I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infrastructure was good enough/I had a bike.
In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen that the biggest shopping centers were located within this zone. Didn't seem to be hurting their business.
The Fußgängerzonen seemed alive, much more so than sterile car-optimized streets.
In the place where I live (Austria, town with 30k residents), the Fußgängerzone in the center is currently dying. Shops close left and right, and migrate to the three big shopping centers. This town is a strange mix because almost everybody needs to own a car (bus system is underdeveloped) to take kids to school or shop groceries, but the town itself is not that big (a lot of places are reachable by bike). Most people rather use the newly rebuilt, comfortable malls with free parking and major brand chains over the harder-to-reach-by-car town center with parking fees and mom-and-pop stores.
The administration is taking desperate measures now, trying to keep shops from closing by promising funding etc, but it turns out the big malls made exclusive deals with brands and there’s not much anyone can do.
I guess Fußgängerzonen only work with an intact public transport system that people can rely on and that won’t take you thrice as long to get there.
One has to know that there are trends in urban planning and one of those trends is our current focus on cars being a net-negative to human life and how banning them from cities altogether can only yield net-positives. Clearly this trend is intertwined with the demographic trend of migrating to the urban cores all across the West.
So it’s a good thing you‘ve mentioned the Fußgängerzone, which were a trend in the 1950-1970s and German cities adapted them just to find out that they can become a booster of decay, if demographics and economics as well as just the trend don’t hold up (homelessness, empty shopfronts, only elderly folk, unemployed youth hanging around).
Fußgängerzonen are largely considered a failed experiment (And because of widespread bombing in WW2 German cities had plenty of room for experiments, which often failed). That they seem to work today, might have more todo with spill over effects from urban population growth, urban revival and a narrow set of datapoints (Fußgängerzonen if plighted areas are often not known to outsiders).
We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”.
You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well.
And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.
Heck, I've been allowed to get a driver's license for over a decade in the Netherlands, but neither I nor my partner has one. Granted, most of my friends to have one, but almost none of them have a car. It helps that we live in a large city, and one that actively discourages driving and encourages public transport and cycling (even by Dutch standards), but not only is it not necessary to drive, it's often the worst transportation option.
I'm living in Gießen, it's very close to Frankfurt am Main. Seltersweg street, being a Fußgängerzone, is the main attraction of the city. There's a slow but sure trend though: Big shops are closing and more restaurants are opening. It's probably the effect of online shopping. I am raised in İstanbul and the same thing was happening in the Taksim/Beyoğlu/Asmalımescit areas when I was still living there even 10 years ago.
Many Dutch cities also have car-free pedestrian areas in their city centers. And it's not just that the biggest shopping centers happen to be there, it is exactly the busy shopping areas that are made car-free, so people can shop there in peace. There's usually a ring of car parking lots around the center, as well as on the edge of the town, so people can leave their car early and cheaply while continuing their trip to the center using public transport.
This was tried some places in the US in the part. Unfortunately most times they failed. Unable to attract enough people, they felt even less alive than the streets and entered a cycle a of death. However there are some signs of a rebirth: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_...
My view is that public transportation in a lot of European cities are great because the cities were built for pedestrians, not cars. It is not the public transportation that makes cities practical without a car. Rather it is cities accessible without a car that makes public transportation practical.
Barcelona is an interesting case study. The city is currently re-doing some of the city's grid neighborhoods into superblocks. The concept is that for every 9 blocks, the interior roads get shut to traffic save for emergency and service vehicles.
Inside, the previously 3-lane streets get transformed into pedestrian avenues with vegetation, play equipment and benches/tables for the residents.
The contrast between traffic-filled streets and urban tranquility couldn't be starker.
Then there are neighborhoods like Gracia that largely closed off its streets to traffic. Going there is like escaping to a village within the city.
Finally, the city puts a huge effort into building dedicated bike lanes, usually at the expense of a car lane. They're also rolling out a new shared biking system, which will combine electric and traditional bikes in the same system.
It helps that the city has mild winters and 300+ days of sunshine a year, but in any case, they're definitely leading the way for large urban areas to give the city back the people.
