> Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc)
Then you need to take the mental step of thinking about all the people who require a car for mobility. People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped.
> cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars
A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
You probably wouldn't believe it: But we managed to raise our daughter without having a car. She's now a happy cyclist herself. And in regards to handicaps, a few years ago I broke my hip, nothing a few plates and screws couldn't fix but I wasn't allow to step on the right leg for months. But I was allowed to borrow a recumbent trike, moving the bad leg was fine. and I was able to ride it with just the good leg. Needless to say I didn't loose much musclemass in the bad leg as it was constantly in motion.
It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. Did you actually watch the GCN video? Have a look again at the bit about the corners that allow cars to go faster but take away space from pedestrians.
We also raised a child without a car -- in North America. It is much more possible than most people claim.
I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical.
The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future.
> who could live closer to work with a smaller living space
If that’s the necessary tradeoff, of course you’re seeing failure of adoption.
Also, would they need to move every time they change jobs (or husband & wife can no longer work on opposite sides of town to continue their careers from before marriage)? Logistics need thought through to be feasible policy.
Yes, you are articulating perfectly why the pampered, irrational and entitled Western middle-class are and will fail to meet any of the real world challenges we now face.
Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.
Awesome. On the bikes. There's plenty of variants, not just the regular city bikes or cargo bikes, but also push bikes for adults, here's one German pensioner who actually made a startup out of this and his bikes are also useful to people with certain disabilities https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/
>It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up.
I'm in California. We have a massive amount of space. If civilization collapsed, we could make a walkable state that can probably suit billions if need be. Being more compact isn't a huge priority here. On the contrary, we're trying to develop other suburbs out in the desertous regions.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Cars and their supporting infrastructure often take up a vast amount of space, which makes walking less attractive as all distances are greater as a result.
Another way of saying this is that because physical space in the city is a scarce resource, the allocation of infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for people is a zero sum game.
yeah, the US solved this by expanding out to suburbia. Because we just have so much damn space and cars let us utilize more of that space.
Of course, the other thing people in this community may look over is that suburbs are often a fallback when you can't afford a dense urban area. I'm in an LA suburb and renting in LA would be over twice as expensive if I moved down there. Even if downtown LA became walkable, most of the LA county wouldn't be able to afford that living.
A city designed for other modes of transport is also better for drivers because only those who need (or really want) to drive need to do so. Result, less congestion and more relaxed driving.
" People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped."- yes, usually all of them will have a more comfortable life in a city that gives priority to pedestrian and bike infra. We are all pedestrians, but not all of us have cars. Disabled ppl in us are living worse than disabled ppl in nl again due to car oriented infra. Having a baby doesn't necessarily means you need to have a car, in a dense area like in NL ppl get by with a backfiets or cargo bike or just are using public transport or taking a taxi/day rental when really needed.
Related to car speed- at some point you have intersections of pedestrian and car infra and if the priority is to have a safer area, cars must drive slower, that's why lots of cities are implementing 30km areas+traffic calming like curbs, bollards and bumps and it works and heavily reduces the accidenta while avg speed remains paradoxically almost unchanged because less accidens/dangerous driving means less road blocks. Also, not all areas are wide enough to have everything separated, that's why the shared road concept exists- cars drive super slow and pedestrians and bikes have priority there, ppl can walk in the middle just like cars and cars will need to wait
It's much much more than that. For example in nl ppl in electric wheelchairs/microcars can use bike paths to drive slowly and safely to their destination. Also due to higher density they aren't far from either shops, cafes, other stuff they may need, everything is close-basically they can live relatively normal lives without relying too heavily on others
Cars are not alive, let alone sentient, so it is no more possible to punish them than it is a rock or a pane of glass.
Perhaps you do believe cars are sentient and capable of receiving punishment. But if not, you might have been using “cars” as a de-personifying shorthand for “drivers”. In which case, yes, drivers should be punished — not for merely existing, no, but for the harm they have caused to non-drivers. From traffic fatalities to car-only infrastructure, drivers and their insistence on cars have been to the detriment of the rest of us.
you want to punish all drivers because some were dumb and reckless? Seems excessive.
