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Comment by systemtest | Hacker News Reader

I live in a 750 year old European city. The medieval center is 1 kilometer in diameter. They wanted to make the center accessible only for cars of residents and suppliers of stores (up to 11am for suppliers). There are four underground parking garages directly surrounding the center and the walking distance from a garage to any location is never more than 450 meter. Free wheelchairs are provided from the garages. This change would make the center much more liveable for residents, guests and visitors.

I have never seen a collective group of people lose their shit during the town hall meeting that much. It was like the end of the world. Apparently during the 750 years history it has become mandatory to have visitors parking right on the monumental cobblestones. Walking 450 meter, even with the free provided wheelchairs, became impossible. I wonder how people survived back in 1438 without the ability to park their car right in front of the shops.

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In 1438 there was no supermarkets with huge parking lots that will lure away all your customers. It's not just that people will have to walk to you (so competition located closer will win), they will also have to carry the stuff they buy back to the car, so they'll probably not be willing to buy a lot, or anything heavier. If you're selling souvenirs or t-shirts it's not a big deal, but for people selling say wines or craft beer or olive oil, you probably want people to be able to buy a few bottles, so distance is a problem.

From what I've heard shops tend to benefit when cars are banned, because more people spend more time in the area.

Why would you drive into the medieval centre of a city to do a large supermarket shop if you can drive to an out-of-town one already?

Studies show that - particularly in Europe - most people are already walking to these shops everywhere. The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often - they either rely on deliveries (cheap and efficient due to density) or smaller shops throughout the week (which often means less perishables waste.)

I thought the point was to allow people to drive less? Driving to a suburb and back to get to your local mega mart doesn't seem to fit that goal; rather, it seems to push it off to somewhere else.

> The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often

Something I wish the holier than though types thought of when they banned plastic bags here. No I can't just keep my reusable bags in the back of my SUV so I have them when I go shopping.

Where have plastic bags been banned? Everywhere I've seen these policies in place, there has just been a mandatory charge added for receiving a bag. This seems reasonable enough to me even without waste or environmental considerations.

Well not banned, but they added a 15c charge for thicker ones, so now I spend more and waste more plastic than I was previously. The thicker bigger ones and the smaller thinner ones that used to be free got reused as garbage bags nearly 1 to 1.

Do you not usually carry a rucksack or shoulder bag? If you're having to use a new plastic bag every time it seems like it might benefit you to get one - they're much more comfortable to use too.

People in European city centers shop differently. They more likely don’t even have cars, the stores are smaller, they shop daily or bi-daily rather than weekly like suburbanites do. They aren’t carrying a few bottles of wine and olive oil, they have one bag, and everything is pretty fresh.

You can have the same lifestyle almost in the states, just live in a downtown area. Watch out for all the cars though, and wading through huge parking lots can still be a problem (I currently live in downtown Bellevue WA, which is only halfway pedestrian friendly, especially compared to Lausanne CH where I lived as a post doc).

Well, it's still not like in States, but mega-markets are taking over in Europe too, at least in my corner. Cities are pedestrian friendly, but pedestrian-only zones are rare. If you can't get to the restaurant/shop by car and it's not really close to you, it's quite likely that you'll go somewhere else. People get the wrong idea because in summer when they visit it looks different, partially because of the nicer weather, and partially because of all the traffic jams caused by tourists, so bikes become the main transportation to locals. Out of season 90% of the small shops is closed, and there'a lot more rain, so we just use cars to go to weekly shopping like everyone else.

Mega markets are limited to the suburbs from my experience living in Lausanne. Yes, people drive to get there, but if you live in a city core it’s not your concern.

Lausanne has nice cobble Stone pedestrian only zones, and it is considered more car friendly by European standards (there are lots of car commuters, and lots of people living in suburbs).

After in 1973 the first such hypermarket opened up in NL, laws were quickly enacted to prevent it from ever happening again. Precisely because it was feared cars would become necessities and city centres would be out-competed.

That single location remains to this day the only hypermarket in the Netherlands [1].

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weidewinkel

I don't understand why city centers would be outcompeted, and this sort of legislation seems rather heavy-handed not just from an American perspective. In the country I live in, the same grocery chains have mostly smaller (with some larger) stores in urban centers and mostly larger (but less frequent) stores outside these areas. I can get most common items at any of the stores near me, and if looking for a less common item I can go to a larger store in my city which will almost always have it. This means that I'm connected by public transit to both small and large stores, neither of which need cars or massive parking lots.

Well, it largely succeeded in preventing shops moving out from city centres in NL, and can be presumed to have encouraged bike usage over car usage, as inner city shops are more likely to be reachable by bike.

Most downtowns in the states do not have a grocery store anymore. If you only eat at restaurants (there are many fine ones around) you are fine, but forget about a home cooked meal unless you drive to the suburbs, at which point you may as well get a weeks worth of food just like everybody in the suburbs does.

Note that there are exceptions where there are stores. However before you point them out, remember that in a generalization there is specifics that are wrong. Even if there are stores, are there enough stores to cover each tiny neighborhood or do a lucky few get stores and the rest have to drive because the stores are not close enough to be useful.

Uhm, which downtowns? Seattle has a few grocery stores downtown, they even have a target. Downtown Bellevue has a Safeway, QFC, and an H-mart. LA, SF....have thriving downtowns with grocery stores. They aren’t huge, but they aren’t invisible either.

Even red-state St. Louis had a grocery store downtown, though it took a bit to find one near the hotel I was staying at.

IIRC, car ownership within the ring of Amsterdam is ~10%, because it is both expensive and unnecessary.

I will grant most people I know living in Amsterdam rarely get outdoors into the green, which is why I did own a car when living inside the ring.

There's more than one similar city which had plans to drastically changed what cars are allowed to do, and when, and the story is similar: people go insane, usually shouting out claims like 'city is going to die' and 'commerce will suffer greatly' and so on (which if I'm not mistaken they do not have any proof for, also not from previous cities where the same happend), and the effect then gets axaggerated on social media.

From what I've seen what follows next is usually the same: the plans are executed, as long as you don't insist on driving your car to the store front in the middle of a medieval city, you're happy because the city became more pleasant and after all there's a ton of parkings, studies one year after execution show less severe accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians, no measurable effect on commerce and less pollution. (again: this is only what I recall from having heard and read here and there, I did not research this in depth so reality might be different)

> I wonder how people survived back in 1438 without the ability to park their car right in front of the shops.

They parked their horse / carriage in front of the shops?

They didn't have carriages in 1438 except maybe for royals.

Carts/coaches were pretty common though.

1438 is pretty far back, before the Renaissance. I seriously doubt carts or coaches were "common", as in every commoner owning one. I'm sure they were around, for carrying goods, doing construction, etc., but this is more like how, today, we have dump trucks and utility vehicles, but the number of dump trucks per citizen is very small. It's just not like today's car-based societies (esp. the US) where every person expects to own a car and use it for getting around.

Wondering which city is this if you don't mind answering?

This isn't Nürnberg by any chance?

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