All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268
Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square.
Its a slow process but its getting there.
Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.
One street in a city the size of NY?
I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;)
On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.
NYC needs more, but I think the tide is turning the right way.
There is no restriction of through traffic. Effectively pedestrians are still confined to tiny and overcrowded sidewalks.
By comparison, here’s what a pedestrian street looks like in the non-US city I grew up in: https://sana.ae/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Corso-Italia-Stre...
Keep in mind that cars are still allowed for emergency services and (night time) deliveries. But the difference is night and day.
This is exactly what “the US can't imagine itself without cars” means to me.
If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.
I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.
As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!
And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.
And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.
This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).
When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.
Many metro systems in other big cities with comparable topological constraints have metro lines that are orthogonal to those going out in roughly a star pattern from the center.
But NYC almost only has the latter.
Underwater sections are not an issue, really. There are many cities that have metro lines going under bodies of water.
And even the length or depth required is not an issue if you want to build it.
That's why you can go from England to France, by train, in roughly half an hour, under the English Channel.
They just don't look like streets anymore, as they are turned into plazzas or parks.
EG: E25st at Lex, Baruch College is truned into a plazza/walkaway. No cars. 8th/st Saint Marks, by A Ave, is off cars, (It is part of the Tompkins park). Irvin Avenue is part of a park (gets interrupted by Grammercy Park)
etc...
There are plenty of places like that, but over time they turn into plazzas or parks, and you think they were not streets at some point.
Ps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Df6U3DkPpUxirG5B9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6
You can see throw time that it used to be a street at some point.
Anyways, there are plenty of examples like that. Just stop exaggerating.
A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are less likely to trigger the outrage congestion pricing has, because it doesn't target car owners directly and en masse. You can sort of pick away at it, street by street. There will be less of a show of solidarity, because, hey, it's not my street.
The only thing that seems silly is penalizing delivery trucks. This only raises the costs of goods and services. This is one reason I would favor narrower, one-way streets over pedestrian streets. You still want vehicles. The issue is that many if not most vehicles in NYC are a luxury item and do nothing but negatively impact the common good. They don't even make transportation easier for their owners, on the whole. Of course, this should be combined with other policies that improve public transportation and improve availability of good and services in the city to reduce the burdens that cars alleviate.
That being said, it takes me nearly an hour to take public transit between my home near Forest Hill and my office in the dogpatch whereas it takes 20-25 minutes to drive (plus an extra five minutes to park and walk from the parking lot to the office). This is not a long distance, on a map it looks like it should take me 10 minutes but San Francisco is so incredibly inefficient.
I would love to not own a car but it’s just not realistic. Also when going to Costco or when the weather is bad, public transit becomes a lot less of a fit as well. I got a bike, only to find out that you’re not allowed to bring bikes on the Muni train which is frustrating, and in the end means my commute isn’t any faster than not involving biking at all. I tried a scooter, and I got in an accident because apparently the brakes don’t work well in the rain, especially when there’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill, so I’m not doing that anymore. I guess they’re trying to make driving as bad as all of the other bad options. I wish instead we could make some good options.
Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.
There is probably no other city in the US where you can truly eschew car ownership (this includes metro "dense" regions like San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston). Maybe you could include Chicago where there is a heavy amount of density/walkability in most of central Chicago neighborhoods.
E.g. I. Berlin metro timing is about 5mins between trains and that is long compared to Tokyo metro timing.
But when it comes to density/how direct a public public transport connection exists between two arbitrary points in the city, Tokyo and Berlin are very close (and far ahead of NYC btw.).
What I'm saying is that the feasibility public will be seen as a real alternative or even improvement over using a car only if both topological as well as temporal improvements are blatantly obvious to commuters.
This used to be a regular street at some point https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6
There are plenty of other examples, just now they look more like plazas, and not streets.