I live in St Kilda, Australia and our council recently changed one of our iconic streets to almost exclusively be for pedestrians and trams.
Businesses protested for months about potential lost business, however as a resident I feel so much safer walking down the street. It feels like foot traffic has increased there, too. It's such an improvement.
I also like to think tunnels to apartment buildings could help us take more cars of the road and create more green spaces for people in the future.
our council recently changed one of our iconic streets to almost exclusively be for pedestrians and trams.
For whatever it's worth, Chicago tried both of these things, and they didn't work out.
The main shopping drag, State Street, was pedestrianized in 1979. You can see it for a few seconds in the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. It didn't work. It was re-opened to traffic in 1996, and is now far more vibrant than it used to be (though, with a number of other contributing factors since nothing exists in a vacuum in a large city).[1]
Maybe people weren't ready for that in the 1980's, though the region has a number of outdoor shopping malls, in spite of its cold weather.
I also like to think tunnels to apartment buildings could help us take more cars of the road and create more green spaces for people in the future.
Again, Chicago did this. 40 city blocks are linked underground (and a few via bridges). I like the Pedway, but it's mostly vacant space, sleeping homeless people, and bad smells.[2] Except for rush hours, it's pretty much derelict.
>Businesses protested for months about potential lost business
Out of curiosity, how did that pan out? Closing off an area to road traffic is basically a re-prioritization towards nearby residents, and away from distant visitors and the commerce that they engage in, so it would be interesting to know how badly the latter groups suffer.
i'm on board with putting express roads and parking underground (even though the costs are high) and making the extra space available for humans, pets and lower speed transport like bikes and scooters.
i'd also advocate making licensing for vehicles much harder and increasing the enforcement and punishment of distracted driving.
Do you mean Ackland st? A small part of it was blocked off, there are still far too many cars going down there. But it is a great start.
St Kilda is a such an awesome area, but like lots of places far too many cars. Melbourne has a serious problem with cars, most of the large parks even include roads running through them. Even with a fantastic inner city tram system, too many people are addicted to cars.
I don’t get why cities are built around cars. As much as I love to jump into my car right outside my house, I’d love it even more when there was no car sound in the streets and children could safely walk everywhere. In densely populated cities cars should be banned outside of major roads
I figure the best way to understand it is as an incremental set of small choices that each seemed like a good idea at the time. Fundamentally people like traveling in cars, and hate traffic. These two things pretty easily make the case as the underlying principals of everything driving car-centered city design today- parking minimums, wider & wider roads, cannibalizing trolley track, marginalization of pedestrian & bicyclists, etc. Then you begin to get second order effects- because everyone drives, things like storefront design codes are just inherently designed for the gaze of the automobile driver. (That one was an eye-opener for some of the subtle effects of car-centric worldview)
Building a city around cars means building it around people who live far away. The people who live out in the suburbs and commute in get a lot more out of the roads than the people who are a block away from every place they need to go.
I don't think many cities were "built around cars", that was mostly a process of evolution. In Europe, many cities had their cores layout even by the romans, latest for sure in the medieval times[1]. At the time the first cars arrived, cities had large roads, used by pedestrians, riders and horse carts. Allowing cars on those streets was the logical thing back when there were not many of them. And while the cars were pushing out pedestrians from the streets quickly, fundamentally the cars still "worked". Street side parking could still deal with all cars, you could drive to the shops you wanted to visit and park there - which still holds true in extremely low density areas today.
With each decade, car ownership grew significantly, but back then it was decided to deal with the increasing traffic by making cities more "car friendly". To a certain point that worked, but later even large efforts couldn't keep up, but the damanges were done to the cities. To reverse them, it will take a long time, as the car traffic needs to be replaced by other means of transportation.
This was brought up in Adam Ruins Everything, and his Automotive episode was so misleading that I don't trust anything he says.
>I don’t get why cities are built around cars.
Sure there is a fantasy that we could have cities that don't require roads. However our modern 5,000,000 population Metro areas wouldnt exist. Instead housing prices would skyrocket, and the lowest income people would be forced to live in rural areas.
