Pontevedra, Spain’s Happy Little Carless City
reasonstobecheerful.world
reasonstobecheerful.world
Car based transportation is still needed for:
1. Shipping of goods/deliveries, etc....
2. Shipping of people (think elderly, sick, disabled, ambulances, taxis, etc..)
Best way to do this with blocks/chunks of the cities being pedestrian only, and roads with loading/unloading areas that come close enough.... but no parking, or maybe parking centralized underground in one place, with one clear entry exit (so people don't circle around to find parking).
Best solution I have seen is in Barcelona, where you have blocks cordoned off, and pedestrian only use, and still have streets that get close enough to these blocks... so you can do your deliveries as well....
Karlsruhe and Ulm in Germany do achieve this as well . (major areas are pedestrian only, allow cars to come close for loading/unloading, limited on-street parking, and parking in the center only allowed in some major underground place).
Most people can reach the center, if they really have to, but it discourages daily use of the car as it would be too expensive to park.
I agree with your sentiment wholly.
I'll be sure to check it out.
If somebody comes up with electric cars that are small and standardized, small enough to carry you and your groceries, and not to be a victim of the elements (rain, heat, cold), then you can call me a believer.
I don't know if the personal automobile is one of the best inventions...it's built on the back of climate change and has led to less efficient infrastructure and less efficient society in the name of slight convenience. If carbon was priced properly based on its negative externalities, cars would be a LOT less attractive.
However, if you have ever had a no commute life- whether it be full remote, or a walkable commute- I think you may just happen to flip your tune. It is a simple delight. If we could build a world around this I think we could be doing something really meaningful and beneficial for society as a whole.
Think grocery stores, doctors, etc all within walking or public transport distance. Imagine if you only needed your car to go visit friends that were far away or to go visit some place that's hard to get to.
I have experienced the full spectrum. I've had a super commute from Olympia to Seattle. I've biked to the train station and ridden with my buddies down to Kent. I've walked 8 minutes to the library where I was an intern. I currently work from home. Cars are a burden on society- one I accept because I occasionally like to take the dogs to the beach or go hiking, but believe me, life is better the less car you can involve in it.
I also happen to enjoy having a cheap old truck as a hobbiest activity. Still, I only drive it on occasion and I love every minute of it. But it is amazing to not depend on it.
My favorite is my current life... easy parking right in my driveway, short drives to stores with ample parking, short drive commute to work with ample parking.
Walking is great, but lugging groceries sucks, even if the store is close. It sucked when I lived in an apartment where I parked in a parking lot and had to walk my groceries from the car up to the elevator to my apartment.
A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking.
It's most that for those who choose a fully urban life, when do we start to deemphasize these vestiges of auto centric culture that sort of took over before cities understood what they were doing.
Are we talking 3-5 min walk close? Just want to establish whether you actually lived in the kind of place people are talking about here.
A 5 min walk with groceries shouldn't be burdensome. A 25 min walk would be.
This seems related to the general decline in fitness of the American population, assuming OP is American. Grip strength has declined massively since the 1980s.
A short walk with bags shouldn't be hard or even unpleasant for the typical adult.
It was a lot easier when it was just for me. I now get enough groceries per trip that there is no way I could carry them all home by myself.
And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.
You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.
Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.
You could also say that the solution is to get the government to stop micromanaging what people do on their own property thereby freeing people from the need to build parking when it is not economical to do so thereby creating the political will for good public transit.
Also the decentralize idea is not too far off. I think the DC metro area, Pennsylvania and the New York suburbia are great in that sense. You take your car to the commuter train station and off you go into the city. It is the best tradeoff without having to do something radical.
So now the question is: on what criteria would you deserve this privilege more than others?
Cars have obvious downsides, urban sprawl and the resulting commutes are obviously out of control and the extremes of car centric city planning are obviously bad for society. That being said, the opposite extreme of striving to completely eliminate the greatest mobility tool ever invented strikes me as just as insane and depressing. City planning should work towards sensible compromise and incremental improvement, not wildly oscillate between opposite extremes every few decades as every generation of planners gets stuck on a new fad.
