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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"

#581

Post by marcosdumay »

basilikum wrote: post #111
newyankee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tunneling underground is extremely expensive. Individual self driving pods aka cars are very expensive. But most importantly cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground, plus now you have to build entrances and exits to the underground system everywhere. Traveling also becomes a lot less appealing when you're in a black tube all the time rather than seeing the city around you. It'…

> cars do not get more efficient in capacity just because you put them underground

I don't think the entire "car tunnels" thing is reasonable either, but this one is wrong. The bottleneck for cars is the inherent interference in the 2-dimensional streets. If you shove them all in a few tunnels right until they get into a low-transit region close to the destination, it would increase their capacity by a lot.

It's also a huge amount of money that is better used some other way. But it has an effect.

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

#582

Post by dfee »

bee_rider wrote: post #557
dfee wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a website I read last night: > Mountain Life > I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night…

A bit weird they decided to include some barbs about how their environment was NOT like some city, even when trying to be positive.

Me? I was just providing an alternate perspective that life beyond the boroughs is not just strip malls.

I've spent a bunch of time in Manhattan. Cumulatively, many months of my life. It's a fun experience, but I'm not interested in raising my kids there.

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

#583

Post by dfee »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #573
bee_rider wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit weird they decided to include some barbs about how their environment was NOT like some city, even when trying to be positive.

Living rent free in their minds. New Yorkers don't think about them at all, just like the scene from Mad Men.

I think you're right. It's strange getting into a taxi and seeing NY1 – there really is minimal consideration of the rest of the country.

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

#584

Post by miltonlost »

shinecantbeseen wrote: post #522
Workaccount2 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are not totally wrong, it's very true that car centric society has enabled the sprawling suburbs iconic of America (a large home and yard for everyone), from a sustainability standpoint, freely developed heavily packed cities win hands down. It's so much easier and more efficient to take care of everyone in one spot rather than sprawled out all over the place.

Sustainability and efficiency, sure - you're definitely right on that. I'm going to take a bit of a devil's advocate role here though: There are negative impacts to dense packing of humans too, though. Think about the local ecosystem of plants and animals that was irreparably destroyed and will never be recovered in the construction of X densely packed city you can think of. Think about the huge scale of resource shi…

??? Sprawl is actually environmentally friendly? What in the world? Densely packed cities by definition take up less space than suburbs.

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

#585

Post by marcosdumay »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #212
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…

Nobody likes to hear this, including me, But a car with no traffic is the overall best form of transportation. Anything that reduces traffic, just makes driving a car more palatable. So we are stuck forever at an equilibrium of tolerable traffic. More people taking the bus, train, bikes, and walking? Great! I'll zip down the highway and get a parking spot right in front.

Yes.

That's why everybody should heavily subsidize public transportation.

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

#586

Post by ericmay »

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

People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.

To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.

You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.

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

#587

Post by deltarholamda »

Zigurd wrote: post #571
deltarholamda wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody I know voted for Nixon." Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.

Somebody ought to tell the people trying to solve a housing shortage that depopulation is the real problem.

There is "housing shortage" and "affordable housing shortage", and these are two things that sound similar but are actually very different.

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

#588

Post by cycomanic »

sandworm101 wrote: post #180
gspencley wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense. From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs en…

>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above. Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the cor…

> Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment.

That does not match statistics for pretty much anywhere in the world. urban/metro areas are growing while rural communities are dying.

>Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport.

I grew up in a city of 70k completely walkable, we had a supermarket 5min walk from the house. Why would I ever want to have to go on large shopping runs, if I can just walk up to the supermarket?

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

#589

Post by mothballed »

ericmay wrote: post #586
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.…

> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment. To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around ou…

It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes on public transit. If I have an uber or a private taxi or even a private collectivo which is a private system that works like public transit in much the 3rd world, if I get sick of someone panhandling for the Nth time I can kick them the fuck out.

If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.

Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.

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