Superblocks: Barcelona’s plan to take back streets from cars
vox.com
vox.com
Let's hope it works out, there are many people rallying against this initiative (Dey Turk Er Ckers!!1) I think it will prove to be for the best (of course this is my opinion).
The problem is that the way postwar cities were built in North America has meant that the overwhelming number of people still need a car to get to the pedestrianized areas, so over the years most of them have failed.
The neighborhood in which I live (Reston, VA) was originally supposed to have several walkable "town centers", but all but two of them were built as standard strip malls, and one of the two that was built to original plan was demolished for a strip mall in 1994.
By happy coincidence, I can walk to work. But, grocery shopping is still a car ride away. And even if I could walk, I'd have to cross giant asphalt wastelands filled with distracted drivers.
Meanwhile, UVillage has an extensive set of interior streets with pretend stop signs for pedestrian crossings that drivers often ignore. And the mall owners keep building parking garages, closing off sidewalks for a year of construction in the process.
I have high hopes for the rebuild of Northgate Mall, on Seattle's north end next to a light rail station. The owners of Northgate filed their 129-page development plan with the city and they spend quite a few pages on how pedestrians will access the property, where people can congregate and play and exist without cars, and how the two additional interior streets will have calming and slowing measures to put pedestrians first. If the owners of Northgate Mall's written plans come to fruition as written, I hope UVillage's business will drop so they'll be forced to adapt in the same way.
I think this type of thing would require a ton of compact living area nearby (apartments, etc) where people almost use the area as their "yard". The small town I mentioned is mostly suburbs where everyone has a small slice of backyard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...
Corbusier-inspired superblocks have meandering, parklike paths, both to play up the similarity to a park and discourage through pedestrian or cyclist traffic. This was supposed to increase safety by limiting the amount of unknown strangers passing through, but in many cases decreased it as the available "eyes on the street" dropped dramatically and in some cases totally disappeared. Stuyvesant Town has been spared mostly because of its location and upmarket residents, but the public housing projects have fared less well.
[1] I considered moving there, but much of it is actually not convenient to the subway or Citibike. And my prospective roommate wanted to be closer to the East Village. So, anecdotally, lack of transit and businesses is what makes the interior less desirable, not lack of car access.
Does anybody with familiarity with the area have a sense of how that test panned out? I can look up the basic results but wouldn't be familiar with how parties stood on the plan, and accordingly if people who backed it were successful or otherwise.
https://elpais.com/ccaa/2019/06/18/catalunya/1560843562_1155...
She'll have a worse position but probably they'll get to move some of the plans.
in general, I'd say the consensus is that he's an opportunist. he knows how to play politics, but he's an opportunist. we are aware of his image in france.
in my opinion, he only joined ciudadanos for convenience, so he could enter the game in a decent position, and now he will attempt a transition towards the socialist party (if they want him, and it's still way too early for this, we probably need to wait 4 years until he's free of his current responsibility in barcelona). this is highly speculative on my part, but it's the way I see it. enter the scene through ciudadanos, and then distance himself through his actions, not leaving ciudadanos himself, but rather being rejected by the party itself. first by criticising the idea of ciudadanos being part of an agreement in madrid to have the support of an extreme-right party (Vox) so the right-wing parties could have the city council, and later, just a few days ago, by giving Ada Colau the support to be named mayor in barcelona, in exchange for "nothing". he's good at navigating the waters, he has experience at that, but everyone knows he's just an opportunist. he's already in the middle of the first scandals regarding some businessmen paying him 20.000€ each month for his involvement in politics. anyway, there are bigger things at play in catalonia with the independence process and all that, so in general people doesn't even care much about him. he's lucky to have that.
For a few months he was a "hero" of sorts for the spanish right wing, since he was viscerally unionist (i.e., against catalan sovereignty), and this is a basic tenet of spanish right wing. Now that he has supported the current mayor of Barcelona to be re-elected, he has fallen out of favor (since the mayor is left wing and somewhat neutral on the independence question).
For left wingers and non-unionists, he's always been nuts.
Right-wing parties, such as C's, that she needs to pass on anything, are against superblocks. Her left-wing rivals on the indy side would probably be against it too just for the sake of leverage.
In the grid, it feels like there is no local road - just arteries (eg Barcelona's diagonals) and .. roads. You can try to downgrade a feeder into a local road using "traffic calming" measures; speed bumps, speed limits, one way systems - but the moment there's any congestion on the intended feeders, people will try to route around it and bring the congestion to the unintended feeders.
The whole "superblock" concept appears simply to reintroduce local roads into a system that was built without them - which isn't actually an issue typical of most European cities.