Sure you can live like that, just like you can survive without electricy, but I honestly do not ever want to do that anymore.
I have an asthmatic child and I live in a big city, so yeah, on my list, somewhat curtailing your right to pollute around goes after my right to not have to bring him to ER with a crisis at 3 in the morning. That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
[1] Related: Molecules of Freedom https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/29/energy-depa...
"Moving it around" here generally means moving it to electricity generation sites - ie places where people don't live. That's a huge benefit already.
And moreover it's much easier to de-pollute electricity generation infrastructure than to de-pollute fossil fuel cars.
I'm no kind of electric car fan. I'd much rather see cars die off wholesale, leaving only well-invested public transport and personal transport for the less able. I don't own a car of any sort and plan never to live more than s 15 minute walk from my place of work. But electric cars are still a huge positive step for urban environments.
So electric cars still have a lot of particulate emissions, thought less so in environments where they have lots of opportunity for regenerative braking.
Study highlights:
A positive relationship exists between vehicle weight and non-exhaust emissions.
Electric vehicles are 24% heavier than their conventional counterparts.
Electric vehicle PM emissions are comparable to those of conventional vehicles.
Non-exhaust sources account for 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 from traffic.
Future policy should focus on reducing vehicle weight
Part of this is that we already spent a lot of deliberate effort on reducing emissions from engines. As the study notes:
> Before the introduction of air quality standards, exhaust emissions used to be a major source of PM, especially for diesel cars (Miguel et al., 1998). Since then, PM emission standards for vehicle exhausts have become increasingly strict and now all new diesel passenger cars are fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF). Bergmann et al. (2009) found that DPFs are very effective at reducing PM emissions, lowering the emitted mass of PM by 99.3%
So go early/late. I used to exclusively ride the train and subway before I moved out of the city and I assure you rush hour congestion is not limited to cars.
>I can do most of my groceries by going downstairs and walking. I can get to the city center in 40 minutes using public transportation. During that time I can look up stuff on my phone without endangering anyone's life, I don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and I don't have to worry about a bunch of expenses that a car brings. I think your car (and car-centric urban development) is making you less free than me.
Good for you. Observation indicates that that there are no shortage of people who find cars worth the trade-offs. The better public transit is the fewer a proportion of the population they will be but as long as we have roads we'll have cars. Subways and trams didn't eliminate carriages and I don't see why things would be different today.
>That is a problem electric cars won't fix, by the way, they'll just move it around.
The solution to pollution is dilution!
Electric cars would be a massive improvement.
Inside city bounds, small trucks could be replaced by horse-drawn carriages; they'd be clean (clean_er- horses still er, produce waste) and large trucks should never be allowed in the same areas as pedestrians and bicyclists anyway.
I'm not saying that the current pace of life in very big cities could be maintained in this way, but just the reduction in emissions would probably make up for any short-term financial loss.
Just because you figured it all out don't expect others to listen to you lecture them.
A small step, easily digestible, that turns out to be useful, is much more useful than long rants: a) the actual goal is one step closer, b) people will start to really think about what you say once you delivered, c) you might learn you are wrong
So is basically like the planet Kamino (de Santiago) but with really memorable food. I love it :-)
Here is the official unofficial anthem that explains everything about this crazy people:
Galicia is a great region, you feel like you're living both in the past and in the present at once, without discordance.
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There are also quite a few golf course / country club / equestrian / etc. communities where there's some other mode of transportation (e.g. golf carts or horses) that's common enough to make car access less necessary.
That's no joke. Venice has canals and all the vehicle traffic is restricted to the canals, but, well, that's exactly it. Vehicle traffic and pedestrian traffic never have to cross each other's path, in fact they physically can't [1]. There are large areas, especially in the interior of the main island, that are naturally only for pedestrians, areas where only small canals reach that are not accessible by motorboat, areas where you don't hear a vehicle for hours on end.
And just to answer the concerns of people who wonder how commerce would continue if delivery trucks are not allowed to enter a pedestrianised city- Venice is a huge commercial zone where everyone sells everything to everyone else. Free trade doesn't need cars, people.
