Iowa City has a pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown and it's the most charming, lively, interesting place in the city. Not to mention, it's safe, fun, and pleasant for all ages. There's music, dancing, a playground, food, etc.
Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
111–120 of 286 posts
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#112We get it citylab, you hate cars, and think everyone lives in the downtown of a metropolis. Meanwhile, the rest of us have places to be, and 99% of my country has no public transport. While I agree that city centers need more walking room, the categorical exclusion of longer distant transport options will just create more parking lots at the border of such areas. The more modern planning ignores the forest (countries…
This is exactly why I left the field of urban planning. Practitioners were wildly out of touch with the way the vast majority of people lived that it rendered the field irrelevant. The job was basically a continued effort in trying to coerce people into living in pre-WWII style cities, when the fact is that most people who live in the suburbs are quite happy with the arrangement, even if 24 year-old me found the idea of suburbs distasteful.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
How often do you have those meetings? If it's once a week or less, you'd probably be better off with a carshare rather than owning a private vehicle. No single mode of transportation solves every use-case. My car is suboptimal when I'm going downtown, as well as for trips longer than 300 miles or so.
Except ... cars do solve every use case. Suboptimal, yes, but I can get whoever & whatever I need to practically every square kilometer of this country (4200 x 2500) within 50 hours (5400km). Public transport simply can't, because it can't have stations within anywhere close to each of 10,500,000 square kilometers - and even where it does, I'm waiting (maybe hours) for service, and am severely limited in cargo option…
The thing is, right now our cars-first city planning means that things like groceries, schools, shopping centers, etc. are built far away from where people live so that you NEED a car to get there. Places like CityLab are advocating for future development that places these daily necessities within walking distance of where people live. Cars are great for long-distance travel, but it would be great to spend less time in them!
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#114My city of roughly a half million was mostly developed post-WW2. Even the denser areas are not really walkable. They tried painting bike lanes on existing roads, but that has just increased the number of bike fatalities.
Maybe expanding bus service 500-1000% and having it run 24/7 would work. Anything less means low-wagers will still need a car.
Passing a Fair Scheduling Act and giving low wage workers a daily $10 to $20 dollar Uber/Lyft credit would do more to dramatically improve lives than mass transit spending. But that is less fun to think about.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but I also don't want to live like a sardine in a can, packed in with millions of others, living in a small box, having no green space, etc. I'm generally a social person, but don't like living that close to that many people. Many others seem to agree.
There are livable and afforable alternative to Manhattan style density and there are plenty of working examples. We just refuse to build that way. Look at many continental European cities. A mid-sized German city will be full of low to mid density buildings and walk up apartments, few skyscrapers. Mixed use of retail and residential, and very good transit by American standards, connecting to intercity rail transit. H…
I think you have a very different definition of low density than everyone else.
Low density means there is at least a full building worth of space between houses and ideally several buildings worth.
It means you can stand on every side of your house and look and have difficulty seeing your neighbor.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#116Part of the change is due to the appearance of alternative powered vehicles. In Tokyo, it seems like every mother is riding an electric cargo bike with covered seating for two kids and room for groceries -- the minivan of bicycles. In Seattle, the morning commute is full of electric skateboards, scooters, onewheels, and wheelchairs. It looks doable.
How do those work in winter? We had electric scooters, but they were all scooped up by their parent companies in October ahead of the coming months of hell.
Seattle-area scooter rider here. I don’t ride rentals, I have a Boosted Rev and a Xiaomi M365 (what many rentals use). I don’t think the rentals and the Xiaomi are really meant to be used in the wet of a Seattle winter. Even the Rev, which touts its weather-resistance, needs a fender extender if you don’t want to get covered in crap (which makes me question how much they tested said weather-resistance).
That said, it’s just another single-track vehicle like a bike, and all that comes with it. Such as, riding on ice or snow is foolish. But even if it’s just rain, reduced traction means increased chance of locking a wheel and dumping it. Hence the likely reason the rentals went away, along with who the hell is going to ride them in the rain? (Answer: people that went ahead and just bought their own.)