> In densely populated cities cars should be banned outside of major roads
>I’d love it even more when there was no car sound
These are short sighted.
EDIT: I'm sorry to kill the fantasy, but wouldnt you rather hear why an idea doesnt work? Or maybe this is another case of 10%ers that care more about quiet streets than societal impact.
Few years ago I visited a large apartment complex about 30 minutes south of Seoul in South Korea. The complex has Dozens of 30+ stories high apartment buildings. Assuming 30 stories high, 8 units per floor, and 25 buildings, we are talking about 6000 units. The unit I visited had 4 bedrooms. Despite such a high concentration of population, the complex itself felt like it was in the country side.
The key factor was underground parking (resident and visitor), with entrance to the underground parking connecting directly with the road. Within the complex are streets for cars with sidewalks like normal street, but strictly for emergency vehicles and moving trucks.
As I walked around the complex day and night, I couldn't believe the peace and calm I sensed as there were no cars moving around me. I kept looking around as I crossed the street as a reflex, but there were no cars to worry about.
A few weeks ago, I looked at a large number of cities and their surrounding suburbs using google earth in VR. It was extremely interesting to see the different styles of building cities.
Soviet bloc countries really built their infrastructure with brutal efficiency in mind. Huge populations in tall, mathematical buildings with lots of open space between them. Almost like someone copy-pasted a few buildings into the middle of the wilderness.
To me it looks like the new infrastructure in countries like South Korea or Japan is an evolution of that, although the buildings look a lot less foreboding than Soviet buildings do. In between them you still get the sense that you're out in the country. It's deceptive because once you fly up (in VR), you can see a sea of buildings going all the way to the horizon.
Compared to the population centers of American cities, which look like irregularly shaped sand dunes made out of shingles as far as the eye can see.
Suburbs in the UK are similar to the American ones, except that the houses are all very neatly aligned on a grid with less space between them and the streets are often one way streets with parking on the curb.
Suburbs in Nordic countries are made of small, taller houses. Each floor looks only big enough for 1 or 2 rooms, but the houses are 2-4 stories tall. It looks really cozy.
If you have the hardware and a few hours to kill, I strongly recommend trying this. Tokyo is just jaw dropping. It's on an unimaginable scale compared to other cities around the world.
My city (Lublin, Poland - about 350 000 people) is doing something similar (if not on this scale).
They introduced long pedestrian street in one of the busiest streets in city center in 90s, it worked pretty well - created lots of restaurants, clubs and shops.
In 00s-10s some of them failed (I blame internet shopping and malls in the outskirts), especially the shops, and mostly banks and mobile phone booths replace them. But the restaurants and clubs remain, and the street is very pleasant, always full of people. It helps that Lublin is an university city (about 20% of population are students).
Recently the city created some more pedestrian streets, invested into biking infrastructure (lots of bike routes, city-funded bike rental system). It's OK, but the city is on hills so biking is quite demanding, mostly young people do it.
Also the public transit is very nice in the city centre, but there are no trams, only trolleybuses and regular buses (because hills). So - public transit waits in traffic jams just like cars.
There's one night each summer when they turn big part of the city center into pedestrian area, put artificial grass on many streets, people sunbathe there. It changes the city completely. I know it's not realistic to make it permanent, but it's so nice.
According to Richard Branson “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” The same goes for cities. Take care of the citizens, and the citizens will take care of business.
Removing parking may be bad for local shops in the short run, but good for the citizens and the city in the long run.
That's only true in some instances for some combination of high margin, not easily reproducible, or low volume products that serve wealthy purchasers.
The reason Walmart killed everyone was because purchasers valued saving a few dollars rather than being taken care of by employees. Similarly with airlines, which Branson wasn’t really able to expand beyond the wealthy NYC-LA-SF routes.
You can also have more parks and fields that are well-maintained and available in proportions appropriate to the local population (i.e. not held at existing supply through density changes). It is a false dichotomy to suggest we have to choose between kids playing outside and having streets for transportation.
Not to mention that anyone who grew up pre-Internet or pre-smartphones knows that the real barriers to kids playing outside are more cultural/societal.
