Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London

This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.

It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true. It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.

> Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.

You stated that there was not a lot of urban planning in most European cities as they grew organically. My point is that many (over their _entire_) history were rebuilt many times, and in some of those instances with explicit urban planning. The example of Paris is to simply demonstrate this, not only was the city rebuilt several times, but once for the sheer sake of urban planning. This contradicts your statement: "There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done", Paris is _one_ (extremely prominent) counter-example.

>> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made

> They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe.

I don't think that is correct, and hence it does not at all invalidate the argument. I'm not sure if you read all of the important quotes and the references. With the benefit of the doubt, I think proof by contradiction can demonstrate this. If modernist urban planners had no sway, and were not at all influential, then these quotes would make no sense (these are referring to Europe & North America):

- "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century."

- "Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. "

To further explore this point, (and this article I really encourage you to read in its entirety): https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...

> “There were these big freeway people, and then there were the counter streams that happened between 1960 and 1970 ... One group was pushing cars out of the city, while others were trying to push them in.”

If Copenhagen was _not_ built as a modernist, car centric city (during the 1950's-1960's), then why would there be a group pushing back against car centricism in the 1960's at all? What would they have been pushing back against? Were they pushing back against how cities were built an ocean away in North America? No.. they were pushing back against how Copenhagen was rebuilt with car-centric, modernist urban planning. I mean, the title of the article is: "how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'"

> Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.

Not quite, the excerpts show that there was a lot of influence back and forth. European city planners went to the US and were influenced, and vice versa. Corbusier even designed several blocks of NYC, and the influence was reciprocal, see quote:

- "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams."

> Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially.

Considering the war effected huge regions of Europe.. that would have been: nearly all of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, a third of France, and countless more as large areas were flattened several times over. Practically every German city alone was carpet and fire bombed many times. Hence, these are very, very large reconstructions, all at a time when Modernist urban planning was the dominant style of urban planning.

> Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend.

I agree... to some extent. That is why the post-WWII reconstruction is so significant. Further, there _was_ also significant outward expansion during this time as well. Here is a quick example that Paris saw large expansions: "These large housing projects, known as the "Grand Ensembles," were constructed by the French government from the 1950s through the 1980s to help ease the housing problems that were prevalent throughout the country. Many of these high-rise buildings and communities still exist today" [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/high-rises-of-the-parisian-s....

In sum: - It's a straw argument to suggest what I'm saying is that every city was rebuilt in a modernist way.

- Though, WWII presented an opportunity for incredibly large reconstruction

- Post-WWII, there was also a lot of new construction for outward expansion

- During this time, the late 1940s to late 1960s, the dominant urban planning style of both NA and Europe was modernist car-centric (and so these constructions were similar from that perspective).

To refute, please give citations of what the dominant Urban planning style was for post-war Europe. I would love specific citations around this, as I have given you to support my claims (and even most of what I have wrote are direct quotes and references)

barriers/bollards: they're meant to stop cars from hitting people or driving in bike lanes or parking where they shouldn't. I like having them around. as for cameras, they're to catch people speeding, they mostly wouldn't be necessary if people didn't speed. and people speed mostly because the design of the road doesn't match the legal speed limit. see e.g. this[1]. so if you don't like cameras, you should welcome these redesigns.

but more importantly than any of that, could you please think about the other side of the ledger for a minute? "restrictions" on mobility are novel or hypothetical to you, but they're not for me.

traffic calming, restricted access roads, low-traffic neighourhoods, you think of these small things as restrictions on you because you can't go places quite as fast or quite as directly as you want, but for me they're lifelines. they let me get some places reliably and safely at all. on a road with 40+mph traffic, I can't use it unless there's a protected bike lane, and junctions designed with cyclists in mind (i.e. some degree of physical separation). and if that road is the only connection between A and B, then I can't get from A to B! pedestrians need barriers and refuges and controlled crossings and slowed vehicle speeds to safely get across busy roads. these things aren't luxuries, they're necessities for people who do not drive.

I've told you about getting around without a car in my city is fairly doable, because the local council has improved the infrastructure quite a bit recently. but that doesn't yet extend outside of the city's boundaries, even though there's no practical reason why it couldn't. so here's a story about those difficulties:

the city next to mine is close enough that cycling to it would be, in theory, a completely reasonable journey. a direct-ish route would take about 40 minutes; perfectly doable as a commute. but it's impossible because there is no such route. trust me, I've looked high and low for one, it simply doesn't exist. I've spent hours scouring Google Maps and Streetview, even doing reconnaissance trips to gauge the safety of certain parts myself, taking photographs, testing whether traffic lights detect me, etc. every route has many absolute showstopper segments where I'm exposed to high speed traffic with no physical protection whatsoever, and/or have to risk my life at enormous junctions whose design is completely hostile to my presence. I managed to get all the way there once, on a tangled indirect mess of side streets and unpaved tracks, taking over 3x longer than it had any right to. it was like finding the Northwest Passage. getting there by bus or rail is not quite as hard, but still far more awkward and unpredictable than it should be.

then I heard about govt proposals to alter one of the several motorway routes between the two cities: of the five lanes, make one into a protected bidirectional bikeway, and two others into a dedicated bus lanes. this isn't expensive, it's just paint and concrete barriers, and some alterations to the traffic lights and signage. but predictably, the comments on the news article were full of uproar about this imposition, a "war on motorists", it would supposedly increase congestion, and my favourite, "why would you build a bike lane? who even cycles there anyway?".

pity the poor motorist! I doubt any of them have ever agonized for hours over whether a trip of less than ten miles between two cities was even practically possible. such a failure of transport connectivity would be inconceivable in a modern Western country. yet situations like this are considered normal for non-drivers. we're expected to put up with not being able to practically reach places nearby, and be grateful for the smallest improvements, while billions are spent on motorways each year. and then I see conspiracizing about 15-minute cities, "restrictions on movement", "geofencing" and so on, and I just have to laugh. I've been de-facto "geofenced" by car-first planning for years, and so has everyone else who can't or doesn't drive (and there are a lot of us).

so if you want to halt these reforms, or think things should go back to how they were, what that really means is, you're happy with people like me living with harsh and pointless restrictions on mobility, far worse than cameras and bollards and congestion pricing are for motorists. for my part, I think motorists have simply gotten used to an unwarranted level of convenience, public subsidy, and politician's attention. the mild restrictions for motorists are enormously liberating for everyone else. and they are mild. you might have to take a slightly longer route, or walk the last hundred yards instead of parking exactly at your destination, or pay to use scarce road space that a huge number of other people want to use ... it's not that big a deal. a fairer balance between drivers' convenience and the welfare of other road users shouldn't feel like an attack on you.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/18/how-street-des...