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Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

citylab.com

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Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#221

Post by smoe »

ghaff wrote: post #55
Barrin92 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never even got a drivers license and have lived just fine so I'm also always shocked by the comments here in transport-related threads when people talk about not having a car as if this is somehow a fantasy utopian vision. And this also I might add includes families with children. While I don't have any I know a lot of parents who don't rely on cars either.

I have zero trouble understanding that owning a personal car may not make economic sense in many cities. I have more trouble really grokking the no driver license. So many trips associated with both work and vacation experiences--or even weekend activities outside of a city--require renting a car. I guess you can consciously avoid those situations but it seems very limiting. (Certainly I couldn't really have done job…

Swiss here without a licence. I agree that a licence would be useful at times but in the 15 years I could have had one, the perceived value of it never outweighed the cost of acquisition.

When I was 18 and wanted a licences, I didn't had nor was willing to save up the about $3000 it costs, and later, when I had the money, I wasn't willing to put in the dozens of hours of my time. So getting one is on my "maybe later" list of life todos.

Thing is in Switzerland, as a software engineer (compared to jobs who definitely need licences), using a car is not just a matter whether it makes economical sense: Public transport is often just faster and in my opinion more convenient. E.g. my last time commuting from one city to another was, door to door, 60 min by train and would have been 50 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes by car depending on traffic. The big difference being that I spent the time in the train working, reading, sleeping, chatting with people etc. and after work I could spontaneously decide to go out with friends, without worries how to get home after some drinks.

Same for weekend activities. Public transport gets you there and especially in Switzerland, cities are so small that you can actually just walk out. You can start e.g. a bicycle tour from your city apartment, no need to get somewhere else first.

As a said in the beginning there are still situation where I wish I had a licence. On the other hand, I'd end up using it maybe 2-3 times a year and I'm not sure how comfortable and safe I would be driving with that little regular experience.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#222

Post by aivisol »

acd wrote: post #113

I hope we remove cars from city centers in Europe and replace them with more bike lanes and public transport. Ie the small particle pollution from cars is making pedestrians and cyclist sick. I hope we put car parking centers outside the city center and offer good inbound public / private transport. I would say clean air is an example of Tragedy of the commons, where the pollution is an externalized cost. https://en.…

I wish the order was reverse: first create public transport and car parks outside and then remove cars from city centers.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#223

Post by paganel »

simongray wrote: post #109
lbeltrame wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the city plans to maintain its metro system’s capacity at less than two-thirds of its pre-pandemic activity. As a resident of Milan, I find this rather displeasing. I don't own a car (and have no plans to own one), and I exclusively depend on the metro + trains to get to work, which is too far away for serious walking or even cycling. FTR: it's actually far easier to go there (at least from where I live) with publi…

> Also, what happens if it rains? I'm from Copenhagen. Almost two thirds of us use our bikes to get around. The weather is incredibly shifty on this island and during autumn and winter it rains pretty much every day. Not always all day, but there's a high chance it will rain during your daily commute. So what do all the people here do? To cope with the weather we have developed advanced technology that negates the ef…

Not all of Europe is Copengahen when it comes to climate, quite the contrary (even though that is very hard to understand even for some of the people I talk to here in Bucharest). Not sure about how rain manifests itself in Milan but summer rains here in Bucharest can be quite the thing, one minute you're minding your own business and two minutes later you can soaking wet if you had dared stay in said summer rain for too long. Something like this [1] or this [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYtYcV-S_0M

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e4dxzpZCZ0

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#224

Post by CydeWeys »

ghaff wrote: post #37
CydeWeys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to drive to a city centre and then have a walk without the traffic noise There's a huge inherent contradiction here though: You are creating the very problem you want to escape from for everyone along your path of travel. land tends to be quite expensive in the city center, and parking is not a good use of it. Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center?

>Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center? That's pretty common for people who drive into big cities for the day (or indeed to work for a day). Maybe they park on the outskirts and take transit in. But that takes time and, especially for a family, the savings may not really be worth it.

Yeah, that's why I chose that figure; it's roughly what it costs to park for a day here in Manhattan. And that's before the bridge and interstate tolls, if you're coming from the west.

To most people it isn't worth it to spend that much, especially because traffic on the bridges and tunnels is usually so bad that the trains are not only cheaper but faster, too.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#225

Post by simongray »

paganel wrote: post #223
simongray wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, what happens if it rains? I'm from Copenhagen. Almost two thirds of us use our bikes to get around. The weather is incredibly shifty on this island and during autumn and winter it rains pretty much every day. Not always all day, but there's a high chance it will rain during your daily commute. So what do all the people here do? To cope with the weather we have developed advanced technology that negates the ef…

Not all of Europe is Copengahen when it comes to climate, quite the contrary (even though that is very hard to understand even for some of the people I talk to here in Bucharest). Not sure about how rain manifests itself in Milan but summer rains here in Bucharest can be quite the thing, one minute you're minding your own business and two minutes later you can soaking wet if you had dared stay in said summer rain for…

There's plenty of heavy showers during summer in Denmark too.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#226

Post by cwhiz »

The only city in America that is even remotely capable of going car free is NYC. And really it’s just Manhattan because in the other boroughs the train service starts to get spotty.

