Oslo made its city center basically car-free

> A few spots are left, converted into parking for disabled drivers or EV charging, and some streets are open for delivery trucks for a couple of hours in the morning. Emergency vehicles still have access.

Nobody who has thought about this issue for a bit is suggesting that we ban cars like we banned chemical weapons. Simply that the number of cars can be cut by a factor of 5-10 easily, leaving behind only those users who actually need the car, and not using it as a convenience at enormous unaccountable externalities.

Not to mention that the the health of many (but not all) is destroyed by absolute minimum exercise needed in car centric cities. When everyone starts walking 5-10K steps everyday, many mobility related ailments are avoided or controlled or managed sufficiently.

Yours is not that case. You have a medical need, as do many people. But it's still reasonable to move away from the mentality that's common in the US of viewing road use and car use as a human right, and towards one that's about explicitly opting into or out of trade-offs about how best to make use of limited road space and government funds. Specifically: if we're going to subsidize road use, should we subsidize all of it, and if so, all of it at the same rate? I think you make a good case for why people with mobility restrictions should have access to such a subsidy, but I don't think it follows that because they should, everyone should. Maybe people who are able to take the bus or walk should have incentives to do so, or disincentives to not do so.

What helped me a lot was getting an e-bike that I'm able to cruise around town at 20mph (32kph) in. I understand that this particular solution doesn't apply to you, since arthritis is triggered by joint movement, whereas my pain is triggered by impact on the damaged foot and ankle (and e-biking is low impact).

But this experience got me thinking a lot about small electric vehicles.

One could imagine a city center where most people walk or bike, and people with a medical permit could drive around in speed-limited, electric golf carts, which are fairly compatible with pedestrian-only areas. Perhaps the city itself would staff the golf carts with drivers who were summonable via app.

So people like us could drive to a parking garage on the outskirts of the city center, and then there would either be rentable golf carts at the garage, or golf carts able to be summoned to go into the city center.

Oslo, and European cities without or with much less cars, have tons of people with arthritis as well and they're doing just fine. A walkable city will be even more welcoming for things like powered wheelchairs, healthier to breath for everybody, and will have low cost (and in some cases in here, free) mass transportation.

>Consider that everyone's circumstances are not the same as yours. Have some compassion for your fellow humans.

Yeah, because nothing says compassion like car ridden cities, and urban areas designed around driving.

All in all, a car free space can be far better for the disabled than what we have right now.

“Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. . . . He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!'... [...]

Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason.

Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low—too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous.

For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas.”

Also detailed in this book is destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods and communities by the common policy of appropriating their land for roads and highways. The lasting effects of these practices is plainly obvious in so many US cities and will not go away without active efforts to reverse the damage. In comparison, disabled-friendly infrastructure is frankly more easily solved.

That is not logical. What is logical, is that if car usage was heavily reduced inside urban areas, it would leave more space for the few cases where cars and lorries are actually needed.

It is a variant of the old argument "but without cars and lorries there would be no food transport" (or ambulances, constuction, or something else where it is easy to see the benefits). That has always been a false premise. The biggest problems with cars in urban areas in cogestion. Fewer cars would mean more space where it's most desperately needed.

What do people with your condition in Paris or Rome do? Most of Europe isn't designed around cars the way the usa is.

So, I'm not exactly sure how much the car culture is actually working in your favor. The alternative (public transportation) means parking lots can be smaller and closer to the actual destination.

All that being said, Oslo is NOT a good city to live in if you need a wheelchair or crutches (which I do, with unfortunate regularity). 500 meters might as well be 100 kilometers if you are on crutches in the winter. Even if where you are going is right next to a train stop, the stops are not very accessible (long ramps way out of the way etc). The curbs do not consistently have ramps at crosswalks. The sidewalks are often covered in ice in the winter. There are stairs everywhere. Even with a car and being able to park near your destination, you still dealt with these issues.

So, I guess my point is, Oslo making the city center mostly car free is not what makes it unfriendly for people with mobility issues. Taking public transportation is still better than parking and walking wherever. But it still sucks if you have crutches.

Also it sounds like a mobility scooter is kind of what you want?

