Can a city really ban cars from its streets? (2014)
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Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime.
We live in such an auto centric society. I often think, why do we have the parking lot in shopping centers go all the way up to the front door (so you have to cross in the path of cars to enter the building)?
Why don't the aisles go directly up to a big sidewalk/walking area in front of the building and that's it? You could have turnarounds every few for picking people up and something dedicated for emergency vehicles, but it's crazy that you have to cross in front of cars to enter the building, when there's 0 reason for those cars to drive right in front of the building!
No lane in front means Fire Trucks cannot stop in front of the massive building.
I'd bet that front lanes are a building code / safety requirement.
Not actually true. Grids come in many different shapes and sizes. As one easy example: the block size. As a city planner, you can choose any block size you like, and this will adjust the ratio of real estate to transportation infrastructure accordingly.
Additionally, and this is fanciful futurism more than anything else: in a city that functions without ubiquitous private vehicle traffic, you can make the roads narrower, which also increases the real estate. To take an example from where I live:
http://sfdpw.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=3690
Potrero Avenue in SF is 100 feet wide. A hundred feet. If you naievely parceled this land out by drawing a line across the road every 5 feet, the each demarcated space would be worth $2k/mo rent. In a hypothetical future city without cars, you wouldn't need a road to be a hundred feet wide.
More reading re: grid plans
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/10/14/places-and-non... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan (specifically this image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Block_Sizes_and_Street_Len...)
In Summary:
- The city of Madrid buried a 6km section of their ring road
- In this buried section, a total of 46km of roads/tunnels have been constructed
- The above area is now a reclaimed riverbank and a huge park
- IMO, a superb public realm initiative, although I'm guessing not cheap
What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here.
> Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime.
We did. We made travel cheap and easy and it has benefited us massively.
Actually, people with lots of free time and access to drugs is the driver of all human progress and development.
To deliberately - or perhaps honestly - miss that point and suggest access to recreational drugs (the only kind we use the term "doing drugs") is necessary to point out.
I can see it as being taken either way though
And I wouldn't put advances in medical drugs particularly high on the list of advances either. It's not even the top of the list of medical advances. Though I don't classify vaccines as drugs.
If you're referring to ICE and automobiles, that "cheap" cost is bought by uncountable externalities that aren't on the balance sheet: many lives and wars to secure this cheap fuel, not to mention climate change.
Arguments to ban cars outright because of climate change and oil might've been relevant in the 20th century, but now they're pretty much moot, so long as electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity.
Even a not particularly car friendly city like Amsterdam would look dramatically different if you removed the parking space, because it would free up such an insane amount of space.
Cars have multiplied the amount of space dedicated to transport, without actually adding much to human progress and development, what with most of it being used to carry individuals short distances from A to B and back again.
I don't see the massive benefit here. It's a pointless habit we shaped a life/work culture around with a mostly negative impact on the quality of life.
Cities did not value green spaces at all.
I understand the desire for the "good old days", but those days never actually existed.
I am opposed to vehicles being the priority, but their prevalence is directly related to their usefulness within the economic regions they occur in. If you ever go to the developing world, you will see vehicles used to grow and maintain society. It is easy to forget, living in the suburbs as i do, that most of the world does not joy ride over-produced SUVs.
The ability to move freely is a magical thing. Living in a place with bad roads is a reality to itself that i think every westerner should experience. The problem is what we use to take advantage of the roads.
Roads are society's rivers.
I hope i live to see the day when city centers are car free, and all cars on the road are automated and distributed. Imagine leaving your domicile, hitting a widget on your device, and in a short time a vehicle approaches near silently, its bay door opening. you step in and you are off to work at a consistent 60kph. Each day, you see the same people on their commutes, so you naturally strike up conversations and friendships. With the steering column as well as ~90% of other standard car interaction gack gone, the interior is free to be redesigned to suit whatever purpose one may have. Vehicles could link up, breakfast could be enjoyed over whatever amount of data you choose to view on your way, and there would be no traffic that the passenger is accountable for. And in the afternoon you do it all again, only now beverage quads flit back and forth between mothership and car swarm, possibly making the commute the high point of the day.
Actually that would have been pretty typical for a 19th century American city, e.g. in San Francisco most of the older streets have always been that wide.
The first section of this article is interesting in this context: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
This is total nonsense, easily falsified by just looking at daily urban life in the modern world. The behavior you describe is completely routine in Shanghai; deaths are rare.