In summary, my only complaint is that by just standing there instead of pedaling, it is kind of hard to stay warm when it is chilly. Otherwise, empty trails make for a great ride this time of year.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
America is certainly decades (if not centuries) behind in public transportation. However, these CityLab articles are doing a great thing by highlighting our unhealthy dependence on cars and making it a part of everyday conversation. If we're ever going to change we need to start by agreeing there is a problem and discussing realistic solutions. I don't quite understand your point about the "technological and class di…
The EU is over 3x as population dense as the USA. Any plan to make the USA transportation system to look like the EU's is doomed to failure from the beginning. You need to be realistic. You are never going to win hearts and minds by railing against cars - Americans love their cars, and for good reason. A bus is not going to pick you up at your front door the second you walk out, and it's not going to drop you directl…
Cars kill ~40000 Americans annually. Is that cheap? Criticizing cars is the only way to wake people up to the damage they have caused in our society. Sure, cars are wonderful for people with mobility issues. For the vast majority of us to design our cities around two ton death machines is a tragedy.
Our cities would be dramatically cheaper to live in with fewer cars. Less parking and road space allows higher density. Transit is cheaper. Walking and biking is healthier and will increase life expectancy.
Not everyone is driving-age, can afford a car or can afford to have parking. Car drivers are not a representative sample of the world population.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#118It's incredible how defensive people are being. Maybe they're reacting to the ridiculous title (no more cars anywhere!), but it's self-evident to anyone who lives in a major city that cars don't belong in crowded city centers.
Let's be rational: city X (SF, NY, Berlin, etc) has a downtown which is 2x2 miles where thousands/millions of people commute to each day. Car traffic in these areas is awful because cars are disproportionately large compared to bikes/scooters etc and congestion is a queuing problem.
The sooner people realize this, and the sooner they get rid of their combative, tribalist, cars vs. bikes/e-scooters mentality, then the sooner we can enact political change to alleviate congestion and make cities cleaner, safer, and less crowded.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: why? It seems patently absurd to me, especially when you're visiting. I'm visiting Berlin right now. It's a car friendly city in a car friendly country and I wouldn't want to drive anywhere here if you paid me. Too much of a hassle. Besides driving is so incredibly boring. If you're visiting, you're not going to really experience the city from behind the windows of a metal box. Maybe Northern America…
other options in USA are 1. Being abused by TSA 2. Take amtrak and get left middle of nowhere at 1 am , 2 days late. 3. Take greyhound/
Other bus companies have come up that are both cheap and reasonable nice. I used to take BoltBus all the time.
Re: Car-Free Streets Will Soon Be the Norm
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I can't drive to near my destination, I'll not likely visit that city.
Honest question: why? It seems patently absurd to me, especially when you're visiting. I'm visiting Berlin right now. It's a car friendly city in a car friendly country and I wouldn't want to drive anywhere here if you paid me. Too much of a hassle. Besides driving is so incredibly boring. If you're visiting, you're not going to really experience the city from behind the windows of a metal box. Maybe Northern America…
Public transit, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I'd have to pay to park (including time spent trying to find a decent spot), walk a non-trivial distance to the station, coordinate movement of multiple people (including young children) amid crowds, wait for transit arrival, board, find seat (!), wait, stop at every station before exit, switch transit multiple times (repeat wait/board/sit/wait), be in close proximity with strange/unpleasant/criminal people, finally walk considerable distance to destination ... never mind cargo issues. If you're acclimated to this, you don't grasp how repulsive it sounds to many.
That vs what is (to us driving-acclimated): get in car, drive there, get out ... with plenty of cargo space. Take the dog if you like.
There's a reason I live suburban and yearn for rural: I don't want to be shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers much of the time, transit included. A few rare cases aside (Munich was nice), I don't want to "experience the city" - most are dirty overcrowded bastions of hyper-dependency. A car is a refuge; transit is exposure.