and lowering speed limits, have done tremendous good for air quality (see the Airparif study for details in [0]). Paris may not yet be at Amsterdam’s scale, but only 5 % of daily trips in the city are made by car. It’s staggering that roughly 50 % of public space is allocated to cars [1], despite t…

It's a reason among others, but this bike-centric policy (pedestrians nor public transport are the priority) led to an exodus of families [0]. I am among them, as I realized pretty quickly that it's a real pain to move around, buy groceries, go to the doctor, and so on with very young children in Paris, especially if you don't own a car. And now you have to deal with the uncivil behavior of the cyclists, moreover.

It's the same everywhere, as most European cities are dominated by 20-35yo people. They vote for green parties and then move out when they have children, as they realize that the policies they supported are not child- or family-friendly at all. The extreme example is Seoul, with its zones where kids are forbidden. It's a shame, as families require more public services and infrastructure (hospitals, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and so on), but they are being pushed away by childless youngsters who hate cars. Unfortunately, no middle ground seems acceptable for this crowd, so I'm unconvinced that it will change.

Another negative aspect is that cyclists do not use public transportation, so they lead municipalities to decrease investment in this sector, which is, however, the most inclusive, safe and efficient way to move people around. This is also seen in Paris, where the bus speed has never been so slow, the fleet is aging,, while the city hall spends like a teenager on a weekend trip with daddy's credit card on new bike lanes.

In the EU at least, the next nail in the coffin will be the low-emissions zones that will make it prohibitively expensive to enter/leave the center, forcing families to leave metropolises altogether.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/09/06/why-the-mi...

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

#416

Post by eigenspace » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

whatever1 wrote: post #365

eigenspace wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very backwards way of looking at the issue. The public transportation infrastructure and denser housing used to exist throughout north American cities, but was bulldozed to make room for comically wide roads, oversized single family houses (increasinly occupied by empty-nesters not utilizing all the now empty space), parking lots, malls, and big box stores. Car centric design caused these problems, and movi…

Did they also bulldoze the skyscrapers that we are missing to house all of the suburbs population in the cities ? It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.

Skyscrapers add density but they're only part of the solution. North American cities have plenty of skyscrapers and plenty of single family homes but they have a servere lack of dense multi family housing units.

> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.

This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.

It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.

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

#417

Post by alistairSH » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #378

alistairSH wrote: post #319

I love this quote from the mayor: The fact that you park your private car in a public space is crazy: if you don’t have room for your freezer, do you put it on the sidewalk?

I dont think its a very good analogy. I completely understand dedicating space to public transport instead of cars. But dedicating space to cars seems entirely reasonable in isolation, because the city has an interest in making it possible to get there. Parking spaces store cars - but is that their entire function? Or is that just an aspect of enabling people to drive into the city? Consider the fact that you cannot…

Yeah, it's a not perfect analogy.

But, when talking about the expectation* that every public space have acres of free-to-use public parking, it makes a fair amount of sense.

* In my experience, this is a very common expectation in the USA.

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

#418

Post by esarbe » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #202

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…

Design won't mean you won't get soaked if it happens to rain when you need to walk to the nearest bus station to get to work. You can reduce the issues with public transport somewhat (at the expense of its density and cost advantages) but you can never completely eliminate them compared to personal vehicles that get you from door to door.

There's things like umbrellas, you know.

No need to wrap yourself in two tons of steel, aluminum and plastic. 100 grams is enough.

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

#419

Post by mystifyingpoi » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:40 PM UTC

jajko wrote: post #350

NickPollard wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Thats how most of Europe lives.

THIS. Europe doesn't end on Paris. People visit huge metropolies and base their judgement on this, which really skews the perspective.

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

#420

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

sebstefan wrote: post #157

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]

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