The Chinese appear to disagree:
Shanghai traffic police have punished 350,000 cases of pedestrian jaywalking this year.... There have been more than 200 crashes involving pedestrians that have killed 56 people as a result of ignoring traffic signals in Shanghai this year, traffic police said. (2012)[1]
and
According to Shanghai traffic police, 48 people have been killed and 206 injured in more than 200 accidents in the first 5 months of 2013, involving either jaywalking or scooters and mopeds running red lights[2]
[1] http://en.people.cn/90882/8059898.html
[2] http://www.healthandsafetyinshanghai.com/shanghai-traffic.ht...
> What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here.
Not all roads are made equal. There's a huge difference between "space reserved for a mode of travel" and the public spaces that roads[1] (in cities) were before cars became ubiquitous.[2] A good analogue is imagining a path in a park: it's generally used for transit (people walking and occasionally biking), but it's also fully open as a public space for the citizenry to use as they please.
[1] This whole conversation is about roads in cities, so that's what I'm referring to: roads across sparsely populated countryside don't have nearly as high a cost, nor do they have as many viable alternatives.
What they were actually like is rivers of mud mixed with horse manure. There were just as many roads before as now, except they were very dirty.
> and the public spaces that roads (in cities) were before cars became ubiquitous
Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were never public spaces like you imagine. They were roads, and carts and horses routinely road right over people who didn't get out of the way.
They were crowded and dirty, and those open spaces you imagine did not exist inside cities. (There plenty of open spaces outside cities, of course.)
Your dream world existed to some degree inside farm villages, but never in cities.
The amount of plays, novels, stories, poems, and songs that take place in and on and nearby, as well as revolving around and referencing to, ares of transit is pretty large. When looked at in the context of human existence on the planet, roads are the pathways human cells use to move and multiply and spread and settle. So much culture and development occurs on the paths of humanity. This is not limited to any single road concept; bridges, train tracks, shipping lanes, and airports all spawn society blocks around them.
The Pathways have always been public spaces. Are you opposed to those public spaces being safer and more productive? If so, would you say it is because vehicles [methods of human conveyance] have a priority over people [humans living] in the Public Square?
The point of travel is the people that can do it, not the profits to be gained or the methods to be employed IMO.
On roads, vehicles absolutely have a priority over people. This is so obvious, I'm honestly not sure why I had to state the previous sentence.
The vehicles have no priority at all, the people in them do.
Does that bother you that someone wrapped in a vehicle has priority over someone not wrapped?
It's like that always - small boats have to give way to large ones for example.
Boats traveling through fluid, controlled by a relatively tiny prop, are in no way comparable to road-going vehicles that enjoy the static friction of rubber on asphalt.
Additionally, all vehicles on the road are held to (virtually) the same legal standards, regardless of size. If anything, laws are more restrictive the larger the vehicle.
Also, this is false:
The vehicles have no priority at all, the people in them do.
There are many parts of the country where it would be illegal to cross a road on foot (jaywalking), but entirely legal to do so within a vehicle.
It is always context as well as proportion. Neither air nor water work as reference points for driving, as the scale in both those worlds is analogous to the variance in insect size [ant to dragonfly] or water creature [diatom to jelly fish] while the road is much more like the difference in dog breeds. On top of that, the land is our natural habitat, as opposed to the hydro- or atmosphere, and the use of that space must take into account that society is based on people and not profits or production. Yes, like mobility, the are absolutely important, but only in how they advance culture and society. A heart is a meat pump if there is no brain to feed oxygen.
There are more people without vehicle access than with. De-personalizing vehicles would be a good thing.
And just because i'm on a rant: how many people die from terrorist attacks per annum v. car accidents? If the government[s] actually cared about people, vehicular death would be confronted with the same rigor and rhetoric that extremist islam is. Kind of sad that rich south africans and faceless cororations are the only ones who seem to be doing anything about it.
I was actually worried my point may come across like this and considered clarifying, but I figured it would be obvious with even a moment's thought that I'm not suggesting literally reverting to exactly how roads were before cars. The only point I was making with respect to the way roads were used was that they were closer to public spaces than the situation we have now. Roads today are reserved pretty much exclusively for vehicles: just try dawdling or having a conversation on a major street in any city to see what I mean. If you RTFA, Hamburg is planning to replace the massive amount of space wasted by roads with green spaces. Relying on things like underground subways or elevated monorails or (much much much smaller than roads) bike paths means we can have the best of both worlds: undo the disastrous damage that cars did to city planning and public spaces without giving up the incredible benefits of streamlined transportation that cars enabled.
> Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were never public spaces like you imagine. They were roads, and carts and horses routinely road right over people who didn't get out of the way.
Absolute nonsense. Go read some history, or even fictionalized accounts. Roads were public spaces almost exactly as I described them, since what I said was that vehicle traffic existed alongside people strolling and standing and doing whatever the hell else. As I mentioned above, we'll even be getting rid of the vehicle-induced downsides of these previous spaces (the mess and the danger), since vehicle traffic will be completely excluded from the road-replacements being described in the article.
We're lucky enough to have video from the early 1900s[1], which shows exactly what I mean about roads essentially being extensions of the way sidewalks are today (+ vehicle traffic), as opposed to the "all vehicles except for crosswalks" style we have today.
By the way, I notice that the only thing you addressed in your entire response was nitpicking (an inaccurate interpretation of) my unimportant supporting comment about how roads previously were. As I said before, the only thing I was alluding to was the fact that they were space that you could actually use, spend time on, play on, etc, as opposed to the reserved-for-cars and much-more-dangerous-for-pedestrians streets we have in the modern era. I can only assume you fully agree with the _actual_ point of my comment, which is that talking about giving up the advantages that efficient transit has bought is either disingenuous or idiotic, since that's not what's being discussed.
No, I understood, I was trying to tell you that roads are, and were, for travel and that's it. This public space you love never occurred on roads. People have ZERO interest in doing anything on a road except getting to their destination. We have lost nothing whatsoever.
> vehicle traffic existed alongside people strolling and standing and doing whatever the hell else
You can not bring back the halcyon days when people strolled slowly and were not in a rush. Those days are gone and are not coming back. People want to get where they are going without any time waste.
You propose replacing roads with underground subway or monorail, which are entirely unsuitable for 90% of cities. Plus they don't solve the last mile problem, I've actually never heard of any solution for it except self driving cars that don't exist, or expensive taxis. And even then you still need your hated roads!
> As I said before, the only thing I was alluding to was the fact that they were space that you could actually use, spend time on, play on, etc,
No ever actually did that. Your dream world simply never existed.
Go watch that video you posted and tell me how many people you see talking to other people. I spotted exactly ZERO. People were shopping, or going places, sometimes together. But none were using this "public space" you imagine for anything except travel.
Perhaps you are thinking of central markets like a souq? But that's only a tiny portion of the road network.
> which shows exactly what I mean about roads essentially being extensions of the way sidewalks are today (+ vehicle traffic), as opposed to the "all vehicles except for crosswalks" style we have today.
And you'll still have your hated roads even in your scenario! Only instead of carts you'll have slow autos? So in essence you want to drop the speed limit? And that's about it? So why all the text about how much space roads are taking?
Or do you want to get rid of roads to bring back an ideal that never existed and that no one even wants (periodic mini-parks would provide all the advantages and none of the drawbacks), and have no suggestions for what to replace it with?
If you're in a rush then taking cars through a city is a terrible method to get somewhere fast. The root problem is not that people have gotten more efficient.
>the last mile problem
You could have public transport. It wouldn't have to be exotic. It would need one lane and wouldn't fill it.
> And you'll still have your hated roads even in your scenario! Only instead of carts you'll have slow autos? So in essence you want to drop the speed limit? And that's about it? So why all the text about how much space roads are taking?
A few slow cars would not take up nearly as much space, and they would not interfere with people walking.
You are flat out wrong. Markets, bazaars, strip malls, housing; these are all based on road placement. What happens when a city has a huge celebration? Why, they shut down the roads so people can move freely in safety and merriment. What happens when the government pushes its citizenry too far? Why, take to the streets and make yourself heard!
TBH, i cannot think of a thing/facet of infrastructure that is more representative of public space and socializing than a road. True, steel death machines flying about at 70kph+ is not conducive to healthy neighborhoods. really, the personal car is a huge fracking waste of time, material, and currency.
I think you may, as my father does, believe that the car is some magical device that creates freedom and profits out of thin air. Just look at the commercials; each year we are expected to believe that the NEW one is SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER than last years model WHICH IS SHIT COMPARED TO THE NEW AVENTURAMO by NISSOTA NOW FOR JUST 200%+ THE AMOUNT IT COSTS TO MAKE!!! Truly, car culture is what props up the fallacious American Exceptionalism that capitalists purport.
How sad is it that the most patriotic thing i can do, more than military service or medical aid or child rearing, is to own 1+ cars and make all of the requisite repairs and pay for all of the titling, permits, and insurance?
