zlacker

>>amathe+(OP)
The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.

Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.

Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.

In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

>>nologi+Mz1
> Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person

Nonsense.

Ljubljana went from full of cars downtown to a 1 square mile pedestrian area with zero cars. It’s fantastic. And all the major arteries into the city went from 2 lanes to 1 lane + bus.

Amsterdam famously reversed its car centric design in the 1980’s.

Even San Francisco was able to close its main city artery to car traffic and transform many of the big roads with dedicated bus and bike lanes.

And those are just the cities I know about. There’s bound to be more. The feat is completely possible, but takes a while as any large refactoring does.

>>Swizec+wN1
Another big example is Tokyo. Sure there's cars and roads in Tokyo, but it's absolutely not the major way that people move around. It's a relatively car light city.

Or closer to NA have a look at Vancouver. From a high level looking at the whole region, it's about as devoted to cars as everywhere else in North America, though if you peek down to the neighbourhood level you can see some incredible successes in moving people away from car use. In the near downtown West End area for example, some 45% of the population walks to work.

>>Tiktaa+PU1
Honestly it feels like when a city/area gets dense enough people naturally stop using cats because it just isn’t practical. Most trips in SF are faster on a bicycle than by car, for example.

Then when that happens, it’s easy to refactor architecture to be more in line with what people are doing already.

>>Swizec+DY1
You'd think so but with the anemic enforcement we have in the US this often isn't the case. Who cares if all the parking spots are taken up when you can just double park in a lane and nobody will do anything about it. When you can speed up the shoulder and skip a few traffic jams with no consequences, why not? Red light running has increased multi-fold since the start of the pandemic. In a lot of busy American cities you'll notice that the lack of enforcement on bad driver behavior means that drivers will bend as many rules possible to make their mode convenient for them. It's an inherent dynamic in car centrism here.

>>Karrot+AZ1
I’ve only lived in SF and Ljubljana so can’t speak of other cities, but in both of those we simply ran out of room. Even if you break all the rules, there’s more cars than space and a walk/bicycle/skateboard/scooter becomes the faster mode of transport unless the city decides to demolish hundreds of buildings to make more room.

I also like how most of Paris has sidewalks lined with bollards so you can’t park there even if you wanted to. Although I always end up running into them as a pedestrian … they hit right at crotch level lol

>>Swizec+802
Careful to draw conclusions from SF it’s just about the only place in the US with decent weather year round in the US. Most the rest is baking hot or incredibly wet (or both) in the summer, and if they aren’t they likely have several months of snow in the winter. Some places even manage both.