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Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

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241–250 of 392 posts

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#241

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Electric cars tend to be heavier than ICE cars. This means their tyres wear out faster, which is plastic dust being thrown up in the air. (We're still not sure of the health impacts of microplastics, but we do know they accumulate in various organs, including the brain.) They also throw up road dust, and we know that rock dust is really bad to breathe in. Air pollution is still present. Compared to ICE cars fitted wi…

The noise pollution is also comparable. Over 30 kph it's mostly wind and rolling resistance.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#242
post #205

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> As the EU continues its course to ban the sale of ICE cars by 2035, the argument of "fewer cars make for cleaner air" is gradually losing weight. Complete nonsense I'm afraid. An EV is about 50% cleaner and way quieter. That's literally it. There's no other real benefits of it. An EV is still a car: - Still pollutes: it's a 2 ton vehicle with rubber tires - manufacturing that is very damaging to the environment and…

EVs are only quieter at very low speeds. If they're going 20 mph or less, they're great, but any faster and air and rolling resistance is most of what you hear.

It's also just as easy for a sociopath in an EV to roll down the windows and blast the neighborhood with noise from the stereo.

EVs are better in the sense that the mufflers of ICE vehicles can be deliberately defeated by twits.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly helps the buses move more efficiently, but it can't do much about things like bus stop placement, or just generally sense of place as you start or end your trip.

> it can't do much about things like bus stop placement Why not? Fewer cars means more room for bus stops.

Because there has to be a place where the bus stop could sensibly be. A history of car-centric design often eliminates those opportunities.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#244
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Netherlands where the weather is arguably tougher than in Paris (rain, cold and wind for large portion of the year) yet everyone bikes year in year out. And not just young active people, it's a habit found across all age groups, parents bike their children to school (or with them if old enough, etc.) All that to say I wouldn't worry too much about the feasibility issue, it's really more of a mindset to…

> the Netherlands It's completely flat and the obvious reason why everyone cycles. Nothing to do with mindset, like you're somehow superior to the rest of EU.

Considering I'm not Dutch, you may feel reassured there is no superiority feeling at play here.

I agree with another commenter that while flat, the Netherlands have their own hurdles (biking with a strong headwind on the banks of the IJ is not easy, even if flat), and I definitely agree that their city design is what makes this unique.

I lived in various parts of France growing up, and I can assure you there are flat cities there, yet biking in them felt very risky at best.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughput is directly proportional to the volume of cars, and SUVs have larger volume. Technically perhaps surface area, but there is a psychological effect to height. I believe people also give taller vehicles more space as a rule.

Throughput in congestion is determined mostly by how quickly drivers react to the opportunity to move and how many points of attrition are in a path. Both of what are impacted by the number of cars and how well they break or accelerate, not by their size. There's space to claim large car cause attrition, but that's completely dependent of the local properties of the streets.

That larger cars cause diminished throughput is pretty solidly demonstrated through a variety of modeling and real-world traffic analysis.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365069344_How_the_r...

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#246
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and for the ones that have to use a car, there's less traffic and less people stealing dedicated parking spots. The article mentions there's now constant traffic jams for city buses in Paris. It seems best for people who can cycle, walk, or people who already live in the city and don't need to travel much.

That's just a weird way of saying that the reforms didn't go far enough.

Congestion pricing seems to be the simplest solution. Has nice clear incentives and less excessive top-down city planning.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can't do much about things like bus stop placement Why not? Fewer cars means more room for bus stops.

Because there has to be a place where the bus stop could sensibly be. A history of car-centric design often eliminates those opportunities.

I see. I think you're talking about stop placement on a higher level? Removing street parking can free up room for lots of extra stops, which can help with bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#248
post #168

I moved from LA to Paris, my mental and physical health improved dramatically. I don't even take the subway, walking and biking are enough where I live. Hopefully we can reach the comfort of dutch cities within a decade.

What do you think about all those videos on how dangerous Paris is? Having made the move, would you say that those stem from real experiences and are organic or would you say that it was an organized campaign for some political reason? Or maybe something else? Trump keeps saying that they want to prevent USA becoming a dangerous place like Europe, even said that recently and the Irish president disagreed with him. As…

Videos about how dangerous some city is, often to scare people about nonwhite residents, is a longstanding and utterly useless genre.

Better to get crime information from anything else.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#249
post #79

> “She is constantly criticized, but still reelected: I’ve never understood it,” says Lionel Pradal, a bistro owner on the bustling Rue des Martyrs. “Parisians never go out and vote, and then after they complain. This is the problem with French people, it’s always the same.” This is somewhat of a public secret, but few people ever stay in Paris for longer than say 10 years and thus aren't that attached to the city. I…

> Parisians never go out and vote, and then after they complain. Wikipedia says that 70% of the people voted. Is it mandatory there? Here in Argentina it's mandatory, but weakly enforced. We get also a 70% of people voting. Anyway, the big problem are bubbles, probably all the friends of the guy don't like the current mayor and complain.

It's not mandatory. Hidalgo got reelected because people like her, the media is giving too much voice to the pro-cars when 70% of Parisians never drive in the city.

Re: Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in fact the end goal wasn’t to remove vehicles, it was to reduce congestion, emissions, etc. Those things are caused by vehicles, so policies to remove them will affect vehicles, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that their motivation is anti-vehicle.

It is also anti vehicle. Moving people in nyc at densities of 10ft by 20ft apart from the next human at the best theoretical case is astoundingly stupid.

> Moving people in nyc at densities of 10ft by 20ft apart from the next human at the best theoretical case is astoundingly stupid

Are you sure? I would expect that it is average density of people over the length of the route that is important when it comes from moving people from some point A to some point B on a road.

With for example buses you have high density where the buses are actually at, but 0 density where they are not. The average over the entire route can easily be lower than the density for cars where you can have that 1 person per 20 feet over the whole route.

If an observer at a fixed point on the route sees more than about 50 cars pass between buses passing the cars will have higher throughput.

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