You are completely wrong:
Many European cities are heavily pedestrianised, with large areas of the centre accessible only for deliveries. There are big public health impacts - walking and cycling becomes more popular, children have safe spaces to play, accident rates fall and the air quality is drastically improved.
99% Invisible did a nice episode on it a while back: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...
https://books.google.com/books?id=Noo4AQAAMAAJ&q=%22jaywalki...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term
EDIT: In case that sounded sarcastic or like I didn't believe you, I'm actually curious about how they're so far off in their "first usage".
Search the book for 1954, or any year before then, you will get results. Search for 1955 and you get nothing.
[1] http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=ncycus...
> Results 1-1 of 1 > Page 49 > Within ninety days after the signing of those pledges, the records of the Bureau of Public Safety showed a decrease of almost 50 per cent in accidents resulting from jaywalking. In 1926 all honorary and special commissionerships in the police ...
I really thing life is better in cities where people has priority over cars. But it is also true that the lower population density in a city, the higher dependency on cars it has.
Cars kill 1.2 million people a year. I think that is special, and not something that happened before.
A ~450 sqft studio apartment in SF costs about $2k/mo in rent.
a ~150 sqft monthly parking spot (as per http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com/), costs about $400
Three parking spots takes up the same square footage as a studio apartment. It costs a little over half of that.
Then consider how much parking in SF is free parking. Just straight up free. Parking lots for stores. Street parking on most residential streets. Driveways and garages.
It's fucking insane how much space is wasted on car storage. It's even more fucking insane that so much of this storage is de-facto free (which is implicitly a subsidy from the person providing the space to car owners; in a sense it's a subsidy from renters, since any parking space could be a sorely needed living space instead)
I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome
First, get rid of the zoning laws that require those spots, then they'll disappear. You can cram (depending on building height restrictions) dozens of apartments in to the same 2 dimensional plane as those 3 parking spots.
The problem then is parking in commercial districts. Street parking is good for businesses on that street, but a better solution could be more city-run parking garages in good locations, and city streets in commercial areas that are optimized for pedestrians.
The best example of this I have ever seen is down-town Silver Spring in Maryland. That was several years ago, I hear they tore a bunch of it up, but it at least used to be great.
Here in London new residential buildings are built with zero parking spaces (just a small a shared drop-off/deliveries area). There are already too many cars in the city, and public transport is good enough for most people (of course there are people who for good reasons need cars, but they're the exception rather than the rule).
Read: The High Cost of Free Parking http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf
If there were more parking garages, there would be less asphalt sprawl.
Mandatory parking garages inside apartments is a bad method, but the goal is admirable. No surface parking, no matter how many cars.
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/03/02/supervisor-breed-calls-...
What such systems do allow is for vehicle storage to be separated from high-density land-use. A self-driving vehicle can be told to go park itself elsewhere, a dispatched vehicle doesn't need to park while the passenger is otherwise occupied.
But both still occupy street space, and require storage space somewhere.
We can figure it out with pure market forces; currently building codes across the continent require businesses to have a certain amount of off-street parking. That also has the effect of killing small local businesses. Own a restaurant? Doing well? Want to expand? Your 6 table restaurant requires no off street parking, but an 8 table restaurant requires (for example) 6 spaces, meaning you can't just add another couple tables, you need to buy / lease the entire building next to yours, demolish it, and use it for parking.
Get rid of these anti-business pro-car zoning laws, and the problem takes care of itself.
Minimum parking laws are the most important of many command-and-control policies and mandates that created the car-oriented American city. More than minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, FAR limits, single use zoning, ploughing heavily subsidized freeways through cities, and the rest, parking policy is why American cities have decayed.
Returning to free markets would let American cities be great again.
As for restaurant parking minima, they're usually based on inside area and sometimes on seating. There are minima for offices, factories, schools, homes, ana every land use in most cities.
When it comes to infrastructure, market forces don't really work.
The main exception I've noticed is Reno (along with the Nevada side of Tahoe), given that the bigger casinos - even in "downtown" areas - will typically provide parking garages for their guests.
Me too. BTW, The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup is amazing on this issue (http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/1932...). Totally changed my perspective when I read it.
You're gonna have to provide a citation for this one.
You'd be surprised how far into your yard the ROW for your street extends.
But you're right, this is one of those academic stats I should be able to cite properly. Since I can't find it (I swear it was on Seattle Public Utilities website once upon a time), perhaps this will be an afternoon task to validate. Should be doable by carving up the city into grid cells of some appropriate unit and then using orthophotos to aid blocking out car-accessible hardscape in a random sampling of grid cells.