I'd start with making sure tests are actually tests and not formalities. Then I'd also expand that to needing to re-test every X years, so old people who can barely see or have poor motor control aren't still driving.
That's the thing — a driver doesn't have to be dumb or reckless to harm those around them. Merely insisting that society provide space for you to drive and park your car, not to mention all the harms that driving itself causes (CO2, particulate matter, other pollution, noise, ...), is a serious harm inflicted by all drivers on those around them.
Electric cars are still cars that need a lot of space in our cities and run over pedestrians. It's rather sad that the move to electric cars wasn't taken as an opportunity towards smaller cars.
in general, you can't convince someone to do the more pro-social action by making their lives worse, you have to meet them where they're at and provide either an upgrade or a side-grade.
Did you know that of the car drivers & passengers killed each year, about 25% (and the difference between the US, UK or EU is pretty small here) didn't put on a seat-belt before their last drive? Of course this number will eventually go down, but it seems there's a lot of dumb drivers out there.
> People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped
99% of cars I see are occupied by a single person. If you get them out of the road (or car sharing at least) you can easily accommodate for the rest with a much smaller footprint
People who require a car for mobility should be in favor of less traffic on the roads. If more people use other forms of transport, that makes it easier for the pregnant soccer mom on crutches to drop off her 9 kids at practice before driving all of the elderly dementia patients in the neighborhood to the hospital.
One thing I like to tell car fans: Unless you LOVE traffic jams and searching for parking spaces (because they refuse to got straight for a parking garage of which we have plenty in my city) you should convince other motorists to give up their car and use a bicycle or public transport. The logic is sound yet a bit too much for most people ;-)
"Anyone with urgent medical needs and the handicapped" probably already have access to paratransit, since municipal mass transit systems are required by ADA to provide it.
> A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country.
> Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities?
No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed.
There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals.
Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...
The post you're responding to talks about having "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", and your response is saying "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets" and "infrastructure separating transport modals". Both of those are making the same case.
> Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city?
To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.
To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport not cars. With cars you'll get more traffic and the fast road will become slow. Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing that will act promptly to the button press to switch to green for pedestrians.
> Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing
The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals".
You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.)
> To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport
That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".)
It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians, that's why many cities in eu are either closing them or doubling them with classic crosswalk and finding out that raised/under paths aren't used anymore since it's much more convenient to just directly cross the road
Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it
You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.
> Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians
I agree, which is why I personally prefer the solution of burying the roads and keeping the pedestrian walkways at what is currently "street" level. That's a major challenge for existing infrastructure, but I've seen more than a few public transportation proposals that have similar "much easier when one from scratch" problems, and I think it's worth designing the ideal before settling for something worse.
> Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting.
No, I'm thinking about ideal public transport versus ideal car transportation. It's not reasonable to compare the best case of public transport to deliberately worsened car transportation and declare public transport the victor. I would love to have public transport that's actually better than the common case of car transportation, but proposals like what you're describing don't go far enough to get there.
I would love to have a world where we have 300km/s trains between every city (major or minor), and automated point-to-pointno-transfer underground transportation within cities. And I'd love to see incremental steps in a direction like that.
What I don't want to see is "if we make cars much worse, we can have public transit that sucks less but is still worse than cars used to be".
Best case of car transport would be if few ppl use it which is achieved by giving priority to public transport and bike paths. If this (car) mode is prioritized, car transport by definition will be a worse experience than an ideal bus because you don't get traffic with the bus.
Burying cars under is a good idea in theory but not that great in practice. It's extremely expensive to do it(and also build all the underground destination infra) and in the end you still will end up with traffic, the difference being that all the drivers will be trapped with their fumes/microplastic tire wear underground.
You don't need to make cars much worse, just make pub transport and bike/pedestrian infra as good as possible and give what's left to cars
Then you need to take the mental step of thinking about all the people who require a car for mobility. People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped.
> cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars
A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur.
Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?