To answer your question on why people are hesitant: they’re not worried about the cities per se, but about the mentality that will then turn its attention to the suburbs and rural areas. There are people who don’t want to live 10mins away from grocery stores because they don’t like grocery shops, or other crowdy places with people milling about. Some of us want to be hermits and live relatively secluded
All that said, I like car free cities. I don’t want denser suburbs tho
Suburbs, are inherently higher carbon emitting that proper urban areas. For an extreme example, if everyone in the US lived in an area with similar characteristics to NYC, it would reduce the counties carbon emissions by 3/4.
Beyond that, they’re only really able to exist, as they do in the US, thanks to exploitative and predatory economic practices. Almost no one who lives there makes their money there, they work somewhere else, extracting value, and then bringing it back to the suburb to fund incredibly inefficient infrastructure.
I’m not saying ban them complete, I’m just saying, take away the massive amount of economic incentives and support that makes them possible. Build out housing in cities and ensure the value generated in them goes to funding their services, infrastructure and development of the cities.
Make the suburbs pay for them selves and they will nearly disappear very quickly.
Beyond that, they’re only really able to exist, as they do in the US, thanks to exploitative and predatory economic practices. Almost no one who lives there makes their money there, they work somewhere else, extracting value, and then bringing it back to the suburb to fund incredibly inefficient infrastructure.
I don’t think this is true with remote work. Also, there are businesses nearby which operate on location—architectural firms, dance studios, lawyers, accountants etc. So I think painting suburbs as “predatory” or “absent of economic activity” is an inaccurate and incomplete description.
Regarding the carbon footprint: yes, that can be improved by more commuter rails to the suburbs, and improved energy efficiency in older houses. Encouraging people to grow native plants in green spaces will also help as opposed to “manicured lawn culture”.
I think you’re undervaluing how much people want to live outside of busy spaces, so there will always be some support for suburban living. From my pov, I am more in favor of the rustic, idyllic spaces as opposed to the overpaved, McMansion scenarios that maybe you’re describing?
If you are willing to pay $100/gallon of gasoline, pay for all the roads, pay for the carbon externalities of both the cars and the roads, and pay for the water infrastructure and basically live in a Galt’s Gulch, then sure, you can do whatever you want. But that isn’t the case today.
@nifty@ylai
You can be a better hermit in a city than in a suburb. City folk mind their own business and make a point of not noticing each other. Suburbanites are always in each other's business -what do you think an HOA is?
Might be a fun social experiment to propose a public gun lending armory. Like a library, you can walk in and check-out an AK-47 for a day or week for free. But just like the library charges for printed pages, you would have to pay for the ammo.
I think there should be libraries for all sorts of things. For example, everyone on my street has their own lawnmower, trimmer, etc. And very rarely do people mow their lawns at the exact same time. It would be a lot more efficient if there was a place to check out the lawnmower to mow your lawn and put it away for someone else to use.
IMO part of the fix for that is liberating psychedelics. There has been some research finding that if someone takes psilocybin (shrooms) before they reach the age of 35, they are significantly more open minded for the rest of their life. Though I’m not sure how they controlled for the question as to whether the drug makes people more psychologically flexible or whether they are more psychologically flexible in the first place if they are willing to try it.
Either way, it seems to naturally follow that conservatives proportionally tend to avoid psychedelics. It’s anecdotal but my fellow psychonauts are all liberal.
London had a problem. In 2016, more than 2 million of the city’s residents—roughly a quarter of its population—lived in areas with illegal levels of air pollution; areas that also contained nearly 500 of the city’s schools. That same air pollution was prematurely killing as many as 36,000 people a year. Much of it was coming from transport: a quarter of the city’s carbon emissions were from moving people and goods, with three-quarters of that emitted by road traffic.
But in the years since, carbon emissions have fallen. There’s also been a 94 percent reduction in the number of people living in areas with illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that causes lung damage. The reason? London has spent years and millions of pounds reducing the number of motorists in the city.
It’s far from alone. From Oslo to Hamburg and Ljubljana to Helsinki, cities across Europe have started working to reduce their road traffic in an effort to curb air pollution and climate change.
But while it’s certainly having an impact (Ljubljana, one of the earliest places to transition away from cars, has seen sizable reductions in carbon emissions and air pollution), going car-free is a lot harder than it seems. Not only has it led to politicians and urban planners facing death threats and being doxxed, it has forced them to rethink the entire basis of city life.
