The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we're absolutely initially designed around walking.
Cities design around walking is technically harder because the space limitation if they want to share it with car, but tend to have everything in close proximity, which in that case it's far easier to just ban car from entering and cater the street to just pedestrian and bicycle/non-electric scooter. Cities design around car however, is easier to convert, as they tend to have wider road and more lane for car. They just need to take away one lane and give it to cyclist and that's it. The only hard part is going through the legislation and carbrain.
Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.
How do people get downtown?
The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren't easily adapted.
"Just use park and rides" doesn't solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it's more expensive and slower than the existing system.
Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there's pushback against expanding it.
There's also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris's 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.
@chiliedogg
I understand the impulse to call them inherent, but they're really just consequences of the same bad policy that kept people off public transit for 60 years.
What's a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn't require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don't own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn't safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn't significantly add to commute times?
I don't live in the US so maybe I'm mistaken but in my opinion a possibility could be :
Wait for a small group of houses in the suburbs to be available (preferably towards the center) and transform them in convenience stores, schools, office space, etc
Next you can link multiple suburbs like that with train/tram or metro for exemple. And you can even leave roads connecting zones for delivery or for people needing to go to another town or things like that
Couple that to a good public transport system overall and now you're living in a space were there's less danger due to car circulation, you don't need to drive multiple km to do groceries, kids can walk(or commute via PT) to school, etc
Edit: Naturally this would not be feasible in a year or two but I can easily see this implemented in 5 to 10 year time
Do you think we don't have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?
We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don't get used because it's 110° for months at a time and you don't want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.
But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don't bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.
I'll accept that maybe my vision of the suburbs is biased by films and TV shows 😅
I live in a city where temperature could realistically go to 110° F (that's about 40~45° C for me) in summer but here bus and tram have AC and there is water fountains (decorative and drinkable) everywhere + the city try to maintain vegetation despite heat waves. So even if it's hot outside, felt air temperature is actually way cooler.
I'll admit this is very dependent of where you live, the climate around you, water availability and other things, but certainly it's doable in some places of the US. For others places, in between accomodations can be found. Walkable cities are not a black and white sets of solution there's levels, hierarchical implementations, etc
@chiliedogg wow this is a nice summary from which to start defining possible solutions. Off the top of my head, it would be low-rise residential co-op ownership clusters with adjoining, enclosed spaces like small Milan gallerias. Residential clusters will be connected by main commercial streets with offices and stores. Cluster groups form towns and cars would only be allowed to travel between towns but not within. Millions of people still need to transition to this, there’s no way around that.
@990000 @chiliedogg
Implement mixed-use zoning with rent controls, and I think you'll find that not everybody wants to have a lawn.
And do I need to explain why being outside for several minutes isn't as much of an issue in places with lots of tall buildings?
#FuckCars #fucklawns #urbanism #publictransit #waroncars
Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that's a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.
Our residents don't want neighbors. They don't want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.
I don't live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won't cover a week's mortgage for some of these houses.