Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
However, there's one caveat here:
> Officials said they were working with boroughs to implement similar restrictions on the minor roads they manage within the area
Some boroughs (e.g. The City) have historically been very interested in pedestrianising, but others (e.g. Westminster) have fought tooth and nail to ensure that roads are cars-first.
I would expect them to put up a fight here, too, so this is probably far from settled.
Mmm...in theory this sounds good. I wonder if the people that could/cycle aren't already doing it. I have a number of colleagues who live in London. However they're just too far away from the office to be able to cycle let alone walk there. London's a big place. A lot of people use trains and buses to get from the periphery to the centre. I'm not sure cycling or walking is an option for them.
I would prefer to cycle, but don't currently. My commute (when there isn't a pandemic on, that is) goes from Vauxhall to King's Cross, which is straight through Westminster - not a great borough to cycle through.
Cycling this route is probably manageable, but it requires a lot more vigilance than I'd like to have to apply during my commute.
If this leads to a reduction in traffic I'll absolutely be cycling going forward, and I've heard the same from various colleagues.
Edit: Of course, there's also a Jay Foreman video on why Londoners don't cycle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gohSeOYheXg
Vauxhall to Kings Cross is fine, there’s a segregated route pretty much the whole way, crossing Blackfriars bridge. The new elephant and castle roundabout is segregated too, and easy to navigate. Traffic levels won’t make all that much of a difference.
The roads are nicer anyway since the 20mph limit came in.
I accept the tube is quicker as the Victoria line is very good, but the returns from cycling make it worthwhile.
There's some bits at the start and end that are annoying to deal with, and it's slightly longer, but as a result of this it's quite likely I'll start going this way when things normalise (though I'm not expecting that to be this year).
For me, the key is to continuously try different routes. Sometimes the busier roads are safer and more pleasant to cycle. Personally once I’m on my bike the length of the route no longer matters - it’s getting on it on the first place that’s tough.
Nearly all of my journeys last year where on my bike, on a hire bike, or in a taxi. It’s wonderful leaving the tube behind.
It was an easy cycle as it’s flat yet when I did that route, there were only a handful of other cyclists. Yet the tube was packed.
There’s huge scope for getting more people onto bikes. There are still cultural challenges around cycling, which hopefully will be challenged by the lockdown.
I know plenty of people who are within cycling distance, but haven't chosen to cycle because they prefer other options for transport and fitness.
Cycling comes with certain inconveniences that it takes a certain enthusiasm to overcome. You have to own a bike you're happy to use. You have to be fit enough for the distance you need to go. You have to plan out and learn a route. You may have to be confident/experienced/macho enough to ride among traffic and navigate big multi-lane junctions. You have to be willing to shower and change at your destination, or not do so. You might need to buy lights or bags or even different clothes. You have to be willing to get wet in the rain. You may have to figure out how to store your bike at both ends.
I agree not everyone will be able to change to cycling, of course. Reading to Paddington can be done in 30 minutes by train, but takes 4 hours by bike - and some people have disabilities or other things that keep them from cycling. But I'm confident there are plenty of people who can rise to the challenge despite not having done so before.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that, in fact I wonder why you even raised it.
And if I'd chosen a non-ridiculous number for my example, someone would have 'corrected' me by telling me they cycle that far. I've met Londoners who have a 2 hour cycle commute, by choice because they love cycling.
> You may have to be confident/experienced/macho enough to ride among traffic and navigate big multi-lane junctions.
But not so much if they're closing large areas of the city to cars, right?
> You have to own a bike you're happy to use. [...] You have to plan out and learn a route. [...] You may have to figure out how to store your bike at both ends.
It occurs to me that this applies to cars too, and cars are an order of magnitude larger and more expensive. So it's mostly a cultural change.
> You have to be fit enough for the distance you need to go. [...] You have to be willing to shower and change at your destination, or not do so.
Would an electric bike help with this? Lower level of physical exertion = less sweating.
In the Netherlands, it's not uncommon to have a cheap bike at both ends of a rail commute.
Full size bikes are sometimes allowed. For commuter trains to/from London, full size bikes are only allowed during off-peak times. On other lines, it may be necessary to reserve before travel.
https://www.thetrainline.com/trains/great-britain/bikes-on-t... , https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/stations_destinations/cyclist...
But yeah, ultimately the pre-Corona model of London commuting, with basically the entire population of the city going into and out from the centre at the start and end of the day is not going to be feasible anymore, no matter what mix of cars, public transport, walking and cycling you have. But we should still try to achieve a mix than enables the best possible quality of life for everyone.
The experiment was a huge success. Commerce has never been busier. I don't think that the drivers miss the roads, and the biggest skeptics -- the shopowners! -- are the greatest benefactors now.
They're extending this concept to further areas now. Promote pedestrian, bike, and public transportation traffic, reduce or eliminate everything else. It's great.
I grew up in rural US.
I took a few trips to Europe and to date the smell of car / bus exhaust reminds me of European cities. It's not a pleasant smell but the memories are pleasant.