London’s car-reduction policies come in a variety of forms. There are charges for dirtier vehicles and for driving into the city center. Road layouts in residential areas have been redesigned, with one-way systems and bollards, barriers, and planters used to reduce through-traffic (creating what are known as “low-traffic neighborhoods”—or LTNs). And schemes to get more people cycling and using public transport have been introduced. The city has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen, but nevertheless things have changed.
“The level of traffic reduction is transformative, and it’s throughout the whole day,” says Claire Holland, leader of the council in Lambeth, a borough in south London. Lambeth now sees 25,000 fewer daily car journeys than before its LTN scheme was put in place in 2020, even after adjusting for the impact of the pandemic. Meanwhile, there was a 40 percent increase in cycling and similar rises in walking and scooting over that same period.
What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach—creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder. “In crowded urban areas, you can’t just make buses better if those buses are still always stuck in car traffic,” says Rachel Aldred, professor of transport at the University of Westminster and director of its Active Travel Academy. “The academic evidence suggests that a mixture of positive and negative characteristics is more effective than either on their own.”
For countries looking to cut emissions, cars are an obvious target. They make up a big proportion of a country’s carbon footprint, accounting for one-fifth of all emissions across the European Union. Of course, urban driving doesn’t make up the majority of a country’s car use, but the kind of short journeys taken when driving in the city are some of the most obviously wasteful, making cities an ideal place to start if you’re looking to get people out from behind the wheel. That, and the fact that many city residents are already car-less (just 40 percent of people in Lambeth own cars, for example) and that cities tend to have better public transport alternatives than elsewhere.
Plus, traffic-reduction programmes also have impacts beyond reducing air pollution and carbon emissions. In cities like Oslo and Helsinki, thanks to car-reduction policies, entire years have passed without a single road traffic death. It’s even been suggested that needing less parking could free up space to help ease the chronic housing shortage felt in so many cities.
But as effective as policies to end or reduce urban car use have been, they’ve almost universally faced huge opposition. When Oslo proposed in 2017 that its city center should be car-free, the backlash saw the idea branded as a “Berlin Wall against motorists.” The plan ended up being downgraded into a less ambitious scheme consisting of smaller changes, like removing car parking and building cycle lanes to try to lower the number of vehicles.
In London, the introduction of LTNs has also led to a massive backlash. In the east London borough of Hackney, one councilor and his family were sent death threats due to their support for the programme. Bollards were regularly graffitied, while pro-LTN activists were accused of “social cleansing.” It was suggested that low-traffic areas would drive up house prices and leave the only affordable accommodation on unprotected roads. “It became very intimidating,” says Holland. “I had my address tweeted out twice, with sort of veiled threats from people who didn’t even live in the borough saying that we knew they knew where I lived.”
Part of that response is a testament to how much our cities, and by extension, our lives are designed around cars. In the US, between 50 and 60 percent of the downtowns of many cities are dedicated to parking alone. While in the UK that figure tends to be smaller, designing streets to be accessible to a never-ending stream of traffic has been the central concern of most urban planning since the Second World War. It’s what led to the huge sprawl of identikit suburban housing on the outskirts of cities like London, each sporting its own driveway and ample road access.
“If you propose this idea to the average American, the response is: if you take my car away from me, I will die,” says J. H. Crawford, the author of the book Carfree Cities and a leading figure in the movement to end urban car use. “If you do that overnight, without making any other provisions, that’s actually approximately correct.” Having the right alternatives to cars is therefore vital to reducing city traffic.
And any attempts to reduce urban car use tend to do better when designed from the bottom up. Barcelona’s “superblocks” programme, which takes sets of nine blocks within its grid system and limits cars to the roads around the outside of the set (as well as reducing speed limits and removing on-street parking) was shaped by having resident input on every stage of the process, from design to implementation. Early indicators suggest the policy has been wildly popular with residents, has seen nitrogen dioxide air pollution fall by 25 percent in some areas, and will prevent an estimated 667 premature deaths each year, saving an estimated 1.7 billion euros.
When it comes to design, there’s also the question of access. Whether it’s emergency services needing to get in or small businesses awaiting deliveries, there’s an important amount of “last mile” traffic—transport that gets people or things to the actual end point of their journey—that is vital to sustaining an urban area. If you want to reduce traffic, you have to work around that and think of alternative solutions—such as allowing emergency vehicles access to pedestrianized areas, or even using automatic number plate recognition to exempt emergency vehicles from the camera checks that are used to police through-traffic in LTNs (which is what Lambeth is doing, Holland says).