You are fortunate enough to be able to afford cars and think that we should continue to design around what works for you. That simply benefits you - and not the handicapped, disabled people who use public transit every day.

I've heard this before... and maybe I'm not qualified to speak, as I'm not yet the age where I really have to worry, but from what I know of current technology, I can totally go out and buy a walking speed electric wheelchair that is safe to operate even after my vision and attention degrade... but self-driving capabilities in cars are still quite some ways off.

Personally, my body would have to degrade a lot before I needed that wheelchair to make it a few blocks; but my attention and vision? that wouldn't have to degrade as much before I would not be able to safely operate a car.

This is actually something I've thought a lot about; I mean, I personally am bearish on self-driving cars, and if we don't get self-driving cars? I think I might need to plan on retiring to New York, as that's probably one of the few places I can count on aging without being expected to drive.

Seriously, we can come up with something other than 2 ton vehicles.

Hundreds of millions of people will live better lives if we can build our cities without needing cars.

The parking spots aren't just for people with wheelchairs. My grandmother got one when she had to use a walker.

You deserve it!

the difference between newer cities built for cars and old pre-car inner cities is quite extreme in that regard. i've got a supermarket 150m and a smallish shopping centre 500m away, which might be too far for you, but an elderly or visually impaired person could still get their shopping done on their own.

the shopping centers at the edge of the city - which are pretty much only reachable by car and you seem to depend on - have a disastrous and self reinforcing effect on inner city QOL (at least that's true for all the smaller cities around here, where cars are required to get around), as they cause most of the small local shops to die off, increasing the distance you have to walk to get to the remaining ones. removing cars from the equation brings those back, which also means the distances are getting smaller. that said, i doubt i cover a much smaller distance on foot when i drive out to the big shopping centers at the city pheriphery, as the distances from most parking spots to the destination inside a huge box store are at least as big as what i'd cover walking to my usual local shop.

of course this doesn't help you much if the distances are to big no matter what - i could see you getting around on a motorized scooter around here without problems though (as a few of my neighbors do).

so, from the perspective of an european inner city dweller, getting rid of cars would be much more inclusionary than the other way round.

As other people mentioned, there'd be workarounds for people with mobility issues for sure.

A car can fairly be seen as a grossly overpowered wheelchair with an extra ton of metal or two.

i can't imagine taking a car to get to a bodega on the other side of the block or across the street is easier than just walking to the bodega directly.

Just consider the trip to the Wal-Mart. I haven't lived in North America for a long time, but in my recent trip to Canada to visit my parents, we went to Wal-Mart. Look at those sprawling mall complexes with their massive parking lots. We had to drive from parking lot to parking lot, just to visit another store!

And the Wal-Mart itself was this behemoth structure with football field after football field of space under its roof. I mean it's half a kilometer from the frozen pizza to the checkout line. If you can't walk 200 meters, you can't shop in Wal-Mart without using their motorised carts (which are admittedly very cool).

Imagine a completely different situation (one which I thankfully live in every day). Imagine that you had stores that were close to where you lived. So close, in fact, that you could walk there if you were abled bodied. But if you were not, you could take an electric bicycle (which many elderly people use where I live) or even an electric cart similar to the one that you can find at Wal-Mart (these are really rare where I live -- most people are quite happy with their electric bicycles, but I've seen them frequently in the UK where I used to live).

Imagine that instead of several square kilometers of parking lots to contend with, you had hundreds of small shops. You had butchers that are just big enough to house the meat it sells. You go up to a counter, which is less than 10 feet from the door and you get your meat and -- lo and behold! There's the cash register, not 3 feet from where you are standing.

I could go on, but the biggest thing that makes this hard for people in North America to imagine is that it is so different. The lifestyle is completely different. Instead of going once a week or once a month to some massive discount store and buying a van full of goods, you go every other day and buy enough to fit in a basket on your bike. It seems like a lot of time, but instead of driving for 30 minutes to the store and spending 20 minutes fining a parking space, you walk 5 or 10 minutes to the store. That's what it means to build cities that are good for walking.

I write this with the full knowledge that my words are not good enough to explain this concept. Even my parents don't understand. When I stayed with them, I discovered that there was a shopping centre only a 20 minute walk from their house. I started walking there to pick up small things for dinner every day (hey 40 minutes of walking a day is not bad). They thought I was insane. Why would you walk to the store when you can drive? Why would you spend 40 minutes when you could send 10? They couldn't understand that the walk was the point.

