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I live in a city center where cars are largely banned, and every time I leave that little "enclave" I am amazed how people put up with that noise, that smell, that constant stress factor...

Cars being largely banned? Forgive my ignorance but where can I find a place like this?

Pontevedra, Spain is one of them.

I bet he/she's talking about Houten:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFEfr7Amn6U

As others have said: Europe ;)

Downtown Minneapolis, Nicollet Mall doesn't allow cars. Only busses and pedestrians. Occasionally you see a car, but it's because it looks like it's someone who didn't know accidentally turn on to the road and get lost.

Yes !

Some cities have already started to ban cars from their centers.

I have been living in the US for one year. The omnipresence of cars is really bothering me.

Moving from point A to B without using a car is way more of a chore compared to Paris.

I don't believe I will spend all my life here, and I hope that my next destination will be car free.

I would really like to move to San Diego - but then I saw the enormous amount of cars parked everywhere and I was surprised how ugly it made everything look.

There are these gorgeous beaches and then all these ugly cars parked in endless lines right next to it.

Santa Monica and the freeway near the beach killed it for me as well :-/

Paris has an especially exceptional transit system. When you leave your current city, consider another city that once hosted the Olympics recently. They tend to be easy to get around without a car.

>Paris has an especially exceptional transit system

True but so does the other large European cities I have lived in / visited. Heck, even the smaller (compared to Paris) French city I studied in has a better public transportation system than SF.

>When you leave your current city, consider another city that once hosted the Olympics recently

That sounds like a good rule of thumb, thanks, I will keep it in mind :) Although I don't think there is a real cause/effect relation for Paris. The city has had a good public transport system for a very long time. It probably helps that it is a very touristic city, but even non touristic places have a good subway support (although some lines really need to be modernized).

And to be clear, I don't have a pro-Paris bias. Some other cities like Berlin seem to be way more pro-active in the direction of a car free city.

> Moving 2 tons to buy a 500g loaf of bread is just insane.

Such a great way to put it

As a programmer, it doesn't seem like a strange thing to do at all. That's a fair description of using Python or Ruby -- 100x "less efficient" than other approaches, but very convenient.

People value convenience over abstract congruity.

... until a service reaches a certain level of operation costs, a switch to other, more efficient technologies will be enforced by management.

Nicely put! ;)

> Traffic in cities should be remodeled.

Absolutely.

> I wonder why we do protect our workers but pedestrians and cyclists/scooters just don't matter. Have you ever seen a working environment where an object with 2-40tons is allowed to freely move next to a person at a speed of 50km/h and more? I'm glad we do have rules in working enviromnents. It would be great to see the same on roads as well.

There are plenty of jobs where such things happen - even something as 'simple' as working with trains, factory jobs etc.

Let's not get paranoid - death rates from traffic accidents in countries with civilized driving culture(mostly Europe, but not everywhere in there) is about 0.05-0.1%. It also includes car->car collisions and car->object collisions - so pedestrian deaths are even lower.

Separation of lanes(pedestrian vs motorized vs bicycles/electric scooters) should be even higher I agree. I really like overpasses for pedestrian crossings - but they introduce plenty of extra costs and problems(mostly for disabled and/or old people).

> I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists. We wouldn't have to build new infrastructure but could simply use the existing one. I could imagine we could even remove most of our traffic lights replaced by roundabouts.

Outside of specific residential zones(where speed limit is already usually between 20-30 km/h(depending on country) and pedestrians already have a right of way) this is insane.

Economically, convenience wise and paradigm wise.

Such system exists because there is a need for fast transportation - it is tied into very complex economical system. If you want to get rid of it - what do you replace it with? If you replace it in your area, will it give advantage to businesses in there? Do majority people living in such areas want to have that speed limit?

> In the long run I hope to see less cars overall and people switching to smaller means of transportation. Moving 2 tons to buy a 500g loaf of bread is just insane.

People usually buy quite more things than just a single loaf of bread. I personally walk to stores, because i can't transport as much goods as car can, so i spend less money.

