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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Louvain-la-Neuve also has an interesting take on this. Like Ghent it's a student city but it's also a planned city, and was built as a "two-levels" city, buildings sit on top of a huge concrete "slab" and topside is completely car-free, with roads & parkings downside.

Not having to "burn" any surface on carspace makes the city pretty inherently walkable.

One issue is I don't remember the public parkings providing electric plugs for EC.

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I still find that Louvain-la-Neuve have failed to build a city for cyclists, but I can't pinpoint exactly why. There are very few people who bike there, almost zero bike parkings despite being a car-free city. The city is small but still, some places are quite far by foot (>30 minutes walking from one side to the other).

> I still find that Louvain-la-Neuve have failed to build a city for cyclists, but I can't pinpoint exactly why.

That is definitely the case. I think they planned for a very walkable/human-scale city but made many of the passages just a bit too small, I remember side-roads where you can only walk two abreast and you have buildings/walls on both sides (at least some of the time) with pretty sharp cornering, that makes it very inconvenient and unsafe for cycling beyond a walking pace, definitely not safe to have pedestrians and cycles both going in both directions.

I guess the planning could have benefited from a few cyclable "arteries"/ring roads.

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