But even then, it’s often just hard to convince people an entirely different city layout is possible. Getting people to accept that how they live alongside cars can be changed—say, with an LTN—takes time. But government surveys of the UK’s recently implemented LTNs have indicated that support from residents for such schemes increases over time. “If you start seeing more and more of those kinds of things, things become thinkable,” explains Aldred. If you start unpicking the idea that car use can’t be changed, “it starts to become possible to do more and more things without cars for people.”
The other issue is that, to put it simply, cars are never just cars. They’re interwoven into our culture and consumption as symbols of affluence, independence, and success, and the aspiration to achieve those things in future. “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure,” the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher reportedly once said. “That’s how we got in this mess in the first place, though,” says Crawford. “Everybody saw that the rich people were driving cars, and they wanted to too.”
That divide goes some way to explaining why the opposition to car-reduction schemes is often so extreme and can devolve into a “culture war”—which is what Holland has found in her experience with LTNs. But that struggle also outlines an important fact about car-free urban areas—that once cities make the decision to reduce or remove cars, they rarely go back. No one I spoke to for this piece could name a recent sizable pedestrianization or traffic-reduction scheme that had been reversed once it had been given time to have an effect.
Many of the cities that pioneered reducing car use—like Copenhagen in the 1970s—are rated today as some of the best places to live in the world. Even with London’s experimental and often unpopular LTN scheme, 100 of the 130 low-traffic areas created have been kept in place, Aldred says.
“Generally speaking, if a sensible program is adopted to really reduce or eliminate car usage in a central urban area, it seems to stick,” says Crawford. “If you go back a year or two later, people will just say: well, this is the best thing we ever did.”
Reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will require innovative solutions at a global scale. In this series, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet initiative, WIRED highlights individuals and communities working to solve some of our most pressing environmental challenges. It’s produced in partnership with Rolex but all content is editorially independent. Find out more.
Thanks for the rec :) I tried one of those extensions a while ago and it didn’t help me so I uninstalled it, maybe I’ll give no script a go. I’ll probably just turn it off and on as needed
To be totally honest a lot of why I appreciate you just pasting the whole thing is cause I’m only ever browsing via my phone and my phone is a decrepit piece of garbage so I don’t usually go to links unless they seem extremely compelling 😅 I probably wouldn’t have read the article had you not shared it in the comments, and I’m glad I read it, it was a good article
Normal people outside of America in rural places live in communities that can arrange for firewood delivery. The only reason you need your own truck is because you don’t have any semblance of infrastructure, community or mutual aid. This is a policy choice and a failure of your culture.
Not the person you replied too, but US is so large, I can imagine there’s situations where policy can’t support those sorts of things. Not mention the fact that people who live in rural areas are more likely to have a culture of not wanting to interact with others and doing things on their own. Regardless, many of the policy changes to reduce car usage are really aimed at reducing car usage in dense areas rather than outright bans or the like. If these policies continue to work out in the US, the relatively few people living in rural areas with vehicles wouldn’t be problematic (in terms of causing traffic nor causing injuries/deaths)
The US is in no way exceptional or different than anywhere else.
Only in America is “doing things on their own” involve running a global empire to ensure their supply of oil. Without the federal government subsidizing rural people in America it would be physically impossible for them to live there, this is literally the opposite of being independent they are extremely dependent on massive globalized infrastructure.
Not everyone wants the US to run a global empire and coincidentally, the people were talking about are more likely to want the US interfering less with their lives and outside the country.
I feel this is such an dramatic and reaching response it’s almost like your intentionally being obtuse.
Some people like reducing their reliance on other people. It seems I need to emphasize the word REDUCE. I chose that word specifically instead of remove because as you pointed out, removing reliance on others is very difficult. These people sre the type of people I am referring to when I say they like to do things on their own.
They are propagandized and agents for the global empire. Their feelings about independence is bullshit and they are a drain on the rest of the world subsidizing their lifestyle.
@PastaCeci@Elmerfuddz
It's even worse than THAT: those huge trucks you see nowadays are almost never used to haul anything, and the owners don't even try to pretend anymore -they acknowledge that it's just about giving off a manly image.
I’ve lived in a rural area and my neighbors were always happy to lend me something if I needed it. If I needed a truck to haul wood I could just borrow one, or even get it delivered.
So if I didn’t have a truck and you don’t have a truck. Nobody 20 miles around you doesn’t have a truck. What you do now? What you’re saying is you rely on others. Thats nice and all, but at some point you need to do stuff “Yourself”.