Bus service in NYC would suffice if they killed off most of the other vehicle traffic. It is sometimes faster to walk than take the bus.

Honestly, the amount of vehicle traffic in NYC right now is perfect. They should just cap it at current levels.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#227

Post by doktrin »

jeltz wrote: post #194
doktrin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oslo has about twice the population today as it had in 1950. That's a weird supporting argument. Can you name any urban centers that have not seen significant population growth since 1950?

I think you missed my point. If more than half of Oslo was built after 1950 it kinda invalidates that the city was built before cars. Oslo, like most cities, expanded heavily in an era where cars existed. So it has less to do with when cities were built and more to do with what urban planning policies different cities had. Different cities went with different paths despite all of them expanding at the same time. But…

> I think you missed my point. If more than half of Oslo was built after 1950 it kinda invalidates that the city was built before cars.

You're missing the more germane point that the relevant metric for "built" in this context are roads, not living accommodations. More people live in Oslo than in the 50s, but the roads and city blocks within ring 3 are what they are from prewar times, i.e. tons of small 1-way streets and the like.

Case in point : many, if not most, of the apartment buildings in "Gamle Oslo" (literally "Old Oslo" - the downtown area to the east of the railway station) were built in the 1980s or later, but the roads around those new constructions are still narrow 1-way prewar streets.

To my mind the parents point was pretty clear - Oslo is an older city, particularly from an American perspective, and you have to travel pretty far out from the city center to find an urban infrastructure that accommodates cars in the way the younger and generally more modern cities in the US (outside the northeast) do. This is 100% related to the city center being built before the dawn of ubiquitous private vehicles, and not to choosing some arbitrarily different urban planning "path".

Another comment mentioned the underground highways that have in fact done wonders to move traffic away from the over-congested city streets, which only reenforces the idea that the city proper was not designed to accommodate even a modest volume of car traffic.

> But the answer your question: Vienna. Vienna has smaller population today than it did in 1910.

That's interesting, but it's noteworthy that it has a higher population today than it did in 1950, so yours is an incomplete answer. The geopolitical reasons for Vienna's population in 1910 are unique, what with being the capital of a sprawling trans-national empire that ceased to exist.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#228

Post by throwawaysea »

pietrovismara wrote: post #133
throwawaysea wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s obnoxious. Cars and vehicles are necessary for many people and many purposes and cities should not use this crisis as a Trojan horse to force changes hastily. Deploying furniture to make it permanent sounds like the doing of a renegade cycle club and not everyday people, however.

Nah. People have all the right to refuse car smog and the dangers and troubles derived by having car traffic. Our generation is the generation that will have to stop using cars, whatever the sacrifice it takes is. Remote working, better public transportations financed by taxes on private transportation, there are plenty of ways to do this without disrupting anyone's life, but since governments aren't stepping up fast…

You’re pretending as if cars don’t give you a lot of benefits but they do. Outside of ultra dense gridlocked cities like NYC, cars free you to get a lot more done on any given day than you could otherwise. They give you time, which you can’t acquire easily.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#229

Post by danbolt »

ekianjo wrote: post #114
danbolt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tokyo can get pretty crammed, but I always feel more like cattle on a crowded highway than I do on a crowded train.

Not sure how you can compare the comfort of sitting in a car with your own space versus standing for an hour or more stuck in between everyone's armpits with no space to move beyond an inch.

Hmm, yeah, I can see what you mean about a car giving a little more independent space. I guess it's the fact that I could get off whenever I wanted? I could look on my phone or listen to something without having to worry about driving the car as well. Or, I guess managing a car has always felt more responsibility than privilege to me.

I guess also "an hour or more stuck in between everyone's armpits" is also like a worst-case scenario, and it happened to me infrequently enough that I didn't mind overall. Or, Tokyo rush hour might have been like commuting on the LA interstate? Neither are very fun, but driving along the Pacific Coast Highway is a more ideal kind of thing. I think I've had a lot of commuter rail situations like that too which have made up for it.

Re: Europe’s cities are making less room for cars after coronavirus

#230

Post by lh7777 »

arcticbull wrote: post #154
renewiltord wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American cities are not capable of running good public transit because they mostly use it as a combination of a jobs program and a poor-people access program. I was car-free for seven years in San Francisco (supposedly one of the relatively high performers) but my standard of living jumped significantly after I bought my car. Overall, I think I might even come out ahead. I don't think I'm going to take public transit…

Does buying a car really make sense in a Zipcar/Getaround/Silvercar world? The numbers just don't work out IMO. Not once you factor in fuel, maintenance, damage, insurance, interest, car payments and/or depreciation, $300+/month in parking fees and the fact I still have to rent a bigger car if I need to pick stuff up or drop stuff off or shuttle more people. I gave my car to my parents a couple years after I moved to…

What's availability like, though? I know that my car doesn't make any financial sense, but my primary use case is getting out of town to go hiking, skiing, etc. I've looked into Zipcar before, but it seemed like I'd have to reserve a car ahead of time to have any chance of getting one on a nice day. In Seattle, we used to have ReachNow, Car2Go and Lime in addition to Zip, but those others recently closed down so I'm also concerned that car share isn't really a sustainable business.
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