This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall.
Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on that island was saved.
Make car life in cities miserable.
Otherwise, what you're describing sounds like someone looked at this well-circulated cartoon and said "hey that's a great idea! Just raise the planks by 15 feet!" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...
Would you say they encourage a vibrant street culture of cafes and shops?
The ones I've seen, especially in Berlin and İzmir, are loud and a hassle to cross. That's because walkways and bikeways over multi-lane roads are car infrastructure. They are there to prioritize high-speed automobile traffic with few interruptions. I'm happy for the one going up at my gym, but I know it's there to ensure bike/ped political forces can't endanger the trunk road underneath. True pedestrian infrastructure there would involve a major speed and size downgrade to the road, which is unacceptable, thus the political defensive move to pay out the nose for something car advocates would never normally fund.
Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.
Make life in cities miserable, is more accurate. The reason is that transit is worse than cars always. If you make travel in cars worse, then all you did is make life worse for everyone.
And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
As long as 'always' is restricted to a certain lifestyle and worldview, and doesn't take into account the excellent transit systems that exist around the world.
> And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
That's incredibly naive, and I think a lot of European cities are direct counter examples to this. It often makes things a lot less miserable for the people who actually live in the denser urban areas that were previously overrun with cars.
Highly efficient uses of space, like dedicated bus lanes, directly transfer road space from cars to improve transit. This necessarily makes driving "worse" in the short term, until enough marginal drivers shift to the now-improved busses, leaving the car lanes quicker and less congested.
In most cities, cars are physically obstructing better transit, which makes traffic worse for everyone involved.
All of this will make driving less pleasant and convenient, the cost of making walking safer and easier. As it is driving is "artificially" easy, the consequence of decades of it being prioritized very highly. It needs to come down somewhat.
I've never seen an urban center where "free and cheap parking is widely available", or one with a speed limit above 25.
Another factor is that urban speed limits vary widely in how much they are actually limits. Research is clear on the fact that road design has at least as strong an influence on driver behavior as posted limits do. Without rigorous enforcement & given the wide streets common in these places, driver behavior tends towards interpreting the limit as the minimum speed they are entitled to, rather than the maximum to be attained only when safe.
And finally neither I nor anyone else here know what you've seen so that's a very silly limit to place on the conversation.
But that’s exactly what it means. It’s not available to people. Someone else already parked there.
Have you tried to park on the street in NYC?
Parking is most certainly not widely available. If spots exist but all of them are always taken, that means zero availability.
If you go to a restaurant with 100 tables, all of them full and a 2 hour waiting list, would you tell a friend on the phone "Yes they have lots of tables available"?
>Improvement to public transport is the only win-win policy measure in the diagram. As a matter of fact, all policies that reduce the need for an automobile to access jobs and services by improving the effectiveness of other modes are generally seen as contributing to alleviating social exclusion, insofar as they improve the situation of households without a car (Shaw and Farrington, 2003, p.109). They should have a positive impact on environmental sustainability as well, insofar as they encourage a modal shift from the private car to less polluting means of transport. However, transport researchers generally agree that “pull” measures that encourage voluntary reductions of car use – or “carrots” – are unlikely to effectively bring about change at an adequate scale and speed (Huby and Burkitt, 2000, p.390); therefore it is generally pointed out that there is a need for complementary “push” measures, which aim to reduce car use in a more direct and coercive manner (“sticks”).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giulio-Mattioli-2/publi...
Or see this thread: See https://twitter.com/giulio_mattioli/status/16250810050893660...
Making driving worse is good, actually.
Or...it requires that governments stop prioritising car-based travel over all others, i.e. they should provide carrots for all forms of transport in equal measure, according to the long-term costs of providing it. I live in a area with far better cycling/walking/PT infrastructure than probably most suburbs in my country, yet I'm still regularly struck by the degree to which infrastructure dedicated to moving people around in private automobiles takes up far more space and taxpayer budget than all the others combined.
Why not?
Why not?