Well thank you! So if everyone relied on the same service for firewood. It be like Amazon where it’ll take 3 days minimum to get it. Plus I pay next to nothing. My land has trees. I cut them down, and then replant new quarter grown trees. Not everything is delivery like some are thinking.
I have trailers I use haul firewood and such. I burn about 3 quarts a year.
If that’s for heating, ideally you’d be using a heat pump / reverse cycle AC as wood burning heaters are harmful to health due to PM2.5 particles and bad for the environment due to emissions. But I get that there is a bit of an upfront cost that may be dissuading you.
I have a cat similar to vehicle that super heats up. I barely produce any smoke or anything. It’s a device inside a wood Burning stove that doubles its temperature to burn anything left from the smoke.
This conforms to my own experience. I first got on the “anti cars” train back when I was a lib, and I got on that train precisely because I worked a job in a place where I wasn’t allowed to have a car, but there was a bus that took me directly to work in the morning and everything else was walkable/busable and occasionally I would take a price-controlled taxi.
Not having to pay insurance or buy gas, not having to find parking, not having to wait in traffic, being able to read or use my phone during my commute - it’s all so nice, I got converted before I had ever heard the word “urbanism” and before anyone had invented the term “fifteen minute city”.
Is there a FAQ about living in car free cities? For example, how do you travel to another city? What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard? Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
Electric mobility scooters as well. I’m sure those are capable of much better range now, and it should keep getting better, and everything they need would ideally be close by
I live in Toronto, and I don’t have a car. I use buses and subways for most of my commute in winter. Along with these options, I use bikeshare (public bicycle rentals) in every other season. There are people who bike even in winter but I’m nowhere close to that hardcore.
I’ve spent maybe $250 on uber in urgent/lazy situations in the last one year - that would’ve been a monthly auto insurance payment.
I waited for a bus for around 20 minutes in -18°C a few weeks back. The biggest problem was that I had overdressed so I started sweating and had to unzip a layer.
An important fact that people who have only ever lived in suburbs miss is that you don’t have to commute thaaat far thaaat often when you live in walkable cities. My cousin who lives in a suburb, drives for ~20 minutes to get to the closest big box store. I have 5 options for groceries in a 1 km radius and one of them is just one block over. So, I don’t even need a bus for groceries, let alone a car. We have seniors who definitely shouldn’t be driving walking around with grocery carts on the sidewalks. So, reducing car dependency improves mobility - not the opposite.
Basically, proper bike infrastructure and snow-clearing make a world of difference. It’s not nearly as bad as it seems if you just put on a coat and get going.
Wouldn’t the elderly be a huge benefiter of a car free city? You get old enough or frail enough that you can’t drive. Then what?
I like in a city that provides free busses and trains to those aged 65+ if they ride in off peak hours, and it’s heavily used. This is in a city designed around cars.
Also “car free” doesn’t have to mean literally zero cars allowed, but just build and layout the city so you never have to use one for daily errands.
I live next to a grocery store and it’s literally the best thing ever, grocery trips take 10 minutes max, I only end up using the car on weekends for hobbies or to visit family and friends.
From what I’ve seen from Not Just Bikes, there’s also car-sharing. There are services to make it super easy to borrow a car for as little as a few hours if you just need to lug some furniture or something.
“Car-free cities” gave the wrong idea. I’d call them walk-friendly cities instead, but I guess that ship has already sailed. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and first-hand experience.
The term “city” can actually be confusing too since it might mean the most central district of a metropolitan area, or it could mean the whole metropolitan area. There is some desire to make the most central parts car free in the way you thought (usually street by street in the centre of the CBD etc), but generally the broader area will not be.
I live in suburbia and the grocery store on the edge of my neighborhood is accessible via a dirt desire path. This beats so many of my friends neighborhoods, but these numbskulls couldn’t pour the 20 feet of sidewalk to connect the commercial to the residential, even though the sidewalk has a 2 foot long spur where it should be. 100% car brained.
Still, running to the store on my bike is just as fast as driving, if not a few mins faster.
It’s cool and all, but trains have fixed routes that can’t take you almost everywhere. Of course I’d prefer trains over highways, just stating the current fact. Take for example every city I’ve lived in Mexico: trains never were an option to travel between cities. That’s changing, fortunately.
PEVs are still not very common around here, but that answers some questions. Thanks for your reply.
sensible places have enough railways that trains can practically take you everywhere, used to be that here in sweden we had railways even to teensy tiny villages a lot of the time.
