Bee-friendly urban wildflower meadows prove a hit with German city dwellers

The noise was terrible. It wasn't even that the road was particularly constantly busy, but because it was the "main" road there was always vehicles. And motorbikes. Motorbikes were the worst, by far. Being woken suddenly every hour by someone on a motorbike revving their engine wears down on you night by night.

Now, I'm on the top (5) floor, on a much quieter side road, and the different is astounding. I can actually sleep with the window open in hot weather.

Less private vehicles with one occupant taking up space means there is more bandwidth for busses and trams etc that can transport many people (and which have ramps for pushchairs, wheelchairs, etc).

I can run across three lanes of traffic in the 40 nanoseconds of pedestrian green I'm given, or stamp on the pedals when cycling so I can make a turn in 25 mph traffic. My dad can't - so the majority of the town, for him, doesn't exist.

Those groups are exactly the people most screwed over by car-friendly design, and using them as a reason to push it more is rather poor taste.

So my comments are not motivated by some kind of hidden agenda, I am just thinking about someone who has apparently fallen through the cracks of the desire that some people have to make cities less accessible for cars.

It's a consideration I voice when I get the opportunity, and hopefully it will be factored into whatever planning happens. Not all elderly people like using mobility scooters, can afford them, want to spend extra time getting public transport etc etc.

The point is already moot.

Also if you can use a car, you could use a mobility scooter or electric wheelchair, and you will greatly benefit from denser, more developed pedestrian areas featuring amenities such as elevators.

One of motivations was that seeding wild flowers gives reason to cut grass less often, allowing to save money and noise. Maybe the same applies in USA and cost cutting could be used as an argument?

Other motivations were biodiversity and that it is less ugly (though not everyone is fan of them).

From city official website: https://www.krakow.pl/aktualnosci/237069,1926,komunikat,zdec... https://zzm.krakow.pl/dzialania-antysmogowe/393-sianie-lak-k... https://www.krakow.pl/aktualnosci/247208,29,komunikat,nowe_l...

Many cities plant lots of male dioecious trees (ie some individuals of the species only have staminate (“male”) flowers and others individuals only have pistillate (“female”) flowers, the city plants only the trees that produce staminate flowers) which produce twice as much pollen as they would if trees were selected more randomly. This is because they drop less litter. But it is bad for people with allergies. I don’t think any such people have had success suing their cities for this practice.

This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides.

We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here.

I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns.

(I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)

However, you may find it interesting to explore the rest of the world via Google Street View: I grew up in the South Downs of the UK, did my degree in Aberystwyth, spent several years in Cambridge and roughly one each in Plymouth and Sheffield, and now live in Berlin. These all have a lot of greenery within and on their doorsteps, the worst among them (Sheffield and Plymouth) being roughly similar to my memories of Manhattan.

Street View images of Spain, Greece, and Cyprus remind me a lot of rural California (when actually visiting, Spain and Greece felt accurate, Cyprus felt like the UK). Most of England, Wales, and North-West France reminds me of New England. The only places I’ve been to that were as bleak as Nevada/Salt Lake were literally beaches, and even there the bleakness didn’t stretch to the horizon.

Rhine Valley has some colossal eyesores, but even then you get to fantastic countryside in a fairly short cycle ride. Everywhere in Switzerland, even the cities, is basically a paradise on par with Yosemite, with the occasional mistake present (e.g. Zürich motorway); and, with the caveat that I was 9 and this was multiple decades ago now, I have lots of green memories from when I visited Singapore, Bangkok, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Cairns.

(Nairobi had a lot of green in a lot of places, but I really did not feel like I grokked any of the cities’ underlying patterns in the week I was there, so I can’t say if greenery implied rich places or poor places).