Of the arguments against cars in cities, I think that "streets waste space" is the weakest. I rarely drive, but I wouldn't want to be in a city without some sort of streets, that would just be claustrophobic.
Pedestrian density should be targeted using a "pedestrians per block" metric, not a "pedestrians per square meter" metric. 100 people on a wide pedestrian path is preferable to 100 people on a narrow pedestrian path of the same length. I don't think that constantly getting in the way of other people, getting stuck behind other people, and constantly bumping into other people helps anyone.
Then again, I also avoid concerts because crowd density, so maybe I'm just the odd one out here.
Ahh, Paris. Well-known for its cramped boulevards.
That change does predate cars by a little bit, though.
Since the tunnels for cars are already dug up, all we need to do is cover them with concrete slabs, cover the slabs over with asphalt for bikes/pedestrians and vegetation for sitting around, and declare the entire city pedestrian only. The cars can continue to hurry back and forth underground.
What a narrow minded blinkered and oblique view of reality. Without the invention of the internal combustion engine and our ability to efficiently do as we please whenever we please we wouldn't have almost any of the economic freedom we enjoy today. If you wish to be a luddite and which a rural localised way of life on everyone that's another matter
So you go from four lanes (2 driving, 2 parking) to just a single one. Sidewalk area increases from "two-lane width" to four and one lane is free for bicycles.
It's going two be a revolution comparable to the invention of the internet, completely changing the quality of living in cities. And I get to see it, yeah. (Unless I end up being one of the world's last traffic fatalities)
You may dislike passenger cars (and I detect more than a faint whiff of Puritanism around that whole attitude, but that's a discussion for another day), but to entirely remove roads requires you to also solve the problem that motor vehicles are also the general circulatory system of a city. Now I think there are solutions to that problem... but they're all about 10 years away, minimum. We aren't there yet.
And then, when we do get there, it won't need to be helped along by governments or modern-day Puritans... it'll just happen, faster and better than any premature attempt to make it happen before the tech is there ever could make it happen.
I believe cities just aren't the right place for cars. It's a tragedy of the commons that car usage creates a situation where public transport cannot be funded to an adequate amount and traffic conditions scare away people who would otherwise take a bike.
Cities also suffer because cars encourage a structure of big, centralised shops that are easily accessible by car, but nothing else. I do get the convenience of a mall (and the economics), but, wow, how much would I miss the social environment of a lively city.
It's possibly a cultural thing … you prefer whatever environment you grew up in, and that just happens to be 'old Europe' for me.
OTOH there's nothing better than a curvy mountain road or the Arizona desert in a convertible. I'm not a complete Luddite.
This is still not the best summary I know, but one half-decent summary is that Puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun, or perhaps something more like, "I don't like cars and have no use for cars and therefore neither should anybody else."
Objective reasons that car traffic is "bad" is in short supply. It is more a taste issue than anything else. But the proles might be having fun with their cars, and we can't have that....
Your fun is yours alone. Their motivation is theirs alone. A vehicle's aforementioned externalities are common though. We can just focus on those.
Is this how Americans insinuate that they think someone is too old-fashioned and stuck up? heh.
Personally I don't see the connection between Puritanism and wanting to live in an environment with fewer cars.
If you're taking a car service of some sort, all the other stuff will getg figured into the per-mile cost and presented for payment each day when you get to work. I'm guessing once people are hit in the face with the full cost, they will make different (and arguably more rational) decisions.
This is one of the things I find somewhat strange about how so many people go gaga whenever optimistic dates for self-driving cars get thrown out. If you live in a city, you already have a "self-driving" option. Maybe someday it will be possible to create autonomous cars (that can put all those drivers out of a job). But basically the only thing that you're doing that you can't do today is dropping the price by, I don't know, $10/hr?
I thought cabbies made more than that when you count in tips, but you might be right. Living in a city that's not very well served by cabs, I don't use them much because when I call for one they only show up 50% of the time, and give very poor information about time-to-pickup. I like to imagine that the "car cloud" would be much better about both of those, and hence more useful. But that may just be wishful thinking.
Manhattan taxis are readily hail-able on the street. And they're supplemented by both Uber/Lyft and private car services. So, as a city, it's probably the definition of well-served by third-party cars and it's very much a part of the city's fabric. Just good luck getting either a cab or Uber (at a reasonable rate) if it's pouring rain.