I think the ability to get to the parks and fields without parental intervention is important in itself. I live in a neighborhood in Sydney where many of our streets are traffic sewers that people blast through at amazing (relatively speaking) speeds. As a large, visible adult, I walk the dog every day and 1-2 times out of 10 some idiot on a street 50m from my house doesn't know what the rules on a crosswalk are. People love to go on tirades about helicopter parents but given the quality of driving (also something that seems to have taken a hit from "Internet and smartphones") they haven't spent too much time thinking about the implications of what it's like to be an impulsive kid who will be mostly invisible stepping out behind a car, in a world where a lot of drivers are impatient and distracted.
There's a huge change in the vibe of having older kids (who can, despite the roads, go out and freely interact with their peers) and younger kids who aren't sensible enough to deal with the streets (and yes, this isn't just paranoia, we had a couple bad incidents in the peer group).
It's not an either/or with the Internet/smartphones, either. I think there's a lot of interaction between these factors ("kids go out less because games/internet are so compelling" vs "kids spend long hours on devices because they are stuck at home") in both directions.
> Not to mention that anyone who grew up pre-Internet or pre-smartphones knows that the real barriers to kids playing outside are more cultural/societal.
I did, and 100% that's not the barrier today. I moved my kids from a neighborhood packed with cars to one with several dead-end streets and no through traffic and the change in my kids' lives has been shocking. They almost never wanted to play outside before because they couldn't really get anywhere safely. Now they are outside until dark nearly every day they aren't in school.
This isn't even addressing your ridiculous assumption that cities/towns can just easily add parks and fields. Those things take up space and people without kids don't care at all about them and want that land for their condos.
The cultural problems are definitely the more problematic ones. My kids run around the neighborhood, but they do so nearly alone, because nobody else's kids are allowed the same freedom. I'm hoping that once the other parents see that my kids haven't been killed by a roving serial killer then they'll let their kids come out too, but there's not much I can do beyond that.
I live downtown Minneapolis and live near Nicollet Mall [0]. Which only allows pedestrians and busses. It's quite nice. They put out chairs for people to sit on and at times have things like a connect four and corn hole games. There is a regular farmers market that happens also.
I love how safe it feels. It's almost like a giant side walk. I'm always surprised that the chairs don't get stolen. I walk down it multiple times a day usually (unless I take the Skyway because of weather).
Yeah, they're doing this plan to Evansville, IN. And it's one hell of a job. They've killed downtown, since there's no 'outer areas' to park. Sidewalks are in complete disarray, and cars still zoom on past.
But the center areas where there are no cars also is set up for no people to move about. The road ledges are still there, so handicapped people cant just use their wheelchairs. It's the worst of both worlds.
It's possible to do this well and badly. Bad iterations of this feel like urban renewal - like those horrifying stunts they pulled in the 70s where they closed half the streets in a given area, put huge ring roads around the area, and then wondered why a urban paradise didn't spontaneously spring into being.
It needs to be done along with public transit (usually the missing link it the US and Australia) and a reasonable attitude to deliveries and whatever parking needs remain.
What I find funny is that the American mall that so many people disparage (like citylab) is a place where the streets are closed to cars. Cars are not really the problem and people should really stop focusing on this object as the reason of so many social problems that exist. The car is used by individual people and families to somewhat mitigate these large scale problems.
Lots of cool main streets have cars going through them. It is just the post war, huge road, big-box chain stores that suck. Maybe we need to go back to where a corporation is only allowed to form (get a charter) if it is planning on doing something that takes a lot of people and capital to execute. Like building an airplane, or a car, or a computer chip, not anything like a retail store. Leave that to the sole proprietor. We don't need corporations, and all its inhumanity, to run burger joints.
At a given mall, quite a lot of property is devoted to surface lots which go unused from 10pm-10am, not great for a growing urban environment! The problem with cars is how inefficient they are just from the physics of them.
