Berlin’s Popular Shopping Streets Will Go Car-Free

For other shopping, you can usually park in a relay parking (a parking close to public transportation) and you will be 5 to 15 minutes from the shops. And unless you brought a real shitons of things (which already means that going shop to shop is going to be annoying anyway) it's not going to be an issue. I lived 8 years in my city without a car. I was very rarely a problem.

The only thing is for people with disability. I can understand that for them, a car can still be practical.

I'm not saying everyone who uses them needs to use them, but if you ban them outright you ban certain people outright, which is discrimination in the absence of alternatives.

Some people have 2-3 bags. Good luck rolling them around on cobblestone streets during a rain storm

Wouldn't that just lead to everybody becoming Uber drivers that just happen to never quite getting around to picking up passengers?

Same with delivery trucks. "No officer I'm not driving to work, I'm a one man delivery company delivering this briefcase to my office in my car".

I'm in no way a fan of the medallion system, but if your goal is to put a hard limit on the number of cars in a city then you're going to need some way to enforce that limit.

One idea might be to rework the "medallion" system so that they're sold at auction at the start of each year, and are only valid for 1 year. Then let both taxi companies and Uber/Lyft/etc. drivers bid against each for medallions once a year in an open market.

Likewise for commuting, the U-Bahn and the ironically underground S-Bahn is more reliable in that area than the surface traffic (including busses) because there’s too much surface traffic and therefore jams.

Anyway, this is a (tiny) start but it won't do much else than move the congestion a few blocks. I'd be in favor of much more aggressive measures. Simply making parking a lot more expensive will help discourage people using their cars inside the city. Some people actually commute by car inside the downtown area. This is not a thing in most normal cities these days.

The other larger cities and conglomerations in Germany don't compare favourably, with Rhine-Ruhr (which stretches roughly from Cologne to Dortmund) being particularly bad.

In Europe Berlin's public transport system probably is only rivalled by those in London, Paris and Amsterdam.

Living in a north american city, it was insane how much faster I could get to places compared to drivers in a 10 min window.

That's 4 hours by train or 6 hours by car. The train costs 160 Euros without any reductions. I wonder what you paid for the car rental and fuel costs etc. A random calculator I consulted estimated about 60 Euros for fuel alone.

(Much of this is moot, of course, if you did other stuff than just do a single-person straight Munich-Berlin trip.)

- it was cheaper - I didn’t have to deal with any car related stuff anymore (insurance, maintainance, remembering where I parked, ..) - The cars are usually just close by to where I lived and needed to go, no long roundtrips to get to the car or from the car somewhere else

Whether this works depends on the amount of usage – but should your usage decrease, it could be a viable alternative.

Reminds me of :https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CharmingShamelessFrogmouth-mobile....

So they don't live there, they can't be going somewhere in St James as there's nowhere you can park, and they're not driving for pleasure. So what on earth are they doing? Did they somehow pick a route that includes driving through one of the most congested places in the country? Why would you try to do that?

Check Google Maps for some representative distances (i. e. picl some apparment building, then map the route to the next supermarket, doctor's office, etc).

You will have a store within 500m for the vast majority of residential buildings, and often within 200m. The closest bus stop should also rarely be farther away than about 150m.

Wheelchairs and electric scooters are used almost exclusively by paraplegics, not by, say, elderly people with arthritis. Having far lower obesity rates compared to the US helps.

My impression is that car ownership is exceedingly rare among the elderly, below the already low 30% of households owning cars.

But these pedestrian areas don't make too much of a difference: they tend to be just single streets, so you can always park on the parallel streets and walk just one block.

How's that going to help anything? American politicians are just doing what they were elected for by the American people, and the American people love cars and hate public transit. Enlightening some politicians will either have them doing nothing different because they want to appease their constituents, or doing something different and losing their re-election bid. The problem isn't the politicians, it's the voters.