________________
[1] Unless a pedestrian falls into a canal; or someone like Ottobre Nero, an infamous gondoliero, manages to get their vessel on land which is not impossible with a bit of motivation.
Pontevedra is great, and I really like how the city center feels, it got super friendly to walk by foot. But every time I see news like this I get a little angry because they don't talk about the real experience of commuting to the city or its crazy development.
Regarding development: The city has very few parks inside it compared to other Spanish cities. Mainly because they don't save spaces for them, the ones that exist have 30+ years. Building development is crazy, you can build virtually everywhere. You can see new buildings leaving very narrow alleys (example in [1]), tons of new buildings with no single "green zone" nearby (example in [2] where the only planned "park" is the little one by the roundabout)
Regarding commuting: Doing so from the multiple towns around is not easy and got way worse. . Many kids go to study to Pontevedra from 20+ km around. The road from my parent's house from my mothers job has 40 road bumpers in total. She does 4 trips a day counting 160 bumps a day. It gets old quick. The "deterrent parkings" are poorly located to avoid crossing the city and the main one we can use looks like a swamp when it rains, as you can see here: https://goo.gl/maps/N7E7jjzzC2VbAjmaA
I just want to put our two cents on a different side on the story, I wish they implemented some more policies for outsiders that work / use city services. I hope more people get the whole picture from this.
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/LTDxgPevfgTyidybA [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4267082,-8.634709,761a,35y,2...
Likely a much, much lower population density than any of these current urban experiments, but I still think of it every time I see the "no cars" thing being done.
Sept 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/mackinac-pence-motorca...
I mean, a car comes with a trunk, where you can put your shopping in. Having to walk 1300m or 15' worth of shopping can't be good for the local businesses.
Found bikers basically spend as much as drivers... they spend less per trip but make more trips.
Having to carry stuff a bit is not a huge problem, that's what personal shopping trolleys are for.
The answer is you shop differently, and the shops are set up differently. I remember one residential area in a Spanish city where there were huge numbers of small fruit and vegetables shops, almost kiosks, which popped up during the morning, there was one just round the corner from where I was staying, and probably 5 within a 5 minute walk. You can literally just go downstairs and pick something up, so that’s probably a third or a half of the shopping weight on your doorstep. Then there were small supermarkets dotted around, and you’d just pick things up on the way back from the bus stop. The whole concept of a huge fortnightly shop is based on a car culture.
Complains that I remember.
- People from outside the city has problems to move apparently. They say that there aren't parkings enough in the city borders, so they have to go for one that's roughly in the center, through very slow traffic lines. That induces them to go less frequently.
- Businesses like bars, chocolate shops and so on flourished (leisure oriented), but others like hardware stores, furniture stores, two law firms, and a Cinema closed.
Imagine that you were going to the hardware store. It's either impossible to park near it https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4264585,-8.6406022,3a,41.3y,1... or difficult/forbidden/very slow traffic https://www.google.es/maps/@42.4304871,-8.6417988,3a,42.3y,1...
It is such an interesting topic, and there's so much assumptions that we always take for granted that prevent us from having a smart conversation about it. And then, of course, there's regulation, which essentially kills any idea almost instantly.
An example? In the US you need to have a rear mirror in a car. A driverless car doesn't need one... But without the mirror, it can't pass the test to make it compliant and allow it to be on the road.
They got away with transient traffic and are now generating their traffic in adjacent communities. Smart.
Who is "we"?
> They have long ceased to be "news" or interesting.
To you, apparently.
> The only real variation here is that it isn't citylab.
Indeed. That's why I filter out citylab references on HN in my feed.
They show a b/w picture from the 1970's to demonstrate the "before" situation with passthrough traffic (https://reasonstobecheerful.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/10...). If you look at maps, you will see that since then the AP-9 highway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopista_AP-9) has been built around the city. So that situation was clearly resolved otherwise. It has nothing to do with the current Mayor's expensive actions to make the city more easily overrun by tourists.