A given car is maybe 3000lbs. A person is maybe 150lbs. 95% of the gas you pump into your car goes to just moving around this hunk of metal wherever you go. And then you gotta have an empty 18'x9' spot available wherever you are going? How many 25lb bird scooters can you pile up in that spot? Even self-driving cars aren't going to solve the issues with wasting energy and space for the two tonnes-or-so hunk of metal that you require to deliver you door to door on demand. Try to have a horse pull you around town in a tesla, and it would die.
What I find funny is that the American mall that so many people disparage (like citylab) is a place where the streets are closed to cars.
First off, there are no streets in a mall. It may be a carless place, with some merits, but clearly that’s where the similarities between malls and downtown Pontevedra end. Malls arose as a natural consequence of a heavy reliance on cars, just as carless downtowns arise when there is no such reliance.
Malls are hated because they create car dependence. They kill off all local stores and require you to drive for 30 minutes to get to a shop. They also take up massive amounts of space for parking.
Of course, this could never happen in the United States. A friend of mine, a single mother, was arrested and charged for letting her kids play without an adult present in the park across the street from her apartment. There are lots of scary people with guns out there, you see. If only it was possible to do something about that.
I've heard more stories about kids in the US not being allowed to play outside. Of all the bizarre stories I read about life in the US, this one is still the most baffling to me.
I wish my city was more livable without a car, but we have more land area than London with 1/4 the population density. The only way to get anywhere is by taking the interstate highways that pass through the middle or else circle around the outside highway. This is Jacksonville, FL.
There are some pockets that are walkable and safe, but nothing at scale.
Over here in San Francisco, I find the problem isn't so much cars as curb cuts. "Curb cuts" are those little sections of the curb that are cut out so that cars can drive over the cross walk to get to driveways and garages.
There is one major reason why this isn't practical in the United States yet: Europe has a well developed, often tax payer or state subsidised public transport network. Americans don't have that at scale: they must use their cars to go to work, else they cannot work. Solve the problem of public transport first. You can start with tax payers' funding and move on to a purely for-profit, no subsidies model gradually by incremental optimisation.
I don't drive but I am into electric cars. I was in a ICE car over Christmas on a drive across country to see some relatives. We went through a local town that I didn't value much when I was growing up, with 'fresh eyes' I think I could see what the problem was, and it wasn't the car. The pollution is the real problem why people shun the street in front of their door. This pollution being the fumes and the noise.
With electric cars there is no reason why we can't get our streets back and for not just kids but for everyone to start to be part of their local community, not just hiding behind doors, curtains closed, putting up with where they live instead of enjoying it.
We have 20 mph city speed zones which are great. But when cars are noisy and polluting these streets are far from tranquil. The dirt from automotive isn't just the smog that comes out of exhaust pipes, there is also brake wear and the micro-particles that come from that. We have ended up with cities that are toxic to plant life as a consequence of this.
With cars that can float along on electric power we need not close off our streets, we need not even banish traffic jams.
Bus transport also needs a bit of work, with electric power they can be the modern transport that people deserve, not these noisy things that vibrate and feel hellish inside. We want the bus to be nice to be on, particularly for those with pushchairs, wheelchairs, kids in tow.
Yet we have an old population of people who seem to have a fetish of loud exhausts, V8 engines, turbo engines and this fuddy-duddy idea that electric will never replace these naff petrol and diesel engines. Hopefully these people will die off soon and Chinese electric cars will show Western auto makers how to make a car properly.
I had a university professor in the transportation department (technically “Operations Research”) who used to joke that transportation policy was mainly receptive to emotional arguments about children. “We should increase investment in autonomous vehicles. But, oh! The children!” He would cry out in class, making all the students chuckle. I thought he was joking! Reading through the article and the comments, I think he may not have been joking, but merely wryly cynical after many years of trying to research and advocate.
[+] [-] ashton314|7 years ago|reply
In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen that the biggest shopping centers were located within this zone. Didn't seem to be hurting their business.
The Fußgängerzonen seemed alive, much more so than sterile car-optimized streets.
[+] [-] manmal|7 years ago|reply
The administration is taking desperate measures now, trying to keep shops from closing by promising funding etc, but it turns out the big malls made exclusive deals with brands and there’s not much anyone can do.
I guess Fußgängerzonen only work with an intact public transport system that people can rely on and that won’t take you thrice as long to get there.