There are better ways to waste less resources than limiting speed to 20km/h. Electric cars, good public transportation system(it is a nightmare to use in rush hours over here)

The avg. speed in London for example is already down to 19km/h due to traffic jams. I don't see a problem with setting it to 20. You'll even reduce the chance of traffic jams by lowering speed limits. There's quite a pleasant traffic simulator to play with: http://traffic-simulation.de/

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37200/umfrage...

The simulator is neat. Is the source code for it available?

Looks like the source is here: https://github.com/movsim/traffic-simulation-de

I am all for safer roads, less city car traffic, but in the end it is the perspective of people living in the city who can commute by train or bike. Lots of people live outside of cities though and commute. For many a car is the only way to get to work in a reasonable amount of time. I'm actually more concerned about the pollution and i'd rather bet on electric and self driving cars to solve both of these issues. Getting rid of many parked cars would free up so much space. I hope this happens while I am still working though.

Why self-driving cars would help reduce pollution (or traffic)? People who can't drive will start using those cars, so probably there will be more, not less cars on the roads.

My thinking would be more efficient driving.

Why not small (ish) self-driving buses that run very regularly (you shouldn't wait more than 10 mins for one) that people can hop-on hop-off. Networked so that you can get from one side of the city to the next in no more than 3 hops.

Big enough also to takes prams/buggies/bicycles/luggage/large shopping items, so that people can also get to do many of the normal things they would do with their day and still use public transport.

I wonder what the economics of this look like.

A bus averaging 20mph running 24/7/365 puts 175,000 miles on it yearly. Ignoring fuel costs, that's a lot of wear & tear on the moving parts. How many passenger miles per day do you need to get out of the bus for it to be economical?

Realistically, no city bus fleet is going to average 20 mph, 24 hours a day. Perhaps 1/4 to 1/2 of that, even with 24-hour autonomous operation.

It’s likely the electric drivetrains in modern buses will last longer than their diesel predecessors, while reducing maintenance costs.

Like the Marshrutka in ex-Soviet countries, or the Dolmus in Turkey? I found them to be very convenient and also very cheap. Not sure they would be happy to fit a pram in, though.

Really self driving cars won’t be much difference than how pervasive taxi use is in countries where labor is cheap, except traffic will be much more optimized.

Uber and Lyft are the mechanical Turk version of self driving cars. They cause congestion.

Self driving cars will be a godsend to congested cities, maybe not in America where there won’t enough political will to ban manual driven cars in mega cities, but definitely in Asia, and especially in China.

I haven’t seen anything like Beijing or Manila since moving to LA and then Seattle, America has first world traffic problems only.

- They could park somewhere else, underground, or just be always in use (for shared cars). This alone would cut space usage in half for typical streets with parking on both sides

- Near-perfect safety would reduce the need for structural safety. That could cut size and weight drastically

- Coordination might allow more efficient use of roads, obviating the need for multiple lanes, allowing cars to travel bumper-to-bumper, drastically increase throughput on intersections

It's pretty much the American concept of Suburbia that makes it hard to use public transport if you don't live in a city (or even if you live in a lot of cities, it seems).

Most European and Asian (specifically Japanese) cities have very good connectivity from the outskirts into the city centers.

Granted, it can be complicated and time consuming to connect from outskirt to outskirt. This is no reason, however, to throw away well working public systems of connectivity for some pipe dream, which still uses much too much resources for the density of a city.

It would really be good if the remaining cars were substancially smaller though. Driving an SUV into the city is not ok and does not provide significant increases in utility for the one doing it compared to a small car.

So build parking spaces at the outskirts and have people switch to public transport or bikes to enter the city proper. Or just extend the rail lines to the outskirts and have people commute by rail all the way.

The suburbs are a problem. We badly need to re-urbanize and live more closely together so that public transit works better.

this isn't a traffic problem, it is a zoning issue. Most cities suffer the same problem, affordable housing at any level is almost impossible to build for many reasons. From the land use regulations prohibiting tall buildings, from "concerned groups" looking for their slice of the pie or exercise of their political connections to city leadership, to environmental concerns which most are copies of the previous issue, to labor use issues restricting who can even do the work.

