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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"

#431

Post by bluGill »

zppln wrote: post #382
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…

I share this sentiment as well, but while living in a relatively small city with only around 150k people in northern Europe. I moved out to the "suburbs" after having my first kid and find enormous quality of life in being able to have a car and a house. The city center is getting increasingly more "hostile" to car traffic but there's nothing to be had there anyway. A side from restaurants and coffee shops you can ge…

As a fellow parent I find dense cities are worse. My kids are not welcome in most of the restaurants, bars, or shops - which is just as well because I couldn't afford to pay for regular family meals at any of them anyway. Even the parks are more art orientation - great for adults but no playground that my kids would enjoy. Not that it matters as 3 bedroom apartments are rare, and more than that impossible to find. They are often food deserts - it is easier for a farmer to get to a grocery store (they expect to drive but the uncontested roads are fast), you often need to drive to a grocery store as there is no option, of if there is one it is the expensive high end store not the discount supermarkets.

Note that most dense cities have within the same city limits less dense areas that look like suburbs. These are often called "inner city" they are generally affordable but because the schools are bad are not places I'd want to live. For this discussion I'm going to count them as suburbs...

It doesn't have to be like the above. I've seen dense cities around the world that are very family friendly. However not in the US.

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

#432

Post by ambicapter »

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 is just a factor of car driving being wildly more inefficient at "people-carrying" than public transport. That is why "improving things" for cars just makes things worse-you're spending your sparse resources (money, land, manpower) more and more inefficiently.

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

#433

Post by stronglikedan »

powvans wrote: post #10

This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first sto…

> Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people.

Maybe most but there's plenty of public space that doesn't. People choose to live around the public spaces that do. Some even try to change that instead of moving somewhere that doesn't. The great thing about America is that there's plenty of everything for everyone, but it's not just going to come to you.

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

#434

Post by solarexplorer »

Saline9515 wrote: post #415
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…

It really depends on the city/quarter where you live. I live in the center of Barcelona and had no problems with two small kids at all. Supermarkets, real farmer's markets, hospitals, pharmacies, schools, etc are all within 10min walking distance. I work from home, but I could walk to the office it I wanted to. I don't have to leave the city at all.

Eventually I gave in and bought a car, not because it was necessary but rather to leave the city on weekends and get closer to nature.

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

#435

Post by mhl47 »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #375
KaiserPro wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but these are multi-million cities. They have amazing public transport. The issue I see here is assuming that Europe = Paris/Rome/Amsterdam. Probably due to tourism. It makes the impression that whole EU is just amazing and no one needs a car. It can't be further from the truth.

Pretty rich that you are complaining about generalization now where you made the initial statement that the "Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density" which doesn't seem to have any limits in scope.

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

#436

Post by ascagnel_ »

panick21_ wrote: post #301
cholantesh wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I had a feeling that was a NJB video. It is generally surreal to me that even smaller settlements in Europe have more, shall we say, evolvability than North American ones, and (at least in some cases owing to their antiquity) prioritize the needs of pedestrians.

American cities, almost all were also built before the car. At least the city centers. Both US and European cities grew after WW2. The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how…

The problem for America is that moneyed interests (big car manufacturers) would frequently sabotage or otherwise salt the earth for public transportation projects.

One immediate one off the top of my head is the Long Island Expressway: when it was constructed, it was built in mostly-undeveloped or under-developed land, and space could have been reserved for a rail line running parallel to the highway.

Another is less obvious: the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line in northern NJ was constructed in the late 90s and early 00s, including a disused rail right-of-way that went from the southern part of Jersey City to the southern tip of Bayonne, near the Bayonne Bridge that connects to Staten Island (a notorious transit desert). While there were plans to extend the light rail line when the bridge was raised in the late 00s, it was decided against, even though it would've been a boon to all three cities/boroughs.

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

#437

Post by arp242 »

newyankee wrote: post #82
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)

How about if cities were built in such a way that you would just have buildings and podium being pedestrian and bike friendly with all transportation network being 1 level underground (or 2 levels) all as self driving EV pods. This may increase the no of possible 'roads' and does not sound as far fetched in terms of overall costs. Emergency vehicles can be given an exemption to operate on the podium

Yes, this sounds nice in principle. Also insanely expensive, difficult to build, and basically just completely unfeasible in reality.

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

#438

Post by tootie »

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.

Very wrong. I'm not OP but I have two teens and we raised them from birth in a city and have never owned a car. We rent rarely and only to go on trips to places inaccessible by rail. All kids activities were walking distance or subway. Probably ten times as much as you can find in a suburb too. Also kids learn to ride the subway by high school if not middle school so they can be independent like no place else.

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

#439

Post by uyzstvqs »

Something I said a couple days ago:

> It's not an either-or. You can have streets which are car-friendly, bike-friendly, and pedestrian-friendly at the same time. Just look at the Dutch, they've been doing it for years. That is until recently in some big cities, though, where some less knowledgeable politicians have also adopted this false populist either-car-or-bike concept. Though the traditional principle still applies to about 99% of the country's roadworks, and it works really well.

Adding onto that, sentences like "made for people, not cars" absolutely validate my point that this is nothing but populist activism. I'm hoping that we can all have a honest, intellectual discussion on how to make infrastructure better for everyone. Just make sure to always remember in every discussion about this topic: it is never either-or, not even in the densely populated Netherlands.

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

#440

Post by arethuza »

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?

You forgot the "who didn’t even pay his fare"... which makes a big difference.
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