[+] [-] woodpanel|7 years ago|reply
So it’s a good thing you‘ve mentioned the Fußgängerzone, which were a trend in the 1950-1970s and German cities adapted them just to find out that they can become a booster of decay, if demographics and economics as well as just the trend don’t hold up (homelessness, empty shopfronts, only elderly folk, unemployed youth hanging around).
Fußgängerzonen are largely considered a failed experiment (And because of widespread bombing in WW2 German cities had plenty of room for experiments, which often failed). That they seem to work today, might have more todo with spill over effects from urban population growth, urban revival and a narrow set of datapoints (Fußgängerzonen if plighted areas are often not known to outsiders).
[+] [-] codetrotter|7 years ago|reply
We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”.
You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well.
And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egeozcan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasahle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|7 years ago|reply
My view is that public transportation in a lot of European cities are great because the cities were built for pedestrians, not cars. It is not the public transportation that makes cities practical without a car. Rather it is cities accessible without a car that makes public transportation practical.
[+] [-] unclesams-uncle|7 years ago|reply
Inside, the previously 3-lane streets get transformed into pedestrian avenues with vegetation, play equipment and benches/tables for the residents.
The contrast between traffic-filled streets and urban tranquility couldn't be starker.
Then there are neighborhoods like Gracia that largely closed off its streets to traffic. Going there is like escaping to a village within the city.
Finally, the city puts a huge effort into building dedicated bike lanes, usually at the expense of a car lane. They're also rolling out a new shared biking system, which will combine electric and traditional bikes in the same system.
It helps that the city has mild winters and 300+ days of sunshine a year, but in any case, they're definitely leading the way for large urban areas to give the city back the people.
[+] [-] kingo55|7 years ago|reply
Businesses protested for months about potential lost business, however as a resident I feel so much safer walking down the street. It feels like foot traffic has increased there, too. It's such an improvement.
I also like to think tunnels to apartment buildings could help us take more cars of the road and create more green spaces for people in the future.
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
For whatever it's worth, Chicago tried both of these things, and they didn't work out.
The main shopping drag, State Street, was pedestrianized in 1979. You can see it for a few seconds in the film National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. It didn't work. It was re-opened to traffic in 1996, and is now far more vibrant than it used to be (though, with a number of other contributing factors since nothing exists in a vacuum in a large city).[1]
Maybe people weren't ready for that in the 1980's, though the region has a number of outdoor shopping malls, in spite of its cold weather.
I also like to think tunnels to apartment buildings could help us take more cars of the road and create more green spaces for people in the future.
Again, Chicago did this. 40 city blocks are linked underground (and a few via bridges). I like the Pedway, but it's mostly vacant space, sleeping homeless people, and bad smells.[2] Except for rush hours, it's pretty much derelict.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Street_(Chicago)#State_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pedway
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, how did that pan out? Closing off an area to road traffic is basically a re-prioritization towards nearby residents, and away from distant visitors and the commerce that they engage in, so it would be interesting to know how badly the latter groups suffer.
[+] [-] clairity|7 years ago|reply
i'd also advocate making licensing for vehicles much harder and increasing the enforcement and punishment of distracted driving.
[+] [-] megaremote|7 years ago|reply
St Kilda is a such an awesome area, but like lots of places far too many cars. Melbourne has a serious problem with cars, most of the large parks even include roads running through them. Even with a fantastic inner city tram system, too many people are addicted to cars.
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ip26|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|7 years ago|reply
With each decade, car ownership grew significantly, but back then it was decided to deal with the increasing traffic by making cities more "car friendly". To a certain point that worked, but later even large efforts couldn't keep up, but the damanges were done to the cities. To reverse them, it will take a long time, as the car traffic needs to be replaced by other means of transportation.
[+] [-] robertAngst|7 years ago|reply
>I don’t get why cities are built around cars.
Sure there is a fantasy that we could have cities that don't require roads. However our modern 5,000,000 population Metro areas wouldnt exist. Instead housing prices would skyrocket, and the lowest income people would be forced to live in rural areas.