And so, while it is unreasonable to expect North America to become Asia or Europe suddenly, I think there is a lot of things that can be done to improve the situation dramatically -- like rezoning areas so that shops can be build where people live. Things like mandating that parking lots have pedestrian paths that allow you to walk to the store without being driven over by a mini van. Things like having down town cores which are already mixed use to have walking only areas. Things like building safe public transit. Things like not approving large box malls in the middle of nowhere surrounded by seas of parking lots and no access to public transit.

Do you think there are people with arthritis and disabilities in Europe?

So many city centres make cars a nightmare, but they are infinitely better places to live than the US.

Not to mention our healthcare but that's another thread...

we should reduce car usage for energy, pollution, life quality

but let's not be extremists

Low-income people take the bus. That's what we should subsidize.

I would find the risk unacceptable. Basically any flinch of anybody on the road can literally kill you. In a car, you are at least surrounded by the steel walls, so if somebody decides to do something stupid, in most cases, it's metal that gets smashed. In a motorcycle, the only thing between hunks of metal wizzing around and your flesh is a thin layer of leather. Not enough for me.

The efficiency gains of a motorcycle vs economy car aren't that significant and the emissions are worse.

1. They're harder to drive.

2. They're more dangerous for the driver.

3. They're uncomfortable in rainy weather. (And even more dangerous during icy weather.)

They don't call motorcyclists donors for nothing.

In college, I sat next to a guy in class every day and one day he was absent. A couple hours later in chapel, they put his picture up on the screen and said he got hit on his motorcycle and died instantly.

Motorcycles are hands-down the fastest way to get anywhere in the city. This gap only widens when you consider that parking instantly becomes a non-issue.

We have perfect weather for it year-round. Lane filtering not only gets you to your destination faster, it's actually statistically safer. They're cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate, cheaper to insure, cheaper to fuel, and dramatically cheaper to park (at home, at work, on the street, and in terms of not worrying about parking tickets from street sweeping since you can often park off-street).

If do you need to carry more cargo than the bike will carry, you can always take a Lyft or Uber.

I get that a motorcycle isn't a workable option for some people. But it's certainly a better option than car ownership for many in the city, and I'm astonished that it's an option that so few people seem to consider given how perfectly-tailored this city is for it.

The noise of them is super anti-social.

New Jersey has a single, statewide transportation agency (local jitneys notwithstanding). It's better than nothing, but it fucking sucks.[1]. Increasing the scope of an agency, at least in the US, isn't a panacea; it just replaces one set of serious problems with a different set of serious problems. The US needs more fundamental changes than just changing the power/scope of agencies. Unfortunately I don't know what that is.

[1] https://twitter.com/FuckNjTransit

This seems like a 'nobody goes there it's too busy' sort of argument. If it's a no-go for private cars then it should be almost empty apart from a few taxis and a bus or two? Which would make it not a no-go for private cars...

Society should be organised bottom up and decentralised.

Communities and regions need more autonomy. Decision making power belongs at the edges, with those who have the most context.

Bazar significantly outcompetes cathedral at scale.

My point being, for armchair futurists who predict the death of the automobile, it tends to be a serious passion. Arguing with these people tends to be fruitless, because more than anything they want to preach. I try to avoid it myself, because right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, there is way too much money to be made selling cars for the business model to fall, short of being confronted with a superior replacement (a la cars vs. horses).

There are more productive uses of limited lifespans than... this.

No, they did it because paving makes roads comparatively weather proof and it sucks to try to maintain a continent spanning empire by military force if rain cuts your lines of movement and supply, not for comfort.

Fighting Car Culture takes more than a few people walking.

Also maybe you don’t need to get around so quickly. That’s kind of my point about how much damage the car has done to society.

And yes, as much as they seem to clutter city streets, electric scooters and the like are seemingly becoming a viable last-mile transportation option.

I can’t otherwise imagine being pregnant and stranded outside at 1am in freezing cold nowhere near other transportation. It still could happen, but you’d call an ambulance to help you out.