Weird that in the US I just never associated big cities that I visited here with it as much I did with my trips to Europe.
Europe is getting over its experiment with Diesel after the whole VW-gate thing, for years they were driving diesels that were polluting more than gas/petrol cars in the US were allowed to.
This has improved dramatically in recent years with truck/bus filtration systems, electrification, and car bans (or dirty car bans) in European city centers.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13651106/electric-car-no...
Sometimes I wonder if folks worried about 'those people from the suburbs' coming in would just result in cities being slightly more dense ... suburbs.
I can't wait for a train to be built near me.
It might depend on the city. I imagine that in a many large cities people go there to work or other reasons and don't necessarily live in the places most affected by traffic and pollution. I imagine that these commuters do care about the quality of the air but I suspect they care more about being able to go work or run their businesses.
What about the folks who've spent a small fortune to live in those "parasitic suburbs" LOL?
The cities and suburbs wouldn't exist in anything near their current form without each other. Neither would exist as they are if rural areas didn't provide the resources they do with the (tiny) amount of labor they do. Our entire modern world is interconnected like that. You can try and turn policy knobs in order to have a steep urban to rural transition with minimal suburbs in between but there's always going to be a transition, never a sharp cutoff.
You gotta cover that need as much as possible before you change the latter.
It’s going to be a challenge to come out of this crisis in car-centric American cities. Even a small mode-shift to private cars in somewhere like NYC will cause insane gridlock, air pollution, and quality of life issues. Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.
In the vast majority of American cities a large portion of workers drive to work during normal conditions. They already have the road capacity, parking, etc needed. The car-centric American cities are actually much better suited for this crisis than NYC is.
* Used congestion pricing as a tool to reduce pollution/returning traffic/mode-shift to cars
* Shut off large areas of their city to cars
* Rapidly built pedestrian/bike networks to accommodate for non-car movement
While NYC has:
* Indefinitely postponed congestion pricing
* Defunded bike safety and public transit improvement initiatives
* Not built any cohesive bike or pedestrian systems to encourage non-car transport
Of course in pre-COVID times, NYC severely lagged in both pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure/investment, and famously has some of the most expensive public-transit construction costs in the world.
re: car-centric cities, agreed that somewhere like Nashville is not going to have these kinds of problems. However, a large swath of Americans live in public transit or carpool-reliant cities (NYC/SF/Seattle/DC/Chicago/Southern California, many large southern cities). Mode-shift to private transit would increase traffic 10-20+% in most of these places, which I think we can all agree is not ideal for pollution, gridlock, parking needs, public health, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/riding-bikes-...
The city's failure to plan is resulting in many people buying cars — even though it is physically impossible for everyone in central neighborhoods to buy cars.
> Compare to NYC, which has no cohesive plan for people movement without public transit.
Yes, NYC is far too dense for cars, but how is this a contrast with London trying to reduce car use, and which is only a little bit less dense?
> Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.
Biking should be public transit, as storing bikes in houses and offices is a waste of spaces and bicycles. The city should have taken over from Motivate, at which point it would be political suicide not to expand to the rest of the city immediately.
In particular, let me rant on this a bit. The equitable way to expand is to cover everything within `x` feet of subway, along with the densest areas not covered by transit. What they've done instead is blatantly prioritize areas where out-of-towners move to. Note this is about social class not economic: starving artists moving east to Bushwick get their bikes before rich native New Yorkers in Forest Hills, or more native but closer to a transit hub Sunnyside.
ISTM the way to make distancing possible on public transport is not to keep people off transport, but to increase capacity. If the train runs every 30 seconds, you'll get quite a bit more breathing room than if it runs every five minutes.
[EDIT:] I should have noted, since I've never been to UK this is more of a general observation than a specific recommendation. Certainly most transit systems in USA have the physical capacity, if not the operating budget, to run much more often. Any bus system, however, could buy more buses, if social distancing on transit were a priority. Perhaps I am too suspicious but when I hear "don't ride the train" I translate that to "we're getting rid of the train". Probably not happening in London but you could see it anywhere in USA.
Now during Covid capacity was reduced but it's being ramped up again.
In London there is physically no way to physically distance people using public transport. The only way it'll be achieved is to get everyone who can walk or bike to work to do so. From my experience only a tiny fraction of the number of people who could bike to work did so.
Now the offices are too small to physically distance people anyway so there are issues there too.
Physical distance is also about more than just not breathing in other's air. It also makes it easier to avoid touching the same surfaces too much. Have a look the number of hands on the centre poll on a London underground train during rush hour.
Modern large cities are incompatible with cars.
The future is in hybrid, low impact remote work, and minimal city traffic. Mass transit and traffic jams belong to the industrial era, should have been abandoned long ago
This is why we need work from home. Banning cars and forcing public transport is not going to fix the problem!
Just because programmers can work from home, doesn't mean everyone can. Programmers should definitely continue to work from home as much as is tolerable