> In densely populated cities cars should be banned outside of major roads
>I’d love it even more when there was no car sound
These are short sighted.
EDIT: I'm sorry to kill the fantasy, but wouldnt you rather hear why an idea doesnt work? Or maybe this is another case of 10%ers that care more about quiet streets than societal impact.
[+] [-] dba7dba|7 years ago|reply
The key factor was underground parking (resident and visitor), with entrance to the underground parking connecting directly with the road. Within the complex are streets for cars with sidewalks like normal street, but strictly for emergency vehicles and moving trucks.
As I walked around the complex day and night, I couldn't believe the peace and calm I sensed as there were no cars moving around me. I kept looking around as I crossed the street as a reflex, but there were no cars to worry about.
[+] [-] jniedrauer|7 years ago|reply
Soviet bloc countries really built their infrastructure with brutal efficiency in mind. Huge populations in tall, mathematical buildings with lots of open space between them. Almost like someone copy-pasted a few buildings into the middle of the wilderness.
To me it looks like the new infrastructure in countries like South Korea or Japan is an evolution of that, although the buildings look a lot less foreboding than Soviet buildings do. In between them you still get the sense that you're out in the country. It's deceptive because once you fly up (in VR), you can see a sea of buildings going all the way to the horizon.
Compared to the population centers of American cities, which look like irregularly shaped sand dunes made out of shingles as far as the eye can see.
Suburbs in the UK are similar to the American ones, except that the houses are all very neatly aligned on a grid with less space between them and the streets are often one way streets with parking on the curb.
Suburbs in Nordic countries are made of small, taller houses. Each floor looks only big enough for 1 or 2 rooms, but the houses are 2-4 stories tall. It looks really cozy.
If you have the hardware and a few hours to kill, I strongly recommend trying this. Tokyo is just jaw dropping. It's on an unimaginable scale compared to other cities around the world.
[+] [-] ajuc|7 years ago|reply
They introduced long pedestrian street in one of the busiest streets in city center in 90s, it worked pretty well - created lots of restaurants, clubs and shops.
In 00s-10s some of them failed (I blame internet shopping and malls in the outskirts), especially the shops, and mostly banks and mobile phone booths replace them. But the restaurants and clubs remain, and the street is very pleasant, always full of people. It helps that Lublin is an university city (about 20% of population are students).
Recently the city created some more pedestrian streets, invested into biking infrastructure (lots of bike routes, city-funded bike rental system). It's OK, but the city is on hills so biking is quite demanding, mostly young people do it.
Also the public transit is very nice in the city centre, but there are no trams, only trolleybuses and regular buses (because hills). So - public transit waits in traffic jams just like cars.
There's one night each summer when they turn big part of the city center into pedestrian area, put artificial grass on many streets, people sunbathe there. It changes the city completely. I know it's not realistic to make it permanent, but it's so nice.
[+] [-] thomasfl|7 years ago|reply
Removing parking may be bad for local shops in the short run, but good for the citizens and the city in the long run.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|7 years ago|reply
The reason Walmart killed everyone was because purchasers valued saving a few dollars rather than being taken care of by employees. Similarly with airlines, which Branson wasn’t really able to expand beyond the wealthy NYC-LA-SF routes.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|7 years ago|reply
Not to mention that anyone who grew up pre-Internet or pre-smartphones knows that the real barriers to kids playing outside are more cultural/societal.
[+] [-] glangdale|7 years ago|reply
There's a huge change in the vibe of having older kids (who can, despite the roads, go out and freely interact with their peers) and younger kids who aren't sensible enough to deal with the streets (and yes, this isn't just paranoia, we had a couple bad incidents in the peer group).
It's not an either/or with the Internet/smartphones, either. I think there's a lot of interaction between these factors ("kids go out less because games/internet are so compelling" vs "kids spend long hours on devices because they are stuck at home") in both directions.
[+] [-] nosequel|7 years ago|reply
I did, and 100% that's not the barrier today. I moved my kids from a neighborhood packed with cars to one with several dead-end streets and no through traffic and the change in my kids' lives has been shocking. They almost never wanted to play outside before because they couldn't really get anywhere safely. Now they are outside until dark nearly every day they aren't in school.