Train or car. Car free mostly refers to inner city trips, for special occasions it’s totally fine to use a car (e.g. moving, buying something big, a weekend trip, etc)
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
Bus, ebikes, other types of electric assist stuff, walking. Crazy steep slopes do put a limit on exclusively human powered mobility (i.e. walking and cycling), but those places are incredibly rare.
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
A walkable city features amenities close by, plenty of benches to rest, and a solid bus system. There are absolutely no issues for people with restricted mobility. This applies to people with disabilities as well btw.
In fact I would turn that question around: how do elders deal with the requirement to drive a car to get groceries, etc? Isn’t that like super duper dangerous?
Thank you for your detailed reply. I was under the impression that cars and buses were out of the question. This clarifies a lot. Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic, probably because I live in latinamerica.
Steep-slope places are not the norm almost anywhere, but they are not really that scarce here. We probably would need to make some technological catch up.
About elders driving, well, it’s common that they have cars although they can’t/shouldn’t drive them. Some younger ones can step in and volunteer, usually family members, but not only. An arrangement can always be made when young people hardly owns a car.
Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic
There are kits enabling you to convert a muscle bike (push bike) into an e-bike. If you get one with a torque sensor, then it will detect how hard you push on the pedals and drive the motor proportional to that force. So you still must pedal but it amplifies your effort which preserves the natural feel and control of pedaling. It essentially makes the hills go away; a hilly place becomes a flat place.
Steep-slope places are not the norm almost anywhere, but they are not really that scarce here. We probably would need to make some technological catch up.
No worries Switzerland and Austria have you covered. Gondolas are only suitable for people and lighter loads, but funiculars can carry a ton of weight and can be built quite steep indeed, Chile has quite a few of them. In less extreme cases there’s good old rack railways. Funiculars are actually the oldest type of public transport in the world, invented before the industrial revolution, back then operated by water power (fill a tank in the top car, it will pull the bottom car up), and rack rail isn’t exactly new. The oldest were built to get stuff up and down from castles. Gondolas of the Mi Teleficero type are quite a bit newer and can reach quite impressive throughput numbers as the gondolas are unhooked from the wire in stations to make it possible to have a fast wire while not having to sprint when getting on (usually they move about at like 1/2 walking pace in the stations but you can also stop them completely for the elderly).
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
Currently they alll use little electric mobility scooters, in cycle lanes when available, bacause its too dangerous to be any where there are cars here in Australia.
How do those with epilepsy get around, they can’t drive at least they can’t here in Australia. One lady with epilepsy I knew rode a little electric scoot, she loved having her independence.
What happens to people when they loose thier license in the US ?
hasan-ok-dude you’re right, not everyone can use bikes so telling people to use bikes is ableist. genius. you’re a real thinker. they’ll be reading about you in the history books centuries from now
no, saying skill issue to people who aren’t able to bike up steep hills when there are other options such as pedal assist is unhelpful and ableist. it doesn’t take being a ‘thinker’ to deduce that.
this is such a silly non-issue to whine at a comrade for. it’s not ableist. obviously if you have a medical condition preventing you from riding up a hill then my comment doesn’t fucking apply to you, idiot
you know how i got my capabilities? i used my body to move around instead of sitting in a car at every opportunity. when you use your body it gets stronger and hills get easier. if that isnt possible for you, that sucks and i get it. but if you do have that ability and you choose not to use it, fucking skill issue get over it.
Why double down on this of all things? It’s not even necessarily about a medical condition (but it’s that too, for many of us it’s not a skill issue but a heart and lung issue), it’s about the fact that biking up a hill can be fucking hard and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for not wanting to do it all the time living in a hilly city, let alone if they’re trying to get home after working all day and are dead tired. The person who you were first responding to, who was asking in good faith from everything I can tell, also said “how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?” You completely disregarded that. Would you tell your 80 year old grandparent just to bike harder in their hilly city? This is a totally legitimate concern and responding “skill issue, just bike harder” really is heading into some ableist territory.
“obviously the exceptions that make it so my comments aren’t fitting and showcase ableism don’t count. Everyone know that. You are the stupid one. I have depicted myself as the streamer for a third time to hammer this home.”
The initial question is about those who are too physically unfit to scale a steep hill. Responding with “skill issue” is ableist specifically because we’re talking about the “exception”
There are many forms of personal mobility devices (some are even like speed limited, miniature, single person EVs) that make navigating a car free city easy for someone with impaired mobility.
Getting cars out of the way makes it easier to accommodate many levels of movement ability, not harder.