Maybe $10 should be $15 but who knows about vehicle costs in some hypothetical future or what human support would be needed. My basic point was that, to a first approximation, we already have what amount to self-driving cars within larger and denser cities.
In sparser areas of the country driverless cars will have less of an effect, but those are also the areas where parkings lots and roads constitute a much smaller percentage of surface area.
The funny thing is, the revolution of the internet, being able to click on Amazon and just have a thing delivered (or from a million other websites) assumes a ubiquitous road network. Let's say you cut the number of cars on the road tenfold... Who pays for this now?
Just for some figures, taxes on motorist in the UK, which are mainly fuel, raise about £50Bn/year. Government spending on all forms of transport is about £25Bn/year. So let's say through self-driving cars, carpooling, more working from home, etc etc we do achieve a tenfold reduction, now far from paying for everything twice over, cars only pay for a fifth. Where does the money come from? And if it doesn't, how much of the "internet revolution" still works?
Official statement from the city of Hamburg (in German): http://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/4257482/2014-01-24-bs...
(Also sarcasm. I broke ribs and had a driver who wasn't paying attention nearly flatten me at a red light)
https://geppbloggt.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/gehzeug1.jpg https://diskussionsgruppespartacus.files.wordpress.com/2012/...
Using 1,5 t of mass to transport on average 100 kg is also a massive waste of energy.
If option A can provide the benefits that option B can provide with less cost (in this case, space), then the incremental space being used is "wasted". It's a pretty fundamental use of the word.
Luckily, they're just trying to make it possible to get around without cars, not illegal to use cars, which is likely to dramatically increase the possibility for lightweight cooperative social interactions.
In central Copenhagen a number of streets are like that, so you often see delivery vehicles slowly making their way through. But most cars that don't need to drive right into the city center will avoid it and take one of the more major roads that bypasses the city center. So it gets most of the cars out of the city center by just incentivizing them to take a faster route, and allows/requires the remaining ones to share the road on an equal basis with other users.
And yes, obviously you still need to allow commercial delivery vehicles. There's really no alternative to that.
I think it's more feasible that we ban personal vehicles in cities while still allowing commercial and emergency vehicles. Even allowing these vehicles, we'd probably be able to reduce most roads to single lane one way streets.
How did the refrigerator get into the store in the first place? It can get out the same way.
This just sounds like concern-trolling.
On the other car, the ban for private cars usually has only effect during a period of the day. In Barcelona, at least, you can access most streets in the city center after 20:00.
As usual, this plan is OK for the more affluent and makes life more difficult for the poor.
For me, living in Tokyo, it is really cheaper not owning a car but renting it when I need to, or hiring a delivery service. I guess that the same happens in most major European cities.
"The city’s proposed Grünes Netz, or “Green Network” will create pedestrian and cycle paths to connect the city’s existing, substantial green spaces, and provide safe, car-free commuter routes for all residents."
That is awesome, but it has nothing to do with banning vehicles.
Map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Burnham_San_Fr...
As I have been spending significant time on evaluating and analyzing the ramifications of autonomous vehicles, one thing has always been a bit of a challenge, how to make a transition. It's actually relatively easy in Germany and not that much of a leap since a lot of the foundational work had been done and the trajectory has been in a complementary direction. The real challenge will be how the USA makes the transition and doesn't simply sabotage itself out of spite for itself as it has an established reputation for now.
(Not trying to be snarky, just though those were still not really ready yet)
See their official statement (in German): http://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/4257482/2014-01-24-bs...
Why not just let people walk on the roads? Places like cemeteries and parks can be quite creepy to walk through, especially at night. Roads next to buildings with people in them are a more comfortable place to walk.
Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) the greenspaces Hamburg is proposing, I have an even cooler idea: turn them into lazy rivers[0]. I'd be totally down with commutes involving calm, aimless drifting on flotation devices.
Except fucking over the people who actually live there for the benefit of people who exist there transiently.
That doesn't seem to contradict the parent claim. You're saying you would be fine with banning something that you already don't use. A more relevant criticism would be if you did have a car in a city but still wouldn't mind cars being banned.
Cars are awesome - they really are! So are helicopters. That doesn't mean one should have to drive a car just to buy a quart of milk.
The fact that you drive a car affects the health of everyone living in the city, takes a huge amount of public space, and makes cities ugly and less habitable.
I guess you can understand the difference.
In London at least, during a normal working day 95%+ of traffic is commercial in nature. You can't stop that kind of traffic without stopping the ability of the city from functioning.
I assume they'd give me a chance to sell it, right?
Seems more likely that cyclists are local and motorists are not, no?