Other than that, there's plenty of public transportation.

And you don't even have to make the entire city center free of cars, i.e. make every 5th street available for cars (limited, like 1 open lane). As long as you can walk a couple of blocks you'll be able to grab a taxi.

There is a mode of point-to-point private-vehicle transport that is quite fast at dense urban scales: bike share. Oslo has it as do many/most European city centres.

It really is just a matter of shifting your expectation. Waiting for a train with friends late at night can even be a really fun experience that you can share with the other groups of tipsy people that are on their way somewhere. You might even meet someone new and special. To me, this is what city life should be, rather than the isolation of swiping on your phone in your ride-share.

IMHO I think with all the money we save on road maintenance, cities would start should look at ways to improve sidewalks. One interesting improvement might be some way to cover them like is done in parts of Seattle or Las Vegas.

Not so much. There used to be inter-city rail that people used regularly.

This old railroad map (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4121p.ct001917/?r=0.329,0.288,...) shows how dense and sprawling the railroad network was, even in 1900. Towns like Rhinelander, WI (and ones even smaller) that aren't even served by inter-city bus routes today had regular train service.

Obviously the automobile is the problem and bikes and public transit is the solution, which we can see has happened here in Olso but also famously in Amsterdam and Copenhagen before it. There is no excuse and reason for having cars in city centers, after you build out good bike, bus, and train transit inside a city.

I've always wanted to establish high tolls on entering dense urban areas, you can leave all the roads as-is but introduce a high tax on driving that last mile and supply free busing to compensate, some rich dudes will still drive everywhere but after a few years of high tolls you could probably ban cars outright with good public support.

I’ve spent some time in Belgium’s city center which has few to to cars, and small beach towns with few to no cars. It’s amazing. You spend a few days in an area with no cars and think to yourself, “Wow. Wow. It doesn’t have to be like that. What are we even doing?”

To me the car is just a phony sense of freedom and control. It drives the modern economic engine. But at great cost.

most of the traffic near city centers are not residents but commuters and shoppers. the goal is not to decrease the number of miles driven but to decrease the number of cars in a zone.

It will increase costs for shipping by truck, but would it also better reflect the true costs of what it costs to ship by truck, drive on highways, etc?

"Over half of all vehicle trips are between 1 and 10 miles." [1]

~35,000 people die on American roads each year. [2]

Let's call a spade a spade. Cars are the villains. The over-reliance on your fast, personal, point-to-point convenience is killing too many people.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl08021/fig4...

[2] https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

Of course. The problem is externalities. If the people enjoying their energy-dense personal transportation aren't incurring the full costs of that transportation, then 1) there will be probably way more of it than there would be in a market with costs internalized and 2) the people who don't use it have a good reason to be upset.

If urban cores were allowed to be built high and dense, to accommodate all those people who prefer to live in dense urban areas, then the grass and trees and backyards of the suburbs would also fit closer to the urban core. Shorter distances even from the suburbs to the core.

My hatred for the automobile grows every day -> My hatred for how pervasive automobile are in cities and for how they damage city planning grows every day.

There, now GP hates a trend in society.

For the second part: this is essentially choosing how free you want markets to be (and how much of society you want to be a market).

In my opinion better alternatives would be more walkable cities and better public transports, which are helped by zone-based auto ban.

Regarding raising the price of gasoline I agree that it would be a terrible choice, it would impact the least the cities and the most industrial transports and rural areas (the only sectors were car/trucks are truly needed)

That’s not true. The electrical subway predates the personal car by a couple decades. Paris, France, and its suburb had 108 (electric) tramway lines in 1900. Autobuses were all over the place when the first “modern” cars first appeared in the city.

I mean, yeah. There's a reason people in, say, Germany do not really have this problem, and it's because cities and towns there aren't built around the assumption that everyone must have a car.

On that day two full trams passed her stop before she was able to get on one. Something that otherwise never happens in the city.

So I think you've got a very different impression of how Amsterdammers stop cycling when there's a bit of snow. My own impression is that there's at least a 10x difference in the number of cyclists the day after some snow at rush hour compared to the same time of day on a weekday in the summer months when you can bike to work in a T-shirt.