Yes we agree. So the response is not “its not an issue” the response is that there are alternatives to bikes. I perceived your response as a sort of sarcastic dismissal and I see now I misread the tone and content, sorry.
There’s wheelchair accessible bikes, but you are actually correct. Good urbanism requires us to take into account not just those who conform to society, but all it’s people. Interestingly an inclusive and accommodating city is also an economically strong one - in the long run more productive potential is freed and less resources are spent on patch-fixing a broken structure (this isn’t why its good to do, but it’s a nice argument to have when you’re talking to people who are afraid that wed be making a better world for no reason other being good people).
This is your reminder to read Invisible Women by Criado Perez
oh damn that’s cool as hell. as a general statement i’m not anti-bike or anything, i am just annoyed at how little care some people here have for those who are less able than they are
Good urbanism requires us to take into account not just those who conform to society, but all it’s people
100% agreed, and i think our rhetoric should reflect that inclusiveness rather than just defaulting to “can’t do it? fuck you”
Yeah the bikes are super cool, there’s lots of different ones too. I once got overtaken by a guy who pedalled with his arms, made me feel like a scrub.
It is a big issue when we don’t plan for those that don’t fit into our ideal of a “normal” person, because when we default to that we default to planning for men - and really planning for no one.
If you’re interested you should look up “gendermainstreaming”. Vienna has a very good manual on it.
I think people here get defensive about bikes because they’re used to arguing against carbrained folks all the time. It should also be noted a city designed for bikes and walkability will be easier to travel in for those who have trouble walking, than a city designed for cars, even if concessions aren’t made.
Train, bus, electrical bike, rideshares for the last mile maybe.
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
Get off and walk, use a bike with electrical assistance, use a different type of mobility assistance if i am very physically impaired.
how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
See above + Elders are typically more physically able due to having lived a life of regular everyday exery + their everyday destinations are not several miles away + “car free” doesn’t paradoxically mean free of cars, just almost all cars - ambulances are still needed for example - as such if a person is so impaired that no mobility assistance is enough to get them to their destination, then they can still be taxied by help.
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
E-bikes and regular bikes with good gearing. And walking up slopes generally isn’t too challenging it’s just slow. Infrastructure can help here too by making sure there are paths that don’t go up hills unnecessarily. Fast and frequent public transport provides another option where walking and biking is less viable.
For example, how do you travel to another city?
Trains and buses. Car as a last resort (preferably one that is hired rather than owned, and preferably electric rather than an ICE).
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
Elderly people can’t (or shouldn’t) drive either so better walkability = better for the elderly since it gives options to get around without relying on a car. Good infrastructure design can help with disability access, and many disabled people can’t drive anyway.
It’s crazy to see how the city centre of Ghent (Belgium) changed when they banned non-emergency cars from people not living/working in the centre. It went from some huge carparks with a few people walking between them to large squares filled with people enjoying the city and people who live here.
Every day I bike besides the Coupure channel to the train station and in the city I work in, I walk to the office besides the Dender river. Good infrastructure is basically keeping my mental health afloat.
yeah, car-free cities dont exist. what does exist is cities where you can live a normal life without a driving license. though even there this is restricted to parts of the city i think, where the public transport network is dense enough.
There are major cities that have “less car” zones in their center. Basically they just charge huge fees to bring a car into the area. It is definitely a step forward, but it would be nice if it wasn’t “no cars for thee but, yes, cars for me” from the rich.
There are, in fact, some car-free places. But it’s largely due to logistic issues (middle of a rain forest or on an island without a bridge. or stupid narrow streets)
I love living car free with my needs in walking/biking distance. However I feel like the car centric problem runs deeper than basic groceries and transit to work. I live near the gorgeous rocky mountains, but our buses only really run to the ski slopes, and only in winter. It’s a true shame to be so close to nature and have my option for access restricted to a rental car. So naturally there’s a plan to build the worlds largest gondola directly to resorts to address traffic. Cause god forbid we just ran more effective bus service year round.
But they will not stop at any trailheads, just the resorts. Additionally it is unnecessarily expensive to build and ride. Also the additional environmental impact of building and maintaining it rather than using existing roads. It’s purely being built for convenience to reduce traffic in/out of the canyon.
I imagine bikes will be very useful in making US cities walkable. The streets have been built very wide to make space for cars, which would make walking more tedious, but bikes are the perfect solution to this bc they let you cover more (flat) distance with just the power of your legs.
