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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"

#471

Post by dropofwill »

deltarholamda wrote: post #225
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…

>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing. I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc.…

Pontevedra is at least 100 times smaller then NYC, it's more comparable to the suburbs that you're moving your family to.

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

#472

Post by cycomanic »

bombcar wrote: post #316
christina97 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book. Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty. My two observation…

Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car. But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be.…

> Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. >

Hold on, if we talk about efficiency and profitability, you also need to compare to roads. You can't on one hand subsidise road/car travel and at the same time demand profitability from public transport.

If we would make road charges actually cover the costs it would become completely unsustainable in rural areas and would likely not become profitable in urban centers (factoring the price of the real estate of roads into the equation would likely increase cost significantly) except for rush hour.

The main thing that will bring cost of public transport down is going to be self driving, not cars but trains.

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

#473

Post by bombcar »

LastMuel wrote: post #371
bombcar wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car. But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be.…

How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?

Someone’s going to push this and the result will be billing the bus for road usage per person …

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

#474

Post by drstewart »

dbingham wrote: post #462
deltarholamda wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing. I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc.…

This all comes down to "We can't have nice things in America because of our toxic mix of individualism and capitalism." Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible…

[flagged]

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

#475

Post by sensanaty »

yostrovs wrote: post #70
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)

Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.

I mean, mine does lol. Of course this is the Netherlands so it'll be different to the states, but I literally live across the street from a train station, and it goes directly to the dead center of the city in less than 5 minutes. There's a train every 10 minutes. The same journey is, minimum, 15 minutes by car (or 10 by bus since we have dedicated bus lanes), at the end of which you have to find a parking spot. You then still have to actually get to your destination cause the chances of parking in the center are slim to none. People really underestimate how much of our public land is taken up by cars just... sitting there, doing fucking nothing.

With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.

> Oh and you might be odor sensitive

I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.

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

#476

Post by ascagnel_ »

stetrain wrote: post #341
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…

There is also a gradient of density and walk/bike-ability between NYC, one of the densest cities in the country, and super spread-out car-dependent cul-de-sac suburbs, but the US often skips those middle steps. Small towns where your kids can get to their friend's house by walking or biking a couple of blocks over can be great for raising a family, as opposed to all of their friends' houses being in a different gated…

They exist, but in New Jersey -- most of the "cities" (with the exception of downtown Jersey City and downtown Newark) would be called streetcar suburbs in an earlier time. I live in one of them, and it's great: I have a small, private backyard, but I'm also Sadly, it's illegal to build streetcar suburbs in most of the US today, because outfitting every house with a private driveway, setbacks, etc., would move everything far apart enough to significantly hurt walkability.

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

#477

Post by cryptopian »

nehal3m wrote: post #393
hammock wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car-centric does not mean driver-centric. Even driver-centric is less anti-human than car-centric. Maybe we need a “People First” movement in this world. I know the climatists and PETA won’t like that, but it’s worth considering as some sort of competing, balancing force in the world vs everything else we have today.

'Climatists' is a strange way of putting this because pulling everything we do back to human scale will be a huge boon to solving the climate crisis. As someone who's worried about threats to the future of the species in the form of climate change I'd be all for a human centric movement.

Exactly. If you have plenty of community spaces spread around an urban area - cafes, pubs, small businesses, public parks - you both reduce the amount of travel required, and strengthen local communities

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

#478

Post by cycomanic »

SoftTalker wrote: post #421
LastMuel wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?

Because they aren't. They enable almost all economic activity that involves moving things or people around.

That same argument should apply to public transport then. You can't on one hand argue that roads don't need to be profitable in the traditional sense because of their benefits and the turn around and ignore the same for public transport.

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

#479

Post by Saline9515 »

panick21_ wrote: post #329
alerighi wrote: post #122

The problem that car solved years ago, is the following: you can develop a city without cars up to a point where the distance that you have to move to get to your work, or the supermarket, the hospital, etc is at max some km, let's say not more than 10/20. That has the consequence that all people wants to live in the city center, and not in peripherals areas. This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (o…

What nonsense. > This has the consequence of making the cost of an house (or rent) go up to a point where most people can't even afford it Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high. > Cars allow us to develop our society not in big cities, but in rather small towns, without ugly skyscrapers Go to Switzerland, it look like that before cars and still does. You can get affordable hous…

> Except that in some of the largest cities in the world rents aren't that high.

Citation is really needed for this one. Especially if you consider Swiss real estate "affordable."

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

#480

Post by rcpt »

deltarholamda wrote: post #225
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…

>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing. I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc.…

> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time

OP is right. The demand is huge and supply is tiny. Even with those scary panhandlers people are jamming onto public transport (when it actually exists) and going far far out of their way to experience walkable areas.

> zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional

Crime in NYC is exceedingly low and the schools are great. Why don't you simply move to Chelsea or the Upper West Side?

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