> My assumption that it's always been this way, was wrong.
On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
On the other side, it's interesting to note that beautiful walkable bikeable Amsterdam was a traffic and cars hellhole up until the 70s. Nothing has to be permanent.
You then can live in a bike friendly city.
It is an indication that walk-and-bike interests are making good progress, and I'm glad to see it.
There's no good reason to phrase the question like that instead of filter the answers after the fact. The only reason is to get people thinking in a certain direction.
Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.
Even Seattle and NYC had parts that were very walkable, especially compared to LA.
Highways exists. There are two options. First, they divide country into two parts you cant cross on foot without taking long hike. Or, you build tunnels and bridges.
And that wasn't even the student part.
Go to SoDo, or parts of South Seattle, or North Seattle, and it’s much worse, and that’s just “Seattle proper.”
I guess people are being anti-car extremists in this thread, but still. SoDo? Land of concerts and events and dispensaries?
Not to mention plenty of cyclist deaths from people who have to cross SoDo to get where they’re going.
Bell St. is a park (albeit paved for vehicles), and it finally received signage about local-only car access:
https://mcusercontent.com/b6749cc9930b55a313056721e/images/2...
That image is from the latest Belltown United newsletter - https://www.belltownunited.org/
I'm a proud Belltown Community Council supporter/participant.
(BTW, I am lumping in biking with "walkable". A better term is "active travel")
Slef driving would probably make the car problem worse.
But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.
In the US? Sure. Now imagine a place where there are hundreds, thousands of cities that walkable or better, and you don't have to be a gazillionaire to live in one.
Based on my recent visit to New York, the main traffic issue I saw was really bad light timing. This trains both pedestrians and drivers to ignore the traffic signals.
If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars is one of the worst developments that could occur.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....
2 - driving time is only half of the time you spend in a car. in Milan I could drive to work in 15-20 minutes, compared to 25-30 using the subway. good luck finding a parking spot though. they're either forbidden, very expensive or non existent. Not counting that many areas, like where my office is, are restricted traffic zones, getting a permit is really hard for non residents and fines are very high (very common in many medium to large cities in Italy). I gladly use the subway and read the news while commuting, so I don't even need to drive myself.
I'm really sorry for those that drive to work everyday, it must be hell, I don't understand how they can withstand it.
None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo?
The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.
For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence.
Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years.
However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable.
Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere.
A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.
And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.
Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this:
1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent.
2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there.
3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with.
It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work.
And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?
"The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today"
Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently.
The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.
The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.
There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...
Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.
Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.
And even within the city, there are less-walkable areas, although for the most part there is bus coverage and sidewalks everywhere.