The only thing keeping me from regularly using bikes or ebikes for short distance travel are the cars and trucks sharing the same space that ignore bike lanes and try to get as close as they can to you when they pass you, and if I try to use the largely unused sidewalks and dip into the street to avoid the occasional pedestrians I get a ticket.
ignore bike lanes and try to get as close as they can to you when they pass you
That’s why protected bike lanes are the ideal, preferably grade separated from the road. Remove the problem via infrastructure, and more people will bike.
Due to the pandemic, people needed more outdoor space in cities (since its unsafe to eg eat indoors), so NYC closed roads to cars and turned them into basically public parks.
When the shops started opening again, they city got a lot of pressure and they made a campaign to close I think 25% of the city’s roads to cars in some years
Yeah, cities in America from around 1870 to 1920 had extensive trolleycar networks. They were so widespread you could hop between them and even travel across state lines. Every major city had them and they were the primary mode of urban transportation. Now cities only have trolleycars as a novelty, like San Francisco still has theirs. New Orleans has beautiful streetcar lines. They’re mostly used for tourists, but if they were made more extensive and modernized then New Orleans could have very functional mass transit.
Most of the trolley networks were ripped up to make room for extra lanes or parking lots. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be possible to repurpose existing roads for trams/trolleys. I really believe this.
Yeah you’re right, who likes no pollution, no noise, strong communities and third places to bond with people, kids having public spaces to play in their neighborhoods, green, sustainability, healthy, active people that don’t sit in front of a wheel all day long… Who likes all that seriously?
I get privacy, AC, and I get to go shopping once every two weeks instead of smaller trips every day, and I still live in a small neighborhood with a lovely park within walking distance.
Busses and trains also have AC. If you’re walking or cycling, the wind will be more than enough to keep you cool.
I get to go shopping once every two weeks instead of smaller trips every day
You can do the same in walkable neighborhoods, only the sane thing to do is to buy less more often. As a bonus, you’ll be healthier and your food will be fresher.
Okay? I guess I’m a liar? What are you referencing if I might ask? I’m not sure where I’m lying here.
privacy
I didn’t have to hear you. I don’t have to touch you. I can blast tswift quite loudly and sing with my daughter as much as I want. I can also enjoy the quietness.
Busses and trains also have AC. If you’re walking or cycling, the wind will be more than enough to keep you cool.
🙄👌👍 I love it when the zealots start telling me how much I sweat. It’s giving insane deranged shit lol.
I get to go shopping once every two weeks instead of smaller trips every day
You can do the same in walkable neighborhoods, only the sane thing to do is to buy less more often. As a bonus, you’ll be healthier and your food will be fresher.
You most certainly do not walk with a family sized trip. I fill a literal full size us grocery cart. Not a chance you are doing that walking without some insane system.
🙄👌👍 I love it when the zealots start telling me how much I sweat. It’s giving insane deranged shit lol.
I suffer from severe hyperhidrosis, meaning I literally can’t stop sweating and sweat way more than the average person at any given temperature. Public transportation does just fine for me.
You most certainly do not walk with a family sized trip. I fill a literal full size us grocery cart. Not a chance you are doing that walking without some insane system.
I literally do. Maybe all that sitting around in a car has caused your muscles to atrophy.
are you realising how petty and mean you’ve become in this comment section? is this the person you want to be? is this the person your daughter would be proud of calling her parent? exercise is proven to be good for mental health, maybe you should take a trip to that park you’ve mentioned and leave the internet be for the day.
Can I attack your kids in this forum claiming how salty you’re getting with losing an argument you don’t agree with? You’re disagreeing and taking it personal. Grow up and likely you don’t have any kids.
Food is fresher….so you like making unnecessary trips all the time regardless of how you get there. I do grocery trips once every three weeks. I also go on tons of camping and back packing trips and walk tons of miles. In short your argument is you rely on being in a neighborhood. How about folks who who grew up in smaller areas and want to be near family whom live there? Want them to pack up and leave and live in a tiny apartment?
shopping once every two weeks instead of smaller trips every day
that just means you’ll only have fresh produce for a week at most, any bread you buy will be unusable after 4 days and if something you need is not in stock you have to wait another two weeks.
We’re GF. The vast majority of veggies are just fine for 2 weeks with little care. The only freshness issues we run into are potatoes and lettuce type greens. If we have to we always have the ability to make a second trip.
What is important to you may not be to others. I don’t understand how the folks in here don’t get this. You’ve already converted people who want to be converted. It’s an uphill battle. You are sitting here trying to prove my preference is wrong. I’ve experienced both and make a choice to live semi rural and it suits every single one of my preferences.