If more people could afford to live in town it would alleviate a lot of in town traffic. So until we can take city planning, at least the veto and coercion part, away from local politicians, not much is going to be done. I am not saying cities should have no say, what I am saying is that independent boards should be established to stop political graft which is the biggest inhibitor.

Trouble is that rich people don’t want to share cars with homeless people. If they did, they would actually have to spend money on fixing homeless issue.

Good thing that most people are not rich.

> I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists.

1. People don't obey speed limits

2. In the US at least, there are people who aren't very wealthy living outside of cities.

They may commute 20+ miles into the office. Their retirement may depend on their house retaining its value.

Drastically reducing throughput of streets is nice for people who are only traveling a mile or two, but it hurts long-distance commuters.

There's the same situation in Europe too.

One option is to build large car parks on the outskirts of cities close to the highways and with good access to public transport.

This way people living outside the city center can still use their cars to get to the city, but can bike/escooter/walk or take the subway/bus/tram to get to work.

Even in Marseille, a city with terrible public transport, there are some of these, with new ones in construction or planning stages.

Parking is free or heavily discounted if you have a transit pass.

I believe this could work well in major US cities with a dense downtown area.

At least in the bay area this does exist. Many caltrain/bart stops have big park&ride parking places next to them.

This should be a several-story parking structure to minimize footprint.

The area next to rail/metro stations is the most valuable place to put higher-density housing. Surrounding the stations with giant surface parking lots is a horrendous waste of space.

Several places, like Daly City, it is.

People don't perfectly obey speed limits, but lowering speed limits does lower average traffic speeds. When limits were reduced from 30 mph to 20 mph in much of Cambridge (the original one), local news reported that average traffic speed in those areas reduced from 35 mph to 25 mph.

Also in Cambridge, there’s a thing called “park and ride”. I have no idea how common park and ride in the USA, but Wikipedia says it exists. Summary of the idea [1]: out-of-town car park with a good public transport link to where commuters need to go.

Unfortunately, people whose retirement depends on their house retaining its value are probably screwed regardless — what happens when self driving, self-charging, solar covered RVs/mobile TinyHomes/seasteads can be mass produced (including interiors) by the sort of robots currently used for cars? Material costs for those should only come to about $35k, most of which is the battery, which doesn’t need to be as large as the one in a commuter vehicle like a Tesla.

[1] implementations vary in quality.

Well, at least here in Switzerland (where you would expect things to be done perfectly), Park & Ride are often half-assed effort that doesn't work that well.

Yes there is some obscure remote car parking. It takes 6-12 months to get through the queue of getting a spot (or more, depends). While waiting you have no idea how long till you get a place. They are almost as expensive as renting a private parking spot in the center. Then there is public transport - there is some, but far from ideal, and very far from motivating commuters to use this system, since it adds so much overhead that they prefer driving straight to the center of the town, even in densest traffic hours.

The message from city government cannot be more clear - we ticked a checkbox, but in reality we couldn't care less. City I am most familiar with this issue - Geneva.

1. And this should be what? An argument to against speed limits in general? 2. You read that this was a case for speed limit IN cities? No one said you should drive 20km/h on highways or country roads.

Just park your car at a P&R just outside the city and use a scooter / public transportation for the last mile.

The goal is to reduce instantaneous speed, not throughput (or even necessarily total travel time).

Because people don’t obey speed limits, the roads must be physically redesigned. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

Urban streets should be limited to 15–20 miles/hour. Any faster and cars are grossly unsafe for everyone else on the road.

On my street the average speed is something like 40 mph (despite a speed limit of 25 mph), and some cars drive 55 mph. At that speed cars can’t react in time to avoid obstacles in the road, and if a pedestrian (e.g. young kid) or cyclist gets hit by a car, they are almost certain to die. And yet this is perceived by Americans as perfectly normal and acceptable.

1. Is quite true, but you can improve compliance by designing streets in ways that encourages low speeds.

2. Can be solved with park & ride. Just make sure that the park & ride is significantly cheaper than driving/parking in the city.

If we believe we can have driverless cars in 10 years, I don't understand why we can't have smart speed limiters as a first step now.