This isn't even addressing your ridiculous assumption that cities/towns can just easily add parks and fields. Those things take up space and people without kids don't care at all about them and want that land for their condos.
[+] [-] onychomys|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|7 years ago|reply
vs
"mommy can I go outside, the local kids are playing soccer in the street"
also, have fun making the case for the land purchase, remodeling, and ongoing maintenance budget for that new park
[+] [-] b3b0p|7 years ago|reply
I love how safe it feels. It's almost like a giant side walk. I'm always surprised that the chairs don't get stolen. I walk down it multiple times a day usually (unless I take the Skyway because of weather).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicollet_Mall
[+] [-] unclesams-uncle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crankylinuxuser|7 years ago|reply
But the center areas where there are no cars also is set up for no people to move about. The road ledges are still there, so handicapped people cant just use their wheelchairs. It's the worst of both worlds.
[+] [-] glangdale|7 years ago|reply
It needs to be done along with public transit (usually the missing link it the US and Australia) and a reasonable attitude to deliveries and whatever parking needs remain.
[+] [-] njarboe|7 years ago|reply
Lots of cool main streets have cars going through them. It is just the post war, huge road, big-box chain stores that suck. Maybe we need to go back to where a corporation is only allowed to form (get a charter) if it is planning on doing something that takes a lot of people and capital to execute. Like building an airplane, or a car, or a computer chip, not anything like a retail store. Leave that to the sole proprietor. We don't need corporations, and all its inhumanity, to run burger joints.
[+] [-] asdff|7 years ago|reply
A given car is maybe 3000lbs. A person is maybe 150lbs. 95% of the gas you pump into your car goes to just moving around this hunk of metal wherever you go. And then you gotta have an empty 18'x9' spot available wherever you are going? How many 25lb bird scooters can you pile up in that spot? Even self-driving cars aren't going to solve the issues with wasting energy and space for the two tonnes-or-so hunk of metal that you require to deliver you door to door on demand. Try to have a horse pull you around town in a tesla, and it would die.
[+] [-] ezequiel-garzon|7 years ago|reply
First off, there are no streets in a mall. It may be a carless place, with some merits, but clearly that’s where the similarities between malls and downtown Pontevedra end. Malls arose as a natural consequence of a heavy reliance on cars, just as carless downtowns arise when there is no such reliance.
Corporations are alive and well in Spain too.
[+] [-] ndnxhs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|7 years ago|reply
Suddenly you can allow your four year old to go out the front door by themself.
[+] [-] labster|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twodave|7 years ago|reply
There are some pockets that are walkable and safe, but nothing at scale.
[+] [-] geebee|7 years ago|reply
https://ggwash.org/view/673/the-san-francisco-way-curb-cuts
https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2008-06-0...
[+] [-] Annatar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndnxhs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
With electric cars there is no reason why we can't get our streets back and for not just kids but for everyone to start to be part of their local community, not just hiding behind doors, curtains closed, putting up with where they live instead of enjoying it.
We have 20 mph city speed zones which are great. But when cars are noisy and polluting these streets are far from tranquil. The dirt from automotive isn't just the smog that comes out of exhaust pipes, there is also brake wear and the micro-particles that come from that. We have ended up with cities that are toxic to plant life as a consequence of this.
With cars that can float along on electric power we need not close off our streets, we need not even banish traffic jams.
Bus transport also needs a bit of work, with electric power they can be the modern transport that people deserve, not these noisy things that vibrate and feel hellish inside. We want the bus to be nice to be on, particularly for those with pushchairs, wheelchairs, kids in tow.
Yet we have an old population of people who seem to have a fetish of loud exhausts, V8 engines, turbo engines and this fuddy-duddy idea that electric will never replace these naff petrol and diesel engines. Hopefully these people will die off soon and Chinese electric cars will show Western auto makers how to make a car properly.
[+] [-] autokad|7 years ago|reply
usually the biggest problems are lack of mixed zoning and really wide streets which leads to very long walking distances.
[+] [-] Markoff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electric_muse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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