> Late last year, the government removed some 700 parking spaces from the city centre, replacing them with benches, bicycle docks and more pavement.
Great! The average parking space is 2*6 metres, so they've regained 8,400 sqm of public space!
For instance, the street I am on is one way and lined with these tin silver box things on either side. A fair bit of the traffic is playing the game of musical chairs, as it is driving round and round looking for a space to park.
If one side was made into a bike lane then that would be a huge bonus to cyclists who should be able to get into town rather than deflected out onto a horrid ring road.
When you count the cars and when you count the bikes being inconvenienced, you wonder how it would work if there was already a bike lane there, used by locals and people on commutes.
Would my neighbours be able to petition the council to close down the bike lane in order for them to park their SUV cars there? Nope, and they would not have the organisational ability to get together to petition the council to close down the bike lane.
As things stand the car owners have squatters rights. So there is no bike lane, just a continual stream of cyclists holding up traffic by riding slowly on the tarmac remaining between the walls of steel each side of the road. Or there are cyclists bombing down the pavement (sidewalk) to piss off pedestrians. All because some people have a god given right to park their SUVs.
So unless there is some revolution the only way to reclaim such space is with a council that sneakily reclaims the spaces. One way this could be done is to mandate more clear road by side junctions for 'safety reasons'. This would benefit motorists as they could see better around the corners. So nobody could object to that. Next, do the same around private drive-ways that join the road, put more double yellow lines down. Then, when there are only a few spots left to park in the council could push the big idea and get a decent cycle lane in so 'kids could safely cycle to school'.
Easy to reach that line by public transit.
Whatever comes out of these modern transformations might as well leave the city centers economically deserted, or at least less attractive to their current citizen.
While I never understood the urge to live in the cities, I do understand the call for more space and in particular less car traffic from those who do live there. But they also should understand that cities do come with downsides and there is no guarantee that you can have the cake and eat it.
The layout of many "cities" in the USA literally requires car transport. Residential is clustered with other residential, retail is clustered into strip malls with a vast stretches of asphalt (for parking), office parks are also clustered in low-density arrangements of flex-space (1-story buildings with a truck dock in the back). All of these places are separated not only by distances that can't be covered on foot, but also pedestrian-hostile highways and utter dismissal of public space.
And yes, schools are large and dotted across the landscape. So in addition to getting to work, by car, many families have to juggle transporting their kids to school in one direction, then go a completely different direction to get to work, repeat the process in the afternoon, and go in other directions for shopping, groceries, and other "third places".
All experience with cities that reduced or banned car traffic point in the other direction. Madrid for example reports a 9.5% increase in local business https://copenhagenize.eu/news-archive/2019/3/14/the-benefits...
If you’ve ever been to the Netherlands you’d also see that their city centers are far from deserted wastelands. Quite to the contrary, actually, at least the ones that I’ve been to.
> But they also should understand that cities do come with downsides and there is no guarantee that you can have the cake and eat it.
Living in the suburbs comes with downsides, too. There’s for example no inalienable right to drive your car in the city.
Plus you're completely ignoring public transport for some reason.
My urge to live in a city comes from the fact that I could get everything I need to live, by going out of my apatment for 30 minutes and walking to few nearby shops. No car needed. And I can get to various interesting entertainment venues by hopping on a bus for a 15 minutes.
First of all, public transport is not individual travel. Neither the times nor the locations nor the cost are under your control. Bicycles are individual travel, and that is why they are so relevant in modern cities, but they are neither weather-independent, nor barrier-free, nor do they provide the same utility as a car. Funnliy enough, they seem to evolve pretty much the same way cars did here in Europe by getting ever larger and more capable.
I would not be surprised if bicycles would be the next piece of individual travel that's becoming unfashionable. IMO the problem cities have with cars is not the pollution, it's the individuality that they cannot deal with. Everything individual tends to become problematic with a high enough population density. Today's 2sqm parking lot might be tomorrow's 0.5sqm bicycle stand or next week's 10sqm individual bathroom. If there shall ever be an acceptable degree of individual space consumption in a city, that city needs to define a limit on population density. Somehow I doubt that any city will ever do that, though.
Acceptable to who? You?
https://www.tripsavvy.com/where-to-rent-and-ride-a-bike-in-h...
Other contemporary* cities should still implement more bike-friendly infrastructure. There's other goals which can be furthered by more people biking. Climate change and public health come to mind.
*we can worry about the problems of hyper-density when it's actually here. For most of the big western cities this is probably at least a few decades out.
I think we should actively work against hyper dense cities. Or at least have the citizens decide about how dense they want their city to become (but then they'll have to live with the consequences). Right now we are facing dense cities and try to somehow adjust the policies after the fact. That seems not ideal.
New developments emerge and we adjust our laws to deal with the new situation in a way that society sees fit. IMHO voting on something like maximum population density policies is way too abstract of a concept for people to even have an opinion about. If it were the opposite one might think we as humans have some kind of plan going into the future... ;)
Then cars are not individual travel as well. The only thing you control is time of departure (not arrival). You don't control locations because you are limited by availability of parking space. You don't control the cost because it's just a function of distance, gas prices, your car efficiency and time of travel.
Car fits you definition only if you have a parking outside of your flat and right at your destinations and there's no congestion. Even then you would not control the cost and time independently. I think your definition of individual travel is unreasonably restrictive.
> Bicycles are individual travel, and that is why they are so relevant in modern cities, but they are neither weather-independent, nor barrier-free, nor do they provide the same utility as a car.
And car in congested city does not provide same utility as a bicycle or subway. Car is not the ultimate mode of transport, just one of many, one overused and abused.
> IMO the problem cities have with cars is not the pollution
You should appreciate pollution. Recent studies show that even at 'safe' levels it significantly diminishes human intellectual capacity. This affects for example results of important exams in your life and harms your career as result of that.
Usually money is way better at limiting than any attempts at enforcing hard limits. You just need to price things right. If market doesn't get the price correctly to include environmental costs then you can always tweak things with tax.