Honestly, genuinely, being able to get fresh produce daily and good bread - gluten free or not (there’s gluten free bread???) - and being able to be spontaneous and take a quick 5 minute walk to the store because I’ve unexpectedly run out of eggs in the middle of baking or whatever aren’t things that are at all important to me, they are just facts of life. What’s important to me is not being inconvenienced by people who think it’s their god-given right to own a car and make it everyone’s problem.
My issue here is that you’re saying
I get to go shopping once every two weeks instead of smaller trips every day
like everyone should obviously agree that only going once every two weeks is the better experience and just stopping by on the way to or from work or in your lunch break is somehow an inferior experience.
You are sitting here trying to prove my preference is wrong.
I don’t care about you, I care about other people possibly reading this and want to make sure - since they’re interested in the conversation already - why we think living car-free is better. The top level comment on this chain is you stating your opinion that cars are better, with no explanation at all as to why. I know that people like you are a lost cause.
Your privacy is of no concern to us, like you could claim you want more privacy, which you can achieve by commuting with a jet(people can stare at you through the car window) - that doesn’t mean the world has to cater to your unreasonable demands.
The fact that there is a park in your neighborhood doesn’t mean anything, since the public spaces are simply not enough. We don’t have more green instead of this sea of tar, because some people like you don’t care about either the environment or the alienation of the communities or the health implications of car centric cities.
The opposite of one trip every two weeks isn’t everyday, it’s once a week on a bike, I’m sure you can make this sacrifice since…yk I specifically explained how our world and lives are ruined from car centric cities. And if you are not willing to make this insurmountable sacrifice, you are just a lost cause and an enemy to green walkable vibrant cities and therefore to us.
You are not fucking crazy, you are fucking toxic to comment in this place to begin with.
I didn’t find it easier. I didn’t like summer commutes and being hot. I didn’t like dealing with other people on public transportation. I prefer my 10 minute drive to my local store in AC with my music in my quite car.
Nope. I have a loving family, am married, have a kid who is in soccer, dance, etc. we have some other parent friends. Just had a nice DnD night and hit up the recent local adventures league.
I’ve also spent nearly 90k converting my roof to solar, buying a PHEV, installing a heat pump and fully offloading my net usage. I ripped up my grass put in clover, planted wildflower, and spend hundreds of hours and dollars beekeeping. You can fuck right off with your little narrow judgments. I’ve likely done more than you’ll ever do to reduce my consumption. Outside of giving up a car.
You have invented an entire persona and story because I have stated how a large population feels about vehicles and living more rural. You have invented some evil character on a paragraph. It’s insane and counterproductive.
As for why I’m here, 🤷♂️ I thought this place was about conversation. I stated a common preference and prefer a small city and driving. You all lost your mind at the audacity of me expressing that option. Being .ml a ban is probably next 🤷♂️.
It’s insane you are attacking me, someone who uses less resources than most of the people in US or EU, and you are screaming at me to fuck off because I have a preference for a vehicle. It’s this insane all of nothing attitude that is 100% incompatible with democratic systems. Jesus Christ my man, you are screaming at a guy you 75% agree with.
If you order food Uber eats, take an Uber to get items. Also request fixing of your dwelling and access to get your groceries. You’re still just as depended. Work as an engineer for city electric company. 90% of thee comments about being car free. Yet people still use them to get them services.
Nice response and showing your maturity. How about folks who grew up small town or rural and that’s what they know? How about people who grew up in small towns with not much access to updated structure? You’re being selfish and comparing someone who only stated they preferred smaller areas. You respond back claiming narcissism and anti-social. Stop being a raging dick about losing your ass on a conversation. Every response is you taking it personal like you’re “God” himself.
We don’t have to convince them to give up their own cars; we just have to stop catering to them by providing so much subsidized road and parking space.
The purpose is the inconvenience. Its the same reason people block traffic. Our infrastructure should he designed to make car travel the least convient mode of transportation.
We should use many tactics to achieve this, both urban planning and direct action.
If that’s what people want to do on their own, that’s fine. My issue is when they hand it to you saying it’s a joint, only to be surprised when it’s basically a cigarette with a tiny bit of weed sprinkled in. I hate smoking tobacco.
I’ve quickly learned to always ask what is actually in it before accepting.
I did not refer to the name but to the ratio. It very much depends on the scene imo. It reaches from pure weed in the reggae scene, a 1:1 mix in the hiphop scene, to almost pure tobacco in “weekend weed smoker” scenes and also just depends a lot on the individual who rolled. That is of course only my personal experience.
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