Also, as someone from further up north than Oslo you may not be appreciating the logistical difference in cycling in the sort of snow they get up there v.s. what you get in Amsterdam. Most of the time when it snows in Amsterdam you've got 2-3 cm at most, no icing, and major cycle paths clear up down to the asphalt on at least the center-line by 8:30 at the latest.

None of which means you need a car. I cycled to work year round to work when I lived in Iceland, but it's definitely a very different challenge. You need studded tires, a mountain bike etc.

Oslo has very steep hills. I know people that climb 100's of meters per day during their cycle commute.

So yeah very different.

Oslo is 5 deg celsius colder in winter than Amsterdam. You sometimes have sub-0, for them it's a norm.

There is a big difference between 5C-10C and 0C (a Warsaw-native here, which is closer in terms of temperatures to Oslo)

When I did live in Oslo I did put on those studded tires for the colder months. But that was only for the late autumn and spring when there might be ice but mostly bare tarmac.

The actual winter months was not suitable for cycling. Studded tires are fine on cleared roads with nice rink type thin ice on it. But on most roads especially the park roads I prefered to cycle on you could not see the tarmac. Cycling in the winter on a normal bike is a nightmare on these surfaces that are several layers of snow and ice refrozen many times leaving random deep grooves which forces your wheel to turn in all sorts of directions all the time. Add a foot or two of snow if the snow ploughers and gritters had not been there yet that morning. Exhausting and dangerous.

I'd like to corroborate the sibling comment: this is not true. Although not in Amsterdam, elsewhere in the Netherlands I consistently park my bike in the same parking around the same time, and it usually fills up at about the same pace. Far fewer spaces were taken when I parked my bike during the harsh weather than there were usually.

[1] http://www.eco-public.com/ParcPublic/?id=3936#

There are designated time slots for suply vehicles in the core pedestrian zone, and the pedestrian friendly streets support these without issue. The two outer zones are the shared spaces where cars may drive at any time, which is a mistake in my opinion. Should be the same as the center. Pedestrian only, except for designated time slots for supply vehicles.

> The "losing business because you can't park right in front of it" is BS in most big western European city centers where you either go to a paid parking or to a spot on the street 10-15 minutes away from your intended destination sometimes.

Yes, that argument appeared often and it never made sense because there never was any available parking space before, except for nearby parking houses that are still available. So pretty much nothing changed, except that some neighbours lost a few parking spaces.

Copenhagen made the shift in 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C3%B8get

Interestingly, many local merchants opposed the shift in fear of losing customers. But then soon saw how the pedestrianized street started to boast more shoppers to their stores.

[0] - https://i.imgur.com/CI7Ynx6.gifv

I don't know, public transport accessibility, frequency and quality is finally a competition I could get behind.

http://en-gb.topographic-map.com/places/Oslo-1311779/

http://en-gb.topographic-map.com/places/San-Francisco-353207...

In working in tech and knowing the city inside and out. This is flatly not an issue.

Further, i used to live upper market at twin peaks - and taking the bus was not a problem other that the normal muni issues whoch this discussion is not about.

Ive biked and walked and commuted literally every area in sf. Lived twin peaks, presidio, biked and commuted all of down town marina etc.

Hills is a literal non issue.

Meanwhile I can simply apply for a parking space right outside my place, and only need to pay something like a 250 EUR/yr road tax (depending on vehicle & weight etc.). That's a flat fee for the entirety of Nord-Holland (my "state"), I'd pay nothing for parking other than needing to apply.

Assuming a parking space is 6x3m = 18m^2 then 4x of those add up to 72m^2, a typical size for an apartment around here.

So if someone parking a car in a 18m^2 parking space had to compete with the market for real estate they'd need to pay 2000 EUR/month for parking their car, because we could otherwise build housing there.

That's before you even get to the problem that the fact that you can only build up to 4 floors around here is also an artificial government restraint, so the true market price of a 18m^2 parking spot is way more than 2000 EUR/month in the center of Amsterdam.

There's no reason to ban cars. You just need to make them pay a fair price for the land they're using and the problem will take care of itself.

according to the oslo public transit website, all buses are wheelchair accessible, and all except three tram lines are wheelchair accessible.

https://www.visitoslo.com/en/oslo/practical-information/acce...